ABSTRACT
The relations between teacher unions and school reform has been raised by the school restructuring shift in the USA and especially by the pivotal role the unions are being asked to play within some appeals for change. This contrasts with the relative silence about teacher unions and school reform in England. However, the paper uses this contrast to raise questions about how the idea of the union is defined and the boundaries around it viewed. The union is often seen as a tightly contained unit, operating as a discrete entity and remaining consistent over time. I will be arguing here that it is a site of production as well as of distribution and that in the modern period it acted as a place where ideas about the work of teachers, its sites and organization, as well as the purpose and form of education were created and circulated. Unions, seen within this frame of reference, were able to act as reform aware places but they have to cope with a major contradiction in this task. Teachers’ work, the heart of the union’s purpose, might be improved, downgraded or even made redundant by the reform proposals, it may be sought to alleviate or solve a problem of the labour process it contains. Either way, engaging in reform talk is both a necessary and a disruptive act within the union. Another way in which this might be seen is that either stalling or proposing reform will lead to the improvement of or a regression in teachers’ conditions of work. For those who win, there are those who will lose. They will be in the wrong sector or with the wrong qualifications.
