Recasted Teachers’ Careers? New Patterns and the Fragmentation of the Teaching Profession in England
(2021) European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2021 — Location: Geneva
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- Abstract
- The fragmentation of the state-funded education system in England, the diversification of the educational offer in terms of school types, the rise of academies and especially of MATs, have profoundly transformed teachers’ labour markets. One can assume that it has also transformed the way teachers think about their professional pathways and choice of workplaces. A second, significant transformation is the diversification of entry routes into the profession (Childs & Menter, 2013). Recent governments have encouraged market-based, employment-based approaches and School-led training, which means more and more teachers are expected to find their first permanent post where they have been trained, possibly leading to different career trajectories compared to other trainees. Third, the flexibilisation of the workforce (increased workload, blurring of job boundaries, staff redeployment within multi-school organisations), the generalization of performance-based pay, the individualization of careers (see Mathou, Sarazin & Dumay, 2020) could transform the traditional career patterns found in the teaching sector, marked by horizontal adjustments (Becker, 1952) and secured ‘job for life’ careers (Kirkpatrick and Hoque 2006). In this context, what does a ‘career’ in teaching mean for teachers in England, and especially in London, with its very diverse educational landscape and particularly high levels of inter-school mobility? Has the meaning of a commitment to the teaching profession changed over the past two decades, with the diversification of entry routes, roles, and school types? Despite the centrality of these questions in a context of teacher shortages and acute recruitment and retention issues, we know little about how teachers make sense of an increasingly fragmented labour market, and how recent transformations of the education system affect the logics underpinning how teachers build their careers. To answer this question, we propose an original perspective, drawing on an interactionist approach (Becker, 1952, 1960), while taking account of the institutional context shaping career trajectories to renew the dialogue between research on teacher’s professional lives and research looking at teachers’ labour market (Rinke, 2008). We draw on 47 semi-structured interviews with teachers carried out in these 8 secondary schools in London, selected to reflect a wide diversity in terms of possible workplaces to choose from. We adopt a dynamic typological approach to account for the increasing complexity and diversity of teachers’ career, beyond ideal-types (Demazière, 2013).
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Dumay, X., & et al. (2021). Recasted Teachers’ Careers? New Patterns and the Fragmentation of the Teaching Profession in England. European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2021, Geneva. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/110295