ABSTRACT

Over the past 150 years or so teaching as an occupation has developed as a form of state professionalism. Since the 1980s, in the context of the rise of various manifestations of global neo-liberal politics, the state has been restructured with implications for teaching as a state profession. With the ‘economization’ of education policy, there has been a loss of involvement of the teaching profession in the production of education policy at a macro level. Education policy production has become largely part of what Bourdieu (1998a) called ‘the right hand of the state’; that is, education has been relocated within the central steering mechanisms of the Treasury and economic policy. This human capital approach has also been accompanied by a range of new policy technologies (Ball 2008) which include targets and testing regimes linked to a broader audit culture (Power 1999). The resultant culture of performativity has challenged the potential for authentic pedagogies and chiselled away at the ‘soul of the teacher’ (Ball 2006). Connell (1985), in his influential study of teachers’ work conducted more than twenty years ago, argued that in a sense teaching was a labour process without a product. The restructured state and new forms of performative control of schools and teachers have ensured that this is no longer the case. In some policy settings this culture is also linked to the introduction of quasi-markets and discourses of parental choice.