ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the findings of research which was undertaken over a two-year period with teachers from eleven primary schools in the Midlands region of England. The purpose of the work was to investigate the effect of macro-level politics and policies, through which the management of in-service budgets was devolved to schools through a government controlled system of Grants for Education, Support and Training (GEST), upon micro-level individual learning behaviours of teachers. The research revealed that leadership support and school culture factors make significant contributions to the quality of professional learning opportunities which are both school initiated and school centred (Day 1991a; 1993). However, the most important influences on the way in which teachers developed were the teachers’ personal and professional learning biographies and their stages of career and life cycle development. ‘Biography’ as used in this chapter refers to those formative experiences which have influenced the ways in which teachers think about their professional development and what kinds of professional development processes they value.
