ABSTRACT
It is the argument within this collection of essays that a major period in the development of teaching, its professionalism and work processes, might be coming to an end in England. It was a period in which a modern system of education was established by a social democratic movement within a particular cultural and organizational framework defined by its ‘Englishness’. This period came into being in the immediate post-war, built on the foundations of work in the 1920s and 1930s, established itself in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and began to receive a number of severe shocks in the 1970s. Within this period, especially after the Second World War, the education service was often described as a collective partnership between local and national government and teachers. This idea of partnership was in part mythological, built around the idea of a peculiar ‘Englishness’, a post-war myth about real English democracy as opposed to continental dictatorships, and it involved a permitted decentralization of the system in which the appearance of autonomy disguised a form of ‘indirect rule’ from the centre. In this period of ‘autonomy and partnership’, the involvement of teachers in the governance of education was described as professionalism; this was seen by contemporary observers as a right as well as a responsibility (for example, Tropp, 1957). In recent years, especially since the 1980s and the Thatcherite turning over of education in the 1988 Education Reform Act (and subsequent legislation), the myths and mock traditions of the partnership have been exposed. One consequence of the restructuring of teachers’ work (post-ERA emphasis on performance and productivity in a market) is the redesignation of the idea of teacher professionalism and the relationship between that idea and the labour process of teaching.1
