Tipología Punto Multipunto (PTM):

The period following ERA saw the wresting of the control of curricular and professional knowledge

away from the profession and the ratcheting up of pressure on teachers and schools to perform.

This led to the policy response of the NA as there were no longer enough teachers to service

schools. Nor was there the political will to increase resources and develop the conditions to

attract and retain sufficient numbers of suitably qualified teachers (Ball, 2008a). By the time the

NA instigated the remodelling and modernisation of the school workforce not only was the

knowledge controlled from the outside but its assessment and monitoring were also externally

determined and enforceable, effectively removing ‘from the teacher the responsibility for

designing the curriculum and exercising professional judgement on standards’ (Gunter, 2008:259)

and robbing them of the ability to innovate in their practice (Regan, 2007). Simultaneously

prescribed teaching methods such as those promoted by the National Literacy and Numeracy

undertake teaching. Gunter (2008:266) called the discourse around teacher professionalism and

pedagogy a ‘distraction’ perhaps because the underlying purpose of the remodelling and

modernisation reform was to produce cheap9 and flexible labour to undertake teaching (see also

Quicke, 2003; Butt and Gunter, 2005; Butt and Lance, 2005).

Staff, whether teachers or TAs, were thus instrumentalised into ‘performing’ an ‘education’

centred on prescription, functionality and quantifiability. Managers were responsible for ensuring

the functional and quantifiable outcomes of staff and pupils’ work; teachers performed specified

roles in relation to children and other adults; TAs undertook specified work in relation to children

and teachers. The knowledge that mattered was the measurable outcomes of children’s work.

Nevertheless, these new ways of working, of structuring the school workforce and of attempting

to determine the agency of the members of the workforce to validate the knowledge that

mattered created tensions (Butt and Lance, 2005) not around the ‘what and how’ of pedagogy but

around the ‘who’ in the classroom (Galton and MacBeath, 2010).

The wresting and controlling of authoritative knowledge – the knowledge that mattered - was a

major recurrent theme in this current chapter, leading me to postulate an understanding of the

promotion of a policy-determined construction of education reform as promoting an equally

authoritative discourse about the construction of education more generally within wider public

sector reforms through neo-liberal interpretations of the role of the state and the positioning of

its citizens. Through an examination of some of the literature I have here attempted to

demonstrate that the authoritative discourses of the NA and other policies resulted in ruptures

and discontinuities. On the one hand policy makers were using the policies as resources for the

establishment of a ‘grand’ or meta-narrative of education and the state. On the other hand,

social relations and practices in schools did not match the policy narrative. Equally the literature

was useful in exploring how policy language sought to justify or obfuscate interests that see

education as a private good, a tradable commodity or as instrumentalising the production of free

labour. Moreover, underlying the meta-narrative of schools as homogeneous institutions, the

findings of the literature, regardless of their degree of criticality, all attested a system that is not

homogeneous.

Contrariwise, the same policy metanarrative of education also promoted a form of heterogeneity

such as marketised provision, or variety in the workforce supporting children, or an

acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of pupils’ ‘needs’. However, these heterogeneities are

policy-conformist heterogeneities of permitted and recognised difference, justifications of

particular heterogeneities which are, nevertheless, by and large accepted by and acceptable to

most people most of the time. The meta-narrative attempts to remove traces of other competing

narratives such as: education as a public good which is rewritten as education for individualised

consumption or private gain; the tradition of liberal education which is rewritten as education to

equip individuals for working life; the meta-narrative of the professional as independent and

autonomous which is re-written as a story of unaccountable, self-serving elites. Over the period

of the review of education reform one might therefore single out another important feature of

the meta-narrative, namely the insertion of new values and norms into the social and material

fabric of schools, into the individuals who labour in them and into the resources they deploy and

Chapter 3: Theoretical and Methodological Approach

Introduction

Chapter 2 involved an exploration of the historical, ideological and policy contexts which have

influenced the development of education, schools and their workforce through the recent past.

My contention was that such an exploration was necessary in order to give a sense of the

temporal location of the participants in my research and, to support that view, my work drew on

selections from the literature which discussed the historical development of the school workforce,

responded or contributed to policy from research findings, or engaged critically with

developments in policy and their social effects. In this chapter I take a relativist and constructivist

approach to continue my theme of enabling the ‘location’ of my participants in order to establish

a theoretical space for the discussion and description of my research tools in the next chapter.

Building on my discussion of the purposes of my research in the introduction to this thesis I here

aim:

- to develop an interpretivist theoretical framework based around social constructivism and

meaning making (Bruner, 1990, 1991, in Bakhurst and Sypnowich 1995), Actor Network

Theory (inter alia Latour, 1987, 2005), and critical language analysis (Potter and

Wetherell, 1987; Fairclough, 2001) to overcome the separation of macro and micro-level

analysis and interpretation and the dissolution of traditional binary oppositions and

hierarchies of structure and agency.

Underlying the contextual approach outlined above are allied assumptions that the past in terms

of the changes brought about through ERA in reaction to the post-war settlement of education

and subsequent policy realignments in the period following the NA contributes to the

‘isolated’ from that past. Indeed, TAs as an identifiable yet difficult-to-define and mutating group

of workers in schools, exist because of past events. My interpretation of the literature and policy

attempted to show that policy and policy-determined practice in schools had resulted in

incomplete and ambiguous realignments in the division of labour and relations of power through

policy-determined definitions of knowledge. The lack of easy identification, definition and on-

going mutation of TAs thus occur because of events in the past and attempts in the present to

mediate or resolve the ruptures and contradictions of past events. The inference is that the

words of my research participants will show ‘traces’ of the past in their discussions of current

social conditions, relations and practices.

These contentions and propositions have implications for the theoretical and methodological

approach that I adopt in this chapter. The idea of the constructive effects of the past on the

present leads me to follow a constructivist path in relation to the theorisation of the location of

my participants within schools as research sites as well as of my participants as knowledgeable

subjects and agents within those sites. De facto, we exist - we are, we do, we know, we

communicate. My concern in this chapter therefore is to establish theoretical frameworks

drawing on a complementary range of theorists whose ideas support my project of situating my

research participants within their schools as sites of social interest, of enabling an interpretation

and analysis of their words, and of enabling me to contribute to knowledge about the social.

In this chapter, therefore, I present my theorisation of the research sites taking ideas from Actor-

Network-Theories (ANT) (inter alia Latour, 1987, 2005; McGregor, 2004a, b, and c). I then

attempt to theorise my participants as knowledgeable subjects and agents, drawing on ideas on

meaning making (Bruner, 1990, 1991, in Bakhurst and Sypnowich 1995). These approaches are

intended to facilitate an understanding of the interaction between subjects and objects within the

1971; Bruner, 1990, 1991, in Bakhurst and Sypnowich 1995; Fairclough, 2001; Potter and

Wetherell, 1987) as a framework for gaining insights into how my participants construct and

ideologise their understanding of their working lives and environments. Through taking a

constructivist stance I present the subject as agent constituted through action and interaction

with other subjects and the material world.