ABSTRACT
Indicative of the way growing numbers of teachers around the world feel at the moment about what is happening to their work, a teacher in England put it like this:
I sometimes feel that I have fallen asleep for five years and just woken up to a radically altered situation at school. Everything has changed for the worst. At the same time we are told that everything has improved; careers, teaching style, resources and opportunities for the kids. Everyday a new initiative to maintain the illusion. Of course it’s just rhetoric but it’s becoming more difficult to distinguish the myth from the reality. And this is destroying our work, destroying teaching
(Macan Ghaill 1992:177) The rapidity, pervasiveness and thorough-going nature of these changes make it very difficult accurately and comprehensively to trace, let alone grasp, the full extent of their impact. As early as the mid-1980s, Ozga (1988) cited a number of the early policy initiatives reshaping teaching in England as being ‘changes in the contractual relationship between teachers and employers; [the abolition of] teachers’ negotiation rights; [loss of] control of curriculum and examinations; and changes in the pay and promotion in teaching’ (p. ix), and that was only in the mid-1980s!
