ABSTRACT
Over the twenty-five years since James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech of October 1976, a major struggle has developed over teacher professionalism in England and Wales. Callaghan’s intervention served to encourage a concerted challenge to inherited ideals and understandings of teacher professionalism that were based on teacher control and autonomy in the curriculum domain: the so-called ‘secret garden’ of the school curriculum. Callaghan emphasised the importance of ensuring that the education system was accountable to parents and the public in general, in the interests of improving educational standards (Morgan 1997: 503). Many of those involved in the self-styled ‘Great Debate’ that followed took this as an opportunity to undermine the vested interests of schools, teachers and their unions. For example, Kenneth Baker, Secretary of State for Education and Science in the late 1980s and primarily responsible for the Education Reform Act of 1988, insisted that ‘producer capture’, in which ‘the interests of the producer prevail over the interests of the consumer’, was one of the key problems facing the education system that needed to be tackled (Baker 1993: 168). This underlying trend fostered protracted and often heated conflict as to the character of teacher professionalism.
