Towards Effective Management of a Reformed Teaching Profession

The purpose of this chapter is to argue that effective leadership and management of the education profession requires a shift of direction away from current orthodoxies of radical transformation, promoted by reform policies, towards a more temperate approach. Temperance would serve a less ambitious but more realistic endeavour to bring about incremental improvement in students’ education. It would encourage and enable teachers to operate as professionals, exercising the judgement necessary to do their best for their students in their classroom and school settings. Conversely, it would embody the expectation that teachers should act professionally in their relationships with colleagues, students and parents, within broad consensually defined limits of acceptable practice.

Ideally, more temperate organizational leadership and management would be supported by more temperate central government policies than the raft of reforms designed literally to ‘re-form’ the education profession by tightening central government control over the scope of practice. They embrace both indirect control measures, as in the national specification of the curriculum, and direct, as in the ‘remodelling’ of the education profession itself. Recently a senior government official commented to me, with some pride, that Britain leads the world in driving the ‘delivery’ of public service transformation through its target-setting regime. In the absence of a political U-turn, effective leadership and management of the education profession would imply protecting the capacity of teachers, as far as was possible, to mediate the contextually insensitive central government reforms connected with this control thrust, for the sake of effective educational provision – in spite of, rather than because of, UK government policy-makers’ well-intentioned efforts.