Journal of Educational Administration and History Vol. 41, No.

4, November 2009, 311326

Teachers and the State: forming and re-forming partnership

Howard Stevensona* and Bob Carterb
a Centre b

for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK; Leicester Business School, DeMontfort University, Leicester, UK 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 States restructuring of public education along neo-liberal lines. Keywords: teacherState relations; social partnership; education policy; teacher unions

hstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk Dr 0 400000December 41 HowardStevenson 2009 OriginalofFrancis 0022-0620 (print)/1478-7431 Journal&Article 2009 10.1080/00220620903211547(online) CJEH_A_421327.sgm Taylor andEducational Administration and History Francis

Introduction The focus of this article is the changing relationship between the State and school teachers in England and Wales over a four-decade period from the late 1960s to the present. This relationship is significant because it raises fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of schooling and how the State seeks to secure its objectives in education policy through its relationship with teachers both individually and collectively. Teachers are clearly central to State education policy as they represent the interface between policy and how young people experience schooling. It is teachers who deliver State education, and who represent the decisive link between policy and the student experience. However, this is not a technical, value-free process disconnected from the wider political context within which it is located. As has long been recognised,1 in a capitalist society State education performs a key role in terms of reproducing the labour power essential to meet capitals needs, and transmitting the values and beliefs capable of sustaining a social structure based on inequalities of power and wealth and driven by principles of market exchange. This means that teaching is necessarily a political activity.2 Explicitly or otherwise teachers are engaged in a process that is capable of both reproducing, and challenging,
*Corresponding author. Email: hstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk 1 Ian Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1979); Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004). 2 Michael W. Apple, The State and the Politics of Knowledge (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
ISSN 0022-0620 print/ISSN 1478-7431 online 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00220620903211547 http://www.informaworld.com

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the ideological framework that shapes the social context. In England and Wales the overwhelming majority of teachers are State employees, they work within the State, and are contractually bound to it. But they are also capable of working against the State, recognising that the State is not a compressed and unitary body but that it comprises different institutions sometimes with competing and conflicting priorities. There is nothing automatic about teachers willingness, as State employees, to implement State policy, particularly as elements of State policy can be confused and contradictory rather there is space for discretion, compromise, negotiation and struggle. It is precisely this disjuncture between policy as discourse and policy as action that raises issues about the relationship between the State and teachers, and the need for the State to ensure teachers work with, and not against, the grain of State policy. The relationship between the State and teachers is necessarily one of control3 in which the State seeks to ensure that teachers function within what might be considered as acceptable parameters. However, the ways in which that control is exercised is complex, dynamic and frequently challenged as teachers resist efforts to direct the content and intensity of their work. This article argues that the concept of partnership between teachers and the State represents a specific form of control in the States relationship with its teachers and that understanding how partnership has been formed and re-formed over time is central to understanding the changing nature of teacherState relations. Adopting a historical analysis we seek to show how a partnership based on a consensus in support of welfare state expansion, professional autonomy and responsible teacher unionism was a feature of teacherState relations in the post-war period, but that this became fractured during a period of profound organic crisis4 in the 1970s, when teachers themselves pushed at the limits of welfare capitalism. The emergence of a more strident neo-liberalism as capital restructured from the mid-1970s resulted in the State attacking and dismantling its partnership with the teaching profession. However, this new settlement proved only temporary, and the State has since reconstituted the notion of a partnership with teachers, although on very different terms to those that prevailed in the post-war period: a deep and multi-level partnership has been replaced by a centralised and formal one, the focus of which is much narrower. In the following sections we begin by discussing the key concepts that inform this article, teachers, the State and partnership and then we provide an analysis of the changing nature of teacherState relations by identifying a number of key phases during which the partnership between teachers and the State was dismantled and subsequently re-formed as what is now described as a Social Partnership.5 In adopting this historical approach we draw on Graces earlier analysis of teacherState relations, and empathise with his argument then that The balance of social, political and ideological forces in education arise out of, and can only be properly appreciated in, a longer socio-historical perspective.6 The arguments presented in this article seek to both replicate, and
3Martin Lawn, Modern Times? Work, Professionalism and Citizenship in Teaching (London: Falmer Press, 1996). 4Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). 5Howard Stevenson and Bob Carter, New Unionism? Exploring the Development of Social Partnership in English School Sector Labor Relations (paper presented at the AERA Annual Meeting, Chicago, April 913, 2009). 6Gerald Grace, Teachers and the State in Britain: A Changing Relation, in Teachers: The Culture and Politics of Work, ed. M. Lawn and G. Grace (Lewes, UK: Falmer Press, 1987).

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update, Graces approach by drawing on his analytical framework and extending this to take account of the profound developments in teacherState relations since 1987. Teachers, the State and partnership establishing terms The focus of this paper is about a relationship, and any attempt to analyse relationships in which power constantly shifts and establishes new frontiers of control is fraught with risk. Moreover, relationships are necessarily multi-dimensional, raising questions as to what extent it is possible to discuss a single relationship. With that note of caution we wish to present a brief discussion as to how we deploy the key concepts at the centre of this article teachers, the State and partnership. Within England and Wales there are over 400,000 teachers, the vast majority of whom work in the state sector. Contractually they are State employees, mostly working for local authorities. One feature of the changing nature of the teaching profession is that growing numbers of teachers are now directly employed by individual schools, always the case in voluntary-aided schools but increasingly in the growing Academy and Trust sectors. Inevitably, in such a large and diverse professional group there can be no unanimity of views, but there are a wide number of organisations that in some way seek to represent the collective views of teachers, for example subject associations such as the National Association for the Teaching of English, and professional bodies such as the General Teaching Councils of England and Wales. One obvious way in which teachers collective interests are articulated is through their unions, and it is important to recognise the significance of high levels of unionism amongst school teachers.7 This is not to suggest that the views of the teaching profession are neatly represented by unions. On the contrary, the stubborn persistence of a complex multiunionism in English and Welsh teacher unionism attests to the divergent views on key issues within the profession. However, it is not possible to understand the relationship between teachers and the State without recognising and understanding the pivotal role of teacher unions as representatives of the profession in that relationship. If anything, the difficulties of establishing the scope and status of the State become even more hazardous. Definitions of the State have always been complex, and in recent years applying models has become increasingly difficult as divisions between public and private sectors have become progressively more blurred.8 The State comprises a complex of institutions beyond the government of the day, for example including senior civil servants within ministries that outlast government ministers. In an education context the State is represented by the institutions within central and local government that are concerned with advising on, drafting implementing and monitoring the legislative framework for schooling, as well as sustaining the institutions and relations at national and local level. Within England and Wales a distinguishing feature of the States relationship with education has been the historically high level of influence accorded to local government,9 although this is a relationship
Stevenson, On the Shopfloor: Exploring the Impact of Teacher Trade Unions on School-based Industrial Relations, School Leadership and Management 23, no. 3 (2003): 34156. 8Stephen J. Ball, Education plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 9Roy Lowe, A Century of Local Education Authorities: What Has Been Lost?, Oxford Review of Education 28, nos. 23 (2002): 14958.
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within the State that has altered significantly during the period covered in this article.10 Indeed the declining role of local government in education cannot be separated from the issues that are the principal focus of this article, and are a key feature of the changing notion of post-war partnership. Space does not permit a full analysis but it is necessary to recognise that the State itself is neither unitary, nor supreme, functioning as it does within a capitalist society through which there are powerful disciplinary forces acting upon it.11 Consequently, the State cannot be separated from the wider social system within which it functions. This is not to assert that the State is no more than the executive arm of capital, but it is to argue that within a globalised world economy driven by market imperatives and liberalised trade then the government apparatus of a nation state not only has to recognise the demands of capital, but has a key role to perform in representing the demands of capital.12 This does not preclude the State being influenced in progressive ways by democratic pressures from elsewhere indeed the State, and in particular the welfare state,13 is a key site of struggle between capital and those who resist the ordering of society in ways that reflect market imperatives, including sections of State labour. However, it is our argument that the State fundamentally functions in ways that support the interests of capital and its continued accumulation.14 Given the central importance of education, and State education in particular, to the development of the economy this must inevitably focus attention on the nature of the relationship between the State and its teachers. The following sections focus on this relationship and argue that the State has relied extensively on notions of partnership in its relationship with the teaching profession, and we set out to argue that the State has fundamentally re-cast the nature of that partnership in ways that are much more favourable to the development of the neo-liberal restructuring of State education. However, it is first necessary to elaborate on how we use the term partnership in this article. At a conceptual level partnership can take many forms15 and over time its place in policy discourses is on-going and dynamic.16 Given these points, and the difficulties in conceptualising both teachers and the State already discussed, the notion of partnership as a monolithic and static relationship between internally homogenous parties is not sustainable. Nevertheless, to have any purchase partnership needs to have elements of stability and to involve fundamentally collaborative relationships between different parties, in this case the State and teachers, in which both work together towards broadly shared objectives.17 This conceptualisation of partnership highlights two key issues. First, as already argued there are difficulties when discussing either
10Clyde Chitty, The Role and Status of LEAs: Post-war Pride and Fin de Sicle Uncertainty, Oxford Review of Education 28, nos. 23 (2002): 26173. 11Nicos Poulantzas, The Problems of the Capitalist State, New Left Review, 58 (1969): 6778. 12Susan L. Robertson, A Class Act: Changing Teachers Work, the State and Globalisation (London: Falmer Press, 2000). 13Paul Corrigan, The Welfare State as an Arena of Class Struggle, Marxism Today March (1977): 8793. 14Conference of Socialist Economists, In and Against the State (London: Pluto, 1979). 15Ron Glatter, Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration: the origins and implications of a policy, Management in Education 17 (2003): 1620. 16Rowena Passy, Bob Carter, and Howard Stevenson, Workforce Reform, Social Partnership and the Construction of Consensus (paper presented at the Remodelling Teaching: Rethinking Education Conference, University of Lincoln, June 5, 2008). 17Ibid.

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the State or teachers as homogenous entities, and we readily accept that at any one time there will be tensions between the parties, and often within the parties. Neither the State nor the teaching profession can be considered homogenous entities, but for the concept of partnership to stand it must be underpinned by a consensus on the key, but broad, parameters within which relationships are conducted, and there is general agreement over what Kogan described as the first-order values18 enshrined in policy and the general trajectory of that policy. However, at times the relationship may come under strain, in particular when consensus is threatened by wider developments and therefore partnership does not mean the absence of conflict. Second, partnership should not be taken to mean an equity in power and influence between parties within the partnership: on the contrary, an asymmetry of power is much more likely, and is certainly the case in the partnership between teachers and the State. What is central to the notion of partnership is a framework in which all parties broadly accept the prevailing power relations and are willing to work together for the long term. In the following sections we chronicle how that partnership relationship between teachers and the State has been formed, dismantled and re-cast over a period of four decades. Welfare capitalism and post-war partnership In the years following the Second World War Britains welfare state developed significantly, supported by Keynesian demand management which seemed to promise full employment, stable economic growth and thereby the resources to fund the expansion of welfare services. The welfarist values that underpinned this social democratic consensus might be summarised as a belief in universal access to services, support for an element of redistribution (through fiscal policy and direct provision of services) and a conviction that the State had a role in compensating for the inequities of the market.19 Education was at the centre of the new welfare state, and the settlement between capital and labour.20 An enhanced role for education offered the prospect of improved capitalist profitability through the more effective reproduction of the workforce, whilst simultaneously holding out to the working class the promise of increased social mobility and improved life chances.21 This location of education as one of the pivotal elements in welfare state expansion had a corresponding impact on the profile of teachers and the teaching profession and consolidated further what had already been a developing partnership between teachers and the State in the pre-war years. The basis of the post-war partnership was rooted in an over-arching commitment to welfare state expansion in general, and within that a separation of professional and industrial issues in education policy relating to teachers. Professional issues, broadly defined as those relating to pedagogy and the curriculum, were left largely to teacher discretion. Whilst it would be mistaken to overstate the extent of this professional autonomy, it was nevertheless possible for Lawton22 to argue that this was the golden
Kogan, Educational Policy-making: A Study of Interest Groups and Parliament (London: Linnet Books, 1975). 19T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: University Press, 1950). 20Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order 19401990 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999). 21Ian Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (London: Macmillan, 1979). 22Dennis Lawton, The Politics of the School Curriculum (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 22.
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age of teacher control (or non-control) of the curriculum. The central importance of professional autonomy as the basis of teacher professionalism is clearly illustrated by an editorial in The Schoolmaster in 1960:
The freedom of teachers in their classrooms is a strongly held professional value in England and Wales. It has always been a source of pride to the profession and a very proper one, that in this country the teacher has the inalienable right to decide what to teach and how to teach it. (our emphasis)23

This freedom and autonomy came, however, within a particular social framework. For example, the 1944 Butler Education Act mirrored labour market demands and reproduced and reinforced class relations through a tri-partite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.24 Moreover, at the same time as teachers enjoyed this degree of autonomy over professional issues then matters relating to teachers working conditions, another important element of teachers professional status, and their claim to a professionalism, were the subject of full negotiation through a process of collective bargaining. So-called industrial issues, such as those relating to pay and conditions of service, had for some time been the focus of collective bargaining, with teachers having their own national negotiating machinery (the Burnham Committee) since 1919.25 Burnham had provided for national pay scales for teachers and was considered a key element in the framework designed to deliver working conditions commensurate with teachers professional status. It had also ensured that teacher unions were central to the relationship between teachers and State. Whilst it may appear that teachers enjoyed significant power and influence in this post-war partnership26 there were definite limitations, with the power of teachers and the State being asymmetrical. Whilst professional autonomy and collective bargaining arguably afforded teachers and their collective organisations real and meaningful opportunities to shape the work experience of teachers, this influence was exercised within clear, if not always visible, boundaries. Professional autonomy was at best permissive, with Lawn27 describing the situation as a form of Indirect Rule akin to the relationship between a colonial power and its satellite. Lawns argument was that professional autonomy was at best tolerated, and that as long as it was exercised appropriately it was esteemed, but at points when professional autonomy represented a serious challenge to the dominant interests of the State, then it was capable of being curtailed. If this was widely understood the expectation was that teachers would conduct themselves appropriately, police themselves as a professional group, and work within accepted boundaries. A similar argument can be extended to the handling of industrial issues relating to pay and conditions of service. The Whitley model of collective bargaining on which Burnham was based was principally a means of managing in an orderly way the potential tension between employer and employees. Underpinning this commitment to negotiate with employees was an expectation that in return unions would be
Schoolmaster, September 30, 1960, cited in Grace, Teachers and the State. Simon, Education and Social Order. 25Mike Ironside and Roger Seifert, Industrial Relations in Schools (London: Routledge, 1995). 26R.D. Coates, Teachers Unions and Interest Group Politics: A Study in the Behaviour of Organised Teachers in England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 27Lawn, Modern Times?
24 23The

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responsible working within agreed procedures, and being moderate in their demands (for an elaboration of this notion see Fairbrother and Waddington28). 19691986 partnership under attack In the latter years of the 196470 Labour government it became increasingly apparent that the post-war welfarist consensus was crumbling. From the governments perspective there was growing concern at the rising cost of welfare and a belief that public spending was crowding out29 private capital. At this point the first signs emerge of the central State seeking to assert increased control, not only over teachers, but over local government more widely. This was illustrated as early as 1965 when the DES (Department of Education and Science) increased its voting strength on the Burnham Committee, substantially increasing its power on the employer side.30 At the same time teachers were beginning to push at the boundaries of the welfare capitalist consensus on both industrial and professional issues. Teacher unions were behaving less like professional associations, and more like their industrial counterparts, and this was evidenced in 1969 when teacher unions undertook the first ever campaign of national strike action.31 Post-war partnership also came under challenge in the professional sphere as teachers, largely organised in the National Union of Teachers (NUT), took a lead in the campaigns for comprehensive education. Moreover, increasingly overt conflicts over teachers professional autonomy also developed and frequently focused on the inalienable right (see above) of teachers to decide what to teach and how to teach it. This was highlighted initially by the experience at William Tyndale school in the early 1970s,32 and these issues were given greater prominence when Prime Minister Callaghan and Secretary of State Williams, launched the so-called Great Debate33 about the future of State education. At this time Britain was in the throes of economic crisis, and Callaghans argument was that Britains declining competitiveness was due in significant measure to the failure of the education system to deliver a workforce suitable for the needs of the economy. This marked the start of Labours loss of confidence in comprehensive education34 and the welfarist values that underpinned it, combined with an argument for a more utilitarian approach to schooling that would be more closely aligned with the functional needs of capital. Problems within the system were attributed to a lack of teacher accountability and teacher reluctance to open access to the secret garden of the curriculum.35 Teachers were apparently disconnected from
28Peter Fairbrother and Jeremy Waddington, The Politics of Trade Unionism: Evidence, Policy and Theory, Capital & Class 41 (1990): 1556. 29R. Bacon and W. Eltis, Britains Economic Problem: Too Few Producers (London: Macmillan, 1976). 30Ironside and Seifert, Industrial Relations in Schools. 31Roger Seifert, Teacher Militancy: A History of Teacher Strikes 18961987 (London: Falmer Press, 1987). 32T. Ellis, J. McWhirter, D. McColgan, and B. Haddow, William Tyndale: The Teachers Story (Tiptree, UK: Anchor Press, 1976). 33J. Callaghan, The Ruskin College Speech (1976), in Diversity and Change: Education, Policy and Selection, ed. J. Ahier, B. Cosin, and M. Hales (London: Routledge, 1999). 34Caroline Benn and Clyde Chitty, Thirty Years On: Is Comprehensive Education Alive and Well or Struggling to Survive? (London: David Fulton Publishers, 1976). 35Shirley Williams, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/03/teaching-shirleywilliams (accessed January 10, 2009).

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the demands of the real economy and a model of teacher professionalism based on welfarist values, teachers professional autonomy and collective bargaining underpinned by responsible unionism was no longer considered sustainable or fit for purpose. The so-called Great Debate is rightly perceived as historically significant36 as it generated a discourse about teacher accountability that has dominated policy from that time to the present. It marked a much more overt destabilising of the post-war partnership as the central State began to assert much more significant control over other partner members, not just teachers, but the local state also. Chitty has argued that by 1976 the partnership years were coming to an end, or perhaps more accurately, the terms of the partnership were about to change significantly.37 At first conflicts arising from this State offensive focused on pay and job protection as teachers played a significant, but often overlooked, role in the industrial action of 197879 and the so-called Winter of Discontent,38 but in the early years of the Conservative government skirmishes between teachers and the State shifted increasingly to professional issues (appraisal) and wider questions of policy (the return of selective 11+ education).39 The increasing marginalisation of teacher unions was perhaps best illustrated by the abolition of the Schools Council, a body responsible for considerable curriculum development and dominated by teacher representation.40 The period witnessed rising tensions between teachers and the central State. In Gramscian terms there developed an organic crisis in which opposing social forces and their allies were engaged in a war of position to assert hegemonic leadership over the future direction of society.41 In the key battleground area of education it eventually boiled over and the two largest teachers unions entered into a protracted and bitter period of industrial action. Highly disruptive action, on a wide scale, took place in schools across England and Wales. Ostensibly about pay, the Times newspaper accurately observed that the dispute was about management not money.42 Pay was the trigger issue, but more significantly the dispute was the culmination of over a decade of conflict between teachers and the State in which what was at stake was the very direction of the school system, and teachers role within it. Within our analysis the 198486 teachers strikes in England and Wales are one of the most significant events in the history of twentieth-century English and Welsh education. They represent the death throes of the post-war partnership model, and the welfarist values on which it was based. A model of teacher professionalism based on an expanding welfare state, teacher autonomy over pedagogical matters, and collective bargaining over the conditions of teachers work had been attacked and defeated with organised teachers, and indeed local authorities, subordinated to the central State. Teachers campaigns around pay and wider policy issues such as comprehensive education had
Chitty, Education Policy in Britain (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Chitty, Towards a New Education System: Victory for the New Right? (Brighton: Falmer Press), 135. 38Ken Jones, The National Union of Teachers (England and Wales), in The Politics of Teacher Unionism: International Perspectives, ed. Martin Lawn (London: Croom Helm, 1985). 39Brian Simon, Does Education Matter? (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985). 40Roy Lowe, The Death of Progressive Education: How Teachers Lost Control of the Classroom (London: Routledge, 2007). 41Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. 42Stephen J. Ball, Staff Relations During the Teachers Industrial Action: Context, Conflict and Proletarianisation, British Journal of Sociology of Education 9, no. 3 (1988): 289306.
37Clyde 36Clyde

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pushed at the economic and political boundaries of welfare capitalism, but had now been pushed back further as capital, through the State, reasserted its primacy. The partnership between teachers, local government and the central State had been progressively weakened, and was about to be effectively dismantled. 19872003 partnership dismantled The first and most obvious manifestation of the end of the post-war partnership in the immediate aftermath of the teachers action was the suspension of teachers collective bargaining rights through the abolition of the Burnham Committee in 1987.43 Burnham had failed to deliver stable industrial relations, and throughout the dispute the governments frustration with union (and local government) influence made the body an obvious target for the central State. Burnham was abolished and replaced by an Interim Advisory Committee, and subsequently replaced by a permanent School Teachers Review Body.44 The Review Body model is not based on collective bargaining and the securing of collective agreements between employers and unions, but rather on a consultation model in which the Review Body makes recommendations to the Secretary of State. The abolition of negotiating rights in 1987 was a key element of the dismantling of the post-war partnership, but it must be considered as secondary to the more substantial prize of the 1988 Education Reform Act. This legislation swept away the 1944 Act settlement and fundamentally realigned the school system along lines that reflected the dominance of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas, and the foundation of postwelfarist values (service user as consumer, marketisation, emphasis on individuals and families) as the basis of a restructured State.45 Underpinned by an antipathy to producer capture46 (the conviction that in the absence of market controls State employees run services for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of service users) traditional sources of influence, teachers and the local government bureaucracy, were cast aside as the central State, and parents, promised empowerment as consumers, were made the driving force of the post-1988 system. The 1988 Education Reform Act profoundly challenged teacher autonomy, thus fundamentally undermining a key feature of the post-war partnership model. Most obviously it introduced a national curriculum, for the first time specifying (with the force of law) what teachers in English and Welsh schools might teach.47 It is hard to imagine a sharper contrast with the inalienable right, asserted by the editorial in The Schoolmaster, of teachers being free to decide what to teach and how to teach it. The focus on the national curriculum was also buttressed by a battery of standardised tests for children aged 7, 11 and 14 in addition to existing examination arrangements for 16 year olds. These tests not only provided a further constraint on teachers professional
Busher and Rene Saran, Teachers Conditions of Employment: A Study in the Politics of School Management (London: Kogan Page, 1992). 44Ironside and Seifert, Industrial Relations in Schools. 45Sharon Gewirtz, The Managerial School: Post-welfarism and Social Justice in Education (London: Routledge, 2002); Sally Tomlinson, Education in a Post-welfare Society (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001). 46Jack Demaine, The New Right and the Self-managing School, in A Socially Critical View of the Self-managing School, ed. J. Smyth (London: Falmer Press, 1993). 47Gary McCulloch, Gill Helsby, and P. Knight, The Politics of Professionalism: Teachers and the Curriculum (London: Continuum, 2004).
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autonomy by adding more demands on teachers that they were compelled to meet, but standardised testing also provided the cornerstone of an elaborate quasi-market structure intended to impose a powerful disciplinary strait-jacket on teachers.48 Armed with the information from league tables, parents were encouraged to make school choices based on schools relative performances, a process facilitated by the ability to make like-with-like comparisons based on a national curriculum and standardised tests. Failure to perform would then be penalised by a funding mechanism that linked school budgets very directly to pupil enrolments. This intricate interplay of a national curriculum, standardised testing, open enrolment and formula funding based on ageweighted pupil units ensured that teachers faced both a pressure to perform, and conform. Failure to do either risked punishment in the market, experienced at worst as school closure and redundancy a risk heightened by funding cuts that made teacher job losses increasingly common. Should there be any confusion over the targets of this reform agenda, Kenneth Baker made it very explicit in a Guardian newspaper interview 10 years later when he asserted that his agenda was to punish the teacher unions [and] kill off the local education authorities.49 During this period partnership was deliberately and effectively dismantled. The central State had to all intents and purposes seized control of both the professional and industrial aspects of teachers work. The neo-liberal ideology that underpinned the 1988 Act was deeply distrustful of producer interests and nowhere was this suspicion more overt than when producer interests were represented by powerful trade unions. The concept of partnership appeared antithetical to the market relations that were to be the basis of the newly restructured post-welfarist state. However, whilst this hostility to collaborative working with teachers, and in particular their unions, might appear logical within a neo-liberal framework, it appears unusual when located within the centre-left traditions of a Labour government, but in many ways this antipathy to partnership continued as an enduring feature of Stateteacher relations when New Labour was elected in 1997. The New Labour government had famously made education its central policy priority.50 Whilst critical of important elements of education policy during the Tory years, in particular the failure to address issues of underachievement in urban areas and the continued existence of significant achievement gaps, New Labour also demonstrated considerable elements of continuity with Conservative policy.51 The quasi-market framework established in 1988, and refined by subsequent legislation, remained largely intact, and it was clear that New Labour valued the disciplinary function it performed. Whilst there were now warmer words about the teaching profession, and indeed a commitment to a new professionalism,52 it was clear that this was to be based on very different values that had underpinned notions of professionalism in the post-war period. Teachers were still presented as inflexible and resistant to change,
Simon, Bending the Rules: The Baker Reform of Education (London: Lawrence and Wishart). 49Quoted in Tomlinson, Education in a Post-welfare Society, 47. 50Stephen J. Ball, The Education Debate: Policy and Politics in the Twenty-first Century (Bristol: Policy Press, 2008). 51Geoff Whitty, Twenty Years of Progress? English Education Policy 1988 to the Present, Education Management, Administration and Leadership 36, no. 2 (2008): 16584. 52Department for Education and Employment, Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change Cmd 4164 (London: HMSO, 1988).
48Brian

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and unwilling to accept the challenges of a modernised profession, in which, for example, labour could be deployed more flexibly and rewards would be linked more closely to performance.53 Therefore rather than promote a new professionalism based on the exercising of professional judgement, teachers experienced New Labour as a further restriction on their already much curtailed professional autonomy,54 most obviously illustrated by the introduction and implementation of the national strategies for literacy and numeracy but reinforced by a performance management and inspection regime that produced increasingly standardised and choreographed teaching. Perhaps most significantly for a Labour government was that teacher unions remained frozen out of the new educational landscape. More constructive relationships with the teaching profession were often conducted through non-union bodies such as the Teacher Training Agency (later the Training and Development Agency for Schools) and the newly formed National College for School Leadership and General Teaching Councils, whilst a commitment in Opposition to restore collective bargaining rights had been quietly dropped. Perhaps most significant was the attitude of Secretary of State for Education David Blunkett, a key figure in the New Labour project, whose relationship with the teacher unions was described by one teacher union general secretary in the following terms:
David Blunketts instructions in the DfES [Department for Education and Skills] as far as we can ascertain were Dont let the unions through the door! Which I always thought was very interesting for a Labour Minister but there we are. (Senior National Official, National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT)) 55

Whilst this desire to keep teachers unions at arms length from policy processes may have been the intention, it soon became clear that it was not tenable, and that a more constructive relationship with teacher unions in some form was inevitable if the government was to secure teacher support and commitment for its reforms. 2003 to the present partnership reconstituted Within a relatively short period of time the pressures that New Labour demands and expectations were placing on the system were becoming increasingly clear. Despite increases in educational spending, not only was the volume and scale of new initiatives creating significant tensions within the system described by the governments own consultants as initiativitis,56 but so too was the growing accountability machinery that was part and parcel of New Labours own brand of new public management.57 For the central State these pressures emerged in two distinct, but intimately related, developments: first was a recruitment crisis as applications for teacher training fell, whilst serving teachers sought to quit for work elsewhere or early retirement; second
53Ibid. 54Roy

Lowe, Death of Progressive Education. in Bob Carter, Howard Stevenson, and Rowena Passy, Industrial Relations in Education: Transforming the School Workforce (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 56PricewaterhouseCoopers/Department for Education and Skills, Independent Study into School Leadership: Main Report (Nottingham: Department for Education and Skills, 2007), vii. 57Stephen J. Ball, The Teachers Soul and the Terrors of Performativity, Journal of Education Policy 18, no. 2 (2003): 21528.
55Quoted

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was a campaign of industrial action against increasing workloads in which the three largest unions representing classroom teachers passed identical motions in support of a 35-hour week at their 2001 conferences. As a show of unity in an English and Welsh union context notorious for its division and fractiousness this was unprecedented. In their different ways, both these developments were considered by government to represent threats to their drive to achieve national targets in standardised tests. The response of the government was to open formal discussions with teacher unions at a national level for the first time since the abolition of Burnham in 1987.58 These discussions began as a form of joint talks, and developed to the point where the outcome was the first national collective agreement since the end of negotiating rights 15 years earlier. The agreement Raising Standards and Tackling Workload59 has many of the features of a traditional collective agreement but it cannot be said to be the product of traditional Burnham-style collective bargaining. Raising Standards and Tackling Workload refers to the agreement as a product of partnership and those who signed it have since become known as the Social Partnership a collective of unions (teacher and support staff) and employers (the Department of Children, Schools and Families, the Local Government Employers and the Welsh Assembly) together with bodies such as the Training and Development Agency for Schools who are not formal members of the Social Partnership, but who work closely with it. One of the largest teacher unions, the National Union of Teachers, refused to sign the national agreement (based on its opposition to the use of staff without Qualified Teacher Status having responsibility for whole classes),60 whilst the largest headteachers union was a member of the Partnership, had a spell outside it due to disagreements over funding commitments, and has since re-joined it. Since the national workload agreement in 2003 the Social Partnership continues to meet and has also been associated with a requirement for a national restructuring of teachers pay (2006),61 and a further development of performance management regulations (2007).62 Arguably the most important feature of the school sector Social Partnership is a commitment to new forms of working, and in particular a rejection of traditional collective bargaining, with its connotations of adversarialism, in favour of a more collaborative and consensual approach to working together. Social Partnership explicitly rejects a them and us approach to industrial relations, but rather emphasises the need to find common solutions from which winwin outcomes can emerge.63 In this respect the concept of social partnership in teacher unionism in England and Wales can be said to share many of the features of interest-based bargaining (IBB) that has
Bangs, Social Partnership: The Wider Context, Forum 48, no. 2 (2006): 2018. for Education and Skills (2003) Raising Standards and Tackling Workload: A National Agreement, http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/docbank/index.cfm?id=3479 (accessed November 10, 2008). 60National Union of Teachers, A Price Too High (London: National Union of Teachers, 2003). 61Rewards and Incentives Group, STRB: Evidence from the Rewards and Incentives Group, May 25, 2005, http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/docbank/index.cfm?id=8454 (accessed 7 September 2009). 62Rewards and Incentives Group, Performance Management for Teachers and Headteachers: Guidance, 2006, http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/10405/PM%20Guidance%20print% 20final%20Nov%2006.pdf (accessed 19, August 2008). 63Trades Union Congress, Partners for Progress: New Unionism in the Workplace (London: Trades Union Congress, 1999).
59Department 58John

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been explored in US teacher unionism. Klingels study on behalf of the National Education Association64 in the USA distinguishes between collective bargaining and IBB in the following terms.
Collective bargaining is often portrayed as a purely distributive exercise, where parties play tug of war over how to slice the pie, IBB is, by contrast, offered as a way to turn distributive contests into opportunities for mutual gain, where separate interests and needs are integrated into a satisfactory outcome. It is less reliant on the use of power to determine negotiation outcomes, and emphasizes the development of relationships and behaviors that will lead to a greater concern for shared success.

This is an approach to teacher unionism that has an established history in the USA and has been promoted strongly by both academics,65 and some union activists.66 It has, however, met with resistance, and may well be in retreat.67 At its core are two key elements; first, is a rejection of adversarialism as the modus operandi of industrial relations and rather its replacement by a commitment to find common solutions to agreed problems. Second, is a commitment to integrate industrial and professional issues such that unions engage much more in discussions over wider questions of education policy and pedagogical issues. This reflects the exhortation of Kerchner et al. to not restrict union negotiating to industrial issues, but to extend these to the other half of teaching.68 In England and Wales teacher unions within the social partnership would feel some affinity with the first characteristic above, but claim little with the latter. Those within the Social Partnership claim that the work of the Partnership is focused on issues of workload, and traditional areas of trade union concern, and that there is an explicit commitment to detach industrial and professional issues.69 For some unions, such as NASUWT, this reflects its traditional ambivalence to committing itself to positions on professional issues. For other unions, such as the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), there is a belief that by disconnecting industrial and professional issues the union can at one and the same time work collaboratively with the government on the former, whilst being oppositional on the latter. In reality the relationship between industrial and professional issues within the Social Partnership is much more complex. The partnership has unquestionably had a significant impact on many staple issues relating to teachers work, such as non-contact time, limits on covering for absent colleagues and the redistribution of a range of administrative tasks to support staff. However, arguably the key industrial issue, pay, remains beyond the scope of union negotiating and remains determined by a Review Body working within parameters determined by the Secretary of State. Moreover,
Interest-based Bargaining in Education (Washington, DC: NEA, 2003). Kerchner and D. Mitchell, The Changing Idea of a Teachers Union (London: Falmer Press, 1988); Charles Kerchner and Julie Koppich, eds., A Union of Professionals: Labor Relations and Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003). 66Bob Chase, The New NEA: Reinventing Teacher Unions for a New Era, American Educator 21, no. 4 (19978), 1215. See Teacher Union Reform Network at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/hosted/turn/proposal.html (accessed January 10, 2009). 67Julie Koppich, The As-yet-unfulfilled Promise of Reform Bargaining, in Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Todays Schools, ed. J. Hannaway and A. Rotherham (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 68Charles Kerchner, Julie Koppich, and J. Weeres, Taking Charge of Quality: How Teachers and Unions Can Revitalize Schools (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 11. 69Carter, Stevenson and Passy, Industrial Relations in Education.
65Charles 64NEA,

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whilst the Partnership rejects the idea that it embraces the other half of teaching,70 that is so-called professional issues, it is the case that the Social Partnerships discussions have focused around the emergence of a new professionalism.71 This has an attraction insofar as its rhetoric emphasises a conception of teaching in which teachers focus on the core task of teaching and learning72 unfettered by extraneous activities such as form-filling and photocopying. The reality is more complex as policies associated with new professionalism, such as the replacement of generic Management Allowances with Teaching and Learning Responsibility points has been to focus attention on a narrow conception of teaching, emphasising the impact on students academic achievement, and often resulting in a downgrading or marginalising of teachers pastoral roles. This is highly contentious within the teaching profession and illustrates how policies relating to so-called industrial issues can have a significant impact on professional practice. This link is further complicated by the increased role of new performance management arrangements agreed by the Social Partnership which trade talk of enhanced teacher professionalism and increased opportunities for professional development with appraisal arrangements which result in increased monitoring and surveillance of teacher performance, and which increasingly draw so-called middle leaders into decisions about the performance-related element of their colleagues pay.73 It may well be therefore that teacher unions in the Social Partnership can talk at one level of a continued separation of professional and industrial issues, whilst in reality they have been offered measures that promise (but have not delivered) reductions in workload in return for a ratchetting up of the managerialist pressures that significantly reduce teacher autonomy. Conclusion partnership formed and re-formed It is hardly contentious to assert that teachers occupy a central role within any education system, but what is contentious is to focus on the corollary the need for the State to control both individual teachers and the teaching profession collectively. The ideological importance of State education, its role in developing human capital and the economic costs of paying for State education, all require the State to ensure that teachers function within ideological and economic parameters, however loosely defined. For much of the twentieth century, and certainly in the immediate post-war period, this was secured through a relatively stable partnership with the profession in which teachers enjoyed a commitment to welfarism, professional autonomy on professional matters and collective bargaining over industrial issues in return for working within appropriate constraints on both professional and industrial issues. Within the context of an expanding welfare state this was tenable. However, it became untenable when fiscal crisis developed, the welfare capitalist consensus began to unravel and when the demands of capital and of organised teachers began to diverge. As teachers pushed at the economic and political boundaries of welfare capitalism, capital was simultaneously, and aggressively, reasserting the centrality of market logic. The equilibrium that was central to the partnership between teachers and the State was irreversibly destabilised once the welfare capitalist consensus fractured beyond
70Kerchner, 71Rewards 72Ibid. 73Rewards

Koppich, and Weeres, Taking charge of quality, 11. and Incentives Group, STRB. and Incentives Group, Performance Management.

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repair. What followed was a decade of skirmishes over both professional and industrial issues, which culminated in more overt conflict during the 198486 teachers strikes, ostensibly about pay but in reality about so much more. This was the period of transition from Keynesian-based welfarism to a form of post-welfarism based on a more aggressive neo-liberal economy and a welfare state that mimicked the market rather than challenged it. The period was a decisive transitional phase in the historical development of education policy as two teacher unions and the State struggled over the death of the old order, and the birth of the new. The defeat of the teacher unions in 1986, and the removal of their negotiating rights the following year, paved the way for the 1988 Education Reform Act and the fundamental restructuring of education along neo-liberal lines. At that time, the only collective organisations capable of resisting the wholesale re-orientating of State education in a way that challenged the core concepts of comprehensive and public education were unable to respond and resist. The State had effectively wrested control of both the professional and industrial dimensions of teachers work. However, teacher unions though defeated, were not destroyed, and in the years following the 1988 Act they not only maintained their overall membership and density levels, but they frequently demonstrated a continued capacity to resist. The 1993 boycott of standardised testing provides one high-profile example (and one that in 2009 looks to be continuing), but numerous local union-led campaigns against redundancies or grant-maintained schools provided further evidence of periodic and uneven union strength and effectiveness. Therefore, although any vestige of partnership appeared to have been dismantled it was still the case that the State needed to be cognisant of teachers as members of unions as they sought to develop and implement policy. This became even clearer in the early years of the New Labour administration when, amongst other things, industrial action by teacher unions over workload forced the government to open formal discussions with teacher unions, from which emerged the first formal collective agreement in more than 15 years. That the State has been compelled to seek a rapprochement with the teacher unions, or at least a critical mass of them, is a reflection of the States need to recognise the importance of organised teachers, and to secure the support of teacher unions in furtherance of its restructuring of education. Winning the support of organised teachers is central to the ability of the State to deliver substantial, long-term and sustainable reform. However, it is also necessary to recognise the narrow, limited and weakened nature of the re-formed partnership relative to the albeit limited form of partnership which existed previously. Within the new Social Partnership professional and industrial issues continue to be formally disconnected. On the one hand, professional issues are now largely in the hands of the central State, supported by a raft of semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable bodies such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the National College of School Leadership and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. On the other hand, the principal industrial issue, pay, is determined by a Review Body that consults rather than negotiates with unions, and has limited direct accountability. Related industrial issues, principally those relating to workload, are the subject of Social Partnership agreement, and it is possible to identify significant headline gains, such as statutory entitlement to 10% non-contact time. However, these have been secured in return for increased labour flexibility and acceptance of a managerialist framework that not only exerts significant pressure on teachers professional practice, but threatens to increase the pressures to perform and work more intensively in a way that cancels out the impact of any measures that claim

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to reduce teacher workload. Workload gains are likely to appear temporary and illusory.74 Underpinning all this is an acceptance by social partners, however reluctantly, of the post-welfarist values on which the neo-liberal restructuring of State education takes place. Teacher unions within the Social Partnership have made an assessment of current realities, and after long years in the wilderness, have accepted that a partnership with government is better than the isolation that they had experienced since 1988.75 The NUT, on the other hand, has rejected this rapprochement with government, and rather has opted for a strategy of resistance not only rejecting the concept of partnership working per se, but seeking to resist key elements of the governments restructuring agenda in schools. The problem for the teacher unions is that whatever the potential efficacy of these respective strategies each appears to be undermined by the divisions between them. Without the NUT the Social Partner unions have opted for a re-formed partnership with government, but on terms which accept an increased power imbalance between the central State and the teaching profession. The location of one of the key classroom teacher unions outside the Social Partnership unquestionably weakens the influence of the unions within it. On the other hand, the NUT has opted to reject the concept of Social Partnership, but without allies, and in its isolation, appears unable to mount anything more than token opposition to central elements of the neo-liberal restructuring of State education and teachers work. For the moment it seems that historic divisions between the teacher unions will continue to prevent them fundamentally challenging the neo-liberal trajectory of education policy in England and Wales. However, just as economic crisis fundamentally damaged the welfare capitalist consensus in the 1970s, and the partnership between teachers and the State that grew from it, so too may the current economic crisis destabilise the fragile equilibrium of social partnership, from which new possibilities may emerge. Notes on contributors
Howard Stevenson is Professor of Education in the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests are in understanding the formation and development of education policy processes, educational leadership, school sector labour relations/teacher unions and the investigation of teachers work through labour process analysis. Bob Carter is Professor of Organisational Change Management at the University of Leicester, UK. He trained as a sociologist and has published on class theory, labour process analysis, trade union strategies and mergers. He is currently working on the introduction of lean work practices into Her Majestys Revenue and Customs.

Teachers Workloads Diary Survey 2008, http://www.ome.uk.com/downloads/ 2008%20Teachers%20Report%20Final.pdf (accessed 7 September 2009). 75Howard Stevenson, Restructuring Teachers Work and Trade Union Responses in England: Bargaining for Change, American Educational Research Journal 44, no. 2 (2007): 22451.

74STRB,

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