ABSTRACT
The expansion of bureaucratic control is justified on the grounds that it ensures the maintenance of standards of education. It is argued that it helps hold teachers, lecturers and their institution to account. While the impact of the standardisation of teaching on the quality of education is debatable, its consequences on the relationship between the different parties – teachers, students, local authorities, parents – is strikingly clear. Bureaucratic intervention in education has led to the transformation of the basic relationships involving pupils, teachers, academics, students, parents and bureaucrats into carefully regulated transactions. Sadly, a focus on transactions distracts teachers from cultivating their relationship with students and parents. They are, above all, answerable to external agencies and not to those whom they teach. Whether they are successful or not depends not on what happens in the classroom but on their ability to meet the formal criteria established by inspectors and auditors. Such a development has had the effect of distancing people from one another. It has had the effect of transforming face-to-face relationships into transactions that are vetted according to a bureaucratic formula established outside the site of learning.
