Building new teachers for new state projects: Mapping new modes of knowledge production and distribution in English teacher policy, 2008-2020

• In Event: Teachers and policy: Responses to educational policies and reforms

Proposal

In 2008 in England, Initial Teacher Training (ITT) requirements focused on the need for teachers to “personalise learning”, to embrace learner “diversity” and to recognise “developmental, social, religious, ethnic, cultural and linguistic” differences. However, by 2019, reference to these terms was dropped from ITT requirements, and in their place could be found a new language, focused on the importance of “memory”, “knowledge”, “retrieval practice” and “high expectations for all”. This paper understands ITT primarily as a political project, and asks why the understanding of teachers encoded in ITT requirements has changed so drastically in England over the last decade. Relying on a critical realist (CR) meta-theoretical framework combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA), it ultimately argues that a shift in government priorities away from the valourisation of multiculturalism and towards a more assimilationist politics, as well as a series of changes in the production & distribution of knowledge about teaching, can explain this fairly radical policy pivot. The paper concludes by raising concerns about whether this new notion of teaching is able to support the development of a more equitable world, given its at times highly reductive focus on the kinds of topics outlined above.

When the Coalition government came to power in the UK in 2010, they positioned teachers at the centre of their reform agenda. Their influential 2010 white paper, ‘The Importance of Teaching’ drew on discourses of teacher centrality (see Larsen, 2010) to argue that ‘improving’ teachers was central to improving educational outcomes, and ultimately the nation’s economic performance. However, while much has been written on the changing position of teachers in England since 2010 (see for instance, recently, Helgetun & Menter, 2022; Spicksley 2022), we still lack a detailed understanding of the various causal factors that lie behind why reform has been able to take the direction that it has. In line with this concern for explanatory causal factors, this paper grounds itself within a critical realist (CR) meta-theoretical framework. What is particularly important about CR for this paper is that it posits a stratified ontology of three levels: the empirical, the actual and the real (Archer, 2019; Sayer, 2000). This stratified ontology encourages us to look beyond what we can observe (such as ITT policy documents), and towards what (at the levels of the actual and the real) might be causing these documents to be the way they are. This CR framework is paired with CDA. CDA gives us a way to think about what can empirically observe (documents and interview data - discussed below) and attempt to see through them to the worlds of the actual and the real (Fairclough, 2005; Fairclough et al., 2002). CDA offers us this because it takes a ‘dialectical-relational’ approach to discourse analysis, forcing us to locate discursive productions in relation to their broader context.

As just noted, this paper relies on two primary datasets: documents and 20 semi-structured interviews. The key documents for analysis were the various ITT regulatory documents themselves, from the 2008 ‘Requirements for Initial Teacher Training’, to the 2019 ‘ITT Core Content Framework’. When it comes to interview subjects, individuals were chosen on the basis of their insight into the policy making process: they may have had involvement directly with ITT policy development, or may have broader insights into education policy making and the production and circulation of knowledge related to this policy making. Interview subjects were mainly selected via a snowballing approach (see Noy, 2008). While CDA (and CR) do not have any ‘paint by numbers’ approach through which to conduct analysis (Fairclough, 2002), the focus here was on extrapolating from interview data, as well as the ITT documents themselves, to map out the various causal factors at the levels of the actual and the real that could have led to ITT policy shifting in the way that it has (cf. Fletcher, 2017).

Ultimately, this approach allowed the mapping of a complex set of changes in England that enabled a radically different vision of teaching to emerge. This paper will first set out key ideological shifts related to the 2010 change of government in the UK, including a turn away from multiculturalism and towards a more assimilationist politics, and a greater focus on meritocracy. Secondly, it will focus on radical shifts in the production and distribution of knowledge about teaching and teachers. Most importantly, over this period power over defining ‘good teaching’ is removed to a large degree from educational researchers in universities (though some retain an important role) and from educational bureaucrats. Instead, new networks of knowledge production and distribution emerge. Most importantly, among other trends, Twitter (‘EduTwitter’) and the blogosphere offer a space where the promotion of cognitive-science-informed ideas about teaching can thrive (Watson, 2021), educational NGOs such as ARK and Teach First deploy new neoliberalised & meritocratic ideas about teaching, and government-backed organisations like the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) sit at the vanguard of furthering an ‘evidence-informed’ model of teaching (see Helgetun & Menter, 2022).

These shifts ultimately allow the state to shore up a changed understanding of ‘the good teacher’, one which the state positions as better able both to support its goal of building a more homogenous and ‘unified’ nation in the face of the increased diversity of the UK population, and better able to develop students who are achieving well academically and are thus able to be economically productive members of society. This presentation will conclude by asking critical questions about this new vision of the ‘good teacher’ that emerges in the most recent ITT frameworks, suggesting that the narrow focus on knowledge and memory, and the downplaying of the significance of student difference within the classroom, pose serious challenges to developing a truly equitable education system. It is hoped that this paper will be of relevance both to those interested in changes to education in England, and also to those further afield, as the rise of, for instance, ‘knowledge-rich’, ‘evidence-informed’ and cognitive-science driven models of education are now increasingly seen in many other contexts beyond the UK.

Author

• Taylor Alexander Hughson, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge