ABSTRACT
It is neither revelatory nor controversial to claim that the demands on teachers and teacher education have intensified in recent years. Over a decade ago, in a paper that made a significant impact within the academy and resonated powerfully with the teaching profession in schools, Stephen Ball (2003) outlined what he described, following Lyotard, as ‘the terrors of performativity’, highlighting the alienating effects of this terror on ‘the teacher’s soul’. Since then the apparatus of neo-liberal performativity has, if anything, grown and intensified. One consequence of this is high attrition rates, with teacher unions in England reporting that 40 per cent of newly qualified teaching staff leave the profession by the end of their first year.1
