Abstract
This article critically evaluates School Direct, a recently introduced Initial Teacher Education pathway for English primary schools. Through doing so, power relations emerge as a key consideration, as the growing consensus within the education community suggests this new route towards Qualified Teacher Status embodies a long-held government objective to remove Initial Teacher Education from the influence of higher education. A critical inquiry approach is applied, for its utility in highlighting power relations in society and thus exposing the forces of hegemony and injustice. This sits within an interpretive perspective, which can illuminate and explore conditions that disadvantage or exclude individuals within society. As the emergent consensus echoes Foucault’s focus on, and account of, power relations in society, a Foucauldian lens is employed in this critical analysis.
What is School Direct?
School Direct (SD) is a new route to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) (Department for Education (DfE), 2013a). It sustains principles underpinning such forerunners in school-based teacher training as the Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) (Teacher Development Agency, 2006), School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) (DfE, 2013b) and Teach First (Teach First, 2013). Its premise is to ‘allow schools to grow their own new teachers’ (DfE, 2013a) and to negotiate how they ‘want the teacher training programme to be delivered in partnership with an accredited Initial Teacher Training provider’ (DfE, 2013a). There are two sub-routes; first, the basic SD route, which results in QTS, combined with the traditional academic Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). This route requires students to complete written assignments and offers the possibility of gaining academic credits at Masters Level. The alternative is a salaried SD route, which is open to graduates with a minimum of 3 years’ work experience. These students gain QTS, but without achieving the PGCE award. They are paid a salary, which is at least the minimum point on the unqualified teacher pay scale. Within this second route, the input of the relevant higher education institution (HEI) is minimal; the direction and impact stems unequivocally from the school.
While the SD route has substantially grown in size in England since 2012, this is not mirrored in the rest of the UK. In fact, within Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland there are no school-based routes to QTS, and in Wales, the only school-based option remains the GTP (Department for Education NI, no date; Teach in Scotland, no date; Teacher Training and Education in Wales, no date; The Teaching Council, no date). However, in a worldwide context, particularly in developing countries, it is suggested that school-based Initial Teacher Education (ITE) is the only logistically feasible and economically sound means of educating the millions teachers required (Moon and Dladla, 2002). Intrinsic to the Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015 (United Nations, 2002) is an increase in the number of teachers; thus, ITE is a central issue. Moon’s (2000) analysis was that the institutions of teacher education created in the twentieth century would be unable to cope with the scale and urgency of demand required in the twenty-first, and a solution was proposed by Moon and Dladla (2002: 3) was that ‘it seems inevitable that most teacher education provision will become school based’. While in this particular context school-based ITE may seem eminently pragmatic, the underpinning rationale does not necessarily stand for England. On the contrary, perhaps less benign and even subversive forces are at play, and require analysis.
Power relations
As a social theorist, Foucault (1977) constructed models of how society worked, with power relations as one area of focus. His questioning of the existing eighteenth century juridical-liberal conception of ancient sovereign power (Rabinow, 1991) was based on its perceived neglect of positive and productive features of power (Gaventa, 2003; Smart, 1988). His radical reconfiguration led to the concept of biopower, which he considered to be a more modern application of the power/knowledge question (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1998). Biopower encompasses the two dimensions in which power is exercised over life: the individual body and the population as a whole (Foucault, 1991a, 1991b).
Foucault’s move away from the juridicial-liberal conception of power was further demonstrated by a shift from concern over the nature and source of power to problematising how it was exercised and its effect (Smart, 1988). Traditionally, power was understood as being dispersed throughout the social order from a centralised institutional nexus (Smart, 1988), on the basis contractual acts. In contrast, Foucault believed power to be a fluid, omnipresent network without restrictions; thus, it is not owned and wielded by the powerful against the powerless, but is operational within everyday relations (Foucault, 1980, 1998). Further, Foucault (1978) asserted that power necessarily entailed the possibility of resistance; multiple points of resistance were necessary for the existence of power.
Critical analysis of School Direct
While SD is officially an ITE partnership between primary schools and HEIs, the increase in schools’ responsibility, leadership and subsequent impact is a significant and critical feature (DfE, 2013a; Northcott, 2011). This suggests that elements of ITE programmes currently attributed to HEIs, such as the development of critical analysis and reflection and professional reason and argument, will diminish. This claim is supported by the reduction of the academic element of ITE, the PGCE, to optional status within the salaried SD route. This decrease of the theoretical element within the SD model of ITE provision evokes comparisons with the apprenticeship as a craft-based approach into employment (Noble Rogers, 2011). Furthermore, although the salaried SD route addresses the same material as an HEI route (UCAS, 2014), the school context in which this is delivered is significant. This route, being embedded in schools, and effectively removed from HEI input, will necessitate trainee teachers mirroring observed practice and engaging more fully with local discourse communities in schools, rather than with the more general and powerful discourse communities to be found in higher education (Edwards, 2001). Correspondingly, opportunities for government influence on ITE content will flourish (Noble Rogers, 2011), and this is of particular concern in relation to accountability measures and curriculum development.
Accountability measures
First, it is commonly acknowledged that for English primary schools there is ‘an increasingly pervasive preoccupation with accountability’ (Hammersley-Fletcher and Strain, 2011: 871). High levels of government output regulation include external inspections and the scrutiny of attainment data (Leat et al., 2013). In fact, it is interesting to note that 87% of children living in the UK attend schools that publicly publish achievement data, compared with an average of 45% for children living in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2014). Furthermore, in England the bar is continually rising as, (for example), the current coalition government proposes an increase from the current ‘floor target’ of 60% so that from 2016 primary schools will need to ensure at least 85% of their 11 year olds meet a more stretching threshold (DfE, 2013c).
This accountability is a high-stakes issue for schools (Hammersley-Fletcher and Strain, 2011), since failure to meet targets can have severe consequences, including forcing maintained schools to adopt academy status (National Union of Teachers (NUT), no date). The pressure on schools within this performative era focuses the mind; their need to prove their effectiveness is all-encompassing, and in comparison the nurturing and educating of the next generation of teachers pales into insignificance, as this is not a measurable output valued by the DfE. Schools simply do not have the capacity to equip or enable students to challenge and question the status quo; rather, the imperative is one of acceptance whereby teachers, and therefore trainees, are likely to implement government initiatives without question in a bid to ensure their school meets the imposed standards. This reality is particularly apparent when considering the curriculum.
Curriculum and teacher autonomy
The 1988 introduction of the primary national curriculum (PNC) was the very start of a process which saw central governmental control of schools’ curricula extend and tighten (Tomlinson, 2005). This generated a broad recognition and concern that teacher autonomy was significantly reduced (Alexander, 2010; Ball, 2007; Pring et al., 2009; Sachs, 2003) and an entire cohort of teachers deprofessionalised (Abbott et al., 2013; Children, Schools and Families Committee (CSFC), 2009; Elliot, 1998; McCulloch et al., 2000). The inhibition of teachers’ influence over developing, defining, and reinterpreting the curriculum (Helsby and McCulloch, 1997) reduced them to mere ‘deliverers’ of the curriculum (NAHT, 2009, cited in CSFC, 2009; Trowler, 2003). Hargreaves offered a particularly scathing summary, caricaturing teachers as ‘drones and clones of policy makers’ anaemic ambitions’ (Hargreaves, 2003: 2). This picture is perhaps even more disquieting when considering MacBeath and Dempster’s suggestion that the very nature of ‘standardised sequential, age-related curricula means a compromise between learning needs and interests of children and demands of a bureaucratic system’ (MacBeath and Dempster, 2009: 5). Encouragingly, some schools have the scope to act autonomously, as the growing number of academies have the freedom to opt out of using the PNC as a key feature of their legal status (DfE, 2012). This potential is countered, however, by Alexander’s (2013) analysis of low levels of curriculum capacity among the teaching profession; one element of this is limited ability to conceive and plan a good quality curriculum which is perhaps unsurprising, given the history. Teachers with their careers rooted in this era are perhaps ill prepared for the critical concerns of defending children’s interests and their own professionalism. This is extremely worrying for the future of the profession if these people are the key source of influence on the trainees within SD programmes.
Ultimately, there may be a delayed impact on the profession at large. Following the subsequent qualification and career of SD trainees, with their abilities to challenge, (action) research, reflect, consider, evaluate, theorise, question and problem solve significantly impaired (Ball, 2010; Edwards, 2001; Hayes, 2011), we may witness a process of deprofessionalisation, perhaps to such a degree that teachers are simply docile bodies awaiting instruction. The autonomy to make professional judgements will be eroded (Hayes, 2011). As an example of regulation and control of human thought and behaviour, a Foucauldian analysis may identify this as biopower being exercised by the DfE over individual trainee teachers.
Such a deprofessionalised cohort of teachers will be impotent in the face of post-ITE mechanisms demanding compliance with government initiatives. The OFSTED framework (OFSTED, 2013), which pressurises schools to implement government policy (NUT, 2013), even if counter-intuitive to the experienced professional, is such a mechanism. The recent introduction of a phonics screening test for 6-year-olds (Rosen, 2012), and an Education Minister’s recent proposal concerning arithmetic methods for primary children and their assessment (Truss, 2013), are two pertinent examples. A Foucauldian perspective of power relations may thus suggest that the DfE is also exercising biopower over the aggregate body of the primary teaching population.
This picture seems incongruent with the recent declaration by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, that there is ‘no profession more vital and no service more important for our children than teaching’ (DfE, 2010: 2). However, it could be suggested that such public rhetoric is designed to reassure the public that policy makers’ priorities are suitably aligned with those of families and wider communities. Despite the use of knowledge and technologies to exercise biopower, the official explanation is that plans are made ‘in our interests’, that they are designed to ‘take care of us’ and are ‘for our own good’ (Danaker et al., 2002). Drawing on Foucault’s conceptual toolkit, it could be argued that such a projection of innocence is calculated, since power is in fact more effective when hidden from view. Alternatively, it could be claimed that this development of schools’ abilities to exercise biopower over their ‘home-grown’ teachers, and by proxy the profession, is a clear example of the government’s faith in their expertise. Certainly, the growing number of SD places offered, 917 for 2013/14 (DfE, 2013a), bear testament to schools’ enthusiasm to participate.
The HE ITE community is also enmeshed in the biopower net. Employing one of Foucault’s central assertions, that resistance is to be found alongside power, the response of unions (Blower, 2012; NASUWT, 2012), professional associations (SCETT, 2011) and academics could be categorised as such. A passionate response from this community indicates a commitment to sustaining biopower over the teaching profession, albeit with a contrasting rationale of maintaining autonomy and upholding professional values. The fact that a rigorous defence of ITE in HEIs has been mounted offers evidence in alignment with Foucault’s analysis that power is everywhere.
Conclusion
Foucault (1974) actively supported the critique of all practices, especially those embedded in institutions, and suggested his ‘theoretical toolbox’ could be used to analyse systems of power. His comment that ‘the work of deep transformation can only be carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism’ (Foucault, 1988: 154) reinforces the importance he assigned critical analysis. Such work is important as it can reveal and undermine ‘what is most invisible and insidious in prevailing practices’ (Ball, 1995: 267). It can ‘call current ideology into question, and initiate action, in the cause of social justice’ (Crotty, 2003: 157). For hugely significant issues of national importance, such as ITE and standards in primary education, this is undoubtedly a necessary and valuable process.