Jon Nixon

Professional identity and the restructuring of higher education

ABSTRACT Higher education has undergone immense changes over the last 30 years. These changes, involving the fragmentation of the academic workplace together with increased differentials between individuals in respect of status and autonomy, have had a profound effect on the role of university teachers and on their sense of professional identity. Nevertheless, university teachers have important insights to bring to the debate on higher education. This paper sets out to present some of those insights. The analysis is based on evidence drawn from interviews conducted with higher education lecturers in two different institutions: an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ university. The interviewees understanding of what makes for good practice—and what institutional conditions are necessary for such practice to flourish—are examined and the implications of that understanding discussed. Any effective restructuring of higher education must, it is argued, take on board this professional perspective and, in so doing, rethink the r...

Towards a Learning Profession: changing codes of occupational practice within the new management of education

Abstract Professionals were once considered to be the civic leaders, the deliverers of the good society. However, the old order has cracked under the pressure of social change, leaving a very different relation between professionals and their publics. This paper addresses some of the questions occasioned by these changes: Where does the altered power relation between parents, students and teachers leave the notion of teacher professionalism? What is the role of professionals within the emergent order? The paper is a product of the ESRC‐funded New Forms of Education Management Project (Local Governance Programme). It argues that, within the new management of education, the professional codes and practices point to a changing relation between teachers and what has traditionally been seen as their specialist knowledge. An outcome of this altered relation is the empowerment of parents and students in relation to teachers. However, the new relation depends upon new shared understandings and new sets of agreeme...

Towards A Theory of learning

Abstract This paper considers the nature of learning and the role of institutions in general and schools in particular in structuring learning. It outlines and commends a view of learning as a process whereby we discover ourselves as persons and thereby act to create the contexts in which we live and work. Central to this view is the idea of the ‘learning school’.

Educational renewal as democratic practice: 'new' community schooling in Scotland

This paper focuses on the New Community Schools (NCS) initiative as currently being developed in Scotland. This major 5-year programme is one of a raft of educational initiatives that the Scottish Executive is supporting across local authorities. Drawing on documentary evidence and interview data, we discuss the potential of this programme for professional renewal across a range of occupational groups involved in NCS: community, health and social workers as well as schoolteachers and pre-school practitioners. A key question for us is whether the initiative can support these professional groups in closer collaboration across institutional and professional divides, between schools and communities, and across the subject demarcations of the school curriculum. The permeability of institutional, professional and curricular boundaries is thus a key focus here. We discuss this theme with reference to the work of a particular local authority in central Scotland. Finally, we highlight a number of tensions within the national initiative; tensions which focus on issues of power and control between centre and locality and between different interest groups within localities. The fledgling democratic structures supported through NCS at the local level are, we conclude, highly vulnerable to these tensions and potential conflicts of interest. I wish, first, that we should recognize that education is ordinary. (Raymond Williams)

The New Management and Governance of Education

The research we undertook provided an opportunity to study the new public management of educational institutions in the context of differentiating governance. It was a study of how schools have accommodated the changes and chosen to develop their management practice over time in contexts of disadvantage. The schools were vulnerable to the pressures of market competition and formula funding based upon numbers rather than ‘special’ educational needs. The organising assumption of the government of the time was that placing public institutions under the pressure of competition would improve their performance. Moreover, institutions in the public sphere such as schools would flourish under this pressure if they developed models of management which, it was argued, had proved themselves in the private sector. Institutions were encouraged to develop the new public management — valuing the customer, strategic planning, targeting resources, delegation and quality assurance. Better performance depended upon better management: there was one model of management and it was private.

A Learning Democracy for Cooperative Action

Abstract Choice, diversity and equity need to be seen not just as potential principles for secondary schooling or even the governance of education but as key organising concepts of the neo‐liberal public domain. This paper will argue that these concepts are, therefore, implicated in the failure of that polity to address the central predicaments of the age. The resolution of these requires a new vision for the public domain which articulates the values and conditions of a learning democracy expressed through civic cooperation, participation and justice.