is being reconstructed as a state technician, trained by various‘providers’to‘de-
liver’a national curriculum in England’s schools. Alongside this competency-based
model of the technical skills-based teacher is a market model of the‘flexiblisation’
of teaching work, a move towards individual contracts and pay negotiations
including the use of non-qualified teachers and teaching assistants—where the
teacher is positioned as part of the contracted labour force rather than as a pro-
fessional partner in the process of education.
The current government is trying to ensure that market forces, competition and
diversity are further inserted into pre-service (and in-service) teacher development.
As Stuart Hall ( 2011 : 9) has claimed,‘the long march of the neo liberal revolution’
is continuing in‘our extraordinary political situation’. Hall believes that currently
we are experiencing another conjunctural crisis. Drawing on Gramsci, Hall argues
that new social settlements and‘the new social configurations which result, mark a
new‘conjuncture’’—where a number of contradictions in different sites (cultural,
education, social as well as economic) come together to conjoin. To go back to my
opening quote from Foucault, some of this conjuncture in society is evident in‘the
type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’(Foucault 1980 :
131). This‘truth telling’for a new conjuncture is amply illustrated in many of
Michael Gove’s earlier policy texts and speeches. One example will have to suffice:
Every parent in the land knows that we need to improve our education system. We’ve got
great teachers doing a fantastic job across the country, but they’ve been held back by a
bureaucratic and dumbed-down approach which has seen us fall behind other nations.
Labour spent money but far too much of it has gone on red tape, interference, quangos and
politically correct pet projects. Teachers have been denied the powers they need to keep
order, they’ve been restricted in the exams they can offer so children in state schools
couldn’t sit the more rigorous tests they have in the private sector and they’ve been judged
not on how well they teach but how many bureaucratic boxes they tick. (Gove2011a,b,
article in the Sunday Express available on DfE website)32.5 ‘Truth Being a Thing of This World’
Turning now to the provision of training schools, in which some schools will take
the leading role in the education of pre-service and in-service professional devel-
opment. I do not think that anyone would disagree with the proposition that
experiences of learning alongside more expert practitioners in a classroom setting is
anything other than a fundamental part of becoming a teacher. But it is not just
about where teacher education is done, it is also about what is being done and how
it is being done and who has the power to innovate. In the mid-1980s some
universities set up PGCE programmes that were jointly planned by school-based
mentors and university staff and that were research-informed (here I am thinking
particularly but not exclusively of Sussex, Leicester and Oxford University).
Projects such as IT-INSET, funded by the then Department of Education and
Science (DES) in 1978 at the Open University, were alternative approaches to
32 Reforming Teacher Education in England... 489