ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which classroom teachers and their senior management spoke about disciplinary issues during interview-based research in ten inner-city comprehensive schools. The notion of 'support' emerged as a key concept for both groups, yet the precise meanings and uses of the term differed such that senior management felt they could not always offer absolute support. The chapter focuses on the ways in which teachers spoke about discipline and the terms in which they described the action that should be taken when discipline is breached. It outlines two related but fundamentally contrasting disciplinary discourses: where 'discourse' is understood as 'a particular area of language use may be identified by the institutions to which it relates and by the position from which it comes and which it marks out for the speaker'. The chapter argues that despite many similarities, teacher and management discourses were fundamentally opposed because of dilemma between need for 'consistency' and the need for 'flexibility'.
