The last twenty years have seen a profound change in the way primary schools have been managed and organised, alongside a fundamental restructuring of the professional and para-professional school workforce. These changes have created both controversy and debate among policy makers, teachers and educational researchers. This chapter provides an overview of the impact of policies upon professional workforce management, reform and support, and assesses recent developments in England and Wales and elsewhere in the UK. A brief comparison with the USA provides a global context for understanding key issues that impact upon teachers and other professionals in primary schools. The time span for this survey is relatively short and focuses on the period from 1998,

when the government published the Green Paper Teachers: meeting the challenge of change (DfEE 1998), to the present day. The survey is necessarily selective, and includes those policies and research studies deemed to have the most impact on the practice of the professional primary school workforce. A number of research studies have been examined in detail. They include, in particular:

NFER evaluation of the National Remodelling Team (Easton et al. 2006) Transforming the School Workforce Pathfinder Project (Thomas et al. 2004a) The impact of New Labour’s education policies on primary school teachers’ work

(Webb and Vulliamy 2006) The deployment and impact of support staff in schools (Blatchford et al. 2004).