I have read a couple of items recently that have really highlighted the presence of different views of what teachers and others in education professionalism is, at a fundamental level. This is a massively nuanced and complex issue, but I’m grappling with it, so here’s a go a breaking it down in a more (hopefully) straightforward way.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/heres-why-teachers-over-50-leaving-profession-nothing-anna-browning

I think there’s a lot that is true in Anna Browning’s blog, and believe that it is likely to be the lived experience of many. Devolving ‘agency’ to achieve and demonstrate achievement of the meeting of national standards to individual schools or MATs has resulted in a great deal of performativity. If you worked on schools between 2010 and 2019, you’ll be familiar with all the hoops (demonstrate progression in 20 mins, anyone?). Then the pandemic… it’s not been great. All this checking, testing and measuring paints a picture of is a manifestation of a managerialist (professionalism = measuring things and meeting defined standards) approach to teacher practice. It sits in tension with other more traditional perceptions of professionalism, in which professionalism = experience and practical wisdom.

And then there’s this:

On the front of our SEF, we proudly proclaim that we develop thinking teachers at our school.

An advisor asked me why we want to develop teachers that think for themselves?

Easier to just tell them what to do and monitor the hell out of them.

— The Thinking School (@Thinkingschool2) May 26, 2023

This feels like the frontline of the battle between the managerialist paradigm and democratic professionalism (making the profession open, clear and research engaged).

I believe that the testing and performativity are only part of the story here. As a profession (and I believe we should strive to embody the democratic vision of what this means), we must engage with high quality CPD. Better CPD might have raised the confidence of some of those over 50s teachers to become research informed experts. It might have raised their sense of agency, promoted their professional autonomy, and reduced their sense of (structurally created) isolation.

To see signs the managerialist paradigm so overtly in the tweet quoted above is a real worry, and something to be kept a close eye on.

See my previous posts for more details and citations on the readings that support these ideas: