1
Inventing the Chartered Teacher: surfacing fractures in the practice of schools,
authorities and an HEI by enacting a ‘new professionalism’.
Jenny Reeves, Institute of Education, University of Stirling
Abstract:
This paper explores some of the issues involved in current attempts to alter the basis of
teacher professionalism by examining what happens when teachers set out to enact
collaborative and evidence-informed practice in schools. The McCrone Agreement, A
Teaching Profession for the 21st Century (SEED, 2001) introduced new pay and working
conditions for teachers in Scotland. As part of re-structuring the profession, it created the
status of chartered teacher to enable excellent classroom practitioners to achieve a higher
salary without having to move into a management post. Chartered teacher status is
achieved by qualification against a standard which positions chartered teachers as
exerting a significant influence on their colleagues to improve the quality of teaching and
learning in schools. This paper looks at some of the conceptual and practical difficulties
faced by teachers and their tutors on one of the accredited chartered teacher programmes
as they try to enact what this ‘status’ means. It argues that those with an interest in the
professional development of teachers need to develop an understanding of the complex
systemic and political aspects of changing professionalism and position themselves as
knowing agents in this process.
The Professionalism of Teachers in Scotland
Up until the mid ‘80s teachers in Scotland, like those elsewhere in the UK, were largely
operating within a framework that Clarke and Newman (1997) have described as bureau
professionalism. This characterised the role of expert workers in the public sector who
were granted a measure of autonomy within limits set by the organisations for which they
worked. Thus teachers exercised an expertise in their own classrooms within the
bureaucratic frameworks laid down by their local authorities administered through their
headteachers resulting, according to Hoyle, in a restricted professionalism where teaching
was seen as an intuitive practice developed through classroom experience.
‘Generally speaking the British school has been characterised by a mixture of
control and autonomy. The Head, with authority invested in him by the articles of
government and enforced by his hierarchical status, has been in a position to
exert considerable control over school goals and administrative structure but he
has had only limited control over the teacher’s classroom activities. Conversely,
although the teacher has enjoyed this relatively high degree of autonomy in the
classroom, he has hitherto had a somewhat limited influence on school goals and
administration and little opportunity to control the broader context in which he
performs his professional activities.’ (Hoyle, 1974:15)
In Scotland this was compounded by a traditional concern for uniformity of educational
provision (Anderson,1999) embedded within a complex hierarchy for the administration
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and management of the profession. Humes and Bryce (1999) ascribe some of the negative
characteristics of Scottish society, such as resistance to change and deference to
bureaucratic authority, as a direct outcome of the experience of Scottish schooling.
A significant change in the definition of teacher professionalism was marked, during the
first half of the 1990s, by the production of a series of performance indicators for schools
culminating in the publication by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) of How good is our
school?:Self-evaluation using performance indicators (HGIOS) in 1996. The most
significant change that HGIOS signalled was in the relationship between senior managers
and teachers. Under the heading, Management, leadership and quality assurance, the role
of senior staff was affixed to the practice of school development planning, the setting of
targets and the monitoring and evaluation of teachers’ work (ibid:64 –68). The chief
function of headteachers and promoted staff is thus to act as line managers
operationalising national and local authority priorities in their schools. Good teaching is
represented as a matter of displaying a number of prescribed behaviours. These
behavioural objectives are to be used by teachers and their managers to grade teacher
performance as a pre-requisite to identifying future targets for improvement (HMIe,
2002). The representation of the teacher in this publication, indeed in the whole panoply
of the Quality Initiative – development planning, target setting, reporting and inspection is clearly that of the educational operative familiar from the work of Smyth and
Shacklock (1998) in Australia, and Mahony and Hextall (2000) in the UK. This
formulation represents the extension of the ‘hard’ end of managerialism into the public
services with an emphasis on accountability and control. This is to be achieved through
the detailed prescription and supervision of performance leaving little to practitioner
judgement or discretion. Clearly this delineation of teachers as operatives shares a
number of elements with bureau professionalism, in particular similar power
relationships. However, educational operationalism does make for a marked increase in
the intensity of control, a substantive alteration of relationships within the hierarchy and
places a severe limit on both class teachers’ and promoted staff’s autonomy.
From 1997 until 2002 the government developed and published a framework of
professional standards for teachers in Scotland. The first of these, The Standard for
Headship in Scotland (SOEID, 1998), differed in an important respect from those
developed for England and Wales in that it was based on three elements in an integrated
model of action (Reeves et al, 1998) rather than being simply an enumeration of
observable behaviours. The three elements were:
•
Professional Values
•
Management Functions
•
Professional Abilities
All the standards which were published subsequently retained this same basic pattern.
Although they all contained significant overtones of ‘educational operationalism’ the
inclusion of values, a commitment to reflective practice, team work and collaboration
meant that the standards for teachers in Scotland were more representative of the ‘soft’
version of managerialism than their equivalents in England and Wales (TTA, 1997, 1998,
DfES, 2001. This strand of the managerial discourse is associated with the socialised,
ethical form of organisation described by Rose (1999:122). Effective management is
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characterised by an organisational ethos which supports team and collaborative work,
knowledge sharing and problem-solving as part of an improvement-focused approach to
practice. This allows both the pursuit of a shared objective and projects of individual selfactualisation on the part of organisational members, a congruence which is cited as a key
characteristic of a learning organisation (Senge, 1990). Rose traces this somewhat utopian
vision of organisational life back to a rather more sinister origin in post-war American
sociology where it depended on ‘a conception of social control that could and should be
inscribed within the very processes and relations of organisational life’ (1999:122).
Nevertheless this formulation of a ‘new professionalism’ has had a lasting appeal for
educationalists (Hoyle, 1974; Fullan, 1988; Hargreaves, 1999).
A similar version of professionalism informed the Report of the McCrone Inquiry, A
Teaching Profession for the 21st Century, (SEED, 2000). The Inquiry was instigated to
break the deadlock in the negotiations between the teachers’ unions and the employers
over pay and conditions during the millennium review. In the list of teacher duties
recommended in the Report there is an emphasis on collaboration and shared
responsibility for the education offered to pupils (ibid:45). However, in Annex B of the
Agreement (2001) that followed, the word colleagues and any commitment to collective
action on the part of teachers was eliminated from the list of teachers’ duties. For
example McCrone’s ‘participating with colleagues in planning, raising attainment,
school self-improvement and individual review.’ becomes ‘participating in issues relating
to school planning, raising achievement and individual review.’ Except for a commitment
to individual annual review and CPD the new teachers’ duties have more in common with
those that had prevailed under the bureau-professional dispensation (SED, 1986) than
they did with the McCrone Report’s vision of a revitalised profession.
The purpose of this summary has been to demonstrate that the introduction of the status
of chartered teacher has occurred within a field where the whole notion of teacher
professionalism is subject to contesting and contrasting paradigms held and championed
by different interests within the activity system. This has resulted in the issue and use of
policy texts by a variety of institutions that ‘speak’ in a mixture of ‘tongues’, where there
are both internal inconsistencies as well as statements laid out in one document that are
contradicted by another. One way of representing what is occurring is to envisage
chartered teacher as entering a space between three competing discourses of teacher
professionalism: the ‘old’ bureau professionalism, managerialist views of teachers as
operatives and progressive managerialism’s construction of a ‘new’ professionalism
(Figure 1). This contestation leads to the opening of a space of indeterminancy between
the three discourses where sites which entail sense-making, such as that of chartered
teacher status, surface the tensions and fractures that it creates. Thus, whilst chartered
teacher status may have a blueprint on paper (the Chartered Teacher Standard), there is
no basis for an agreed blueprint in practice, in fact, quite the opposite. Those attempting
to promote and enact the role will find themselves having to invent it in practice in a
context where the teacher professionalism advocated by the standard will be vigorously
contested. Whether chartered teacher status becomes a successful Trojan Horse for the
new professionalism or it is hybridised or swamped by one or both of the other discourses
J.Reeves 20.7.05 6345
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will depend on the outcome of the complex politics of the system during the initial stages
of the implementation.
Figure 1: The Contesting Discourses of Professionalism
Bureau Professionalism
Space of
indeterminancy
Educational
Operationalism
New Professionalism
The Concept of the Chartered Teacher
The consultation document, Targeting Excellence (SOEID, 1999) heralded most of the
changes brought in as a result of the McCrone Report (SEED, 2000) and placed them
within a wider agenda for the reform of the education service. The document proposed
modernising the teaching force in Scotland through the creation of ‘a more highly
qualified, more effective profession which would acquire higher status’ within the
community as a result. Supporting and strengthening the professional expertise of
teachers (ibid:58) was linked to the production of a comprehensive set of professional
standards, the revision of initial teacher education and probationary arrangements for
newly qualified teachers, the stripping out of a number of management posts in schools,
the introduction of more administrative and classroom support posts and the creation of a
means to encourage excellent teachers to stay in the classroom (ibid:65).
As a key element in this modernisation project the McCrone Report (SEED, 2000)
recommended the establishment of two new statuses: chartered teacher and advanced
chartered teacher, each of which signified a level of excellence in teaching. Chartered
teacher was to be achieved by a significant majority of established teachers whereas
fewer would attain advanced chartered teacher status. Whilst chartered teachers would
remain in the classroom and serve as a role model for junior colleagues the advanced
chartered teacher was envisaged as fulfilling a far more demanding role and serving as ‘a
resource for the nation in driving forward educational standards.’ (SEED, 2000:22-23)
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Both statuses were to be achieved through the completion of an appropriate, accredited
programme of CPD (ibid: 66).
Between the Report and the Agreement advanced chartered teacher status disappeared to
leave chartered teacher as the only step to pursuing a classroom-based teaching career. In
the process, two contrasting interpretations of the status appeared in policy documents.
The first of these presented chartered teacher ‘as a means of rewarding experienced high
quality teachers who seek a challenging career without having to pursue school
management posts.’(SEED, 2002b) which was, and still is, understood to mean that the
status would be achieved by good classroom teachers for doing much as they had always
done. This interpretation was broadly congruent with the description of chartered teacher
in the McCrone Report and was supported, in Annex B of the Agreement, by the use of
the heading ‘teachers/chartered teachers’ (SEED, 2001) above the list of a single set of
duties. This view that the status signifies a personal achievement rather than a role is
underlined by making participation on chartered teacher programmes a private and
personal investment by individual teachers in which neither schools nor local authorities
have any locus. These arrangements have ensured that the only institutions with any
interest in promoting chartered teacher status are the Universities and the GTC neither of
which has any direct influence on what it is that a chartered teacher will do, or be, back in
school. In both the Agreement and the documentation resulting from local negotiations
there is no mention of a role for chartered teachers.
However, the Standard for Chartered Teacher (SEED, 2002a) presents a very different
conception. It delineates a role which is closer to the McCrone Report’s description of
advanced chartered teacher but entails an even more ambitious formulation of teacher
professionalism. The Chartered Teacher Standard follows the pattern of the Standard for
Headship in adopting a model of practice which privileges values as the basis of the
professionalism which the Standard describes:
“The consultation process confirms support for identifying nine forms of
professional action. These can be categorised to correspond to the four
professional values and personal commitments, namely, Effectiveness in
promoting learning in the classroom; Critical reflection, self-evaluation and
development; Collaboration and influence; and Educational and social values.”
(SEED,2002a:8)
The detailed description given under each of these values does not equate with a simple
endorsement of previous definitions of teacher professionalism. Under collaboration and
influence the Chartered Teacher is described as ‘committed to influencing and having a
leading impact in team and school development’, ’contributing to the professional
development of colleagues’ and ‘As a member of a wider professional community - influencing teaching and learning’ and ‘strengthening partnerships with other
professional groups, parents and other agencies’ Core educational values are listed as
‘concern for truth, personal responsibility, equality, social justice and inclusion’. In the
more detailed exemplars the Chartered Teacher is to be ’innovative and creative’, an
‘initiator and advocate of change’, engage in ‘professional enquiry and action research’,
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prepared to identify and challenge ‘negative aspects of school culture - - stimulating
colleagues to bring about improvement’, contributing ‘to the literature on, and public
discussion of, teaching and learning and education’ and ‘articulating a personal,
independent and critical stance in relation to contrasting perspectives on educational
issues, policies and developments.’ The document also states in its introduction that
‘the Chartered Teacher will require and expect to be less closely supervised than
a Fully Registered teacher: he or she will have a more marked capacity for
exercising initiative, independent judgement and other features of professional
autonomy. (SEED,2002a:5)
The clear commitment in this Standard to criticality and independence of judgement as a
characteristic of teacher excellence in Scotland is heartening and surprising, given that
the Scottish system is as swamped with paper, box ticking and multiple, rapidly breeding,
performance indicators and targets as anywhere else in the UK. What this Standard
allows for both providers of chartered teacher programmes and those teachers who wish
to achieve the status, is a space in which to assert a form of teacher professionalism
which is in marked contradiction to the educational operationalism model.
Thus the current policy position is one of muddle and confusion between two very
different conceptions of the status. In many ways the avoidance of any role description
for chartered teachers is unsurprising since defining a role is clearly going to be
contentious. It is in this context that newly qualified chartered teachers have to find some
form of modus vivendi.
Inventing the Chartered Teacher
The GTCS started accrediting programmes leading to chartered teacher in 2002, by which
time the MEd, Professional Enquiry in Education had been running for a year. This was
conceived as a practice-based learning programme and its design was based upon what
had been learned from research into learning processes on the Scottish Qualification for
Headship (Reeves et al, 2003, Reeves et al, 2005). In formulating the proposal for the
new postgraduate course a partnership was formed, called the Partnership for
Professional Enquiry, in which the tutor team worked with a group of teachers,
headteachers and local authority representatives to identify the principles that should
underpin the development of the programme. The Partnership for Professional Enquiry
agreed that the course should:

have a clear focus on developing classroom practice;
•
provide opportunities for the creation of knowledge;

make a contribution to the development of the professional community
through the use of rigorous but practical evidence-based enquiry to
develop learning and teaching;

make a contribution to enhanced collaboration and team working to assist
schools in their efforts to create and sustain learning environments for
teachers and pupils;
•
support professional creativity and curiosity; and
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
provide learning opportunities for both students and the tutor team. The
course should build on, and extend, the expertise of both groups.
The structure of the new programme was as shown in Figure 2. There were two
professional enquiry projects. The first, Improving Classroom Practice, consisted of an
investigation by the student, in the form of action research, into an aspect of her own
practice based upon an assessed proposal from the previous module.
Figure 2 The Programme Structure
PE01
Extending
Professionalism
PEA1 series
Linked Option
PE02
Improving
Classroom
Practice
PE03
Collaboration &
Professional
Enquiry
PE04
Collaborative
Project 1
PE05
Collaborative
Project 2
Key: shading = practice- based learning module
The second project, the Collaborative Project, required the student to work on a
professional enquiry together with one or more colleagues in school. Again, the focus of
the enquiry was classroom practice and the improvement of pupil learning but this time it
was to extend beyond the limits of the participant’s own classroom.
Learning from Project 1 (PE02 in Figure 2)
In the discussion which follows observations under this first heading are the result of a
team evaluation based on tracking the work of five individual students from PE01 to the
end of PE02, interviews with nine students who had successfully completed PE02
together with a textual analysis of ten of these students’ PE02 submissions (Reeves &
I’Anson, 2005). The observations under the second heading, Learning from Project 2, are
more tentative at this stage being based on records of meetings with the students during
PE04 and an initial examination of their PE04 submissions.
At the inception of the programme we had asked all the participants to provide us with an
image of how they felt about their role as teachers. The outcome of this exercise was an
overwhelming representation of being ‘ cabined, cribbed, confined ’ in their current role.
In the interviews at the end of PE02 participants were asked about their experience of the
course. They pointed to a number of positive outcomes on both a personal and
professional level. What was striking about these claims was that they were largely to do
with having a greater sense of agency and self-confidence i.e. they were about a change
in participants’ perceptions of their personal power.
Most claimed an increase in expertise as a major benefit of the course experience:
“You just have the confidence to say I have read ‘x’ and I do know ‘y’ – it gives
you the confidence to say, ‘I do know’ and you become an expert in a particular
field which gives you a voice. People do respect what you say and do appreciate
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what you’ve been involved in.” (Person B).
One outcome of writing an account of their own actions in the PE02 assignments was that
they were able to cite texts to justify their actions and opinions because they had searched
out the references either as part of their thinking in carrying out their work-based projects
and/or in preparing their commentaries. Participants could also claim an expertise which
was not simply gleaned from literature:
“so what you could argue that comes from the course is the sense that it catalyses
you to try these things in your classroom, from those things you gain a better
understanding of the students.” (leading to a)“wider perception of the possibilities
that I can employ in the classroom .“ (Person A).
In writing their commentaries bits of text (in the form of pupils’ work, parental
comments, observations from colleagues) derived from the school setting were frequently
used by the teachers to supply authenticity and pragmatic force to their claims. Through
undertaking the assignments participants had had the space to stand back from what they
had done and marshal evidence and arguments in order to present a consistent and
coherent account of themselves and their practice. This experience of shaping and
rehearsing their accounts on paper was probably significant in giving participants a
greater sense of agency and inner security,
“I think it gives you confidence, your body language changes – you feel more
inclined to go to the management or someone else and say, ‘I would like to try this
and these are the reasons why.’”- “I’ve got the confidence to speak in front of
people now ” “I can explain myself – I have the words, I have the knowledge”.
(Person C).
It appeared that enacting the ‘new professionalism’ had had a very positive effect on
these participants’ self-concept and reports from assessors after their school visits attested
to the reality of changes in classroom practice. The commitment to greater activism and
the acquisition of additional credibility as an outcome of PE02 was to be critical for the
next project where the micro-politics of initiating a new practice emerged as a dominant
theme in our discussions with the students.
Learnings from Project 2 (PE04 and PE05 in Figure 2)
Once the students had completed the first practical project they went on to module PE03.
The original assignment at the end of this module was to prepare a project proposal for
collaborative action but it soon became clear that collaborative enquiry entailed a very
different way of working. A full proposal could not be produced until after a group in
school had worked together long enough to clarify their joint objective and the methods
they would use to carry out the enquiry. The PE03 submission therefore centred on the
negotiation of a basis for collaboration with the submission of a full proposal and
baseline study being postponed until the end of PE04.
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The engagement in the collaborative project opened up a number of issues. Initially many
participants had thought of disseminating the work they had done and engaging others in
a similar project. In discussion it was suggested that they would probably need to start
with the school or departmental development plan since they would need the backing of
their managers to enable them to resource a collaborative enquiry. Whilst it was
appropriate for them to carry over the generic knowledge they had acquired about
professional enquiry from their own classroom project, the focus of the new project
needed to be on what their collaborative group agreed to be important. This presented a
number of difficulties for students. Taking on the task of negotiating with colleagues and
managers was both novel and daunting. Some had already formed alliances on the first
project through involving colleagues as critical friends or observers and therefore the
transition to a collaborative project was relatively easy. Others encountered mixed
reactions from their colleagues many of whom expressed surprise that they should want
to initiate any such venture. Some teachers and departments could not think of any
problems they would want to address. A few people were positively hostile and implied
that participants were only interested in using others to gain a higher salary.
Once participants had managed to secure a group to work with they found coping with
uncertainty and lack of control difficult. The contrast between acting as an individual and
as part of a group was disturbing. Some collaborative groups were very supportive but
firmly placed the participant in a traditional leadership role - ‘You just tell us what to do
and we’ll get on with it’. In nearly all cases participants reported that their colleagues
expected them to take the lead, at least during the initial stages. This played unhelpfully
with the instinctive inclination of many participants to keep control of the project because
colleagues might not ‘do things properly’. It was very hard for participants to know how
to position themselves not least because a number of them wished to enact a genuinely
democratic model of professionalism. They found themselves wrestling with the question
of whether they were leaders, facilitators or there to serve as providers of ideas and
materials.
It was also difficult to cope with the length of time it took to reach some form of
alignment of purpose and understanding with their colleagues. They found establishing
discussion and debate extremely difficult. Getting people to bring along examples of
pupils’ work was often the best way of developing discussion but it took time to establish
sufficient trust for teachers to be ready to do this. In nearly all cases getting people to the
point where they would contribute and critique ideas took several meetings. Some
programme participants found it difficult when their own ideas had to be modified or
dropped in the light of discussion. These observations pointed to the problem identified
by Hargreaves of overcoming norms of interaction amongst teachers that suppress risktaking, criticality and ‘grown-up’ professional relationships (2003). The participants’
interventions also highlighted other manifestations of bureau professionalism. For
instance, one participant was working with the first group in her school to contain a
mixture of infant and junior staff.
Many of the collaborating teachers only took an interest in the project at the level of their
own classrooms and showed little curiosity in taking any wider overview (Hancock,
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2001). Generally the collaborative groups would only engage with very simple readings
and summaries of either research or policy. Colleagues were also inclined to want to
apply ideas immediately in their classrooms without engaging in any detailed diagnosis
of learners’ problems or an exploration of possible solutions. The notion of articulating
desired outcomes and establishing a baseline before trialling a new approach was very
foreign to people. One participant observed that she had often collaborated with her
colleagues on working parties in the past and that it came as a shock to her to realise just
how different action enquiry was from their normal way of working.
One interpretation of these experiences is to point to the discontinuities arising from the
interplay and clash of different constructions of teacher professionalism. Enactment
showed the course group that they had their own difficulties with the whole notion of
collaboration because for them, as for their colleagues, the dominant framing remains the
old bureau professionalism with some admix of the ‘educational operationalism’
paradigm. It was difficult to cope with the notion of being an ‘activist’ teacher (Sachs,
2003). Given a degree of personal and professional credibility through completing the
PE02 projects successfully participants felt they were then framed as quasileader/managers and expected to mimic a hierarchical and directive form of behaviour.
Nixon et al’s notion (1997) of the new professionalism as emergent, localised and
negotiated took on a stark reality. Extending professional enquiry beyond an individual
teacher’s classroom raised a number of issues about the practicality of the formation of
‘communities of practice’ and the implementation and sustainability of the collegiate
ideals expressed in the Chartered Teacher Standard (Huberman, 2001).
Not only did the enactment of collaborative professional enquiry reveal some of the
fractures in teacher culture it also caused problems for participants in interaction with
their managers. As with their teaching colleagues, many managers were inclined to
regard a display of activism on the part of a class teacher as surprising and, in some cases,
highly inappropriate. Even where participants gained the verbal backing of their line
manager some still felt frustrated by having to negotiate and gain permission on a
piecemeal basis for resources in a way that they felt signalled to them and their
colleagues that they should not suppose that teachers would be treated in the same way as
a member of the management team. Other line managers were extremely suspicious,
possibly suspecting some form of usurpation of their own role, and wanted to keep a very
tight rein on what was happening which participants felt made it difficult for them to
apply collaborative principles in their work with colleagues. These difficulties can be
interpreted as indicating a clash with the norms of bureau professionalism in that it was
‘not proper’ for an ordinary teacher to display behaviour reserved for those in
management posts.
A second source of discomfort arose from the clash between the process of action enquiry
and the operationalism of school development planning. Whilst managers might agree to
let participants lead an initiative that related to the school’s priorities they wanted it
actioned in the usual task completion framework and did not understand the process of
focusing on the experiences and responses of learners. There was impatience with time
being taken to explore, investigate and debate ideas rather than ‘getting on with’ the task.
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Participants felt this was attributable to the short-term and superficial model of change
embedded in development planning and the concern of their managers to comply with
targets. Interestingly one of the three authorities whose staff were involved in the MEd
had adopted an organisational learning strategy and had altered its planning procedures so
that schools focused on barriers to learning and adopted action enquiry as the basis for
school improvement (Reeves & Boreham, 2004). Teachers from this authority found that
this provided them with an important source of legitimation. They were generally
regarded in a more positive light by senior managers and given better access to resources
than their colleagues from other authorities (this variance gave an indication of how
strong the operational link between school managers and local and central government
has become). It is significant that difficulties with managers were characterised by both
the bureau professional mindset and, equally strongly, by educational operationalism.
For the tutor team it was as though we were inventing collaborative professional enquiry
with the participants. The seminars on PE04 became joint problem-solving sessions as
the participants shared and reflected on their experiences. It was obvious that there were a
number of ways in which we could have prepared participants better for the collaborative
project. One difficulty we had encountered was that much of the literature on
collaboration did not focus on teachers working with their colleagues in schools. Most
dealt with either external networks and/or collaborations between university staff and
teachers. There was little that prepared teachers for the political work of attempting to
change practice with their colleagues (Dadds, 1994). Initiating collaborative enquiry in
school required an ability to persuade and influence others and a combination of
flexibility and persistence in interaction with staff at various levels within the school
hierarchy. In almost all cases, this was an unfamiliar form of practice for both the
participants and their colleagues and it was therefore hard to secure a space for it to
happen (Reeves & Forde, 2004). It was also evident from our discussions that would-be
collaborators needed a sound understanding of the way in which their schools worked. A
lack of work-process knowledge was a significant barrier both to the successful
negotiation of initiation and the work of some of the groups once they were formed
(Boreham, 2002).
Having proceeded on the basis of our experience of working with candidates on the SQH
we realised that we had not fully allowed for the difference in the position power of
members of the chartered teacher cohorts. Not only did the vast majority of SQH
candidates already have a management post in school but they also benefited from the inschool supports the course design offered them: sponsorship and mentoring by their
headteacher; a prior claim of involvement in the school development plan; and
networking supported by a local authority co-ordinator. Without these supports the
would-be chartered teachers were reliant on their personal credibility and skills in
securing the permissions and resources they needed to act. This in turn raised ethical
questions about our own practice. Given the uncertainties surrounding the positioning of
chartered teachers should we be promoting a form of teacher professionalism which was
so clearly incongruent with much of current practice?
Conclusion
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The initial feedback from participants indicates that the chartered teacher standard
embodies a form of practice which is even more novel than we suspected it was when the
programme was planned. There is clearly an ethical issue here about supporting a form of
teacher professionalism whose sustainability is largely contra-indicated despite increasing
talk in the literature about communities of practice and distributed leadership (Harris &
Lambert, 2003). Without changing the system so that it supports collaborative interaction
and evidence-informed practice chartered teachers will be left facing formidable barriers
to exercising the kind of professional influence that the McCrone Report saw as critical to
delivering an effective education for children and young people.
Whilst it may seem that this analysis is essentially pessimistic it does afford grounds for
hope. The projection of a monolithic capacity on the part of the central authorities to
control what happens in the field is illusory. There is space here, if it is seen, understood
and used, for influencing the future of teacher professionalism. The Partnership for
Professional Enquiry can act as a knowing agent in this struggle. Our involvement in the
Chartered Teacher programme, CPD for middle managers and the Scottish Qualification
for Headship offers a number of opportunities for the partners to work together to enact a
form of professionalism that is in opposition to the worst features of bureau
professionalism and the reductive force of educational operationalism. We can, by
changing our practice locally, support greater interaction and networking between groups
to help improve communication and coherence and secure structural change.
Understanding our activities as part of an evolving and dynamic system and our position
as actors in this field provides grounds for both the Partnership and chartered teachers to
actively engage in the process of continuing to invent a teacher professionalism for the
future.
References
Anderson,R. The history of Scottish education, pre-1980 pp 215 – 224 in Bryce,T. and
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