ABSTRACT

If, as Gunter and Butt (2007: 5) argue, New Labour felt the need to ‘break the dominance of teachers as providers of education’, workforce reform did not appear to offer the means to do so within secondary schools. Within this sector, the impact of a number of aspects of workforce remodelling promised to be less than dramatic and certainly less so than in the primary sector. The transfer of routine tasks to support workers was the least controversial element of the reforms, and the size of secondary schools already offered the possibility of moves towards greater potential divisions of labour. The separation of pastoral work was not unproblematic but again the organisation of teaching rotating classes in secondary schools, where teachers are subject specialists, resulted in weaker emotional ties with students, so was likewise not perceived as a great threat. Moreover, the major benefi t of the reforms for primary teachers, the guaranteed 10% planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time, was already in place in many secondary schools: indeed we have examples of schools already having more non-contact time than the reforms stipulated. The reduction in cover was a defi nite gain and was welcomed with less ambivalence than in the primary sector, where teachers felt uneasy sometimes about the quality of staff taking ‘their’ class. The reforms were very much with the grain therefore.