Tipología Punto a Punto (PTP):

In the chronological examination of policy I demonstrated how the policy-determined approach to

the leadership and management of teachers had resulted in the naturalisation of a culture of

managerialism (inter alia Clarke and Newman, 1998; Gunter, 2005; Rayner and Gunter, 2005;

Devecchi and Rouse, 2010) and performativity (inter alia Ball, 2003). Considerable policy work

and on-the-ground ‘rationalisation’ had, for example, been invested in teachers’ job specification

through the implementation and mediation of the various versions of the teaching competences

or ‘standards’ (for example, DfEE, 1998c; TDA, 2007c) and the allied regulatory and monitoring

mechanisms of performance management and Ofsted inspection regime to bring this about.

In this cultural context, the NA can be seen as having contributed to the policy discourse about

the practices of leading and managing TAs and teachers. The Agreement represented modernised

and remodelled school staffing structures and relationships as hierarchical and ‘rational’. School

leaders could be seen as being at the apex of a hierarchy triangle, responsible for ensuring that all

staff would be focused on the continued improvement of standards of pupils’ attainment. The

construction of the hierarchy included a notion of devolved or distributed leadership to lower

levels (Gunter, 2005; Rayner and Gunter, 2005; Raffo and Gunter, 2008; Hartley, 2009). As I have

shown elsewhere above, TAs were cast in roles of ‘junior partners’ (Smyth and Gunter in

Chapman and Gunter, 2009:193), or ‘servants’ (Quicke, 2003) and ‘apprentices’ (Devecchi and

Rouse, 2010) in relation to qualified teachers with their own sets of vocational standards (latterly

Placing TAs as subordinates meant that teachers would, even if by default, be responsible for

leading and managing them (Howes, 2003) resulting in a new role for teachers (Bach et al., 2006)

requiring training to enable them to carry out this new role (Wilson and Bedford, 2008). Indeed,

even though the idea of appropriateness where the management of TAs was concerned had been

left vague in the NA, which stated that teachers would not have direct line-management

responsibility for the TAs with whom they worked (ATL et al., 2003:12), a fuller realisation of the

‘rationalising’ and definition of roles and remits led to the junior role of TAs being further

enshrined in the Professional Standards for Teachers (TDA, 2007c). In this document part of a

teacher’s role included the coordination of members of teams of adults ‘where appropriate’

(2007c:21).

Understandably, some (for example, Hutchings, 2010:112) have argued that the promotion of

such a relationship could have built on and extended the existing hierarchical structures and

networks in schools and ‘rationalist’ specifications of teachers’ roles through sets of ‘standards’ or

competences as they had gradually developed and become naturalised. From the outset the

model for the remodelled workforce contained this in-built fault-line of TA-teacher collaboration

and cooperation without direct accountability to teachers. It was around this fault-line that

aspects of the literature discussed the development of relations and practices to include teachers’

appropriate management and leadership of TAs. One aspect of this debate included the

facilitation of the appropriate development and training of TAs (for example, Wilson and Bedford,

2008:149). Another theme concerned the establishment of ‘inclusive’ ‘cultures of learning’

(Simkins et al., 2009) with the ‘common purpose’ (Hartley, 2009) of fostering the mutual

However, the same writers also recognised how the preceding and concurrent reforms of

education had given managerialist and performative discourses hegemonic pre-eminence in the

management and leadership of teachers. This hegemony also included the valorisation of

particular kinds of knowledge and particular relations of power (Gunter, 2008; Hartley, 2009) in

the ‘culture of learning’ both between the policy centre and schools, and between staff within

schools. School managers’ central concern was to conform to and comply with policy

requirements (Hammersley-Fletcher and Atkinson, 2009:194; Hutchings et al., 2009a and b) and

they were often effectively silenced by the policy hegemony (Yarker, 2005).

The model of managerialist and performative management and leadership was one typified by a

concern for targets, accountability and the measurable outcomes provided by the attainment of

pupils against externally (politically) ‘constructed and assessed performance programmes’

(Gunter, 2005:182) as the knowledge that matters (Gunter, 2008). The distribution and

delegation of management and leadership down the school hierarchy was therefore a distribution

of the drive for the production of those measurable outcomes which ‘proved’ a school was

‘successful’. The impact of this on TAs could be seen as part of the ‘creation and sustaining of

organisational arrangements’ to achieve this ‘success’ and positioned them alongside other

resources to be managed (McGregor, 2004b). Such an interpretation led Gunter (2008) to report

a perception among managers that the outcomes of the process mattered more than the process

itself. Rayner and Gunter (2005), in their discussion of the Pathfinder8 project, gave evidence of

the subversion of this dominant model by headteachers in some schools. Equally, the subversion

of the dominant might be tempered or reversed when Ofsted inspectors turned their gaze on

those schools (see also Hammersley-Fletcher and Atkinson, 2009:194).

8 _{The Transforming the School Workforce Pathfinder Project (DfES, 2002a) involved 32 pilot}

schools in the deployment of strategies and resources to remodel / modernise their workforces to inform the national roll out of workforce remodelling. However, the NA was signed and the national roll-out began before the Pathfinder Project was completed.

The distributive drive downwards through the school hierarchy of the knowledge that matters

undermined more collegial and democratic ways of working and headteachers delivered policy

under the guise of leadership (Gunter, 2008). Taken together the ‘positivist epistemology’

(Gunter and Thomson, 2007:27) of targets, accountability, and measurable outcomes supported

by the application of policy-promoted notions of distributed leadership led to a re-fashioning of

education values and norms (Edwards, 2002) as teachers came to discipline themselves (Foucault,

1977 and 1988b; Rose, 1989 and 1996; Edwards, 2002; Miller and Rose, 2008) through exposure

to hierarchical supervision, examination and accountability (Perryman, 2009). Within its scope

the refashioning of organisational values and norms included the labour of children and young

people in classrooms as well as those who supported their learning in a ‘plan-deliver-test-report’

model of education (Howes, 2003:148).