Sounds of silence: The social justice agenda of the teacher training agency

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Sounds of silence: The socialjustice agenda of the teachertraining agencyPat Mahony a & Ian Hextall aa Roehampton Institute , London, United KingdomPublished online: 04 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Pat Mahony & Ian Hextall (1997) Sounds of silence: The socialjustice agenda of the teacher training agency, International Studies in Sociology ofEducation, 7:2, 137-156, DOI: 10.1080/09620219700200010

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Sounds of Silence: the social justice agenda of the Teacher Training Agency

PAT MAHONY & IAN HEXTALLRoehampton Institute London, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article deals with the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) andthe implications of its activities for social justice. We argue that the conceptionof what constitutes the ‘effective teacher’ is being reshaped by the TTA in linewith particular responses to demands for the United Kingdom to become morecompetitive in the global economy. Teachers’ responsibilities in relation to socialjustice are evacuated as the ‘true purposes of schooling’ and the need for‘effective teachers’ are redefined. We further argue that the teaching profession isbeing increasingly differentiated in ways which are likely to disadvantageparticular groups of teachers. We conclude the article by exploring the ways inwhich issues of representation, governance, policy steer and accountabilityconnect with wider debates in the public sector both in the United Kingdom andelsewhere.

Introduction

The Teacher Training Agency (TTA) was formally established in September1994 and one year later we began an ESRC funded project into its nature andactivities. The project ran from September 1995 until November 1996 and itsoverarching purpose was to explore the educational and wider social policycontext within which the TTA is located and to track its immediate impactwithin the system. In clarifying the policy context within which the TTAoperates we particularly wanted to make connections between educationpolicy and analyses of policy emerging from other fields. Public sectorrestructuring has been widely discussed within the literature on public policyyet with the exceptions provided by a few education policy analysts and aneven smaller number of social policy analysts, education has not generallybeen recognised as a key arena for studying the implications of these changes(Raab, 1994).

In eliciting users’ and beneficiaries’ perceptions and evaluations of theimpact and significance of the TTA we were aware of the dangers inherent in

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dealing with ‘snapshot’ accounts and of the difficulties of integrating thesewithin a wider critical framework (Ozga & Gewirtz, 1994). However, if policyis “a response to complex and diverse elements, including a range ofconstraints imposed by other levels of public and educational policy, differentadministrative contexts, varying ideologies and the personal idiosyncrasies ofthe people involved” (Daws cited in Taylor et al, 1997, p. 154) then there isno alternative but to accept that the process of the research will be‘challenging’ (Mahoney & Hextall, 1997a).

We used a combination of documentary analysis, literature review,interviewing and survey questionnaires in order to track the specific initiativesemanating from the Agency, to gather responses to these and to reflect uponthe impact within the education system and their significance in relation tobroader issues. We interviewed 36 people with a stake in teacher educationincluding representatives of the TTA. Two politicians and one TTA Boardmember did not respond to our requests for interviews.

Questionnaires were sent to all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)involved in Initial Teacher Education, all Local Education Authorities (LEAs)and approximately 170 schools, of which two-thirds were secondary schools.The research was not funded at a level which would have enabled us to use astatistically reliable sample of schools. Our intention was purely to gain anindication as to the level and the nature of knowledge which existed amongstschools about the activities and operations of the TTA. Thus it constituted anindicative or sensitising exercise. City Technology Colleges, GrantMaintained Schools and, more specifically, School Centred Initial Training(SCITT)[1] schools were deliberately over-represented in our selection on thepresumption that they were most likely to be aware of the TTA. This provedparticularly pertinent in the case of SCITT schools which, although onlyforming 8% of the school cohort, provided 24% of the returns. Response ratesafter reminders were:

30%Schools

45%LEAs

65%HEIs

Education Policy and Public Policy

The TTA is located within a broad context of policy changes not only ineducation but in the public sector generally. There has been a tendency totreat these transformations as though they were specific to the UnitedKingdom. This fails to recognise that comparable developments in thedelivery of public welfare services have been widespread amongst OECDcountries (OECD, 1991) and may even be having an impact further afield insuch countries as Pakistan and Kenya (Davies, 1994).

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One driving force in education policy reforms (including school reformsand those in teacher education) is a preoccupation with increasing thecompetitiveness of United Kingdom plc in the global economy. Though theprecise contribution of schooling to economic well-being lacks clarity (OECD,1989), the belief that prosperity depends upon high levels of knowledge andskills (a principal tenet of micro-economic reform) is evident in the DfEE’sdeclared aim “to support economic growth and improve the nation’scompetitiveness by raising educational achievement” (DfEE, 1995). It is abelief with which, during the course of our interviews, a TTA Board Memberconcurred:

... the smaller and medium sized enterprises in particular, and the engineeringcompanies all say they can’t get the skills in the labour force that ourcompetitors get in the rest of the world and that has an effect on UKcompetitiveness.

Therefore, so the argument runs, schools need to become more effective and‘lever up standards’. The Chief Executive of the TTA claimed that:

... everyone is now agreed that the top priority in education is the need to raisethe pupils’ standards of learning. ... And there is a widespread awareness that,in a competitive world, constant progress is necessary just to maintain paritywith other nations. (Millett, 1996a, p. 2)

The Government’s response to these demands, in the case of schools, is nowwell known: greater centralised control of the curriculum (and soon, perhaps,teaching methods); devolution of financial management to schools and aweakening of Local Education Authority (LEA) powers; the introduction ofquasi-market policies exerting pressure on schools via published league tablesof exam performance and inspection reports; open enrolment to deliverparental ‘choice’ and the re-introduction of differentiated schools. While theimplications of these policies for social justice continue to be explored within aburgeoning literature, it is enough for our purposes to note that thesemeasures provide the context for the discourse of educational effectivenesswithin which teaching is being reconstructed (Hextall & Mahony,forthcoming 1998).

Such reconstruction did not begin with the TTA. Even before itsestablishment, there had already been a number of major changes in theorganisation and ‘delivery’ of teacher education, the detail and significance ofwhich have been described elsewhere (Sidgwick et al, 1993, 1994; Tomlinson,1993; Whitty, 1993). Thus when the TTA was first ‘proposed’ to ‘reforminitial teacher training’ (DFE and Welsh Office, 1993) it came as a surprise tothose who assumed that ITT had already been ‘reformed’. Such anassumption was to ignore the wider context.

If one driving force in education policy reform has been the drive toincrease ‘effectiveness’ then the other two of the ‘virtuous three Es: economy,efficiency and effectiveness’ (Pollitt, 1993, p. 59), have involved the reductionof public expenditure. To this end new public management (NPM) has been

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introduced across all parts of the public sector and in most OECD countries(Shand, 1996). There is increasing evidence that different countries andsectors have introduced NPM in diverse ways according to their specifichistorical and cultural traditions (Pollitt & Summa, 1996; Mahony, 1997).Broadly conceived, NPM is viewed as a way of:

... reorganising public sector bodies to bring their management, reporting andaccounting approaches closer to (a particular perception of) business methods.(Dunleavy & Hood, 1994, p. 9)

As such, it is a generic term for what some would claim represents ahegemonic shift in the philosophy and practice of management in the publicsector. This involves a move away from the (patriarchal) Weberian notion ofpublic sector organisation with its emphasis on adhering to procedural rulesdesigned to prevent corruption, favouritism and illegitimate interference bypoliticians and towards the idea of modelling the public sector along the linesof ‘best’ (i.e. ‘efficient’) commercial practice.

Framed in these terms, major questions (best for whom, in whichcontexts and in which ways), emerge as central issues within the widerliterature (Clarke et al, 1994). Of relevance here is the extent to which themotivations of particular powerful groups, predominantly white, male andeconocratic, have connected with the ‘efficiency fetish’ (Lingard, 1995). Whileno-one would extol the virtues of inefficiency, definitions of ‘efficiency’ havebeen largely defined by powerful elites in the private and public sectors(Hutton, 1995) including those in a position to construct their ‘popularity’with the electorate and those employed to achieve it.

In the United Kingdom the introduction of NPM has often beenjustified by questioning the motivations and efficiency of public sectorworkers. Education in particular has been seen as epitomising:

... much that was seen to be wrong with burgeoning state power. It wasconstrued as expensive, not self-evidently adequately productive, insufficientlyaccountable, monopolistic, producer-dominated, a bastion of an entrenchedprofessional elite, resistant to consumer demand and, at worst, self-generatingand self-serving. (Fergusson, 1994, p. 9)

One way of understanding the establishment of the TTA in this context is as abody designed to efficiently reconstruct the mechanisms through which more‘effective’ teachers can be produced, in line with the needs of UnitedKingdom plc in the global economy. In addition, as others have cautioned(Whitty, 1993), it is important not to underestimate the influence of theradical Right in framing policy in teacher education (Hillgate Group, 1989)especially since two of the appointed members of the TTA Board have a longhistory of involvement in right-wing educational pressure groups.

While there remains considerable confusion over the assemblage ofinterests which underlay the establishment of the TTA, its purposes areformally framed in terms which appear unexceptional:

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The purpose of the Teacher Training Agency is to improve the quality ofteaching, to raise the standards of teacher education and training, and topromote teaching as a profession, in order to improve the standards of pupils’achievement and the quality of their learning. (TTA, 1996a, p. 2)

Our concern with these formal purposes is not what they say but what theymean and what implications their translation into practice will have in relationto issues of social justice, for present and future cohorts of teachers, for thechildren or students with whom they work and the communities in which theyare embedded. Recognising that the concept of social justice is problematic(IPPR, 1993; Rizvi, 1993; Griffiths, 1996), we shall for the purposes of thisarticle treat ‘social justice’ as a term used to point to:

... the general movement to a fairer, less oppressive society. This is a movementtowards opening up from the few to the many the rewards and prizes andenjoyments of living in society – including schooling. This movement focused onsocial class for the first half of this century but now includes ‘race’, gender,sexuality and disability. (Griffiths, 1996, p. 1)

The TTA is of central concern to this movement insofar as social inequalitiesboth impinge on teachers and are to some degree reconstituted or challengedby them. In what follows we will identify some of the major issues aroundwhich the TTA’s relationship to social justice could be considered. We willfirst focus on the reconstruction of the teacher and of teaching and then moveon to consider some of the general issues emerging around the governance ofthe teaching profession.

Reconstructing the Teacher

The most obvious starting point for an analysis of the TTA’s translation frompurpose to practice lies within the recent proposals to introduce nationalstandards for teaching. During the past year the TTA has been formalisingplans to develop such standards for: newly qualified teachers; expertclassroom teachers; subject leaders in both primary and secondary schools;headteachers; and Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs). Atthe time of writing, the precise specifications for these have not been finalised,although from existing consultation documents and public statements there islittle evidence that the education of teachers in matters relating to socialjustice will be accorded a place.

In a related move Gillian Shephard (former Secretary of State,Department for Education and Employment [DfEE]) announced herintention to introduce a National Curriculum for Initial Teacher Training(NCITT). She invited the TTA to undertake the development of this and atthe same time stressed that it would not be limited solely to the ‘initial’ phaseof teacher education although that would be its starting point.

Rather earlier in 1996, once again in conjunction with the DfEE, theTTA undertook a revision of the framework within which Continuing

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Professional Development (CPD) would be located. A series of nationalpriorities were announced. These were: leadership and management ofschools; ‘middle management’ in secondary schools; specialist teaching in theprimary phase; the subject knowledge of Key Stage 2 teachers; effectiveteaching in the 14-19 phase; the use of information technology to improvepupils’ achievements; effective teaching for early years children, and SENCOdevelopment. Of these the first four were accorded the highest status.Although, at the time of writing, this has not yet been formally confirmed, theintention has already been signalled to link these to both the nationalstandards for teaching and the NCITT. Again, in the establishment of thesepriorities there is no mention of the needs of teachers to be educated inmatters relating to social justice. Furthermore the establishment of nationalpriorities by the Agency may have considerable material consequences for theactivities of LEAs and HEIs in these respects.

Jointly with the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) the TTAhas also embarked upon a review and revision of the appraisal procedureswhich currently apply to teachers. As Ms Sulke (Head of Policy, TTA) said atthe launch of the 1996 Corporate Plan: “Appraisal is the glue which binds ittogether”. At this point in time there have been various discussions about theproposed revisions and an interim document has been produced.

Taken together these various initiatives concerning standards forteaching, a teacher education curriculum, priorities for professionaldevelopment and appraisal mechanisms, constitute an assertive restructuringof the nature of teaching as an occupation and of teaching as a profession. Wereturn to these issues later, whilst focusing on for the present on the contentof these various proposals and their neglect of social justice issues.

People who work in schools, be they staff or students confrontcontextual circumstances such as: dilemmas over levels and distribution ofresources; acts of violence and aggression; complex patterns of interpersonaland group relationships; power struggles for control and dominance; contestsover who is and who is not responsible for what happens in schools; disputesover achievement and its definition and issues about appropriate ways ofeducating for the future. In some cases such issues take demanding anddramatic forms, in others they are the routine weft and warp of school life. Inall cases they form the experiences within which parents, teachers, students,ancillary staff, governors and others inhabit schools. They are also intertwinedaround the axes of gender, ‘race’, disability, class and sexuality amongst otherdefining and defined social and political identities. To be a teacher is to belocated within these politics and to have certain consequent responsibilities.

To talk in a decontextualised manner about ‘pupils’, which much of theTTA literature does, can make the activity of teaching appear deceptivelysimple. When we think of Angie who was sexually abused by her father, orElavalagan who recently fled from Sri Lanka, or Sophie, ‘a middle-classboffin’ in a working-class school, then what it means to teach immediatelybecomes more complex. The same is true of teachers. They too act out of, are

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influenced by and in turn reconstitute or reshape social or political identities.Teaching involves relationships between people whose personal, social,economic, cultural and political identities and positionings are complex.Negotiating and succeeding within this arena calls for sophisticated, everydayrepertoires of skills which teachers constantly need to develop. Reference tosuch creative professionalism is, however, absent from the TTA’sdocumentation which instead concentrates almost entirely on concerns aboutteachers’ subject knowledge and pupil performance, both of which are treatedas de-situated. At no point in any of the consultation documents on nationalstandards for teaching, for example, is there any reference to ‘race’. In May1996 the Anti-Racist Teacher Education Network (ARTEN) responded tothis silence when they wrote to the TTA expressing their concern over ‘Thelack of reference in the work of the TTA to equal opportunities generally’(ARTEN, 1996, p. 1). Rather, the TTA’s position is one of denial thatschools exist within, are structured by, and have any role in maintaininginequitable social relationships. In the TTA’s vision of curriculum andpedagogy little connection is made with the world which many children facenow or in the future. Nor is there any acknowledgement that the schoolingcontext is undergoing cumulative re-differentiation and is characterised byskewed resourcing. Rather the Chief Executive claims that:

Any social, cultural and economic disadvantage which pupils experience can becompounded if, with well-intentioned but misguided motives, teachers areunwilling to add further pressure in the shape of academic demands. (Millett,1996b, p. 6)

Clay & George (1993) argue that the evacuation of issues of social justicefrom the agenda of teacher education has been developing since the 1980s.Thus, when John Major (1993) dismissed the politics of ‘gender, race andclass’ as diverting schools from their true purposes, he was merely repeating awell-rehearsed refrain. The national implications of this shift were vividlybrought home when one of us recently attended a European workshop onin-school prevention of sexual violence against girls and boys.[2] Inpreparation for the workshop the organisers had conducted a survey ofin-service provision in the 15 member states. This sought to elicit informationon how questions of sexual violence were discussed and dealt with in schooland how teachers were supported in this work. The questionnaire returnedfrom the United Kingdom was not filled in, because as an attached noteexplained, such work was the responsibility of the LEAs. The LeedsInter-Agency Project has noted, however, that Local Management of Schools“has made it difficult to promote and resource such work across the LEA”(1996, p. 2). This is but one instance of the material and ideologicalconsequences of tightened definitions of ‘effective schooling’.

What then are the ‘true purposes’, invoked by John Major, from whichteachers should not be diverted? In the pursuit of global competitiveness thedrive to school effectiveness is being directly tied into the National

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Curriculum and judged in accordance with criteria derived from it. Qualitymeasures of schools and teachers are dependent upon their capacities todeliver in these terms. Concomitantly, teacher education, professionaldevelopment and quality teaching are to be evaluated vis-à-vis the productionof such ‘effectivity’. Thus in announcing the proposals for the NCITT, GillianShephard said that it will be:

Based on the National Curriculum for pupils, (and) will specify the essentialsof what must be taught to trainee teachers in each core subject .... (DfEE,1996, Annex p. 1)

In their accompanying letter the TTA asked respondents to comment on thefollowing central elements as essential for trainees:

(a) their own knowledge of the subject;(b) what their pupils should be taught;(c) effective teaching and assessment methods and how and when to usethem; and(d) the standards of achievement they should expect of their pupils (TTA,1996, p. 1).

Again, there is no sense that any relevance is accorded to where studentscome from, the nature of their life experiences nor their prospectivedestinations. Laurie Angus (1993) has identified the assumptionsunderpinning such an approach:

... educational practice is conceived of in a particularly mechanical way. ... Inkeeping with economic definitions of effectiveness, it is the bit that comesbetween ‘input’ and ‘output’. It is seen largely as a set of techniques, the ‘coretechnology’, for managing ‘throughput’ rather than a complex and alwaysunpredictable process of ongoing construction of educational practice. Practice isimposed rather than constructed, negotiated or asserted; it is a set of techniquesto be employed by teacher technicians on malleable pupils. (p. 337)

Similar trends are being noted and critically discussed in other spheres ofpublic policy. Lena Dominelli (1996), writing about social work, could well bemounting a critique of some trends in the development of teachercompetences:

Insofar as competencies separate out various elements of complex socialinteractions and take frozen snapshots of dynamic processes, they fragment thequalitative nature of social intercourse and abstract it out of existence. (p. 163)

In teacher education, the development of explicit criteria of good practice inteaching (later renamed competences) was sometimes undertaken as ademocratic move with the emancipatory intent of enabling new teachers toengage critically with their own professional learning. Making standardsexplicit was intended to open up a debate around two key elements of teachereducation; what counts as good teaching and how professional learning mightbe enhanced (Mahony, 1996a; Mahony & Harris, 1996). Some saw, within

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these developments, the potential to advocate critical accounts of pedagogyand to advance progressive ways of working with new teachers (Mahony,1995). That these efforts may have been co-opted and made to contribute to“the ... managerial and economic rationalist settlement for education reform inhard times” (Knight et al, 1994, p. 457) only makes it more important toconfront the contradictions in such incorporation. This is given even greaterurgency if such managerialist redefinition of teaching is presumed to provide asense of purpose, value and progression for the practising teacher and amotivational inducement for those considering entry to the profession.

Reconstructing Teaching

Whilst teaching is already a differentiated occupation we would argue thattaken together, the various initiatives and proposals of the TTA constitute anassertive and stringent redifferentiation with serious implications for therecomposition of the teaching force. The following constitute some of themain elements in these new calibrations of teachers’ work.

Entry Procedures

It is significant that only in relation to recruitment and supply do issues ofgender and ‘race’ receive any explicit recognition from the TTA. Thus in itsrecent Strategy document (TTA, 1996d) the Agency announces as one of itspriorities, the recruitment of more men into teaching on the assumption thatthe ‘feminisation’ of teaching is problematic. It also invokes a ‘role model’argument to underpin its prioritisation of ethnic minority recruitment(pp. 11-12). In both cases it stresses that such priorities are to be seen in thecontext of shortage subjects and emphasises the need to maintain quality.‘Quality’ of entrants also figures in the data to be used for the qualityassessment of providers.

Diversity of Routes

The various standard entry routes through Higher Education courses arealready differentiated in terms of their models, structures and partnershiparrangements (Whiting et al, 1996). There are also Licensed Teacher,Overseas Trained and Registered Teachers and SCITT routes. In addition,the TTA has recently welcomed the new Graduate Teacher programme as anemployment-based route into the profession (TTA, 1996e).

Output Criteria

All of these entry routes will fall under the aegis of NCITT, the nationalstandards for NQTs, and the proposed career entry profiles, in addition towhatever academic criteria providers may require or impose.

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Initial Qualifications

In recent pronouncements the TTA has underlined that it is the award ofQualified Teacher Status by the DfEE which constitutes the license to teachand that validated academic awards such as degrees and PostgraduateCertificates of Education are of a different status, in effect, ‘voluntary’ notrequired.

Career Stages, Standards and Qualifications

Once having gained entry into the profession, the teacher, as we have seen, isconfronted with a series of prospective career stages. Each of these is to havenational standards and a qualification structure which may or may not controlfuture progression.

Performance Appraisal

Regardless of this formal career progression, there is the intention to set inplace a revised appraisal process. Routine OFSTED inspections also produceperformance gradings, on a seven-point scale, which differentiate along acontinuum of ‘Good to Poor Teaching’.

Continuing Professional Development

On the basis of the above judgements and evaluations, teachers may beoffered or required to undertake CPD, predominantly provided and funded inaccordance with the pre-specified national priorities. Access to such‘opportunities’ will raise important issues of entitlement and compulsionwhich could have significant professional and career consequences.

Differentiated Rewards (Performance Related Pay)

Finally, in its recent submission to the School Teachers’ Review Body, theTTA has proposed the introduction of a reward structure for teachers judgedto be performing well. In its view this would establish a significant linkbetween quality and remuneration (TTA, 1996c). In our view it wouldestablish a significant link between particular accounts of quality andremuneration.

In prospect this constellation of developments carries importantpotential ramifications for the opportunity structures available to teachers.Given that many of the elements of career progression will rely upon officialsponsorship and support, it is conceivable that already existing patterns ofgendered and ‘racial’ differentiations will be maintained if not exacerbated.Although dealing with school students in the USA, Moore & Davenport

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(1990) provide a succinct illustration of the intersection between institutionalprocesses and social justice:

Students ended up in the various types of high schools and programmes ... asthe result of a complex admission process that included the following (sometimesoverlapping) steps: (1) recruitment and information gathering, (2)application, (3) screening, (4) selection of students offered places, and (5)final student acceptance. Investigating each step in this process highlights themany points at which formal requirements, informal requirements, staffdiscretion, and parent and student initiative affected the final result typically tothe detriment of equitable admissions. (p. 194)

There are also points within this cumulative process at which the experiences,opportunities and judgements made could articulate between an increasinglyredifferentiated teaching force and a comparatively redifferentiated andhierarchical schooling system. Writing about the possible implications ofschool restructuring for the differentiation and redefinition of teachers’ work,Martin Lawn has recently expressed similar concerns. The fact that he beginsfrom the redifferentiation of schooling, whereas we are beginning from therestructuring of teaching illustrates the interweaving of different elements ofpolicy:

There is a legitimate expectation that current inequalities in teaching willcontinue as the local management of schools produces a differentiation of thework force ... In that process of differentiation women teachers and blackteachers will continue to lose out in pay, promotion or recruitment. A recentproject on teachers’ work (Maclure et al, 1990) has been quoted as detecting “asink group of teachers, mainly women, who are working harder than everbefore, but getting neither promotion nor professional training” (The TimesEducational Supplement, 12 December 1990). This sink group may amount to25-30 per cent of the profession, the report suggests. They lose out in thesecondary schools because men in the shortage subjects get allowances and inthe primary schools, where they predominate, because there are fewerallowances. “These teachers reported a pervasive sense of bewilderment andfrustration at a system which did not, as they saw it, recognise their virtues,reward their efforts or offer any help with their future” (The Times EducationalSupplement, 12 October 1991). (Lawn, 1995, p. 354)

Others, both within education and more generally in the public sector havepointed to the ways in which the organisational restructuring which hasaccompanied NPM have been generating an increasingly divisive set ofrelationships between professionals and leader-managers (Ball, 1994; Walby &Greenwell, 1994). The developments outlined above contain precisely suchimplications in terms of the ways in which access to control, leadership anddecision-making is becoming distributed and rationalised. For the bulk ofteachers their roles will become increasingly defined astechnician-professionals, working to directives established elsewhere and withlittle opportunity to engage in negotiation over the parameters and criteria

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within which they work or the indices which are appropriate for evaluatingtheir practice.

Such potential occupational restructuring and recomposition containsan agenda of social justice issues which calls for detailed research, analysis anddebate. In the final section of this article, we argue that, as in other policyfields, such an agenda will not be adequately addressed without resolvingquestions of representation and accountability. Current concerns overdemocratic governance are exposing the ways in which these issues influencethe formulation, steering and implementation of policy.

The Governance of Teacher Education

As the purposes, organisation and delivery of public sector services in theUnited Kingdom have been undergoing radical transformation, so the generalissues of standards in public life has been thrown into high relief by the workof the Nolan Committee (Nolan, 1995). Although much of the mediaattention has focused on the more salacious aspect of politicians’ behaviour,serious questions are emerging not only about the effectiveness of thedemocratic process but about the nature of democracy itself in Britain in themid-1990s. One major concern has been the effect on democraticaccountability of the spread of Quasi-Autonomous-Non-Governmental-Organisations (quangos) at all levels of society (Ridley & Wilson, 1995). Asresponsibility for public services is shifted from elected government tounelected quangos then issues are raised that:

None of them are directly responsible to the public; and ... the mechanisms ofaccountability which do seek to direct and scrutinise their activities areinconsistent and defective. (Weir & Hall, 1994, pp. 9-10)

It is into this wider concern for democratic accountability that anxieties inrelation to the TTA can be placed (Mahony & Hextall, 1997).

One feature of quangos (including the TTA) is that their membership isnot generated through election but by appointment. For example, the Board,as an appointed body is not representative even though certain constituenciesare present. Thus, although several members are formally connected withparticular HEIs, the sector as a whole is not formally represented. We havealready noted the controversial nature of two Board appointees who wereidentified as having connections with ‘New Right think tanks’. The fact that itis not known what procedures or criteria were used to appoint board membershardly generates confidence especially when appointments to some quangoshave occurred in unusual circumstances:

Another chairman was appointed following a pheasant shoot at whichSecretary of State was a fellow gun; the subsequent chairman of a waterauthority bumped into a Cabinet Minister while birding on a Greek Island.(Weir & Hall, 1994, p. 19)

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The Agency’s working structure is both clear and complex at one and thesame time. There is a well-established model of Chair, Board, Chief Executiveand Officers which has remained fairly stable since the establishment of theTTA, despite some expansion in the numbers of officers and redesignation oflines of responsibility. As with many other public bodies, however, the clarityof the structure dissolves when one tries to trace the interactions and powerflows between different or the dynamics of policy steers.

From the Board downwards the TTA works through a plethora ofBoard Committees, sub-committees, working groups and advisory groups.Board Committees have clear and publicly identified memberships, albeit withno transparency in the original process of appointment, nor with any publicaccess to their agendas, minutes or proceedings. Weir & Hall compare thissituation, typical of quangos, to that for local authorities where the publichave access by law to all council meetings (including committees andsub-committees) and to all relevant agendas, minutes and background papers.In respect of freedom of information they argue, “west Europe lags far behindthe US in opening up quasi-public government to the public” (p. 30) and “theBritish Government ... is becoming increasingly isolated in not providing thediscipline of a public ‘right to know’” (p. 29).

The range, composition and purposes of the other groups working forthe TTA also lack transparency which has important implications for issues ofresponsibility, accountability and policy attribution. Our questionnaireresponses revealed that the range of working groups is substantial (31% ofHEIs and 16% of LEAs reported that they were actively involved in TTAworking groups). Through the interviews it became clear that it is notgenerally known who makes up the membership of particular groups or evenwhich groups exist at any one time. The process of appointment was felt to bemysterious and even the working group members whom we interviewed werenot clear how or why they had been chosen. They felt that this raised complexquestions concerning representation which were made even more difficultbecause issues of confidentiality had not been clarified.

Taken together these factors make the centralisation of powerinescapable. No-one outside of the TTA really knows who is working onwhat, with whom, with what remit, through what mechanisms, reporting towhom or with what recording procedures and developing an overall view ofthe nature and scale of activity is difficult to achieve.

This means that the democratic process of accountability can easilybecome confused and subverted in the routines of the TTA. Margaret Simey(1985) has some telling points to make about the principles underpinning theconcept of accountability which highlight the increasing ‘democratic deficit’ inthe United Kingdom:

... accountability is not a mechanism or a routine but a principle. More thanthat, it is a principle which serves a specific purpose. In a democracy, thatpurpose is to provide a basis for the relationship between the society and its

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members, between those who govern and those who consent to be governed. Theword consent provides the significant clue. (p. 17)

Once a managerialist model subsumes political accountability (one majorrationale for the movement towards ‘agencification’, Waldegrave, 1996), itseffects and those of its legitimating discourses become all pervasive as thestress on commercial styles of management replaces the former public serviceethic. Where teacher educators once worked with beginning or experiencedteachers, they are now variously described as ‘customers’, ‘units of resource’or more cynically as ‘money on legs’. The ‘delivery’ of ‘products’ in ‘costeffective’ ways becomes a major preoccupation and the language of commerceand war is rife as bullets are bitten, strategies developed and targets hit (ormissed). Whether teachers are being adequately educated to enable youngpeople to understand and act from the precepts of social justice, in anincreasingly complex world, is a question notable for its absence.

These issues of accountability and representation lead us directly intoquestions of policy determination and steer. Formally, it is the Board whichformulates Agency policy although the Secretary of State remains ultimatelyresponsible for its activities. However, in the context of assertive management,fast policy, fragmented staffing structures, kaleidoscopic working groups andexternal contracting of key activities, formal structures of policy accountabilitybecome highly attenuated and processes of reconciliation when there aredifferences of opinion between the Board, Committees, and Working Groupsare obscure. The role of individual TTA Officers further complicates theproblem of tracing policy origin:

Because of the fragmentation it’s much more possible for an individual officerto stamp their own particular version ... We’ve ended up, because we as agroup were never allowed to think through the fundamental issues, with areally rigid model which is basically the view of that one person. Who thatOfficer speaks for God only knows! (TTA working group member)

In accordance with the principles of ‘reinvented government’ (Osborne &Gaebler, 1992) the TTA has expressed a preference for working throughprocesses of consultation. Interviews with LEA, HEI, professional associationand umbrella organisation staff provided detailed accounts of handling whatone person described as a ‘blizzard’ of consultation documents. Manyreservations were expressed in our questionnaire responses and interviewsabout the quality and significance of consultation which is a ‘preferred’ styleof the TTA (TTA, 1996a). While the majority of our respondents in HEIs,schools and LEAs were very appreciative of the fact that consultationoccurred at all, many saw it as tokenistic in that agendas for consultation werenot negotiable and the context for discussing what such agendas might be didnot exist. In addition there was a marked lack of awareness about the TTAand its operations amongst non-SCITT schools. The marginalisation ofschools has to be seen as problematic for the TTA, given the importance itattaches to schools’ involvement in initial training, especially within the

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partnership context. Bob Lingard has pointed to a comparable phenomenonin the Australian context in what he calls ‘the silencing of teachers’ voices inpolicy production’ (Lingard, 1995, p. 15).

... the call for a reinstatement of teachers’ and teacher educators’ voices in therelevant policy production process, ... is not about establishing professionalbarriers, but about providing a more inclusive and socially just form ofeducation for all. (p. 3)

Within the official documentation of reinvented government, ‘effectiveness’,‘efficiency’ and ‘higher standards’ have become the new mantra, repeated sooften that their meaning slips beyond question. Problems arise when oneinterrogates the substance of these terms and tries to establish democratic andequitable procedures for the representation, reconciliation and operationalimplications of the different interpretations and value positions whichunderpin them.

Such issues are by no means limited to teacher education (Phillips,1993; Ranson & Stewart, 1994). Not only are they being asked in diversepolicy areas but also internationally (Eliassen & Kooiman, 1994). Even if wefocus on teacher education, we find that there is intense internationalrestructuring occurring, involving both nation states and supranational bodies(Galton & Moon, 1994; Kallos & Nilsson, 1996). There is no neat and tidypattern to these restructurings and as we have indicated in relation to NPM,different historical, cultural and social contexts demand to be fullyappreciated in any analysis. However certain themes, such as representation,are recurrent.

Social justice issues move directly into the foreground once we begin totrack who is and who is not represented in agenda-setting anddecision-making. Teacher education is not an arcane, esoteric matter and in asociety which takes democracy seriously, there will be widespread legitimateinterest in how teachers are themselves educated. The questionnaireresponses from HEIs, LEAs and schools showed very clearly the extent of thedisquiet which the composition and form of the TTA raised (fewer than 30%wanted the TTA to continue in its present form). How then can genuinelyinclusive mechanisms can be developed so that different ‘voices’ can be heardand reconciled rather than silenced?

Support was expressed for “a more democratically established TeachingCouncil [which] would be far preferable to a Government-instigated quango”.However attempts to establish a GTC in England and Wales have in the pastbeen blocked by political obstruction, and ‘turf’ struggles amongst the teacherunions/professional associations.

In addition the GTC proposal raises other issues. As one of ourinterviewees said:

... I’ve always been very sceptical about a GTC. I don’t think the State islikely to give up its regulative functions to a professional body in the 1990s andit would probably like to take some of them away from existing professional

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bodies. So I think we would get a form of General Teaching Council whichhelped to mollify the profession, but not actually give it real powers. So Iactually think it is an illusion. I’d rather it was much clearer who was pullingthe strings.

A number of people whom we interviewed also expressed dissatisfaction withthe idea of a GTC if that was “designed to enhance professional autonomy”.One can detect a will to think beyond the rock of professional autonomy andthe hard place of an unelected, unrepresentative agency of government, whereneither meet criteria of inclusivity.

Conclusions

Despite the fact that the TTA has no explicit agenda for social justice itsredefinitions as to the nature of what constitute the central activities ofteaching and its potential for reconstructing teaching as an occupational fieldboth carry significant implications for any such agenda. In the first case it failsto recognise the problematic nature of the social contexts within whichteaching and learning is located. By neglecting the impact of such contextualfeatures it is in danger of failing to educate teachers in the sophisticatedprofessional skills which would enable them to make the most effectivecontribution to the enhancement of all pupils’ learning. Recognising this isnot to deny the importance of ‘subject knowledge’ but to acknowledge thatthis needs to be mediated through an awareness of, for example, the racialisednature of curriculum and schooling processes. As Fitzclarence & Kenway(1993) express the dilemmas of the current social/educational context:

What is the most appropriate curriculum for this complex and perplexingperiod, particularly for those who bear most of the personal costs of these hardtimes? (p. 104)

In relation to the restructuring of teaching as an occupation the focus shifts toquestions of access to the profession itself. It is one thing to construct whatlooks like a neat and tidy model of career progression from point of entrythrough to subject and school-leadership and to invest this model with verytight specifications of required ‘knowledge, understanding, skills and abilities’.It is quite another to recognise and guard against the possibilities ofdiscrimination and adverse selection within such progression and to takeaccount of the contestable nature of definitions of professional competences.

In this respect issues of centralisation/decentralisation pose particularchallenges, not just in education but more widely in the public policy arena.There is a real tension to be resolved over the extent to which it is eitherlegitimate, sensible or practical for the centre to provide a tight definition ofwhat should happen in different localities and regions. Conditions andcircumstances may be so diverse, for example in relation to something astangible as CPD provision, as to warrant responsive arrangements. Differentlocal ‘constituencies’ may have views about their ‘needs’ which do not

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correspond, and may even conflict, with central definitions. The fact that suchrecognitions raise complex issues of entitlement and diversity will become noeasier through being ignored or wished away. They return us directly toquestions of accountability and representation and back even further to theestablishment of the policy context within which the TTA is located. What arethe problems to which restructuring teacher education is seen to constitute atleast part of the answer? Who defines those problems, whose solutionsbecome accepted and whose interests do those solutions serve? Who is heardand who is silenced? As we said earlier in the article such questions haveresonance not only for present and future cohorts of teacher, but for childrenor students with whom they work and also for the communities in which theyare embedded. Complex issues of access and distribution, entitlement anddiversity, representation and voice pose dilemmas which lie at the heart ofsocial justice and require democratic arenas for their contestation andresolution.

Correspondence

Professor Pat Mahony, Faculty of Education, Roehampton Institute London,Downshire House, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 4HT, UnitedKingdom.

Notes

[1] The SCITT scheme was established by the government in 1993, prior to the formation ofthe TTA. Through the initiative, consortia of schools are able to establish their ownarrangements for the recruitment, training and assessment of trainee teachers, without theinvolvement of higher education. There has been a considerable amount of debate about thescheme which is variously seen as an innocent extension of ‘choice’ or an attempt to breakthe ‘monopoly power’ of higher education as providers of teacher training. The SCITTscheme is now funded and administered by the TTA.

[2] The European Workshop was entitled In-school Prevention of Sexual Violence Against Girlsand Boys. It was supported by the European Commission and organised by the PetzeProject, Kiel, and the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Cultural Affairs,Schleswig-Holstein. It took place in October 1996 in Weissenhäuser Strand, Germany.

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