ABSTRACT
One of the principal aims of this volume is to explore the link between teachers’ experience of their work and the wider industrial relations environment in which that work takes place. Previous chapters have presented and discussed data that describes how workforce remodelling has brought about changes in teachers’ work and the way that it is organised. This was done through separate chapters on both primary and secondary school contexts, refl ecting qualitative differences between the two sectors and the ways in which workforce remodelling played out differently in the two sectors. This chapter seeks to draw this material together and explore, at a more analytical level, the wider developments that are shaping teachers’ work under the broad heading of workforce remodelling and ‘transforming the school workforce’. This analysis of teachers’ work continues to draw on a framework provided by labour process analysis, which treats teaching as work, teachers as workers and schools as workplaces (Connell 1985, Ingersoll 2003). The chapter aims to draw on one of the major strengths of a labour process approach within education writings, namely its focus on the work of teachers coupled with an ability to connect this to wider institutional and macro-policy contexts.
