Teaching in the Mid‐1980s: the centrality of work in secondary teachers' lives

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a survey of the perceptions of 686 secondary school teachers working in the north of England about aspects of their working lives. It looks at the teachers' involvement in their work and the factors to which it is related. General and specific measures of work attitude were derived from a questionnaire completed by teachers in 20 schools which were selected so that their teachers would proportionately represent the characteristics of teachers in all secondary schools in six large Local Education Authority areas. The 686 respondents comprised 60% of the target sample. A facet‐free measure of work centrality acted as the dependent variable for a series of multiple regressions which showed that (1) work centrality was, in general, ‘value driven’ so that the more a job dimension was valued as a source of job satisfaction, the greater was the teacher's involvement in work; (2) the greatest single net effect on work centrality was the perceived degree of workload support followed by involvement in the pastoral role, in professional development activities and in a pupil‐centred pedagogy, and (3) when seven demographic variables were added, these specific roles and activities appeared to be a function of seniority achieved relatively early in the teaching career. A cluster analysis of the data identified four stable, groups of teachers who differed in the shape and level of their profiles on 16 variables. A discussion of the findings elaborates the notion of the ‘spoiled’ career and focuses on the special position of the mature entrant into teaching.