Re-making teacher professionalism in England: localism and social responsibility

Teaching and teacher education in England have been subject to thirty years of sustained public scrutiny and political intervention (Furlong, 2013). A range of technologies have enhanced central control and promoted cultures of disciplined self-steering. These include systems of specification (through Teachers’ Standards), measurement and comparison (through the audit of ‘hard’ performance indicators and periodic inspection of schools and teacher education), and prescribed forms of reflexive self-monitoring (quality assurance and evaluation processes). This article offers a critical analysis of the re-positioning of teaching and teacher education in England achieved by successive governments from the mid-1980s. Following a review of the trajectory of policies concerned with teacher development, three questions are addressed. How is teaching (re-)conceptualised in the reform of the Teachers’ Standards in England? What models of professionalism are discernible in recent drives to modernise and liberate the teaching profession? How do models of ‘occupational professionalism’ (Evetts, 2011) interact with concurrent moves towards localism and de-centralisation of education and children’s services? The article concludes by identifying areas of tension between devolution of responsibility and the promotion of local accountability, and the continued development of a national teaching service conceived as a public good