ABSTRACT
So far we have portrayed teachers as being very much on the defensive. Their time and space have been colonized, their sense of reality disturbed, and they have experienced feelings of deprofessionalization. But ‘all strategies of control call forth counter-strategies on the part of subordinates’ (Giddens, 1985), and teachers are very resilient. In previous studies we have remarked on their powers of adaptation and resistance (Woods, 1995; Woods and Jeffrey, 1996b). To some extent, this reaction has been facilitated by the ‘implementation gap’, as was the inspectors’ implementation of the inspection as discussed in Chapter 1. Part of the rationale in establishing Ofsted was to decrease this gap, to ensure that government policy was being carried out in schools, and to close down resistance. This is a comparatively new kind of constraint on teachers. In the past, they have had to cope with more ‘neutral’ factors that have become almost part of their jobs, such as state of school buildings, class size, salary levels, or recalcitrant pupils. As is shown in Chapter 2, Ofsted represents a direct intervention from above in a hierarchical system, operated by strangers employing a discourse foreign to most primary teachers. These circumstances are not new to most teachers but as we have shown in preceding chapters they profoundly affect the teachers and to some considerable extent dominate their lives. So how do teachers cope with this new constraint?
