ABSTRACT
This book is meant as a follow-up to Jelmer Evers’ and René Kneyber’s incredible volume, Flip the System. It was after a presentation by René at a researchED conference that, both looking to recover our professional pride after a bruising few years in Special Measures, we found a new purpose. Those had been years of disempowerment and all-consuming workload, of CPD as cruel and unusual punishment and of health-destroying stress. Now, we would fight back to fitness, not just for ourselves, but for the profession. In the very incubating chamber of neoliberal reform, we would seek out the other voices of dissent, and we would make them heard. We would look beyond their divisions and identify their commonality. We would analyse our findings and we would use them to define teacher professionalism, and to write the teachers’ manifesto. We would transform the education system in this country – not with a view to rewriting its curriculum, nor to delimiting its pedagogy, nor still to restructuring it, but to give teachers back the power to effect those very changes. We would show that any education policy that failed to take the profession into account – and that is every education policy since education policy became a thing – was doomed to failure.
