Teachers, workforce remodelling and the challenge to labour process analysis

Abstract

Early attempts to examine the labour process of teaching concentrated on the processes of de-skilling and proletarianization and were largely ignored. Subsequent attempts to amend the approach have had similarly limited impact. This article examines the restructuring of teachers’ work during the last Labour government under the auspices of ‘workforce remodelling’, a policy intended ostensibly to reduce workload pressures on teachers. Rather than this outcome, the result was the further division of labour and increased intensity and control of teachers’ work through the extension of managerial hierarchies within schools. These developments, it is argued, are best captured and explained by an analysis informed by labour process theory. The account is based on the results of two years’ funded research involving extensive interviews with education officials and trade union officers at national and local authority level, and head teachers and other staff in 12 schools located in three contrasting local authorities.