ABSTRACT
A concerted and determined attempt by central government to transform the school as a workplace and teachers as a workforce is seen. Intensification has increased workloads, expanded bureaucracy, colonized teachers' time and space, reduced flexibility and separated the conceptualization of policy (made by others) from its execution (by teachers). Teachers, like others reported elsewhere, were in favour of balance. They welcomed a National Curriculum in principle, but were concerned at the amount of content and the effects managing its implementation would have on their kind of teaching. As A. Hargreaves points out, time greatly structures teachers work, and is, in turn, structured by it. Time is a different element in 'going with the flow' than in 'getting done'. The term 'contrastive rhetoric' was coined by A. Hargreaves to describe a strategy deployed by senior managers in a school to secure collective decisions for one option by ridiculing others.
