Pat Mahony and Ian Hextall

Gendering teaching

Pat Mahony and Ian Hextall

Contact details

Professor Pat Mahony

FroebelCollege

RoehamptonUniversity

Roehampton Lane,

London SW15 5PJ

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006

Abstract

This paper will draw on data from three ESRC funded projects as the basis for reflecting on policy developments that have gradually reshaped the ways that primary teachers’ work has been defined, regulated and re-gendered. The paper will explore the extent to which at each stage of these developments gender has been implicated either implicitly or explicitly in the reshaping of teachers’ professional identities.

The first project The Policy Context and Impact of the Teacher Training Agency (R000221642)

was undertaken by undertaken by Mahony and Hextall between 1995 and 1996.Data were collected through: document analysis; questionnaires to HEIs, LEAs and to 170 schools; and 36 interviews with key actors including teachers. Two of the main findings were that the TTA represented a significant realignment of patterns of power and control in the governance of teacher education and professional development and that the TTA’s activities constituted a potent intervention in the restructuring and recomposition of the work of teachers and the teaching profession. The data from the project will, for the first time, be reviewed for the extent to which subsequent gendered prescriptions about teachers and their work are prefigured in the mid 1990s.

The second project, The Impact on Teaching of the National Professional Qualifications (R000 23 7382) followed on between 1997-99 and sought to explore in depth, the significance and effects of the National Teaching standards being developed by the TTA. Data were collected through document analysis, questionnaires to HEIs and LEAs, 48 individual and group interviews with key actors including school teachers, heads and deputies. The paper will explore the ways in which the gendering of teaching and headship had become much more overt by the late 1990s, with the first official codification in England of teachers’ work. Within a policy context in which claims about the ‘feminisation of teaching’ and calls for more men into teaching were prevalent, the professional standards were highly significant both in providing centralised (masculinist) definitions of teaching and teacher roles, and in the managerially orientated way that they specified how the various postholders should relate within the command structure of the school. By utilising gendered discourses of ‘professionalism’ a tension was created between managerial and professional orientations which produced amongst our interviewees contradictory feelings of consent and compromise, compliance and commitment.

The third project, The Impact of Performance Threshold Assessment on Teachers’ Work(R000239286) was undertaken by Pat Mahony, Ian Menter and Ian Hextall between 2001–2003. In order to explore the Threshold policy from its sources, through development and implementation, to its impact on teachers, teaching and the profession, we adopted a three strand methodological approach consisting of: documentary analysis; interviews with a range of key actors; and indicative case-studies. This paper draws mostly on the five primary school case studies consisting of 38 interviews involving 26 staff.One of the major findings of the project was that the principles underpinning Threshold Assessment were‘masculinist’ in ways that privileged hegemonic male identities to which few teachers, male or female, subscribed. The paper will show how the regulatory version of performance management that was evident in the Threshold procedures rely on a form of economic rationalism that impacted differentially on men and women primary teachers to ‘do’ gender.

Overall, we shall argue, there is a story to be told about how government policies governing teachers and their work have over the last ten years increased the salience of gender whilst at the same time seeming to render the structural characteristics of ‘workers’ irrelevant.

Introduction

We undertook the first project, The Policy Context and Impact of the Teacher Training Agency, (R000221642) between 1995 and 1996. The intention to establish the TTA first entered the public domain in 1993 via a document entitled The Government's Proposals for the Reform of Initial Teacher Training. Having experienced a long line of Conservative government interventions, we naively believed that ITT had already been 'reformed' and so the puzzle for us was to try to understand what lay behind this initiative.

The third project, The Impact of Performance Threshold Assessment on Teachers’ Work (R000239286) was undertaken with, Ian Menter between 2001–2003. By this stage, policy as framed within the 1998 Green Paper was firmly set in the direction of severing the link between pay and time served and introducing what is generally known internationally as ‘performance pay’.

In this paper we focus first on the question of how gender has become much more overtly significant in relation to the effects of these policies (or maybe we’ve just got better at spotting it), before going on to consider some general themes. We could of course have chosen other axes of social differentiation to make similar arguments. First there is a chronological story to be told.

The TTA, operating in a way that was recognisably more managerialist than hitherto, proposed a raft of policy initiatives which constituted a more centralised and systematic control of the education and development of teachers, to the extent that it was difficult to find any area of activity that lay outside its control, from pre-recruitment publicity through to Continuing Professional Development. Taken together these set the direction for the subsequent restructuring of the nation's teaching force. They had career-long significance for the working lives of teachers in terms of the model of progression through which the Agency was working and the equity issues which this subsequently raised. 'Effectiveness', 'efficiency' and 'higher standards' became the new mantra, with the TTA being the body responsible for instituting the steering mechanisms through which more 'effective' teachers could be produced. Not surprisingly throughout our interviewing of politicians, policy practitioners, LEA and union officials, heads, governors and teachers, we could not find anyone who was against 'effectiveness', 'efficiency' and 'higher standards' nor anybody who argued for 'ineffective' teachers. How these terms were being defined by policymakers was, however, regarded as leaving a good deal to be desired – not least in relation to the absence of any recognition of social justice issues. Our data showed that teachers in schools were the least well informed about the restructuring of work and the profession though they were beginning to become aware of the National Professional Standards that were being established. It is worth noting that comparable redefinitions of what it means to be a professional and of the nature of professionalism (as defined by occupational standards) in the context of high surveillance/low trust policies have continued to receive a good deal of attention throughout the public sector and internationally, although we shall not have the opportunity to explore either of these issues in detail in this paper (Mahony, et al 2006).

By the late 1990sthe gendering of teaching and headship had become much more overt, with the first official codification in England of teachers’ work via the National Professional Standards. Within a policy context in which claims about the ‘feminisation of teaching’ and calls for more men into teaching were prevalent, these professional standards were highly significant both in providing centralised, technicist definitions of teaching and teacher roles, and in the managerially orientated way that they specified how the various postholders should relate within the ‘command’ structure of the school. By utilising gendered discourses of ‘professionalism’ a tension was created between managerial and professional cultures which produced a good deal of anxiety amongst our interviewees. We were still in the throes of the National Standards project when the framework was changed to include Threshold – this marked the point (roughly 5 years into teaching) at which reward for performance was introduced. We found that the principles underpinning Threshold Assessment privileged hegemonic masculine identities to which few teachers, male or female, subscribed. Both sexes were critical of what they understood to be the clash between their professional values (of being a primary teacher, charged with the care of children) and the ‘insulting’ assumption that they were motivated solely by money.

Within these particular stories, about which we have written at length (see Roehampton web-site for details of publications), a number of recurring themes can be discerned. It is to some of these that we now turn.

Managerialism and Individuation

It is now well established that in recent years significant shifts in the governance, management and administration of the public sector have occurred in most OECD and many ‘under-developed’ countries with variations on the theme of what has variously been called ‘managerialism’, ‘new managerialism’, ‘corporate managerialism’ or ‘new public management’ having been introduced across the globe (Clarke, J. and Newman, J. 1997, Gewirtz 2002, Hood, 1991, Mahony and Hextall, 2000, Smyth, et al 1998). In rejecting the Weberian notion of public sector organization, with its emphasis on procedural rules (designed to prevent corruption, favouritism and illegitimate interference by politicians), managerialism involves reorganizing the public sector along the lines of ‘best’ commercial practice. World-wide manifestations of this have included: employee performance measurement; increased demands for public accountability in achieving specified outcomes, and new centralized forms of control and regulation accompanying decentralized responsibility for local management (Lindblad, 2000).

Managerialism deals in units of labour stripped of their social, structural characteristics which are deemed largely irrelevant, providing that specifications and working criteria are complied with. This renders such characteristics as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ‘disability’ and class, marginal. It places people involved in the 'education industry' in different relationships, both to fundamental definitions of their 'core business' and to the various cohorts and categories of people with whom they work and interact. In much of the literature on public sector transformations this has been summarised as reflecting the shift from a bureau-professional to a managerial ideology in which 'equal opportunities' has been increasingly defined as an expensive extra to the 'core business' of improved academic achievement (Clarke and Newman, 1997). Analysis has indicated how the models of management and leadership portrayed within the ideology of managerialism exemplify dominantly masculinist assumptions and values even when couched within a seemingly neutral discourse (Mahony and Hextall, 2000). In speaking the language of ‘all’ teachers, professionals or practitioners the danger is that:

… dynamics that treat women and men ‘the same’ are actually male preferential because they are premised on men’s lives, men’s bodies, men’s time, men’s expectations and men’s ability to valorize work over home, family and personal life (Yancey Martin, 1996, p. 191)

Discourses of the ‘new professional’, ‘lead professional’ and ‘para-professional’ evident in more recent policy documents such as the Five Year Strategy for schools (DfES 2004) and Every Child Matters (DfES 2004) continue to present the issue of who inhabits these positions as benignly ‘gender neutral’.

Elsewhere we have distinguished regulatory models of performance management from those that we have described as developmental (Mahony and Hextall, 2000, chapter 2). The latter involve professional conversations that review achievements, negotiate plans for the future and identify support needed to achieve aspirations. Regulatory models embody a set of principles involving performance targets that focus on the visible and the measurable. At worst, they ignore the messy ‘people’ business of teaching and focus solely on outcomes that are available to scrutiny, judgment and evaluation by line managers. They increase the organization’s capacity for surveillance, and in a manner highly reminiscent of critiques by second wave feminists, such approaches objectify and commodify by reducing individuals to their external appearances (their ‘performances’). The language of targets, moreover, is itself highly gendered: they are ‘hard-nosed’, ‘tough’, there to be aimed at and preferably hit.

Regulatory models of performance management also rely on individualistic and competitive models of motivation, achievement, performance and progression. In doing so they take it as axiomatic that this version of the teacher will prove to be more ‘efficient, effective and economical’ in relation to the production of desired outcomes (itself a highly contestable assumption). Such discourses exemplify a hegemonic masculinity which works against values that focus upon student need, disadvantage, inclusion, and collegial social relationships (Blackmore, 1999). It is perhaps no accident that in our efforts to identify the architects of Threshold, people close to the policy process repeatedly presented us with the names of the same three white, politically powerful men.

In the 1990s a highly developed international literature emerged on the impact of the new managerialist movements in relation to work cultures (Itzin and Newman 1995; Walby and Greenwell 1994; Limerick and Lingard 1995; Mahony 1997). Issues around work cultures were also pertinent to the tensions expressed by women primary school teachers, as they struggled to fit their professional identities of caring within the new masculinized environment of the competitive ‘individualized individual’ of neo-liberal society (Hey 2003; Skelton 2005)

Politics, strategies and discourses of debate

If the place of social differentiation is neither specified nor recognized, then policy will be continue to be framed by and for those who experience no dissonance with concepts which invoke the 'normal', 'natural' order of things residing in 'common-sense'. That schools are political institutions is not commonsense. That schools both reflect and reconstitute (or challenge) social inequalities organized around the axes of ‘race’, gender, class, sexuality and disability is an understanding that many teachers take time to develop. The gender regime of the school is mediated through: patterns of staff employment; the messages conveyed in curriculum materials; teaching and assessment practices; the organization of option choices; the basis on which students are grouped; the assumptions embedded in school discipline; the organization of the pastoral system; the kinds of language used and the ways interpersonal relations are handled. In some cases such issues take demanding and dramatic forms, in others they are woven into the daily routines of school life. In all cases they constitute the experiences, acknowledged or not, within which parents, teachers, students, ancillary staff, governors and others inhabit schools. In relation to the first iteration of the National Standards for QTS some interviewees noted the gendered nature of the model of teaching that was being portrayed:

… some of the standards are OK, the language of others .. for me .. there are connotations of male ways of teaching ... authority, discipline and control rather than the more subtle strategies you see the women developing. Some of the standards are wide open for interpretation - for good and ill. It’s what’s missing that’s the problem and how far people will even notice it. (Deputy Head in charge of student teachers)

Despite the nature of schools as political institutions, policy on teacher education during the decade within which we have been working, has failed to address the fact that schools exist within, are influenced by and have a role in maintaining inequitable social relationships. Indeed the Thatcher and Major years were notable for erasing from the collective memory of teacher education, many of the insights gained from work which sought to explore the ways in which educational structures and processes are both constituted by wider social divisions, and in turn reconstitutive of them (unless contested and interrupted by teachers). Such work cannot be simply transported across time, however, for political identities have become complex as a consequence of globalised economies, developments in technology and communications and widespread movements of people (Zmroczek and Mahony 1999). That said, one ‘inefficiency’ in current policy-making is that almost no reference is made to anything that has been learned before. As we have written elsewhere:

In our explorations of the policy-making process we have been dismayed by the limitations we have encountered. Politicians and policy makers are orientated towards a ‘short-termism’ which possesses limited perspective on the past and scarcely stretches beyond the electoral cycle. We are faced with a politics of the ‘solution’ but without an adequate definition of the problem which it is deemed to solve. Little attention appears to have been paid to how problems might be defined and who should be involved in the process of defining them, nor to what the parameters and impact of ‘solutions’ might prove to be in terms of the consequences (intended or otherwise). Mahony and Hextall 2000, p. 150)