ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three major ways in which school employers and managers have set about achieving their objectives of staying alive in a competitive market. These are job losses and the threat of redundancy; changes in skill mix through flexible use of teacher workforce allied to new pay structures; and through increased workload. The chapter identifies the main issues that will arise in schools as a result of the recession/reform-induced changes, drawing from the case study and questionnaire findings of the Keele survey. The general impression was that too many teachers felt that under local management of schools the head would decide more and tell less in terms of the industrial relations issues in schools than ever before. The experiences of most classroom teachers and head teachers are likely to be that the majority of issues are settled without reference to ‘industrial relations machinery’.
