The boundaries of the teaching profession under pressure. Flexibilisation of teacher recruitment and working conditions in France and England

The narratives related to the teaching profession “crisis” widely vary across national boundaries. If in France the public debate remains strongly focused on the crisis in teacher recruitment (Brisard & Mallet, 2004), in England, the debate is as much centred upon retention as upon the loss of attractiveness of the teaching profession (see e.g. DfE 2019). Teacher-related policies and reform trajectories also follow distinct paths in the two countries. In France, teacher policy reforms have been historically centred on initial teacher training, and some dispersed policies aiming to improve the attractiveness of the career are underway (e.g. anticipated recruitment at the end of a bachelor degree, retraining of teaching assistants, premiums for teachers in disadvantaged schools). Meanwhile, England has adopted over the past two decades a larger spectrum of teacher-related reforms touching upon initial teacher training, modes of certification and recruitment, and career pathways and employment conditions (Childs & Menter 2013; Jones 2016). Our presentation attempts to analyse the interplay between the trajectories of teacher-focused reforms in France and England and the very nature of the ongoing flexibilisation of teacher recruitment processes and working conditions. Theoretically, our analysis is anchored in the framework of work and employment sociology, drawing upon Kalleberg’ work (2009; 2018) on the flexibilisation and polarization of employment relationships on the one hand, and on the literature on state transformation and changing modes of regulation of professions (Bezes et al 2011) on the other. We hypothesise that teacher-centred reform trajectories in England, resting on multiple forms of flexibilisation (training, recruitment, employment, career), can be interpreted as a move towards a liberal deregulation of the labour market for teachers. By contrast, in France, the upholding and reinforcement of existing institutional settings that regulate teachers’ careers (recruitment through concours, a central model of initial teacher training, and a centralised system of teacher allocation to schools), coupled with the recruitment crisis, have led to a polarization of teacher supply and recruitment as well as working conditions