ABSTRACT
As we have stated earlier in this book, poor performance is not limited to one particular group in education, nor to a particular moment in a career cycle. There is no limit to its causes: each individual can perform at an unsatisfactory standard because of any combination of different professional and personal factors. It might be the result of management decisions or policies, incompatibility of personalities, ineffective recruitment strategies, a mismatch of skills to the job, innovation fatigue or any of the external pressures felt by people living in today’s complex society. The problem might be as fundamental as a wrong choice of career-there are some people whose skills are not suited to a career in education-or a wrong choice of school-different types of school have different cultures and different expectations of both their staff and their pupils. In these cases, the solution to the problem is probably less straightforward than the cause. Qualifications (insufficient for direct movement into another career or only suitable for teaching) or a financial or personal situation might make it difficult for someone to move out of the sector or into different schools.
