Howard Stevenson

Restructuring Teachers’ Work and Trade Union Responses in England: Bargaining for Change?

A key feature of current school-sector reform in England is the restructuring of teachers’ work and the increased use of support staff to undertake a range of activities previously undertaken by teachers. Supporters speak of a new teacher professionalism focused on the “core task” of teaching. Critics fear deprofessionalization through a process of deskilling, work intensification, and labor substitution. This article uses labor process theory and empirical data to analyze recent developments in teachers’ work and links these to the different ways in which teacher trade unions have bargained over reform. The article argues that workforce reform cannot be analyzed separately from the trade union strategies that seek to influence policy and that the emergence of a type of “reform unionism” in England represents the integration of product and process in policy.

A case study in leading schools for social justice: when morals and markets collide

Purpose – This paper explores how school leaders seek to promote social justice agendas within the context of multi‐ethnic schools in England.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on data from five case‐study secondary schools in England. Qualitative data was derived from interviewing principals in each institution together with interviews with staff, students and members of the wider community.Findings – Effective principals in multi‐ethnic schools had strong values commitments to social justice and were able to articulate these values across and through the policies and practices in their schools. However, in some cases value commitments to equity and inclusivity could be challenged by the consequences of policies promoting school choice and the development of a quasi‐market for school education. This could present school leaders with complex moral dilemmas that counter posed inclusion aspirations against performance in the local market.Originality/value – School leadership committed to promotin...

Moving towards, into and through principalship: developing a framework for researching the career trajectories of school leaders

Purpose – The paper seeks to develop a conceptual framework capable of informing future research into beginning principalship in diverse cultural contexts.Design/methodology/approach – Based on recent literature, and specifically drawing on contributions to this Special Issue, the paper explores the relationship between externally generated pressures and tensions facing beginning principals and their influence on principal socialisation and development.Findings – The paper identifies tensions between increasing pressure on schools to meet a diverse range of social objectives and a context of high‐pressure accountability, limited resources and increasing institutional and systemic complexity uncertainty. Beginning principals face the difficult task of having to reconcile these tensions and in some contexts there is emerging evidence of this impacting on a crisis in principal supply. The paper argues that if systemic problems of supply are to be addressed educational researchers need to develop more sophist...

Teachers, workforce remodelling and the challenge to labour process analysis

Early attempts to examine the labour process of teaching concentrated on the processes of de-skilling and proletarianization and were largely ignored. Subsequent attempts to amend the approach have had similarly limited impact. This article examines the restructuring of teachers’ work during the last Labour government under the auspices of ‘workforce remodelling’, a policy intended ostensibly to reduce workload pressures on teachers. Rather than this outcome, the result was the further division of labour and increased intensity and control of teachers’ work through the extension of managerial hierarchies within schools. These developments, it is argued, are best captured and explained by an analysis informed by labour process theory. The account is based on the results of two years’ funded research involving extensive interviews with education officials and trade union officers at national and local authority level, and head teachers and other staff in 12 schools located in three contrasting local authorities.

Industrial relations in education: Transforming the school workforce.

All phases of education from pre-school to post-compulsory, in virtually all parts of the world, have experienced unprecedented reform and restructuring in recent years. Restructuring has largely been driven by a global agenda that has promoted the development of human capital as the key to economic competitiveness in the global market. This book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach drawing not only on education research but also from the fields of industrial sociology, management studies and labour process theory to locate the reform agenda within a wider picture relating to teachers, their professional identities and their experience of work. In doing so the book draws on critical perspectives that seek to challenge orthodox policy discourses relating to remodelling. Illustrating of how education policy is shaped by discourses within the wider socio-political environment and how unionization and inter-organizational bargaining between unions exerts a decisive, but often ignored, influence on policy development at both a State and institutional level, this book is a must read for anyone researching or studying employment relations.

Teacher leadership as intellectual leadership: creating spaces for alternative voices in the English school system

Teacher leadership has become an area of significant interest in research and policy terms in recent years. However, as a form of leadership it remains orthodox and conservative, rooted in largely traditional managerialist hierarchies, and disconnected from a critique of the wider policy imperatives that shape the contexts in which leadership is constructed. This article reports on an evaluation study of the work of Union Learning Representatives in a major teaching union in England and suggests that their role offers a new and more fruitful way of considering teacher leadership. Such leadership needs to be genuinely democratic and focused on cohering a professional voice amongst teachers. It is not a leadership concerned with providing ‘vision’, but one rooted in a dialogic and critical process, from which genuinely transformatory possibilities emerge.

Teachers and the state: forming and re-forming ‘partnership'

Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of ‘partnership’ is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second World War. Initially a partnership based on a commitment to welfarist values, professional autonomy and collective bargaining; this has been systematically dismantled and reconstructed as a ‘social partnership’ based on teacher union involvement in workforce reform coupled with a significantly more managerialist conception of professional accountability. Re‐engineering the terms of its partnership with teachers has been central to the State’s restructuring of public education along neo‐liberal lines.

On the Shopfloor: Exploring the impact of teacher trade unions on school-based industrial relations

Teachers are highly unionised workers and their trade unions exert an important influence on the shaping and implementation of educational policy. Despite this importance there is relatively little analysis of the impact of teacher trade unions in educational management literature. Very little empirical research has sought to establish the impact of teacher unions at school level. In an era of devolved management and quasi-markets this omission is significant. New personnel issues continue to emerge at school level and this may well generate increased trade union activity at the workplace. This article explores the extent to which devolved management is drawing school-based union representation into a more prominent role. It argues that whilst there can be significant differences between individual schools, increased school autonomy is raising the profile of trade union activity in the workplace, and this needs to be better reflected in educational management research.

From 'school correspondent' to workplace bargainer? The changing role of the school union representative

This paper draws on research in three English Midlands local education authorities to analyse the changing role of the teacher trade union representative in schools. It focuses on representatives of the largest teachers’ union in England and Wales—the National Union of Teachers. The paper draws on mainstream industrial relations literature, and more recent research into school sector industrial relations, to assess how the role of the union representative is changing in an era of autonomous schools. The research indicates that new issues are emerging in schools, and these have the potential to transform the role of the representative. Where representatives can respond to the emergence of these new issues there is the prospect of a new, more participative trade union culture developing in schools. However, it is far from certain that school union representatives will want to assume these increased responsibilities, and this poses a major challenge for the development of teacher trade unionism.

Challenging School Reform From Below: Is Leadership the Missing Link in Mobilization Theory?

ABSTRACT This article presents research relating to the experiences of union and community-based campaigns that have sought to challenge the establishment of academy and free schools in England. Such schools are removed from local government control and are seen as a defining element of the neoliberal restructuring of public education. The research draws on social-movement literature, and particularly mobilization theory, to better understand the dynamics of such campaigns and the contexts in which they can either thrive or wither. In the article, I argue that mobilization theory provides a useful framework for such analysis but that it fails to adequately reflect the importance of individual agency and the role of leadership at a local level. Leadership of such campaigns is often assumed by individuals reluctantly, and often defies traditional descriptions of “leadership,” but must be recognized if mobilization theory is to avoid being overly deterministic.