ABSTRACT
A tentative classification of teacher accounts was made in the first instance on the basis of an overall assessment of the teachers’ perspectives in relation to the ideological positions. While a tentative articulation of the teachers’ positions in relation to certain ideologies of education could be attempted, it was apparent that a more specific classification of teacher perspectives was necessary, based upon each of the major issues and concerns of the inquiry. The elementary school tradition remained physically enshrined in many of the buildings of the other schools and something of the elementary school ethos was still detectable in School. Almost all the schools were associated with relatively high levels of pupil poverty and almost all of them had been, or currently were, the objects of a social imagery which stressed their toughness and turbulence and their constitution of a ‘pedagogic challenge’ to any group of teachers.
