Author Query Sheet
Manuscript Information
Journal
Acronym
rJIE
Volume and
issue
34:4
Author name
Stevenson
Manuscript
No. (if
applicable)
332979
AUTHOR: The following queries have arisen during the editing of your
manuscript. Please answer the queries by making the necessary corrections
on the CATS online corrections form. Once you have added all your
corrections, please press the SUBMIT button.
QUERY NO. QUERY DETAILS
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Q5
Replace HRM in full
Confirm sentence is OK
Provide full date website was accessed
Provide name and location of publisher
Provide page span for article
Journal of In-service Education
Vol. 34, No. 4, December 2008, pp. 457–468
ISSN 1367–4587 (print)/ISSN 1747–5082 (online)/08/040457–12
© 2008 International Professional Development Association (IPDA)
DOI: 10.1080/13674580802328129
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Challenging the orthodoxy: union
learning representatives as organic
intellectuals
Howard Stevenson*
Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
Taylor and FrancisRJIE_A_332979.sgm10.1080/13674580802328129Journal of In-Service Education1367-4587 (print)/1747-5082 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis344000000December 2008Dr HowardStevensonhstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk
Teacher education and continuing professional development have become key areas of controversy
in England since the period of school-sector restructuring following the 1988 Education Reform
Act. More recently, teacher training and professional development have often been used to promote
and reinforce a narrow focus on the government’s ‘standards agenda’. However, the emerging dis-
course of ‘new professionalism’ has raised the profile of professional development in schools, and,
together with union learning representatives, there are opportunities to secure real improvements in
teachers’ access to continuing professional development. This article argues, however, that union
learning representatives must go beyond advocating for better access to professional development
and should raise more fundamental questions about the nature of professional development and the
education system it serves. Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of the ‘organic intellectual’, the article ar-
gues that union learning representatives have a key role as organisers of ideas—creating spaces in
which the ideological dominance of current policy orthodoxy might be challenged.
Introduction
The education function of trade unions has a long and honourable tradition in the
history of the organised labour movement. It has also been a controversial and
contested history in which fundamental questions have been raised about unions’ role
in relation to the wider social and economic system. Within the history of the British
labour movement there has always been a strong tradition of seeking to work within
the system in order to maximise the benefits for workers, whilst the voices of those
who have argued that unions must ask more fundamental questions about the nature
of capitalism have tended to be more marginal (Hyman, 1989). This conflict,
presented crudely as between reformists and radicals, is echoed in the history of trade
union education (Simon, 1990), which for many years wrestled with the tensions
*Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln
LN6 7TS, UK. Email: hstevenson@lincoln.ac.uk
RJIE_A_332979.fm Page 457 Friday, September 26, 2008 9:25 PM
458 H. Stevenson
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
between an independent and critical working-class education—’carried on by and for
the working class, and under its own control’ (Simon, 1990, p. 16), and a system
underpinned by significant state support, positioned within, rather than against, the
dominant economic system.
The political, economic and social context at the current time is in many respects
significantly different from, for example, the issues identified by Brian Simon in the
early part of the twentieth century. However, in important ways the relatively recent
emergence of union learning representatives resurrects the historic debate within
trade union education about the extent to which such education has an explicit role
in challenging the status quo. Or is it the case—as an integral element of the relation-
ship between the state, capital and labour—that union learning representatives are
central to reinforcing, rather than challenging, current orthodoxies?
Union learning representatives have developed as a key feature on the landscape of
contemporary trade unionism within the United Kingdom. Supported by statutory
entitlements, union learning representatives have a qualitatively different function
within trade union education in so far as their role is presented as one of facilitator,
rather than provider. Union learning representatives have a key role in supporting
fellow union members to gain improved access to education and training through the
provision of advice, and the negotiation of learning agreements with employers. A key
emphasis for union learning representatives has been to support those sections of the
workforce for whom an inability to access basic skills leaves them at greater risk of
marginalisation in the labour market. However, union learning representatives are
also a feature of white-collar unionism, and this article focuses on the role, and the
potential role, of union learning representatives in the school teacher unions.
Union learning representatives have developed at a time when issues of teacher
education and professional development have emerged high on the policy agenda.
Policy discourses speak of a ‘new professionalism’ (RIG, 2005) in which teachers’
work will be better informed by access to high-quality continuing professional devel-
opment. However, the apparent increase in emphasis on professional development
also highlights the potential use of such forms of teacher training as a means of rein-
forcing current policy agendas. Education performs a powerful role in forming and
shaping the ‘common sense’ of the world that we inhabit. Teachers’ training, and
their continuing professional development, exerts a powerful influence on teachers’
professional world—shaping not only what they do, but what questions are presented
and how problems are perceived in the first instance.
In such circumstances, union learning representatives may have an important role
to play in ensuring their colleagues can access the professional development that is
the rhetoric of new professionalism. However, as union learning representatives, to
what extent is it possible for teachers in these roles to work against the grain of current
policy, and to open up spaces where the common sense of current policy discourses
is challenged?
This article identifies how teacher education and the continuing professional
development of in-service teachers performs a powerful role in shaping and reinforc-
ing the discourses within which policy is framed. It then explores the role of the union
RJIE_A_332979.fm Page 458 Friday, September 26, 2008 9:25 PM
Union learning representatives as organic intellectuals 459
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
learning representative within school teacher unions, and specifically within the
context of the new professionalism agenda. The paper highlights the development of
union learning representatives within a context of ‘social partnership’ in which unions
and employers seek to work together to secure common objectives. The article
concludes by discussing the potential development of the role of union learning repre-
sentatives, but located within the more traditional concerns of trade union education.
Drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) notion of the ‘organic intellectual’, the present paper
argues that union learning representatives can create spaces in which critical
discourses can emerge, and in which ideas that challenge current orthodoxies can be
encouraged and developed.
Teacher education and professional development: capturing the discourse
Perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the changes that have taken place in
the English school system in recent years has been the degree of centralisation, and
the extent to which the discourse of ‘standards’ has come to dominate the entire
educational landscape. Such developments are common in different forms globally,
but even by international comparison the extent to which the English system has
succumbed to the demands of the central state are striking. Of course, the means by
which this has been achieved are complex. There can be little doubt that the suffocat-
ing presence of the body responsible for the inspection of schools in England, the
Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), buttressed by the introduction of
quasi-market structures, has had a profound disciplinary impact—encouraging
uniformity across the sector, coupled with an obedience to the demands of national
policy. However, it is important to recognise how many of these processes have been
reinforced by key developments in teacher education and professional development,
the consequence of which has been to narrow the opportunities for generating critical
perspectives in relation to current policy.
The importance of teacher education to winning the battle of ideas in education
was perhaps most graphically illustrated by the state’s role in reforming teacher train-
ing by taking control of the teacher training curriculum and putting OFSTED in
place to police its implementation (Furlong, 2005). Coupled with the encouragement
of more school-based routes to qualified teacher status, the consequence of these
changes has been to focus ‘training’ more on practical skills of ‘delivery’, whilst
marginalising efforts to raise more fundamental questions about pedagogy and prac-
tice. These tendencies within initial teacher education have then been reinforced by
the state’s nationalisation of ‘leadership and management’ training under the auspices
of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL). In contrast to the United
States, for example, where a master’s qualification is the accepted route to principal-
ship, policy in England requires potential head teachers to hold the NCSL-provided
National Professional Qualification for Headteachers, a qualification reinforced by a
battery of related programmes for middle leaders, new and experienced head teach-
ers. NCSL’s monopoly on providing the professional qualification for headship,
supported by its associated programmes, provides a powerful mechanism whereby
RJIE_A_332979.fm Page 459 Friday, September 26, 2008 9:25 PM
460 H. Stevenson
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
the central state, through its arms-length agents, is able to assert influence over all
those teachers who take on the leadership of a school. The impact of all these reforms
is to significantly diminish the role of universities and other higher education institu-
tions in providing teacher education and professional development. Hence those
institutions whose traditional mission has been to generate new knowledge and to
promote challenge and critique as the basis of educational enquiry have their role
significantly diminished through the influence of new forms of regulation and profes-
sional accreditation.
Moreover, it is possible to discern further ways in which teachers’ professional
development becomes used both to support and to reinforce the demands of the
central policy agenda. Specifically these link to the ways in which the culture of
performativity increasingly drives the professional development needs of both teach-
ers and schools. At an individual level, teachers face a performance management
system that is now heavily focused on demonstrating impact on pupil performance.
Both pay and career progression are underpinned by the need to show improved
results, and within the performance management system there is a clear logic to iden-
tifying continuing professional development needs that support the drive for results.
The link between professional development and performance at an individual level
then becomes replicated at an institutional level as schools operating in a competitive
environment search for quick-fix solutions that offer the prospect of providing
improved results, quickly. In such circumstances it is little surprise if growing
numbers of private providers enter the market to offer schools what they want (Ball,
2007). These organisations have no mission to generate new knowledge, to challenge
or critique. On the contrary, their business survival depends on appearing to make the
system work, not raising wider fundamental questions about the efficacy of the system
itself.
The extent to which continuing professional development is both driven by
national agendas, and reinforces them, is highlighted by the Association of Teachers
and Lecturers (2005, p. 3):
Government policy has attempted to standardise practice, showing a lack of trust in the
profession and a denial of complexity. It conceptualises CPD [continuing professional
development] as a management tool to ensure good classroom practice, and is seeking to
embed it within the management toolkit, including performance management, pay
progression and contract. Items of training are to be imposed on teachers according only
to immediate corporate needs.
Teacher unions, continuing professional development and the new
professionalism
Teacher unions have long had an interest in ‘professional issues’ and professional
development. Arguably the history of teacher unions in England often reflects
uncomfortable efforts to reconcile their dual role as traditional trade unions
campaigning on issues of pay and conditions of service, and professional associations
advocating on matters of professional concern for teachers (Ironside & Seifert, 1995).
RJIE_A_332979.fm Page 460 Friday, September 26, 2008 9:25 PM