The Meaning of Infant Teachers' Work (Teaching As Work Project)

THE MEANING OF INFANT TEACHERS’ WORK

Teachers of the youngest children at school were the first to bear the brunt of the policies to change the curriculum after the Education Act 1988. What did the changes mean to them? How did they perceive their impact upon their work, on standards in the curriculum, on assessment and testing, and on their relationships with pupils and colleagues? How did they cope with stress, long working hours, intrusions into their home lives, and with change imposed from outside? The authors capture in detail the views of thirty infant teachers and compare their subjective perceptions, dominated by a sense of massive change, with the objective record of both continuities and changes in their work. This book is part of the Teaching As Work Project, which has systematically recorded and analysed nearly 7,000 working days from over 700 teachers in 91 Local Education Authorities. All four of the authors teach at the University of Warwick.

THE TEACHING AS WORK PROJECT Edited by R.J.Campbell and S.R.St.J.Neill, both of the University of Warwick The last decade has seen the introduction of new educational policies affecting the working conditions of teachers, the management of schools, the curriculum and its assessment, and relationships between teachers and their employees. What changes, if any, have these new policies brought into the work of teachers? At Warwick University, the Teaching As Work Project, directed by Professor Jim Campbell and Dr Sean Neill, has recorded and analysed nearly 7,000 working days from over 700 teachers over the period 1990 to 1992 in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. The research provides a detailed picture of how the teachers spend their time on work, both on and off the school premises, which the authors then analyse by reference to national policy, to issues of school management and to concepts of teacher professionalism. The results of the Teaching As Work Project are published in three volumes: PRIMARY TEACHERS AT WORK R.J.Campbell and S.R.St.J.Neill SECONDARY TEACHERS AT WORK R.J.Campbell and S.R.St.J.Neill THE MEANING OF INFANT TEACHERS’ WORK L.Evans, A.Packwood, S.R.St.J.Neill and R.J.Campbell

THE MEANING OF INFANT TEACHERS’ WORK L.Evans , A.Packwood , S.R.St.J.Neill and R.J.Campbell

London and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 L.Evans, A.Packwood, S.R.St.J.Neill and R.J.Campbell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Meaning of infant teachers’ work/L.Evans…[et al.]. p. cm. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Early childhood teachers-Great Britain. 2. Early childhood teachers-Great Britain-Social conditions. I.Evans, L. LB1775.6.M43 1994 372.21-dc20 93–46104 CIP ISBN 0-203-97824-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-08858-5 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-08859-3 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Part I

List of illustrations

vii

Foreword

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH 1

Part II

TIME SPENT ON WORK: THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

3 11

The picture from the interviews 2

PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

35

3

ADMINISTERING NATIONAL TESTS

59

4

PERCEPTIONS OF THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

79

5

CURRICULUM PLANNING AND CLASSROOM PRACTICE

97

6

THE USE OF TEACHERS’ TIME

123

7

STRESS

151

Part III

Changing teachers’ work? 8

TEACHERS’ MORALE AND JOB SATISFACTION

173

9

DILEMMAS OF PROFESSIONALITY

193

vi

10

APPENDIX I: APPENDIX II: APPENDIX III:

THE KEY STAGE 1 CURRICULUM: CONTINUITIES AND CHANGE

207

TABLES CONTAINING DETAILS OF PARTICIPATING TEACHERS

223

THE SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

231

CODING SYSTEM

235

Bibliography

239

Author index

251

Subject index

255

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1.1 Comparison of Year 2 and other teachers, 1991 1.2 Comparison of total hours, 1990 and 1991

26 28

TABLES 1 2 1.1 1.2 1.3

Probability levels for combinations of teachers’ views Professional details of interviewees Time spent on work at Key Stage 1 Mean time spent teaching Percentages of time allocated to core subjects, other subjects and teacher assessment 1.4 Time spent on preparation 1.5 Time spent on administration 1.6 Time spent on professional development 1.7 Time spent on other activities 1.8 Mean time on work by teachers with and without Year 2 children in class 1.9 Mean time on professional development by teachers with and without Year 2 children in class 1.10 Mean time on aspects of preparation by teachers with or without Year 2 children in class 1.11 Mean time on aspects of teaching with or without Year 2 children in class 1.12 Means for 50 teachers in 1990 and 1991 1.13 Mean time on work in 1990 and 1991 1.14 Numbers of teachers changing overall time on work on school premises in 1990 and 1991 1.15 Numbers of teachers changing the amount of time on marking/recording between 1990 and 1991

8 8 11 13 14 15 16 19 20 21 23 23 25 29 29 29 30

viii

10.1 Proportions of time on basic subjects and other subjects in a range of research studies 10.2 Notional percentages and hours of curriculum time

209 213

FOREWORD

This is the report of a study of the perceptions of Key Stage 1 infant teachers about the first two years of the introduction of the national curriculum in England and Wales. It is based on interviews with them, conducted in the spring term 1991, and explores how they saw their work being affected by the changes that followed from the Education Reform Act 1988. It was a two-year period of great turbulence, with changes to the curriculum and assessment, to the management of schools and the school system, and to educational policy, being brought in at a previously unknown pace—and simultaneously. It is now acknowledged that the statutory curriculum and the assessment and testing arrangements were flawed and unworkable, taken as a whole. At the time, however, the changes were presented as necessary to raise standards to establish greater accountability, and were perceived, accurately, as legally enforceable. In 1992, Sir Malcolm Thornton MP, the Conservative Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Education Science and the Arts, in commenting on one of the changes (Local Management of Schools) brought in by the Education Reform Act 1988, said, ‘I have no doubt that the basic principle…is right…so what has gone wrong? Quite simply, the effects of delegation…were not thought through’ (Thornton 1992, p. 171). Our evidence is that exactly the same should be concluded about the attempted ‘reform’ of the curriculum and its assessment at Key Stage 1. Its effects on teachers were simply not thought through; infant teachers were conscientiously committed to making the changes work even though they were unworkable. The consequences, as we show, were immense stress, long working hours, reductions in morale and job satisfaction, poor support, but relatively little structured change in the curriculum delivered in the schools. If nothing else emerges from this book, we hope that the lesson about how

x FOREWORD

not to implement change has been taken to heart by those responsible for introducing it nationally. The book is in three parts. Part I provides an introduction and a summary of quantitative data about the time spent on work, and the activities upon which it was spent, by the teachers. Part II provides most of the interview data, grouped around five topics. Part III reflects upon the extent of changes in morale, in professionality and in curriculum and assessment practice. We do not offer this third part as a contribution to grand theorising about change. It is linked with some theorising, but we have deliberately disciplined the discussion by the limits of our evidence. Finally, we have eschewed the common practice of commencing the book with an overview of all the relevant research and theorising, preferring instead to connect our evidence with other research throughout the text. In this way we have attempted to link the interview material directly to research findings.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We should like to acknowledge the interest and support of colleagues at Warwick University who have been constructively critical of the approach we have taken in this research. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to three colleagues outside Warwick: Sheila Dainton, Assistant Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, who has been a constant critical friend to us; Professor Jennifer Nias, whose book, Primary Teachers Talking, has been a source of intellectual challenge to us and who has discussed our work with us as it progressed; and Colin Richards, HMI, Assistant Director of Inspections at Ofsted, who has offered a critical and conceptual clarity in commenting on the research, which has taken it further than it would otherwise have gone. Sheila Lucas has patiently processed and reprocessed our words, and we are extremely grateful for her skill and accuracy. The anonymous teachers gave generously of their time and ideas, and we record our gratitude to them also. Finally, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, previously the Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association, provided both funds for the study and the guarantee that we would retain academic autonomy. Despite all this above help, advice and criticism, we remain responsible for what we have written. Linda Evans Angie Packwood Sean Neill Jim Campbell University of Warwick

xii

Part 1 INTRODUCTION

2

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

In 1987 the then Department of Education and Science published a consultative document (DES 1987c) in which the intention to establish a national curriculum in England and Wales was opened up for discussion by, amongst others, the teaching profession. In autumn 1989 the first statutory orders in mathematics and science applied at Key Stage 1 and, according to DES Circular 5/89 (DES 1989a), ‘reasonable time’ was expected to be given to all the nine foundation subjects of the national curriculum and Religious Education. In spring term 1990 Key Stage 1 teachers were involved in Teacher Assessment (TA), attempting to assess pupil performance during teaching time. In the school year 1990–91, the second year of the phasing in of the national curriculum, English, mathematics and science were in statutory orders, and in the summer term of 1991 the teachers were involved in the administration of the national tests, called Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs). In the spring term 1991 they had been required to use Teacher Assessment to establish the levels of performance of their pupils in the core subjects before the administration of the SATs. Teachers at Key Stage 1 became the first teachers to experience the process of implementing the National Curriculum, and this experience might, in principle, help us learn lessons about how to bring about nationwide change in the school curriculum. Equally it might help us understand the obstacles to such change. In 1990 we established a number of research studies at Warwick University, primarily examining the relationship of the changes set in train by the Education Reform Act 1988 to teachers’ work. Most of the findings from these studies are reported in the other two books in this series (Primary Teachers at Work and Secondary Teachers at Work) and are based on quantitative evidence about the use of teachers’ time. Within these studies we had a four-year longitudinal research project of

4 BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

Key Stage 1 teachers, drawn from the membership of a teachers’ association, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (formerly the Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association). This book reports and analyses interviews with some of the teachers, conducted in the spring term 1991. Our intention was to find out what perceptions the teachers had of the implementation process in which they were engaged. We were gathering the quantitative data by questionnaire and records of teachers’ working time over a four-year period, but wanted to flesh-out the skeletons of this evidence with more subjective evidence about its meaning to the teachers. Our main motivation here was intellectual curiosity; we had the more objective evidence but wanted to know what it meant subjectively. A secondary motivation arose from the recognition in much of the research literature (see Blenkin et al. 1992) and most obviously the work of Fullan (1992) that how teachers perceive educational change affects its implementation. At an early stage we were aware that, as far as could be judged, the teachers at Key Stage 1 nationally were encountering difficulties in implementing the statutory curriculum and assessment arrangements. The first semi-official claim that there were problems was made in the report of a survey (DES 1989b) by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate at the end of 1989, called The Implementation of the National Curriculum in Primary Schools. The survey, based on approximately 1,000 classes of 5- to 7-year-olds, was designed ‘to monitor the progress of primary schools in preparing for, and implementing, the national curriculum requirements for Key Stage 1’. Although they found schools were working hard to prepare for implementing the curriculum, the Inspectors reported (paras 10 and 36) that: a pressing problem for almost all of the schools was the lack of time for teachers to plan and prepare work, and in the case of subject co-ordinators, to assist their colleagues during the school day…Some schools were pressing ahead with improving recording procedures but, again, lack of time for undertaking work on assessment and recording was a major obstacle. A later survey by HMI (DES 1990a) was published in Spring 1990, also called The Implementation of the National Curriculum in Primary Schools. It was based on 400 lessons in 100 of the 500 schools in the previous survey. This covered work in the autumn term 1989, that is, as the core subjects of the national curriculum were being implemented in

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH 5

Key Stage 1. In this survey it was reported that time allocation to the curriculum was causing difficulties, with half the schools ‘devoting a reasonable amount of time to core and foundation subjects in Key Stage 1’, while in ‘a minority of schools far too great an emphasis on the core subjects was leading to a neglect of other areas of work’ (para. 8). Likewise, time within school was proving a difficulty since ‘coordinators fulfilled their delegated responsibilities adequately but their roles seldom included influencing the work at the planning stage, and very few were given non-contact time to work alongside their colleagues’ (para. 39). In general teachers were working hard to deliver the national curriculum but ‘anxieties about assessment and recording and about time to fulfil requirements and responsibilities were still high’ (para. 53). Even the teachers who were the most effective at class management were ‘finding it difficult to create enough time’ for observation, assessment and intervention (para. 5a). Thus the initial picture was of teachers attempting to implement the changes—there was almost a complete absence of opposition to, or overt subversion of, the curriculum at Key Stage 1—but finding difficulties arising for the most part from their working conditions. An overview of the second year of the introduction of the national curriculum, 1990-91, also carried out by HMI (DFE 1992a), reported improvement in the quality of work in science as the only clear area where there was a rise in standards, with teachers feeling ‘rather more confident’ about assessment and developing more collaborative planning. The problem of curriculum time allocation persisted, with a concentration on the core subjects of English, mathematics and science at the expense of other foundation subjects. HMI also signalled some significant problems as seen by the teachers: assessment, recording and reporting results ‘remained matters of concern to many teachers’ (para. 46); the statutory orders were seen ‘not without reason’ as ‘ambiguous or obscure’ (para. 47) for assessment purposes; record-keeping was a source of anxiety with many teachers still ‘uncertain of what was needed to be recorded and in what form’ (para. 49). Non-contact time for in-school curriculum development was identified as a major problem for curriculum co-ordinators. Against this general background we interviewed twenty-four Key Stage 1 teachers from across England and Wales; all were from the longitudinal study mentioned above. In spring 1990 ninety-five teachers had participated in the research by providing questionnaires and diary records of the time spent on work, including the activities upon which

6 BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

time was spent. In spring 1991 fifty-three teachers participated, fifty of whose records we were able to identify and match with their previous year’s records. Chapter 1 provides a summary of the findings from these questionnaires and diary records, and Appendix I provides details of the questionnaire data. Of these fifty we interviewed twenty-four and, with their agreement, conducted the interviews either at their home or in an hotel. None was interviewed in a school setting in order to provide as much assurance to them as possible that the interviews would be confidential. As a matter of fact, since we were able to approach the teachers directly, there was no reason why heads or other colleagues needed to know that the teachers were participating in the study. This arrangement also meant that we were not dependent on heads or other colleagues for the location of the interview or for the control of other contextual factors. The interviews were conducted according to a semistructured schedule (Appendix II) and were tape recorded with the consent of the teacher. Extracts used in this book are verbatim transcripts, except where, very rarely, the transcript needs an addition to clarify meaning. Where this has been done it is indicated by placing the addition in square brackets. We were able to show that the twenty-four teachers were not, statistically, significantly different in terms of the amount of time they spent on work, or in respect of school and professional factors such as size of class, length of experience, etc., from the fifty-three participants in the quantitative study, and that the fifty-three were, likewise, representative of the ninety-five participants in the 1990 study (see p. 29, Chapter 1 and Appendix I for details). For the 1990 participants a split-half analysis of the questionnaire data, using every alternate subject, showed high levels of agreement. The time data for the first fifty-one returns were analysed separately and showed very close agreement with the total sample. Differences might have been expected because these teachers were recording slightly earlier in the data collection period. Thus we had some reason for being confident that the teachers involved in the 1990 and 1991 studies comprised an internally consistent group, representative of a much larger population of infant teachers. HOW SIGNIFICANT ARE OUR INTERVIEWEES’ VIEWS? One problem in a small-scale interview study such as this is to know whether the eloquent quotes provided by our interviewees actually

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH 7

represent a view widely held in the profession. We can get some impression of this by looking at how many teachers actually held the view and, for this purpose, we have shown the proportion of teachers holding a particular view, opposing it, or having expressed no opinion about it in the interview. Thus (20:3:1) means that twenty held the particular view, three disagreed, and one did not say anything about it. First, there is a clear difference between, for example (16:8:0), where all interviewees held a definite view, with a third of them disagreeing with the majority, and (16:0:8), where a third held no definite view. In the latter case we may suspect that those who supported the view might be less committed than in the former, where teachers may be in a genuine dilemma, and we could look to see whether the quotations support this suspicion. We can also make a statistical judgement as to whether the majority holding a view is significant. The simple approach is to compare the majority with the other two groups combined, using the binomial test (Siegel 1956). With twenty-four teachers, if the majority group is twenty-one or more (the other two groups totalling three or less), the two-tailed probability is p<.001. This means that there is less than one chance in a thousand that the population of infant teachers as a whole holds no view on the matter, or holds the opposing view. Correspondingly, if the majority group is nineteen or twenty, the probability is one chance in a hundred (p<.01), and if it is eighteen the possibility is one chance in twenty (p<.05) (the lowest level of statistical significance normally accepted). In any of these cases we can talk of ‘most’ teachers holding a particular majority view in confidence that this is true of infant teachers as a whole. Frequently a small proportion of teachers held no particular view. Strictly we should use a three-sample test such as chisquare, but as an approximation we may disregard the ‘don’t knows’ and use the binomial test to compare the ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ groups. Table 1 below gives significances at the three levels mentioned above, for combinations of ‘don’t knows’ up to four. The sizes of the majority group are the minima; thus, with one ‘don’t know’ a majority of twenty or above is significant at p<.001: The professional details of the twenty-four teachers are given below in Table 2, with pseudonyms. They are provided so that readers may contextualise transcript excerpts and can see the range of teachers used in presenting excerpts throughout the book. It will be seen that we do not rely exclusively or mainly on a few teachers’ views.

8 BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

Table 1 Probability levels for combinations of teachers’ views

* Proportions of 16:6:2 and 17:7:0 only narrowly miss statistical significance at p<.05. At this sample size, where a single teacher changing her view might make the difference between significance at p<.01 and no statistical significance, it is important not to read too much into the precise figures. Table 2 Professional details of interviewees

Finally, our teachers were interviewed in Spring term 1991, before the administration of the national curriculum tests, called SATs. We wished to supplement our evidence by including interviews with teachers who had undertaken the administration of national tests, and

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH 9

we used an opportunity sample of six teachers for this purpose. We are not able to say how representative their views are except by contextualising them in other research. Their interview evidence is restricted to Chapter 3 and, for this reason, the views there should be treated with less confidence about representativeness than the others. TEACHERS’ WORK AND EDUCATIONAL CHANGE We were particularly interested in whether the teachers’ perceptions reflected the view that their work was being affected by the changes being introduced by the Education Reform Act. There is little doubt that the teachers perceived change to be occurring. Nearly all of them, for example, thought that they were having to work longer hours than had previously been the case, and this perception was supported by the quantitative data in Chapter 1. In Part III, however, we examine three aspects of their work: morale/job satisfaction, professionality, and curricular breadth and assessment. In the first of these we detect substantial change; in the second we detect resistance to the extended professionality assumed for the implementation of the national curriculum; in the third we detect no objective change, but strongly-held perceptions of change, in respect of the broad and balanced curriculum, alongside substantial change in respect of science and assessment practice. It is argued by theorists of educational change, such as Blenkin et al. (1992), that in the postmodern, post-Fordist world, change is the characteristic of all our lives, both in practical experience and in the world of theory and ideas. Permanent change is a prime concept for understanding our world. We are all with Heraclitus now; chaos theory rules. Our work, focused on two years of imposed changes on infant teachers, does not pretend to contribute to grand theory. We have been gathering a limited amount of evidence and attempting to make sense of it by understanding how the change process was being read by those involved in its early stages. The fact that it was in its early stages imposes its own limitations upon theorising. The general picture, however, is that the most substantial changes—in reduced morale and job satisfaction, in long working hours and stress—were perceived in those areas not intended to be affected by central government policy. Yet those changes which were the objectives of Government policy— the broadening of the curriculum, extending concepts of professionality, and improving assessment—were either being resisted, were limited in

10 BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

impact, or were not changing objectively, even though perceived to be by the teachers. It is a picture of emergent policy failure at high personal and professional cost.

1 TIME SPENT ON WORK The quantitative frame

The intention in this chapter is to provide a summary, with brief comments, of a quantitative kind, about the time spent on work by the teachers whose interviews comprise the main evidence in this book. It is a summary only, relating to two years and a relatively small group of teachers. The picture of infant teachers’ work under change, however, is very similar to that provided in the first book in this series (Primary Teachers at Work), which is based on more teachers, both infant and junior, across a wider-time frame. The relatively objective data in this chapter connect directly in many places with, and thus help to frame, the more subjective interview material. The teachers’ records of the time spent on work in Spring 1991 are summarised in Table 1.1 below, with the 1990 figures for comparison. Table 1.1 Time spent on work at Key Stage 1 (hours per week)

Notes: i. Percentages are the hours on a particular category of work (e.g. teaching) expressed as a percentage of total time on work. ii. The total time on work is less than the sum of the categories since activities in different categories were sometimes carried out simultaneously.

12 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

The data in Table 1.1 show that in 1991 the teachers were working for 54.6 hours per week in the term time, an increase of some 5 hours over the same period in the previous year. These total hours compare with those from Hilsum and Cane’s (1971) study of junior teachers in Surrey, collected in 1969, which showed the typical teacher working 43 hours a week. Thus, our evidence suggests a significant increase over the twenty-year period, an interpretation supported by the fact that three other surveys conducted in 1991 each using different methodologies and time sampling (Coopers and Lybrand Deloitte; 1991, Lowe 1991; NAS/UWT 1991) all reported figures for total working hours of between 51 and 55 hours a week. Thus, we can think of our teachers as working the equivalent of an 11hour weekday, if we assume, wrongly of course, that they did no work during the weekends. TIME ON DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF WORK Table 1.1 shows the amount of time recorded for teaching, preparation, administration, professional development and other activities. The detailed meanings of each of these categories are given in the coding system that we devised for the teachers to use. (See Appendix III.) The first thing to note is the overall patterning of the different categories of work. The teachers were spending only one-third of their time actually teaching pupils, with almost as much time spent on preparation (including planning, marking, recording results and organising resources). A relatively large amount of time was spent on professional development (including meetings of all kinds) and over a quarter of time was spent on administration (see Appendix III for the activities included under this category heading). The time spent on each category will now be examined in detail, with the data broken down into sub-categories for each main category. Teaching Table 1.1 showed that, on average, the teachers spent 18 hours per week on teaching. Table 1.2 provides the data broken down into the time allocated to different subjects, and assessment whilst teaching (Teacher Assessment). It can be seen from Table 1.2 that the teachers spent 18 hours on Teaching in a week. This figure excludes some aspects of the teachers’

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 13

Table 1.2 Mean time (hours per week) spent teaching

Note: The total teaching time is less than the sum of the categories since activities in different categories were sometimes carried out simultaneously.

work, such as registration, supervision and assembly, when they are in contact with pupils but not teaching them. These aspects were recorded under administration. We have already pointed out that teaching in this sense amounted to only 33 per cent of the teachers’ overall time on work. Teaching time was dominated by the three core subjects of English, mathematics and science, and especially the two ‘basic’ subjects of English and mathematics. There were no significant changes in the times spent teaching since 1990. A second point here is that the total of 18 hours was considerably less than the sum of the individual subjects (=40 hours). This indicates the integrated nature of the teaching at Key Stage 1, with much of the teaching involving at least two subjects simultaneously. Third, the time available for the six other foundation subjects and Religious Education, at 8.8 hours maximum, looks inadequate for the delivery of the ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum of the Education Reform Act 1988. It is equivalent to about 15 minutes a day (an hour and a quarter a week) for each subject. Because of the way the teaching time was recorded, the figures for each subject reflect the maximum times. They show the amount of time in the week when some teaching of the subject was occurring. But obviously, given the sum of the individual subjects at 40 hours, for much of the time, two or more subjects were being taught simultaneously. In fact, given that teachers taught for 18 hours, but recorded times for individual subjects amount to 40 hours, they were teaching 2.2 subjects on average per hour of teaching. Another way of representing the practice of integrated teaching is to say that they were teaching a ‘220 per cent curriculum’. Although our recording method was designed intentionally to capture this approach to teaching, which characterises infant practice and therefore reflects classroom reality, it creates difficulties in arriving at a typical proportion of time allocated to

14 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

each curriculum subject, given the 18-hour teaching week. Our assumption is that when two or more subjects were taught simultaneously, they were equally distributed amongst the pupils. We therefore expressed the actual times recorded as percentages of the sum of individual subjects, and these are given in Table 1.3. Table 1.3 Percentages of time allocated to core subjects, other subjects and teacher assessment

These percentages represent more closely than the maximum times in Table 1.2, the curriculum experienced by pupils on average. The figures in Table 1.3 show just over 50 per cent of the time being devoted to ‘the basics’ of English and mathematics, and a further 15 per cent to the other core subject, science. Almost all of the Teacher Assessment time was allocated to the core subjects, understandably given that in spring term 1991 the teachers were required to complete Teacher Assessment in the core subjects, prior to the administration of the national curriculum tests (Standard Assessment Tasks, SATs) in summer term. Three points arise from Table 1.3. The concentration of time on the basics in 1991 is in line with a long series of studies (Bassey 1977; Bennett et al. 1980; Galton et al. 1980a; DES 1987a; Tizard et al. 1988, Alexander 1992) showing that in English primary schools, at least 50 per cent of the curriculum time is typically devoted to these two subjects. Second, the amount of time on science was higher than the previous studies reported, suggesting that the requirement to teach and assess science through the national curriculum had contributed to a substantial change in the infant school curriculum. In 1991 the teachers were expected to devote ‘reasonable time’ (DES 1989a) to the core and the six other foundation subjects (history, geography, technology, art, PE, music) and Religious Education. This was in order to meet the objectives of the ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum required by the Education Reform Act 1988. The 22 per cent of time allocated to cover worthwhile learning in these seven subjects is equivalent to at most 4.6 hours a week, or about 40 minutes per subject. Although it is possible to teach one lesson each of RE and music in 40 minutes a week

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 15

to infants, it is difficult to imagine doing justice to subjects such as art, PE, technology, history and geography, which are practical, timeconsuming activities at this stage. It is also the case that 40 minutes a week is substantially less for each of the seven subjects than the guidance given to the national curriculum working groups, about the time they should assume to be available for their particular subject. (See Chapter 10, Table 10.2 for details.) Table 1.3 therefore represents the most direct and substantial problem facing the teachers; the fact that the whole curriculum they were statutorily required to implement could not be made to fit into the time available. Preparation Preparation in our coding system included three elements; lesson planning, marking and recording results, and organising resources/ visits. The figures for preparation overall, and its subcategories are given in Table 1.4. Table 1.4 shows the mean overall time on preparation. This enables us to see that these very experienced teachers were spending nearly as much time on preparing (i.e. planning lessons, marking/recording and organising classrooms and materials) as Table 1.4 Time spent on preparation (hours per week)

Note: The total preparation time is less than the sum of the categories since activities in different categories were sometimes carried out simultaneously.

on teaching. We can express this as a teaching:preparation ratio of 1:0. 9, which shows that for every hour of teaching, 54 minutes of preparation were carried out. Preparation accounted for some 29 per cent of the teachers’ working week. The amount of time spent marking/recording, 6.5 hours per week, almost certainly reflects the increased pressure arising from the statutory requirement for assessment and recording of the pupils’ performance in the core subjects. It was this aspect of work that showed the most significant increase from 1990. Whereas lesson planning and organising resources took identical amounts of time in 1990 and 1991,

16 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

Table 1.5 Time spent on administration (hours per week)

Note: The total administration time is less than the sum of the categories since activities in different categories were sometimes carried out simultaneously.

marking and recording results showed a 24 per cent increase in 1991, viz. 1.25 hours a week. The hours spent on preparation, almost as long as those spent teaching, reflect the demands of the curriculum reform process. The teachers were nearly all very experienced (ten years or more) infant teachers, so that the preparation time cannot be put down to teacher inexperience. On the contrary, the figures in Table 1.4 represent the second substantial problem facing the teachers; both the curriculum content and the assessment arrangements were new, and were being simultaneously introduced. Multiple innovation meant that the teachers were having to plan what for many of them were new subjects, in new forms, and to develop new approaches to assessment; while they were working on these in relation to the core subjects and technology, further orders in other subjects, notably history and geography, were being brought in. Because they were the first teachers to implement the reforms for a whole Key Stage leading to end-of-Key-Stage assessment and testing, there was little in the way of experienced advice to support them, and no agreement about the form and extent of marking and recording necessary. At the same time, and despite the untried novelty of the assessment and testing arrangements, teachers knew that the intention was to use the results of testing at 7-plus to publish ‘league tables’ of schools, at very least in respect of local authorities and possibly on a school-by-school basis. They were working in a political climate where, as Troman (1989) argued, the assessment arrangements were being used to shift teachers from a professional conception of accountability to a ‘market accountability’.

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 17

Administration Administration in our terms included a range of activities that contributed to the smooth running of the schools, but were not directly concerned with teaching pupils. As can be seen from the coding system, it did not mean school administration of the kind carried out by headteachers (Appendix III) The figures for all administration, broken down by sub-category are given in Table 1.5. The total time on administration showed no significant increase since 1990, and this finding was to be expected since most of the activities subsumed under the heading tend to be controlled by the organisation of the school day and are not influenced by individual teachers’ choice. For the same reason, the figures for most of the individual subcategories did not show significant change since 1990. However, three aspects of administration showed reductions from 1990. These were time on display, on supervision and on registration/transition. These findings are explored further in our interview data, where teachers reported not having enough time for display and for chatting to pupils, as would happen during supervision, registration/transition. Thirty of the teachers were spending more time in meetings with parents (Wilcoxon p<.05), perhaps reflecting the increased market accountability referred to above. It is worth noting that the teachers spent the equivalent of 60 minutes per week day on breaks and lunch times and, of this time, some 38 minutes per day were free of work. This was supported by our interview evidence and suggests that teachers were too busy to have morning and lunchtime breaks of a ‘reasonable’ length, assumed in the Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act and in the DES (1989a) Circular on the Length and Control of the School Day. However, the time spent on breaks had not changed since 1990. The combined figure for supervision, registration/transition and assembly was 61 minutes per week day, 5.08 hours per week. The comparable figures for 1990 were considerably higher, 6.4 hours per week, and the reduction is in line with evidence in the interviews where teachers reported ‘snatching’ time from assemblies and spending less time talking informally to pupils, as would happen in supervision and transition. This figure is a substantial time in the teachers’ contact with pupils, although it is not teaching in its strict sense. One point about the figures for supervision and registration/ transition affects the time available for teaching the curriculum. Supervision and registration/transition amounted to 4.1 hours per week. Of this time, registration would typically take up about an hour a week, leaving some

18 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

3 hours in the week for transition (e.g. moving pupils from the class to the hall or from school to swimming pool), and for supervising them while they change, tidy up, put away equipment, etc. Transition time of this kind was normally fairly small units of time, often 3 minutes or so, but, even if all supervision time is ignored, it took up 1.7 hours a week minimum. This kind of activity occurred in the time allocated for teaching, and was therefore not available, or not used, for teaching the formal content of the curriculum. For this reason, we have called it ‘evaporated time’ following a local authority training document (ILEA 1988), and it exacerbated the time problem identified earlier (pp. 4–5) since it meant that there was even less time available at school level for teaching than the committees planning the curriculum reforms had been given to understand. This remained true despite the apparent reduction in time spent in 1991 on registration/transition and supervision. The pressure on teachers is also reflected in the use of break times. The total time recorded for all breaks, i.e. including morning breaks and lunch times and, where they occurred, afternoon breaks, was less than might be expected, because some teachers entered other codes (for example, planning lessons or attending meetings) if they spent time in breaks on such activities. It follows from this that the category recorded for ‘working during official breaks’ (2 hours a week) is the minimum, and that recorded for ‘breaks free of work’ (3.3 hours) the maximum, in practice. Professional development The category of professional development included five sub-categories, In-service training, travel to Inset, non-pupil days (‘Baker’ days), formal and informal meetings, and reading of national curriculum documents, professional journals, etc. Table 1.6 provides data on the time spent on all professional development, broken down by subcategories. The time spent on professional development as a whole had not altered since 1990. Perhaps the most striking figure is that for meetings. This sub-category included both formal staff meetings and other less formal meetings with colleagues, and is obviously substantially greater than the conventional weekly staff meeting which tends to last for an hour at most. Table 1.6 reflects the time spent by the teachers largely on

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 19

Table 1.6 Time spent on professional development (hours per week)

Note: The total professional development time is less than the sum of the categories since activities in different categories were sometimes carried out simultaneously.

‘extended professionalism’ (Hoyle 1975). The amount of time overall is equivalent to the half the time that the teachers spent teaching. Another way of looking at this time is to take the time spent on the sub-categories of in-service training, non-pupil days and meetings, as a measure of the extent of ‘collegiality’ (Campbell 1985), though Hargreaves’s (1990) reservations about ‘contrived collegiality’ (that collegiality may be forced on teachers to serve managerial purposes) need to be borne in mind. Nonetheless, Table 1.6 suggests that something over 5.5 hours a week were spent working with colleagues on professional activities, i.e. working with adults outside, rather than with children inside, the classroom. The ambivalence of the teachers towards their experience of the time spent in this way is explored in the following chapters, especially Chapters 6, 9 and 10. Time spent on professional reading might be thought of as more properly part of preparation, since it included reading of national curriculum documents, professional journals and magazines, all of which may help in planning; and the first of which were needed for reference when national curriculum assessment and recording were undertaken. If time spent in this way were considered as preparation time, the teachers spent 18.7 hours a week on preparation, more than the time spent teaching. Likewise, the total time on professional development would be reduced to 6.1 hours per week. Other activities Other activities was a category which included time spent on three subcategories, attendance at governing bodies, taking extra-curricular

20 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

activities such as sports, orchestra, play or trips, and ‘miscellaneous’ a sub-category for activities which teachers could not allocate to any other code. Table 1.7 provides the data for other activities, broken down into the three sub-categories. Table 1.7 suggests that these teachers, despite the pressure on them to deliver and assess the national curriculum, had not abandoned commitment to extra-curricular activities, still spending about an hour a week on such activities. The high amount of time on the miscellaneous category may be explained in part by the wide range of activities that teachers’ work at this age involves; some teachers indicated what was involved for them. They included ‘taking pupil to hospital’, ‘supervising student teacher’, ‘moving classroom furniture’ and ‘writing Table 1.7 Time spent on other activities (hours per week)

school’s curriculum policy’. More senior teachers (holders of Incentive Allowance ‘B’, and deputy heads) spent significantly more time than other teachers on Miscellaneous, so that activities involving school administration were probably included also. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WORKLOADS OF TEACHERS OF PUPILS IN YEAR 2 AND OTHERS Table 1.1 shows the general picture of time spent on work. However, within the sample, a significant difference emerged according to the age of pupils taught. Our sample of fifty-three teachers comprised twentysix with Year 2 children and twenty-seven without Year 2 children. Year 2 children were those whom teachers in spring term 1991 were required to assess, using their own assessment (Teacher Assessment) of the children whilst teaching them, and to record assessment in a summary form before they were ‘tested’ using SATs in the summer term 1991. This item was not included on the questionnaire in the 1990 study so that direct comparison across the two years was not possible. However, we had predicted that teachers with Year 2 children would have to work longer hours than other Key Stage 1 teachers because of

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 21

the statutory requirements on assessment and the widely reported pressure on them to develop assessment and recording techniques. Table 1.8 Table 1.8 Mean time on work (hours per week) by teachers with and without Year 2 children in class

* Analysis of Variance

shows the overall time on work, and by Year 2 and non-Year 2 teachers separately. When we examined the range we found that it was wide, but Year 2 teachers spent substantially more time, and had higher minimum and maximum times than others. The data in Table 1.8 focus on the main differences between the two groups for work overall, and on preparation and professional development combined. The figures in Table 1.8 show that Year 2 teachers spent more time on work overall, on preparation/professional development during the week, and especially preparation/professional development off school premises. The statistical significance levels for these three are high. Apart from the special pressure that teachers of Year 2 children were under as a consequence of the end of Key Stage core subject teaching, assessment and recording, they had similar working conditions (class

22 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

size, non-contact time, etc.) to the other teachers. Table 1.8 shows that the non-Year 2 teachers were working overall slightly longer hours than the 1990 teachers as a whole (51.1 hours per week). But the increase since 1990 was carried mainly by the Year 2 teachers, who were working for 58.1 hours. Thus, the average extra workload for Year 2 teachers, compared to other teachers, was about 7 hours per week. The top 20 per cent of Year 2 teachers were working nearly 68 hours a week. The top 20 per cent of non-Year 2 teachers were working 59 hours a week. We think the great differences in working time were attributable to the particular demands of the core curriculum, assessment and recording on the Year 2 teachers. We have evidence from the detailed analysis that provides support for the above explanation. If Year 2 teachers were working longer hours than other Key Stage 1 teachers because of the pressure on them to deliver, assess and record the core subjects of the national curriculum, they would be spending more time than other teachers on planning and marking/recording and organising classrooms and learning materials (i.e. the subdivisions of preparation); on reading national curriculum documents and other documents and on assessment whilst teaching. Furthermore, Year 2 teachers would engage in more preparation overall during week days because of the intense pressure they were under and more marking/recording at home, because there was no time to do the extra recording at school. Tables 1.9 to 1.11 provide details about the evidence related to our predictions. Table 1.9 shows substantial differences in the amount of time spent on professional development by Year 2 teachers and others. The statistically significant differences are systematically in the same direction and those relating to the main sub-category are very high. Year 2 teachers spent significantly more time on all professional development activities combined, whether across the week as a whole or on week days only, or at weekends. This was particularly true of time on professional development away from school premises. They spent more time on in-service training, especially during the week days. As might be expected, reading national curriculum documents and other documents and journals also took more time for Year 2 teachers, presumably because they needed to consult such documents for planning and assessment more regularly and more intensively than other teachers. The explanation is supported by the interview evidence in later chapters, where teachers reported the need to resort constantly to the national curriculum orders and all the paperwork associated with assessment and recording.

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 23

Table 1.9 Mean time on professional development (hours per week) by teachers with and without Year 2 children in class

* Analysis of Variance

Table 1.10 provides detailed figures for both groups of teachers in respect of preparation. Table 1.10 shows Year 2 teachers spending significantly more time on preparation overall, especially at home. The most important finding here is the highly significant differences between Year 2 and other teachers in respect of the amount of time spent on marking/recording of

24 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

Table 1.10 Mean time (hours per week) on aspects of Preparation by teachers with or without Year 2 children in class

* Analysis of Variance

pupils’ work.Year 2 teachers spent much more time on this activity than others, whether considered overall, during the week or away from school. The explanation for this was that the Year 2 teachers were spending time on assessment and recording children’s work against the national curriculum statements of attainment. The finding that Year 2 teachers spent more time organising learning resources in school during the week makes sense also, since they would be expected to organise materials for national curriculum activities relating to teacher assessment more often than other teachers. The finding that Year 2 teachers did not spend significantly more time on lesson planning was in line with the evidence quoted earlier that time on lesson planning had not increased over the previous year whereas time on marking and recording had. It suggests that all teachers, not just Year 2 teachers, were planning lessons using the statutory orders, and that the planning of all teachers was affected by them equally.

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 25

It is worth noting the stark fact that Year 2 teachers were spending 8. 9 hours per week on marking/recording results, 5.4 hours of which were spent off school premises. This time was almost certainly spent on assessing/recording for the national curriculum. The comparable figures for non-Year 2 teachers were 4.2 hours and 1.6 hours respectively. This suggests that the extra burden upon Year 2 teachers of assessing/ recording the national curriculum alone (i.e. ignoring other aspects of preparation and in-service training) was just under 5 hours per week. Finally, Table 1.11 shows the time allocations to the curriculum by the two groups of teachers. Table 1.11 shows that the overall time spent teaching and the patterning of time on the curriculum by the two groups of teachers were not significantly different. The total time spent teaching was identical for the two groups and, apart from time spent on English and on assessing whilst teaching, the Table 1.11 Mean time (hours per week) on aspects of teaching with or without Year 2 children in class

Note: Figures in brackets are the percentage of time on the subject as a proportion of the sum of individual subject time. * Analysis of Variance

proportion of time spent on curriculum subjects was very similar. The higher figure for English for non-Year 2 teachers reflected the greater time given to language and reading activities in Reception and Year 1 classes. It interestingly suggests that even the imminent national curriculum testing did not make teachers devote unusually long time to

26 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

English, mathematics and science in Year 2. Even if Teacher Assessment time is added to the proportion of time spent on the core, the pattern of curriculum time between the two groups was very similar. The longer time on assessing whilst teaching in Year 2, though not quite reaching statistical significance, reflected the special demands on Year 2 teachers as they finalised assessment activities for the national curriculum by Teacher Assessment (TA). If the percentage of time spent by Year 2 teachers on Assessment is translated into hours (on the same basis as in Table 1.3), the figure of 2.7 hours is obtained. When this is added to the time spent on marking/recording, the Year 2 teachers were spending some 11.6 hours per week on assessment and recording activities. We can illustrate the significant differences in workloads between Year 2 and other teachers by means of Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Comparison of Year 2 and other teachers, 1991.

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 27

Figure 1.1 shows Year 2 teachers with the bigger workload, nearly 60 hours compared to just over 50 hours per week; more time on preparation and professional development combined, 27 hours compared to 19 per week; more time on marking and recording, nearly 9 hours compared to 4 hours per week; and more time on professional reading, 4 hours compared to just over 1.5 hours per week. ONE TO ONE COMPARISON: 1990–91 Strictly speaking we would argue that the most convincing indication of changed hours of work between 1990 and 1991 was not a comparison between the average hours of ninety-five teachers in the 1990 survey and those of fifty-three of them in the 1991 survey, given in Table 1.1. The most convincing indication would be a one-to-one comparison of the time spent in 1990 and 1991 respectively by the same fifty-three teachers, i.e. those for whom we had data for both years. But the fiftythree for whom we had data for both years might not have been representative of the ninety-five. For example, they might have become involved in the re-run exercise for reasons that would also affect their hours of work, such as high level of ‘conscientiousness’, or a strong commitment to demonstrating the long hours necessary to carry out teaching at Key Stage 1, or some other reason. To carry out such a comparison was difficult because the returns were anonymous and therefore matching the year-by-year data records was not straightforward. However, some key responses on the questionnaire, viz. the LEA, the age, sex, school size and type, when taken in combination, enabled us to match fifty of the fifty-three teachers. The patterning of their total time is shown in Figure 1.2. The shift between 1990 and 1991 was of two kinds. In 1991 the teachers on average spent more time (4.1 hours per week more) than in 1990 and, second, the 1991 distribution was bipolar. The explanation for this latter difference lies in the different workloads of Year 2 and other teachers, analysed earlier. An obvious possibility is that the teachers who participated in the study for a second year running were particularly motivated and conscientious. We checked this by comparing the total time they worked with the whole group of ninetyfive in 1990. We found their total work times were distributed evenly across the entire range of the 1990 group. A Mann-Whitney test showed no difference between them and the teachers who did not respond in 1991. We can therefore take the 1991 group as being wholly representative. It was now possible to make a one-to-one comparison.

28 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

This was done in two ways: analysis of means of total time on work and main categories so as to illustrate the extent of the year-on-year changes; and a count of the numbers of teachers whose overall time had increased or decreased or remained the same, irrespective of the extent of such changes.

Figure 1.2 Comparison of total hours, 1990 and 1991.

The means for total time on work for the fifty teachers for 1990 and 1991, together with the means for the main sub-categories, are given in Table 1.12. Table 1.12 shows an increase in overall time spent by the same teachers in 1991 over 1990, though somewhat smaller (4.1 hours per week) than the increase shown in Table 1.1 between the means of the ninety-five teachers in 1990 and the fifty-three in 1991. It provides very powerful evidence that overall the mean workloads of these teachers had increased significantly over the year in question.

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 29

Table 1.12 Means for 50 teachers in 1990 and 1991

Note: The total work is less than the sum of the categories since the activities in different categories were sometimes carried out simultaneously.

When we carried out an analysis of the numbers of teachers whose time on work had changed (increased, decreased or remained identical) the evidence became even clearer as Tables 1.13 to 1.15 show. The Wilcoxon test was used. Table 1.13 Mean time on work in 1990 and 1991

Thus, eight out of every ten of the teachers had increased time overall on work. This matches approximately the proportion of teachers (72 per cent) on the questionnaire who perceived their time as having increased since 1990. It is also possible to show the number of teachers whose time had changed on work in school between 1990 and 1991. These are given in Table 1.14. Table 1.14 Numbers of teachers changing overall time on work on school premises in 1990 and 1991

Thus, two in three teachers were working longer hours on the school premises than they were the previous year. This is an indication that teachers were working beyond their directed time on school premises

30 THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME

and is supported by the interview evidence where teachers said that directed time was no longer used as a serious framework. Marking and recording were the sub-categories which showed the most clear change, as Table 1.15 shows. Table 1.15 Numbers of teachers changing the amount of time on marking/ recording between 1990 and 1991

The differences are highly statistically significant and all in the same direction. Taken with the evidence in Table 1.12 they provide a basis for believing that the workloads of the teachers increased since spring 1990, by about 8 per cent at least. Another way of indicating the change is that eight out of ten teachers increased their time on work overall, and six out of ten teachers increased work time on school premises, and on marking/recording. Another statistic relates to the number of teachers who had increased/ decreased time on supervision and display since 1990. On displays, thirty out of fifty teachers had reduced time since 1990, though the difference did not quite reach statistical significance. On Supervision thirty-six had reduced time since 1990 and this was highly significant statistically (p<.001). In the interviews the teachers reported that they felt forced to cut down on time on displays and informal talking to pupils because of the pressure of work. It is worth drawing attention again to one aspect of all the findings reported in this part of the study. The time spent on work was time spent in spring term 1991, i.e. before the summer term 1991 in which the administration of national tests occurred. This suggests that, for Key Stage 1 teachers, not only was the summer term likely to be a period of intensive overload but so was the spring term. Two terms, not one, were affected by assessment and recording, with the implied stress on teachers’ working lives, as we show in Part II. This is especially the case since most of the Teacher Assessments summarised at the end of the spring term had to serve as substitutes for the SATs, following the decision that SATs would cover only nine of the thirty-three Attainment Targets. Under national curriculum assessment arrangements, therefore, workloads of teachers are not affected only by the end-of-Key Stage national testing requirements. As this study shows, long hours on work

THE QUANTITATIVE FRAME 31

were typical of the period in which Teacher Assessments were summarised before the time in which national tests were administered.

32

Part II THE PICTURE FROM THE INTERVIEWS

34

2 PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

The importance of teachers’ perceptions of educational innovation has long been recognised. From an early focus on adoption and then implementation, to what Fullan (1991) identifies as the ‘beyond implementation’ phase, research into educational innovation has supported the view that the fate of innovation is ultimately determined by the attitudes of its potential users which, in turn, reflect their perceptions. The notion that the individual teacher has a ‘make or break’ role in the innovation process (Kelly 1982) is widely accepted (see, for example, House 1974; Ben-Peretz 1980; Brown and McIntyre 1982) and has been integral to most analyses of what makes for successful implementation. Hughes and Keith’s (1980) investigation of the perceptions of an innovation of thirty Canadian elementary schoolteachers who were to be involved in its implementation corroborates the findings of earlier research (Rogers and Shoemaker 1971; Paul 1977). Teachers’ perceptions of the innovation’s relative advantage, compatibility, complexity and observability were significant influences on level of use or implementation. Fullan (1991) has identified four criteria which influence teachers’ perceptions and assessments of any given change: its potential for addressing a need; clarity in terms of what the change involves for teachers; its likely effect on teachers in terms of such things as time, energy, skill, sense of excitement, competence and interference with existing priorities; and likely rewards in terms of interaction with peers and others. This chapter explores similar issues by presenting our teachers’ interpretations and perceptions of the major curriculum reform which they were involved in implementing. Our findings support those of Hughes and Keith (1980) and of Fullan (1991) in terms of matching most of the criteria identified as being significant to teachers, but we have re-grouped their criteria in a way which reflects how our teachers

36 PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

reported perceiving the national curriculum. All of the chapters in this part of the book present teachers’ perceptions of some aspect of the national curriculum, but this one focuses on how the national curriculum in principle was perceived. It illustrates the extent to which our teachers, with the benefit of their experience of it, considered the national curriculum to be not merely a change but a change for the better over previous practice. In presenting our findings in this chapter we identify teachers’ constructs in relation to three attributes of the national curriculum: its basic principles and value assumptions; its content and form, and what it might lead to. THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM: PRINCIPLES AND VALUES There is little consensus on the educational value assumptions underlying the national curriculum. Government rhetoric has been reflected in the stated aims of the reform: to raise standards by requiring the delivery of a broad and balanced curriculum. Although the rhetoric is considered by some to accommodate the New Right’s commitment to excellence (see, for example, David 1991a), the entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum in nine subjects, prescribed in centrally imposed regulations, has been criticised, on the grounds of excessive state control, by both the Right (e.g. Letwin 1988) and the Left (e.g. Kelly 1990). Academic assessments generally incorporate rather more sinister, overtly political, interpretations. These tend to focus on the national curriculum as an intended antidote to what the New Right perceives as the poison within the education system: bad practice by inappropriate teachers resulting in insufficient attention to the basics and in lowered standards. Alexander (1992, p. 168) implies that the national curriculum represents a last ditch measure to put all to rights: If change cannot be achieved by consent then it must be mandated. The adversarial encounters then serve a different, softening-up purpose of marshalling and manipulating public opinion, isolating the professions in question, and creating a climate in which such measures seem to offer the only solution. The national curriculum is a particularly good example of this process at work.

PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM 37

Brehony (1990), too, suggests that the national curriculum was intended to overturn progressive pedagogic traditions, despite evidence that primary teachers had generally not followed Plowden in practice (see Alexander et al. 1992; Campbell 1993a). Brehony (1990) says of the New Right that: ‘in its various guises and metamorphoses it undoubtedly helped pave the way for a National Curriculum which is likely to push primary schools in a direction diametrically opposite to that of Plowden’. These differences in analysis may have arisen from the fact that the policy was set up to undermine the educational establishment, perceived to be leftish and soft-centred theoreticians (see Graham and Tytler 1992) and, in making this point, both existing practice and the views of those required to implement the change were ignored. Most of our teachers’ interpretations were less structured by political awareness. Only two made reference to hidden political agendas: I feel it’s a ‘con’, basically. I really think the Government are getting people to work their blooming guts out for absolutely no thanks whatsoever!…I look at it as a politically motivated exercise…what is it but social control? (Helen) Generally, the stated aims and rationale were accepted at face value, rather unproblematically, and teachers often included them in their evaluation. There was no indication that the majority of teachers had analysed the conflicting evidence of what the national curriculum might stand for, because they saw their roles as implementers, not policy analysts. They were, therefore, less concerned with the rationale for a national curriculum than with issues which affected how it was to be implemented. Indeed, when asked for their views on the national curriculum, teachers frequently gave responses which indicated that they found it difficult to divorce underlying principles from implementation processes: I think the national curriculum in a way is a good thing, but I think they’ve tried to push everything through too fast. (Patrick) In theory it’s a good idea…but it’s putting it into practice… (Christine)

38 PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

By and large, our findings corroborate those of Relf (1992, p. 31): Although some [teachers] questioned the political motives of introducing any form of centralised curriculum, by far the greatest censure has been directed towards the procedures by which successive models have been moulded and implemented—the management of the change process. Curricular coherence and entitlement The assessments which our teachers did make were concerned with what Fullan (1991) identifies as the first criterion influencing teachers’ perceptions of change: whether the reform potentially addresses a need. Most (21:3:0) felt a real need was potentially to be met, with the three negative comments largely to do with the affront felt by the teachers because of the way the government was seen as having manufactured a crisis in education in order to justify the reforms considered unnecessary by the teachers: I think ‘they’ perhaps feel that teachers don’t know what they’re doing sometimes, which is a bit demoralising. They’ve undermined the confidence of a lot of people…I’ve felt, at times, quite unnerved in a way…I do feel that the majority of teachers have been taken to task just for the sake of the few who haven’t done their jobs and I think that, if they wanted to make a stronger profession, then the poor ones should’ve been weeded out without having to have all this for everybody. I feel it was quite unnecessary. (Patrick) While talking it through I can think of several children I’ve had conversations with over the last couple of days, and I’m not a terribly organised sort of person, I’m aware of that, but I know that Sarah happens to be very clued into Magnetism. Now all I can write about in the form of evidence is a discussion in February, because there’s nothing else to actually say about it; and a lot of background to this is teachers not being trusted for their professional qualities, in a sense. If you can’t accept that I’m aware that she has this idea of Magnetism and she’s working with it quite happily and I could take her on individually—if you’re

PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM 39

not prepared to accept that from me, speaking about it—then writing it [down] isn’t going to make much difference. (Nina) Positive assessments focused on the structure, uniformity and coherence which the national curriculum was intended to provide and which the teachers felt were long overdue. The needs they identified echoed the arguments in the Third Report from the Select Committee (House of Commons 1986) about the problems arising from lack of curriculum consistency nationally, and the advantages of curricular entitlement: I think, in itself, it’s a good thing because I quite see the need for an overall plan. (Ann) I do feel that the basic idea of having a sort of scheme, or outline of goals, or whatever—targets—is, in essence, quite a good thing. I do feel that, for the child’s sake, the idea of continuity from school to school is a good one… (Sheila) On the one hand I think it’s a good idea. I can see why it’s been brought in. I think there was too much diversity between schools and if it brings schools a little bit more in line with each other in terms of the diversity that there was, then I think that won’t be a bad thing. (Olive) Approval in principle Generally, it was a positive response which prevailed (22:2:0), and one which provided little support for Brehony’s (1990) claims that primary teachers’ reactions ‘range from resignation to resentment’. Rather, our findings could be used to support Pascall’s (1992) assertion that: ‘Very few people disagree with the principle of a national curriculum. Indeed, most teachers now view the National Curriculum as the most important of the Government’s educational reforms’. The difference between Brehony’s view and those expressed by our teachers may be explained in part by the time of our data collection. We were dealing with teachers who had had two years of implementing the curriculum, an advantage not available to Brehony. We think that the

40 PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

general approval by our teachers stemmed from the realisation, after publication of the statutory orders in English, mathematics and science, and particularly the ATs (Attainment Targets) in each subject which required practical applications, experiments, pupil choice and talk, that the reforms were not intrinsically antipathetic to existing notions of ‘good’ pedagogic practice. The outcome was that the national curriculum gained the general approbation of our teachers since it appeared to be compatible with their ideologies, a factor which Poulson (1992, p. 10) recognised as crucial to successful implementation: ‘it is… important to identify the centrality of the individual teacher’s own ideologies, belief and conceptual framework to the implementation of any change’. But to approve of a reform in principle is a far cry from accepting it as a workable model. The closer our teachers came to consideration of the implementation of the national curriculum, the more its viability was called into question and specific features of its design and content critically scrutinised. NATIONAL CURRICULUM: CONTENT AND FORM Our teachers’ views on the format and content of the national curriculum were rationalised with respect to its appropriateness from both educational and practical considerations. The main concerns focused on two elements of what the national curriculum looked like: its overall design and the appropriateness of its content. Overall design The perceptions of the overall design included the format in which the national curriculum had been presented, the assessment and recordkeeping procedures associated with its implementation, and implications for ways of delivering it. The announcement in late 1992 by David Pascall, Chairman of the National Curriculum Council, that teachers’ voices had been heard and were being responded to by plans to make the national curriculum more manageable, prompted suggestions from practitioners and academics on the best way forward (see, for example, Armstrong 1992; Winkley 1992; Wragg 1992). The discrete-subject format was criticised by Armstrong (1992), a primary school headteacher:

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the attempt to define the primary curriculum exclusively in terms of subjects has to be abandoned. There is certainly space for all nine foundation subjects and religious education within the primary curriculum but not as so many independent bodies of subject matter, each with its own domain. Children’s thought cannot be circumscribed by subjects. The most imaginative experiences of childhood are those in which the course of investigation wanders in and out of subjects. One of our teachers, Christine, disapproved of the subject-based format for similarly child-centred reasons: My experience tells me that children don’t learn in the way the national curriculum is set out. They learn in far more miscellaneous packages, really. And I think the job of an infant teacher is to get a child really wanting to come to school, really interested in things that go on there, to teach basic skills but not really to be concerned with this parcel of knowledge that the national curriculum is trying to teach…I don’t really see the national curriculum for infant children in the same way that the national curriculum writers seem to see it. I think you’ve got to teach skills to infant children. You’ve got to teach reading, writing and number work, and all the rest has traditionally been done in the way of topic work, and you go into science, history, geography, whatever, as the topic leads you. Another teacher highlighted the practical implications of having to cover ten different subjects as prescribed: It’s okay for teachers, say, in secondary schools who’ve got one of these national curriculum files which covers Years 6 to whatever level they call [age] sixteen now…but I’ve got ten of these files and I’ve got an ability range in my classroom across from Level 1 to, say, Level 4. I’ve got to be aware of four levels in ten subjects. (Rose) For the most part, though, our own findings (see Chapter 5) and other evidence (see, for example, Ward 1991; Cox et al. 1992) indicate that the teachers did not allow the subject-centred format of the national curriculum to alter fundamentally the ways in which they presented

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curriculum content to pupils, and therefore did not perceive it to have threatened their existing practice or ideologies. As a result, it was not perceived as a cause for undue concern. At worst, the division of the national curriculum into separate subject orders was considered a hurdle which could be got over. There was some concern about the division of subject content into attainment targets and statements of attainment, graded into levels. Not all of our teachers were critical of this format. Ursula felt that the attainment targets promoted uniformity: I think it’s a good idea that we’ve got the attainment targets so that children moving to other parts of the country will have covered more or less the same sort of work. I think that’s good. And Denise was very enthusiastic in more general terms about the format of presentation: Oh, I think the national curriculum documents are super! I think they’re great. I don’t mind any of the documents, I think they’re all very readable, all very helpful. They’ve put in order the things that children are supposed to learn…there’s nothing frightening now that we’ve got them. However, amongst our sample there were more reservations expressed than commendations (9:2:13). Helen’s criticisms centred around what she perceived to be mismatch between the statements of attainment and an understanding of how children learn: What has come out I’m very much opposed to because it wasn’t based on any theories of children’s development or children’s learning—it’s subject-based. I mean, how do you put a curriculum for primary school children under subjects?—it’s crazy…Even the science, which is meant to be ‘hands on’, all you can do is talk and tell your children what these facts are…And so many of these statements of attainment, the child has to ‘know that’ so-and-so— I mean, again, that’s not discovering anything or doing anything, that’s just having something put in and pressing a button and out it comes!

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Those who were critical were predominantly concerned with practical implications. Kathy complained about the complexity involved in having to relate her work to so many statements of attainment: you’re into such fiddling details. This is what I object to…I’m not against the national curriculum but it’s all these fiddly bits of keeping records that people expect you to keep, and all the stress on each, being aware of, ‘Have I covered each attainment target?’ and writing it down. I know you have to be aware of it, but all this writing, it gets me down! Nina’s disapproval was of what she perceived to be the futility of quantifying and recording pupils’ progress in terms of statements of attainment: even if we know, in detail, written down to the last tick or cross, where one child is on every single attainment target, it’d be different today and different to-morrow. Similarly, Betty felt that assessment and recording to such a degree of specificity was unnecessary: I could’ve written a tick list that would actually have put those who are at Level 1 and those who weren’t. I couldn’t have said that Nicky would’ve known nine positions but wasn’t sure of ‘below’, or that Jane knows nine positions but stumbled on ‘behind’, because we were learning ‘before’, ‘behind’, ‘above’, ‘below’. I couldn’t have done it to that level of accuracy. Now the assessment did it to that, but I don’t think I need it to do that. Some teachers, whilst less specific about their relation to the national curriculum’s format were, nonetheless, dissatisfied with the bureaucratisation of the record-keeping procedures. There was disapproval of what was perceived to be the unnecessarily increased workload, with an underlying connection to the implications for teacher accountability: It makes you feel insulted…all this having to fill forms in. I don’t feel it’s really what we’re paid to do. I think we’re clearing our backs all the time in case somebody shoots at us…I feel it’s becoming ridiculous. I just feel we’re filling paperwork in for the

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sake of it, really…I’m sure nobody is ever going to look at them. That annoys me. (Mary) It’s got little boxes for you to fill in and little boxes for you to take out of and there’s nothing left for you, really. I feel it’s almost like Big Brother looking over your shoulder and checking that you’re doing your job properly. That’s how I feel. (Angie) More specifically, many (20:2:2) teachers were critical of the inclusion of standard tests, particularly at the end of Key Stage 1. Indeed, it seemed that the SATs were the ‘fly in the ointment’: The national curriculum doesn’t worry me in the structure that it’s given us—it’s the assessment of it that’s proving difficult…I’m not worried about the national curriculum but about the assessment I am. (Betty) Predictably, Year 2 teachers did, for the most part, express the greatest concern about SATs, and this reflected their worries about how the testing procedures would affect their own individual pupils: I worry about the children. I have a feeling that no matter how hard you try they’re going to know that this is ‘testing’, as the parents would put it…It’s going to put them under a lot of stress and that bothers me because we’ve spent all this time getting them happy and relaxed, to make up for their home backgrounds, because we have such a lot of children from broken families and what this’ll do for their problems I don’t know…I mean, the very fact that there are going to be more people in the classroom is going to worry them…I think if it weren’t for the testing I think it’d be quite a reasonable thing. I mean, if they’d just take your word for it…I feel that having had the children for a year I should be able to say, ‘Well, yes, that child can do this, that and the other.’ (Mary) If the SATs come down to just paper and pencil tests I shall be really cross because I think a lot of children, particularly still at

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infant level, are very good orally but not good with paper and pencil. (Jane) Our teachers’ disapproval of standard testing at Key Stage 1 stemmed primarily from two factors. First, it implicitly called into question teachers’ professionalism and expertise and thus weakened the credibility and status of the profession as a whole. As Beattie (1990, p. 33) pointed out: if you trust teachers as professionals you will be able to take a correspondingly relaxed view of testing and thus mitigate some of the more authoritarian aspects of a defined central curriculum. If you do not trust them, then correspondingly elaborate testing procedures are required to monitor their impact and effectiveness. Second, testing is often regarded as being contrary to child-centred educational philosophy and is recognised as a symbol of traditional, formal education. It is seen to promote competition rather than cooperation; to label, to categorise and to stigmatise. It is not conducive to the informal, Plowdenesque pedagogy, whose direction and pace are determined by individual children’s needs and interests, since testing emphasises outcome rather than experiences. Testing resonates in the primary teaching profession with memories of the selective process at 11+. For these reasons, amongst our sample of interviewees the prospect of implementing standard tests was treated with suspicion. Appropriateness and manageability of the curriculum Teachers’ views on the suitability of the content in the subject documents reflected educational ideologies first and foremost, but practical considerations also crept in since subject content inevitably has some bearing on its teachability. Most comments highlighted underlying concerns about child development, such as those criticisms which arose out of teachers’ perceptions of mismatch between prescribed content and children’s ‘readiness’ to receive it: I think it’s too heavily weighted on the academic side for little children. I think it’s too academic for them. I think they need time

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to play, they’re still only five…I think we’re pushing the academic side a little bit early. (Patrick) I think we’re pushing far too much into them. They might be able to cope with it—you know, the knowing where electricity comes from—but a lot of them are very immature, they still want to just play and they want to listen to fairy tales, and they’re not really bothered about those aspects that we’re trying to get over. (Brenda) Some teachers were more specific in identifying examples of mismatch: The technology is something that’s really bogging me down. I don’t really understand it. I mean, how can you get a reception child to identify a need to start with, and then some means of solving the problem? It’s expecting too much of children. As far as I’m concerned it’s better to learn how to handle the equipment and to put things together and make things work. There’s plenty of technology in that, but, there we are!… The mathematics is reasonable enough, except that I think it goes too far. I think for a Level 2 child to be able to count to a hundred isn’t really necessary because I think it’s making them count beyond their understanding. I think Level 3, again, is much too advanced for the majority of children…There are some things in science that I don’t feel are difficult, but…well, the effects of human influences for reception, knowing that humans produce waste and so on…I mean, okay, they can pick up litter but you don’t really want to take it to that extreme. (Grace) The technology really bugs me. That really is my downfall, not attainment targets 2, 3 or 4 so much because I feel children are doing that whatever they’re doing, but attainment target 1—to see a problem for themselves and then go through the process—I really seethe at that! That annoys me and I can’t get to grips with it. I’m not sure at Key Stage 1 how children can see a need. I don’t think they have enough experience to see a need…I must admit, I don’t like technology, the way it’s presented at Key Stage 1. (Nina)

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The maths, we’ve found hiccups with it; little things that they’ve put in that we wouldn’t have…there are differences. We would’ve structured the curriculum slightly differently. The science… whether we’d have put quite so much into Key Stage 1…But, having said that, it’s provided a framework. (Betty) For the most part our teachers’ comments, as we suggested earlier, revealed them, to varying degrees, to veer towards, Plowdenesque ideology which, as Alexander (1992) suggests, ‘tended to fixate on context and pedagogy and neglect content and management’. It has also used the concept of ‘readiness’ to justify resistance to raising expectations, an attitude reflected in the quotations above. Our teachers seemed to be drawing on rather simplistic versions of Piagetian development, or the burgeoning interest in Vygotsky, through ‘constructivist’ approaches to children’s learning (see Donaldson 1978; Tizard and Hughes 1984; Wood 1988; Desforges 1993). The national curriculum, on the other hand, as Alexander (1992) also points out, focuses on content and management and so, what he describes as a ‘gulf’ or ‘culture clash’ between the two ideologies, which was evident in his Leeds study, was to some extent also evident in our study; and it was this that was partially underlying our teachers’ opposition to standard testing. In criticising specific national curriculum content as being inappropriate, our teachers were implicitly claiming superiority of expertise, on the basis of their professional experience and craft knowledge, over the writers of the national curriculum subject documents. Helen’s comment sums up the sentiments of many of our teachers: I think the actual thing itself has been badly done. It hasn’t been thought through. The people involved in it know nowt about nowt—no, I’m sorry, they know a lot about their subject but they don’t know anything about how children learn…I don’t think it would have hurt to have had something written by teachers— something very, very school-based and child-centred. Alexander (1992) identifies three broad categories of ideas which underpin educational practice: those relating to children, society and knowledge. It was our teachers’ concerns about children and about knowledge (insofar as children’s developmental needs have a bearing on the knowledge which is imparted to them) which influenced their

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criticisms of the national curriculum content. Issues which related to society, such as the national curriculum’s prevalent eurocentricity (MacNeil 1990; see also David 1991a, p. 98), were generally not raised. Only one of our teachers made reference to such issues and did so deprecatingly, commenting on a specific local authority national curriculum in-service course which she had recently attended: There was a lot of airy-fairy carry-on, you know, and I don’t think there’s time for airy-fairiness…there was all this, I don’t know how to put it, really. You’ll think I’m a real peasant—all this multi-cultural crap…and anti-sexism, that’s another one. We’re all aware of it, we don’t need telling about it now. (Denise) In assessing its appropriateness, there was a tendency for teachers to focus much more on the content with which they had been presented than to give consideration to omissions such as those identified by Hewlett (1990). Certainly, some did comment that they had identified specific ‘gaps’ in particular subject documents, but the consensus was that there was generally too much content. Some teachers’ criticisms of the quantity of curriculum content focused on its unmanageability. One of our teachers was prescient about what would happen at the policy level once all subject orders were in place: I think there’s far too much content…once history and geography come in, and music, the day isn’t going to be long enough…I think they’re going to have to take some bits out of it to make it work once they’ve got everything else in there…You just look at, say, the history document. We worked it out that you only need to do one day trip for one term and that’s virtually all your history allowance gone for the term. So, when do you teach everything else that you’d have liked to have done that term? (Jane) She took the view later adopted by Winkley (1992, p. 23), who commented that: ‘It rapidly became apparent that any comprehensive delivery of this mass of material in a 25-hour week was an improbable undertaking.’ Other detractors have made more child-centred criticisms of the breadth of the curriculum. Wragg (1992) argued that Key Stage 1 pupils

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needed to be literate before being faced with nine different subjects, and several of our teachers similarly constructed child development and learning ‘readiness’ as the rationale for retaining a more narrow focus for the whole curriculum: I think there are far too many areas for a child to cope with. (Brenda) I think what I’d like to see is the attainment targets cut down because I think, with very young children, they can’t retain great amounts of knowledge and they learn by getting lots of practice in one particular aspect in lots of different ways. (Ursula) By late 1992 the NCC Chairman had declared his commitment to ensuring that, by tackling problems of overload and complexity, the national curriculum would become practicable and manageable (Pascall 1992), though he insisted upon the retention of all nine subjects and RE. By August 1993, significant modifications to the curriculum and assessment arrangements had been proposed (NCC/SEAC 1993). As early as 1991 our teachers had already experienced the national curriculum in operation and were beginning to see the need for revision. Many of them made their own predictions about what the national curriculum would lead to and whether it was likely to fulfil its intended objectives. WHAT THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM WOULD LEAD TO Analysts of educational change warn that innovation seldom achieves more than surface change (Fullan 1991; Rudduck 1991). More specifically, Winkley (1992, p. 23) offered an assessment of the dubious benefits resulting from the national curriculum: ‘It is still open to question whether anything in the national curriculum makes any difference to the quality of the teacher’s mind or the classroom experiences of the child.’ Our teachers told a somewhat different story. They provided examples and illustrations of the varied changes which they perceived as having been effected by the introduction of the national curriculum, and these are presented in the chapters of this book. Not all of the changes were deemed to be improvements; indeed, we would sum up the general feeling as

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one of ambivalence, or even as a notion that what was gained on the swings was cancelled out by what was lost on the roundabouts. It is debatable whether, with the exception of the implementation of a national programme for science, these changes were, at this stage, sufficiently fundamental or significant to meet the exacting criteria for real educational change identified, for example, by Fullan (1991): change in materials, teaching approaches and belief. Nevertheless, the two years’ experience of implementation had provided a strong basis to give our teachers the capacity to speculate about what this major educational reform would lead to. Our teachers’ predictions fell into three very broad and interrelated categories; how the national curriculum would affect teachers as professionals, curriculum and pupils. Perceived likely effects on teachers as professionals Simons (1988, p. 78) warned of the threat to a particular view of teacher professionalism which the introduction of the national curriculum would pose: The professionals which I have in mind evaluate what they do against self-generated critical standards, they research shortfalls in provision and performance, they respond to changes of context or clientele, they experiment, they reflect, they develop new programmes to solve identified problems, they collaborate, they engage in persuasive negotiation with the constituencies whose support and approval they need…This kind of teacher professionalism, whose nurture has been the most striking and innovative feature of In-service education over the past fifteen years, will be stopped in its tracks by the current legislation. Our interviewees’ comments provided no clear consensus on the issue of how the national curriculum would affect teachers as professionals. Effects on both individuals and on the profession as a whole were identified. A few teachers (5:2:17) commented that they had become more reflective and that their own teaching had been enhanced or improved as a result of having to implement the national curriculum: I think I’ve become a better teacher because of it—a more careful teacher…I’ve been helped to order my teaching better. I have a

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framework to work from which I’ve always wanted and never had—only ones I devised for myself. (Grace) It gives you more confidence in a way because…you think, ‘Oh, that’s what I was already doing’…and it tells you why you do it, you know, which is good. It gives you more of a basis—like a rationale really—that it didn’t have before. (Kathy) The national curriculum has certainly made me look at my teaching because, prior to it, I probably taught in a very— if I say ‘intuitive’ it sounds, well careless—which I don’t mean it to be… (Ann) I feel I’ve learned a lot from it because I’ve had to go and learn this and that. I think it’s added to my knowledge… (Brenda) But there was clearly much ambivalence, too, which is best illustrated by including the sequels to the last two quotes, which provide an ‘on the other hand’ perspective: …but I felt, in a lot of ways, that I was responding to the children’s needs in a far more immediate and effective way prior to the national curriculum. (Ann) …but I think it’s narrowed the way you can teach in that you can’t use all your skills as a teacher, in the aspects you might be interested in because you’ve to work to a prescribed formula. (Brenda) Moreover, a small minority (2:5:17) offered much more negative assessments, supporting Simons’s (1988) predictions, of how their roles had altered: I used to have a cupboard at home of resources…now we’re sorting out attainment targets rather than gathering materials. We’re justifying what we’re doing in terms of attainment targets. I don’t think the quality of teaching is being improved by that. I

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don’t think the quality of my art table is being improved because, instead of delving into my kitchen cupboard at home, through my lentils and split peas and so forth, I’m sorting out which attainment targets I’m going to be covering by this activity. I’m doing less of the quality preparation work, which is what reception work is all about, than I used to do. (Betty) We’re more and more being told that this is what to do and get on with it, and your own specific talents and abilities aren’t being utilised at all. (Sheila) With respect to potential effects on the primary teaching profession as a whole, our interviewees were divided in their judgement of what they thought the national curriculum might achieve. A minimum achievement, that less conscientious teachers would have to start pulling their weight more, was taken as probable: They can no longer decide what they’re going to teach that day while they’re cleaning their teeth in the morning. They’ve got to have it ready, they’ve got to ensure continuity, they’ve got to ensure progression within their children’s learning…I think it’s making people prepare their work a lot better, and that type of thing… (Tricia) I do like the in-service that we’re obliged to do now, and the time that everybody’s putting in on it. I used to always put a lot of time into it—like, I used to go in during the holidays, before the school opened, and get the classroom all ready, but I was the only one who ever bothered to do that at our place. But now we have an INSET day, probably the day before the school opens, and everybody has to go in and do it—and so they should, I think! (Kathy)

Unfortunately, if you’ve got poor teachers they can easily get away with a very narrow curriculum and…there was nothing to stop them doing that. So I think the national curriculum, what it’ll

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do is standardise teaching much more. You won’t get the very poor teaching but, on the other hand, you won’t lose the best of it. (Christine) Others were more dubious that the national curriculum’s demands would serve to improve the profession: I don’t feel it’s raised standards at all. There’s no pick-up on people who aren’t delivering it properly, and the ones who are delivering it properly were obviously doing a better job beforehand. (Penny) Potential effects on the curriculum We have already referred to suggestions that the Government’s purpose in introducing a national curriculum was to alter not only what was taught in schools but also how it was taught. Concern that standards had fallen as a result of progressive, informal teaching in primary schools prompted a ‘back to basics’ campaign which was particularly prominent in 1991. In 1993, ‘back-to-basics’ arguments re-surfaced with the NCCs Advice to the Secretary of State for Education (NCC 1993a) and two Ofsted publications (Ofsted 1993a, 1993b) whose tone was contemptuous of typically progressive, Plowdenesque teaching approaches, and which prescribed a re-definition of good primary practice in the light of the need to accommodate a national curriculum presented as discrete subjects (see, for example, NCC 1993a, paras 4.12 and 4.13). It remains to be seen whether or not the ‘back to basics’ movement will make significant gains in discouraging progressive practice, but our teachers offered their own predictions of how the national curriculum would affect what is taught in terms of both content and method. Content In a speech, which heralded significant modification to the national curriculum, David Pascall (1992) left no room for doubt about the importance which he attached to providing breadth and balance within the curriculum: Prior to the Reform Act, the curriculum in many primary schools was too often narrow and unimaginative…The National

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Curriculum was introduced to ensure that all our children would follow a broad and balanced curriculum which would prepare them in the fullest sense for adult life. It has been a key objective of the national curriculum to achieve breadth and balance and, for the most part, our teachers were of the opinion that their own repertoires of content, and those of other infant teachers, had been significantly widened to encompass new subject areas and more content and greater depth within existing subjects (16:2:6): It’s got to raise standards because they’re having a broader education. At the moment it’s not, but in two or three years we’ll see what it’s done. (Felicity) I think, in a sense, the national curriculum has made you aware of the gaps, and it’s good to go through and see what you’re supposed to be doing…There were things, and you read about them and you’d think, ‘Well, I haven’t covered that, maybe’, or ‘Maybe I could do a bit more on that.’ For instance, at Christmas we made all these houses and then we kept them and put up snow scenes and we put then on the wall. We made streets and, thinking about geography, we were aware of the map thing. Like, before the national curriculum you might’ve put it up and not talked about it any more. But I talked to the boys and I said, ‘There’s a car travelling up here. Which side of the street do you think it should be on?’…We talked about left and right…we talked about roundabouts, and then we’d say, ‘What do you think is over here? Should we put something here?’ and talked about planning and things like that. Like, when you study the national curriculum you’re more aware that these are the kind of things you should do. (Kathy) In 1991, i.e. before statutory orders in most other foundation subjects applied, many teachers attributed the increased breadth and balance especially to the inclusion of technology, and of science in particular, because of its high status as a core subject. Indeed, there is generally consensus that one of the quickest achievements of the national curriculum has been the breadth and balance which it has achieved in primary schools by increasing and improving learning of science (and

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technology to some extent) (see, for example, DES 1991; Alexander et al. 1992; Wragg 1992; Campbell 1993b). However, not all of our teachers enthused about this. Nina was able to signal other curriculum priorities and to predict adverse affects on reading time as the full breadth of the curriculum came on stream: ‘If we put as much effort into science, technology, history and geography as we’re supposed to, then we’re not going to have time for reading.’ For many teachers, the increased breadth and balance was regarded with ambivalence since they were aware that, by increasing curriculum content without extending the time available in the school day, something would ‘have to give’. As we reveal in Chapter 5 and analyse in Chapter 10, what many teachers found was having to be sacrificed was the teaching of basic skills and, in particular, hearing children read. They experienced in practice what the time allocation analysis in Chapter 1 has shown, namely that there would not be adequate time for basic skills and all the new content designed to broaden the curriculum from its existing practice. The NCC, drawing on seminars with teachers, also identified the problem: At Key Stage 1 there is particular concern that the breadth of National Curriculum requirements means that there is now insufficient time to teach the basics of reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic which are essential for all future learning. (NCC 1993a, para. 2.3) The dilemma confronting our teachers was that which represented the NCCs greatest concern in considering restructuring the national curriculum, as Pascall (1992) explained: if we simply cut back on the number of subjects at Key Stage 1 we are sacrificing breadth and balance. What worries me…is that there is a real possibility of returning to an excessively narrow curriculum which could deny children the rich learning experiences that subjects like history and geography undoubtedly offer. Some teachers (8:0:16) felt that, by integrating different subjects and relying heavily on teaching through topics (see Chapter 5), the national curriculum could be much more manageable than if a discrete-subject approach were adopted, and breadth and balance would be less threatened (see also Brehony 1990, p. 119). This is not convincing if the

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arithmetic of time allocation in Chapter 1 is accepted, and it would add to workloads since the curriculum has to be assessed and reported in single subjects. The more practical solution would be a reduction in the collective weight of the orders, as Jane (p. 49) predicted and we have proposed (see Campbell and Neill 1992). Teaching methods There has been much speculation about the effect which the national curriculum will have on teaching approaches. Marsh’s (1990) prediction that ‘there will no longer be sufficient time available to teach reading as if it were a subject’ was borne out by our findings and, as we discuss in Chapter 5, was a matter of great concern to the majority of our teachers. The underlying concern of most analysts is that the assessment procedures which are integral to the national curriculum, and particularly the use of standard tests, will significantly alter primary school teaching. Marsh (1990) anticipated that primary teachers would see the national curriculum ‘largely as a tool for the analysis of children’s work rather than as a direct contribution to the improvement of teaching’. Brehony (1990), Hoyles (1989) and Relf (1992) all envisage ‘teaching to the test’ taking priority; a view which a few of our teachers shared (4:0:20): If you’re talking about standards of how a child is able to learn, how motivated they are, how independent they are, then I would say the national curriculum is going to drop standards, quite honestly, because teachers are going to teach to the test. (Sheila) Unfortunately, I see it heading towards teaching to the test…I don’t see that it’ll raise standards at all. (Vivienne) The problem with both the analysis and the teachers’ perceptions is that they assume the influence of tests to be malign. But when teachers used tests from the APU in the 1980s, their curriculum was broadened because the tests were broader in focus than was much practice. Teaching to good practical tests may improve the curriculum as much as teaching to poor limited pencil-and-paper tests may damage it. Crucially, it depends on the nature of the tests. Gipps’s (1988a) more specific predictions about classroom organisation have not all been

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borne out by our findings. Ability grouping and an increase in more didactic teaching had not materialised among our sample at the time of our research, nor was topic work reported as having declined, although Silcock (1990) found evidence of this. However, the combined effects of a possible intensification of competitiveness between schools and pressure from the ‘back-to-basics’ movement may eventually vindicate her concerns. Anticipated effects on pupils Gipps (1988b) also suggested two effects which the national curriculum testing procedures would indirectly have on pupils: increased competition and the potential for failure. A few of our teachers (4:0:20) voiced the same, or similar, concerns which reflected their disapproval of what they perceived as the damaging impact of the curriculum on the self-image of the low attainers which the national curriculum was likely to create: I feel now that the children who are more academic are going to be given a higher status than those who excel in other areas. (Sheila) The only thing that I’m concerned about is assessment and children taking a so-called test at 7. I think it’s going to produce a system of failures for a young age—that’s my main fear. (Ursula) Brehony (1990, p. 128) likewise suggested, as the most likely effect of the national curriculum: primary schools will lose much of their distinctive character for which they were once internationally renowned. That is to say that they will no longer be places where young children are encouraged to develop socially and cognitively in a supportive environment guided by enthusiastic and committed teachers who empathize with children…For Plowden’s child at the heart of the educational process there should now be substituted the Standard Attainment Test (sic). These criticisms arise from a view of the philosophy and ideology of the Plowden Report (CACE 1967), and in this respect they assume a

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practice, and even a value orientation, which Alexander et al. (1992) argued was not widespread in the profession. It is also the case that the statutory orders incorporated much ‘child-centred’ practice; practical first-hand experience, pupil choice of materials, open-ended investigations, the emphasis on speaking and listening. It may be for this reason that the national curriculum content was, for the most part, considered non-threatening by our teachers. The essential source of disagreement was the inclusion of national tests, seen as undesirable by our teachers on the grounds that they were against the best interests of the children. SUMMARY The general picture amongst our teachers was of strong approval for the principles of the national curriculum, with little interest in the political purposes which its introduction might serve. There was some degree of unease about the format in which the curriculum was written, especially the specification of statements of attainment in hierarchically-ordered levels. The cognitive pressure on pupils arising from the curriculum was seen as running counter to notions of ‘readiness’, even though such notions are now somewhat discredited. The manageability of the curriculum was defined almost entirely in terms of content overload for pupils. Teachers differed in their predictions about the impact of the reform process on teacher professionality, on the impact of the broadened curriculum on standards in the basic skills, and there were some anxieties about the impact of testing and differentiation on pupil self-image.

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THE BACKGROUND In 1987 a National Curriculum Task Group for Assessment and Testing (TGAT) was established by the Secretary of State for Education to make recommendations on how children’s performance and progress across the subjects of the national curriculum should be assessed and reported. The task group’s report recommended that, at the end of each Key Stage, statutory assessment should combine teachers’ own assessments (TA) with the results of externally provided tests, known as Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs). During the course of administering the tests, the teachers were to observe children’s activities and, using standard procedures, mark the artistic, written and oral work the children produced. As far as possible the SATs were expected to represent normal classroom activities, fitting ‘unobtrusively’ into the teachers’ existing practice. At the end of the testing process, teachers would combine the test results with their own assessment to arrive at a judgement about the ‘level’ a pupil had reached. The levels expected at Key Stage 1, within an overall 10-level scale, were 1 (below average), 2 (average) and 3 (above average). The principles of the TGAT report were accepted as the basis for the assessment arrangements, and Key Stage 1 teachers administered them in 1990 for the first time, as trials, and in 1991 as the basis for reporting to parents. In the climate of mandatory change the task group was sensitive to the concerns of a profession which perceived itself to be under threat. The administration of SATs would place an increased load on primary teachers, particularly those who taught pupils in Year 2, the end-of-Key Stage year, and it identified the need for training. It also acknowledged some of the fears expressed by teachers: the possibility of some children being disadvantaged; of classwork being circumscribed; of ‘league

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tables’ of schools; of individual teacher accountability; of hostile, dissatisfied parents. The TGAT proposals had aimed to minimise such possibilities in the design of the system of assessment. For 7-year-olds, SATs were to take the form of topics for children to work on, designed to look like ordinary class work. The intention was that children should be encouraged to show what they could, rather than what they could not, achieve. Children would undertake some tasks in groups rather than as individuals, and the modes of performance would include talk, practical tasks and problem-solving, as well as writing. Thus, assessment would support the work of teachers and enhance, rather than diminish, their effectiveness. Assessment was to serve the curriculum rather than vice versa. Since 1990 the TGAT principles have been steadily eroded (see Black 1992 for a detailed analysis of the erosion process), but in 1991 they were largely intact as the basis for the assessment arrangements which our teachers administered. In 1990 pilot SATs were carried out by 2 per cent of children at the end of Key Stage 1 (NFER 1990). The Chief Inspector of Schools (DES 1990b) had expressed concerns about the effect of the assessment arrangements on the professional lives of teachers: If actually carrying out assessments, recording and reporting outcomes and accounting for what has been done do turn out to be overly prescriptive and inquisitorial, not only will the quality of teaching and learning be adversely affected but the competence, professionalism and creativity of the teaching force may be undermined. (DES 1990b, para.25) This warning proved prophetic. Assessment has had a considerable impact on schools, teachers and children. The TGAT report had originally proposed that the Standard Assessment Tasks should cover all attainment targets, but that teachers should report attainment in terms of clusters of targets (profile components) in each of the three core subjects. The 1990 pilot SATs, however, required teachers to assess, record and report in relation to fewer attainment targets, but to assess and record in greater detail using statements of attainment. One calculation gave a total of 1,500 assessments for a class of thirty children. The evaluation of 1990 pilot SATs was reported by the Evaluation and Monitoring Unit of the Schools’ Examination and Assessment

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Council (SEAC 1991). In the report it noted that few of the comments received ‘endorsed the model of SATs operationalised during the pilot’ (SEAC 1991, Annex 2, p. iii). This was because the teachers reported the SATs as being unwieldy to implement, too time-consuming to use, and leading to the neglect of pupils not being tested. Some of the lessons learned from the 1990 pilot SATs were used to modify those for 1991. As a result of the evaluation of the pilot, the number of attainment targets covered by the SATs was reduced. In 1991 children were compulsorily tested on seven attainment targets in English, mathematics and science, and within each of mathematics and science children were assessed on a further attainment target from a constrained choice. However, reducing the coverage of the SATs did not reduce the assessment demands since targets not covered by SATs had to be assessed by TA and incorporated into the reporting process. The teachers faced the demand of assessing all their pupils on thirty-two targets, either through SATs or TA. An evaluation by the National Foundation for Educational Research reported a variation in the total number of assessments made by a teacher as being between fifty-five and 2,553, depending upon the number of children to be assessed in a class (NFER/BGC 1992). During the course of our research, six teachers who had just finished administering SATs to Year 2 pupils were interviewed. The teachers had felt very much under scrutiny and were determined to take the process seriously. There had been no attempt to undermine the testing process: I wanted to do it 100 per cent so that I could satisfy myself and anybody else who might make enquiries…I wanted there to be no element of doubt… (Eva) Yet from the interviews it became clear that the modified 1991 SATs posed problems similar to those caused by the 1990 pilots. The teachers graphically illustrated the disruptive impact of the administration of the tests on their personal and professional lives, on the routines of school and classroom and on the learning and attitudes of the children. OVERLOAD The most common difficulty was the unrealistic workload involved if teachers took the task seriously, as ours did: ‘how long can I keep up

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this dual role of teacher and assessor? It’s just too much; just extreme exhaustion, mental and physical’ (Eva). The evaluation report of the 1990 pilot SATs had noted: ‘absolute unanimity that the workload expected of teachers was far in excess of what might be reasonably expected’ (SEAC 1991, Item 12, Annex 2, p. iii). The preparation for Teacher Assessment (TA) and the administration of SATs had increased teachers’ workload, despite the claimed reductions made to the assessment requirements following the pilot: [My workload has] increased, I would say, yes definitely. I have just emerged from doing assessment, of course, being a Year 2 teacher, which has meant an enormous amount of extra workload—really huge. It has meant spending hours and hours in the evenings and at the weekends, so it has meant many hours a day, to not very great effect, I don’t think. (Fran) Teachers identified the time-scale of the operation as the main cause of their feeling overloaded. The SAT materials went to schools in March 1991, and the SATs had to be administered to all children at the end of Key Stage 1 during the first half of the summer term. Results had to be finalised and entered by the end of that half term. Within this time-scale there were three issues concerned with time which caused problems, viz. having sufficient time to do all that was required; the efficient use of available time; and the worthwhileness, in educational terms, of the use to which the time was being put. Time was needed for preparing for assessment in respect of its theory and practice. Additional time was needed for the planning and preparation of SATs, over and above that needed to meet the everyday demands of teaching: it’s the sheer organisational time…there is a lot of planning and then moderating beyond that; it takes tremendous time. (Greta) it was just horrendous, the amount of time put in. (Eva) This interpretation was reflected in the research carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER/ BGC 1992).

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During the SATs period an average of 23 hours was spent on planning outside normal class time, and an average of 3 hours was spent on recording the required information (NFER/ BGC 1992, p. 85). RESENTMENT OF TIME SPENT ON TESTING The NFER/BGC report produced a figure of 18 hours during the SATs period being spent in planning and preparation for the standard assessment tasks themselves (NFER/BGC 1992). It is difficult from the report to decide exactly how long the SATs period was. The recommended time period was three weeks. The report showed that only 25 per cent of teachers were able to administer SATs during this time period, 5 per cent took less than the three weeks, and 70 per cent took longer than three weeks. Our teachers certainly felt that the demands on their time were excessive: …it [assessment] has encroached more into personal time—more working at weekends. (Greta) [My week was] extremely intensive from the moment I got up in the morning until the moment I went to bed. It’s very difficult to say I was actually in bed before midnight any one night. (Eva) They resented spending time on the SATs because they saw them as something separate from, and additional to, teaching. As such, SATs had to be planned and prepared for separately, thus increasing the demands on teachers’ time without giving them a proportional reward in terms of increased effectiveness in the classroom: I’ve resented having to spend so much time on the assessment, certainly, because it did mean that I wasn’t teaching the children, really. They haven’t learnt anything very much new—it had all sorts of bad effects on them. (Fran) The resentment focused, in addition, on the perceived offence to their professional judgement:

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Teachers should use their professional judgements but, when it came to SATs, my professional judgement wasn’t good enough… I am allowed to use my professional judgement in everything else, but they don’t believe me when I say a child can do this or that. (Dora) They felt that they were capable of making professional judgements, both formative and summative, about their pupils and did not need their decisions confirmed by SATs, particularly in such detail and at such cost of time and attention. Teachers certainly felt that SATs were not raising standards of achievement in general and that, particularly, standards in basic skills were being lowered by the pressures on class time caused by assessment: The reading, the writing and the maths scheme have had less attention than they have been doing and, slowly, standards are dropping’ (Dora). Although, paradoxically, Year 2 teachers interviewed did feel, like others, that the national curriculum as a whole would raise their standards of teaching as it was expanding their content and teaching strategies in some areas: ‘I think it [the national curriculum] has certainly raised standards in science teaching, and I think probably in Maths teaching as well’ (Fran). The paradox is partly resolved by the differential references to learning (Dora) and teaching (Fran) and partly by different and contradicting views about the relative influence on standards of testing and the programmes of study respectively. STRESS AND ANXIETY As with the reform process generally, the change in assessment and testing created stress. The increased workload, and the pressures caused by time constraints and anxiety, resulted in the teachers experiencing considerable stress, both professional and personal. For example, this teacher saw it as professional: Would you say that SATs have caused any particular stress? Certainly, although we didn’t actually have any time off during them—but I think some schools did have a lot of teachers absent. We felt very wound-up and absolutely desperate for half-term,

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and then it was quite difficult to wind-down during half-term because we were obsessed with getting through to the end of the SATs—and they seemed to go on much longer than the hours it was suggested they might take, of course. They took almost all of the seven weeks, so I did find them stressful. (Fran) While, for others, the administration of the tests was causing considerable strain in their personal lives: I’m very conscious of all this on my mind and, if you once let go of all this it’s very easy to lose a thread. It takes quite a while to pick up again—so you’ve got to be on-the-ball with it all the time. I’m trying to deal with my children and, of course, my husband. Fortunately he is very understanding, very patient, but of course I feel unkind to him…So I think, above all, families of teachers involved need a great deal of praise, very definitely. I’m extremely tired. (Eva) The main reason for the feelings of anxiety and the resulting stress were the lack of clear guidance, and of focused training in assessment techniques: the advisers didn’t seem to have any more information than you had…you were asking questions and people were reassuring you but, without hard facts because nobody had any—even at the point of SATs you still had no hard facts. Hard facts, like the SATs prior to the teacher assessments, would have been invaluable because we would all then have been using the same evidence of attainment. (Carol) For our teachers this lack of help resulted in their over-assessing and over-recording what children were doing—one record system we saw consisted of twelve A4 sheets per child. Not knowing what needed to be recorded they recorded everything, and not knowing what counted as evidence they collected too much indiscriminately. The teachers felt that at some stage someone in authority would be checking up on whether they had done things correctly:

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I thought, well, you’ve got to be careful here because if we don’t do it thoroughly they, the powers-that-be, could turn round and say, ‘Well, you’re saying that but you didn’t do it properly…’ (Eva) Brown (1991) noted that any changes in systems of assessment would necessitate changes to documentation but, as Broadfoot et al. (1991), Freedman (1991) and Silcock (1992) found, and was the case with our teachers also, it was not changes in documentation which were causing problems so much as the fact that teachers were inventing new record systems of great complexity as a way of alleviating their anxiety. IMPACT ON CLASSROOM ORGANISATION AND LEARNING Assessment had a paradoxical effect on classroom organisation and routine. Teachers planning in advance for TA and SATs changed their teaching style in order to do more group work and to encourage the children to become more self-sufficient in organising themselves and their learning. The purpose was to give themselves the time to observe and record: I also encouraged from September on, knowing that SATs were coming up, more interaction amongst groups, more thought from each other… So you’ve got a whole series of arrangements which filter out a lot of the routine requests? Yes. It gives them a lot of support and makes them use their common sense quite a lot, and think rather than immediately running to me. (Eva) The Evaluation of National Curriculum Assessment at Key Stage 1 (ENCA 1), conducted at the School of Education at Leeds (SEAC 1992), also observed this change in teaching style—‘a dramatic and statistically significant shift from whole-class to group work’. Teachers organised children into small groups which were encouraged to work with minimal supervision. More use was made of groupings formed on the basis of similar ability rather than mixed ability or friendship.

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Classroom materials were organised in such a way that the children could resource themselves. This finding is ironic given that the national curriculum was perceived by the then Secretary of State to be a means of reestablishing more traditional, effective teaching methods: At its worst, current practice [child-centred teaching methods] hinders concentration, disguises time-wasting, lack of real learning and superficial questioning, and provides little useful contact between the teacher and the individual pupil…So the questions concerning current practice include whether it promotes progression, whether management of the classroom obstructs the stimulation of learning, whether the expectations are high enough, and the place of whole-class, didactic teaching given the evidence of their greater effectiveness. (Clarke 1991) His view was reflected in a DES discussion paper given wide publicity in 1992: The organisational strategies of whole-class teaching, group work and individual teaching need to be used more selectively and flexibly. The criterion of choice needs to be fitness for purpose. In many schools the benefits of wholeclass teaching have been insufficiently exploited. (Alexander et al. 1992) However, in order to implement the national curriculum tests, our teachers were moving towards, rather than away from, group work and, indeed, tended to see group work as being almost mandatory: We do work an integrated day…the children have got used to working that way. I don’t know sometimes whether I should stop it and see whether I could work a more formal day…and say, ‘Right, to-day we are going to do this together’…so sometimes I do like to stop the class and do something together. But I don’t know how often I should do that without breaking the rules. (Harriet) Although this approach is clearly not a statutory requirement, it is of interest that both for delivering the curriculum, as we show in

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Chapter 5, and for testing attainment, group work encouraging greater pupil autonomy and less time spent in whole-class grouping was perceived as the most facilitatory classroom arrangement. As the SATs come to be more like conventional pencil-and-paper tests, heavily reliant on easily marked, written answers, the amount of group work may be reversed with teachers teaching more to the tests in a whole-class situation. This is a possibility of which, as Black (1992) explained, TGAT was aware and had attempted to minimise by making assessment reflect children’s usual classroom learning because penciland-paper tests would ‘put teachers under pressure to teach for such tests’. He argued that the subsequent changes in the SATs meant that the emphasis on assessment, reflecting normal teaching, was ‘receding, and drilling for the test is now taking its place to the dismay of many teachers and the potential impoverishment of many pupils’ (Black 1992). The ENCA 1 (SEAC 1992) report also noted that, because teachers spent significantly more classroom time on classroom assessment during the SATs period compared to before it—36.9 per cent as opposed to 8.2 per cent—there was less time spent on other sorts of interaction, such as monitoring non-SAT work in progress or checking discipline (SEAC 1992). Our teachers noted that one of the effects of administering SATs was to reduce the amount of time they had to interact personally with the children to the detriment of relationships: ‘We didn’t leave enough space for things like talking to the children, because that’s one of the great pleasures of teaching, having a chat with them’ (Fran). It also had an impact on the behaviour of the children: the children didn’t have our full attention all the time and they did react against that, and they are still punishing us for that, really… the children got more and more difficult and all the other staff in the school were complaining about them. (Fran) The ENCA 1 project also found similar changes in the classrooms which they observed. They referred to children’s behaviour as showing ‘statistically significant’ increases in disobedience and troublesome behaviour (SEAC 1992, p. 12). This had also been a main concern of those undertaking the pilot SATs in 1990:

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Children who at times were not involved in SATs had to be given low-level activities as one had no time to spend with them…The standard of work produced in non-assessed activities has deteriorated steadily since the beginning of term… (Torrance 1990) One consequence was that it could be argued that even more demands were placed on the teachers in 1991 to make every attempt to ensure that children not involved in SATs were gainfully employed (NUT 1991). This was the case with our teachers who, as the period for administering SATs approached, were determined that the disruption to the children’s routines and learning should be minimal. They spent a considerable amount of time in planning activities for those children who were not directly involved in SATs so that they did not become bored and disruptive and had something worthwhile to do. What our teachers had done in an attempt to minimise the adverse effects on children’s learning and behaviour was to spend even more time planning and preparing so that there was plenty of purposeful work available for those not being assessed. This kept stress on children, boredom and behavioural problems to a minimum, but it was done at a cost to the teachers of even more work and more personal time being used to do that work: there was no boredom. I could never sense that children had nothing to do…but I think this is why I’m so tired…because every night you didn’t go home and just sort out SATs for the following day or whatever, you then were conscious of the rest of your class, you had lessons to prepare. (Eva) Our teachers were satisfied that they had been successful in presenting children not being tested with interesting and stimulating tasks. However, the ENCA 1 observers and the teachers they observed both felt that children’s tasks were ‘less stimulating and challenging than they had been pre-SATs’ (SEAC 1992, p. 12). THE BENEFITS OF TESTING One positive aspect of SATs was that the teachers particularly appreciated the opportunities to work intensively with small groups of

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children. Assessment was seen as being a way of legitimising this style of teaching and interaction: The children have enjoyed quite a lot being taken out of the classroom and being able to talk to the teacher in a very small group, and that was a very positive experience for me as well. It was like having permission, in a way, to work with a very small group, which you don’t often have. (Fran) It was also true that, despite a general view that administering SATs revealed nothing that was not already known, for Eva the experience genuinely improved her professional understanding of her pupils: On a one-to-one basis, when you’re actually talking it all through with the child and they’re answering you…you get a closer and more detailed insight into how their minds are actually working. (Eva) Brown et al. (1992) similarly identified some of the other positive aspects of SATs, particularly in respect of science. For example, the use of group work facilitated SATs; colleagues provided a valuable source of support and help; most children were not unduly stressed by SATs; teacher assessment and SATs showed a high degree of agreement. On the whole, what they identified as positive aspects were a direct result of teachers modifying their classroom practice in order to deliver SATs successfully. The benefits did not accrue intrinsically from SATs but from teachers’ professionalism in implementing SATs. Thus, some of the problems experienced by teachers in 1990 were overcome, but at a cost of additional time spent on planning and preparation. This might be a partial explanation why, despite the changes to the SATs, the teachers were still working so much in their own time. PUPILS’ LEARNING Teachers were concerned about the amount and type of learning which was taking place as a result of the SATs themselves:

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You are only snatching at information when you are doing SATs…I think they learned little snaps of information throughout, but nothing concrete, and it’s that which worries me. (Eva) The SEAC evaluation of the 1990 pilot SATs made the point about the purposes of assessment (SEAC 1991, Item 20, Annex 2, p. iv) that whilst teachers commented on the amount of testing which went on during SATs, no-one commented on what children had learned during SATs, and that there was a distinction between these two concepts, teaching and learning. Although the SEAC evaluation saw pupil learning as an implicit purpose of SATs, identified as a purpose in the official statements, our teachers did not. They did comment on children’s learning but they saw SATs as a means of testing children’s learning not a teaching strategy. The teachers used the tests in order to assess how well the pupils had learned skills, concepts, attitudes and knowledge to which they have been given prior access through previous teaching. They did not give tests in order to teach children new knowledge. If, as the comment from SEAC indicated, learning should take place during SATs, then a fifth purpose is added to the list of formative, summative, diagnostic and evaluative which assessment was supposed to serve: that of assessment as a teaching strategy. However, for our teachers’ pupils, any cognitive learning that took place through SATs was accidental. As a matter of fact it was non-cognitive learning that the teachers noted. As we have shown earlier, they saw their pupils learning, almost by default, to be independent, to be self-motivated and to work in self-directed groups. IN - SCHOOL SUPPORT At the same time that assessment was taking place the normal routine of the schools continued with little or no concessions being made for the impact of SATs: While SATs were on we still had staff meetings, we still had external visitors coming in…all these sort of things I still had to be involved in because it was the running of the school… (Eva) As with the implementation and delivery of the national curriculum, the teachers were helped most in those schools where they saw the head as

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committing extra staff resources and their colleagues as giving extra support. This was effective in that Year 2 teachers were well-resourced and received help with organising the administration of SATs, and supportive in that the demands made upon them were understood by the headteacher and the rest of the staff: What has been the attitude of the rest of the school to Year 2 teachers in terms of SATs? They have been very supportive, really. Having said that, we did get occasional grumbles and, as it was getting to the end of the SATs period, we were getting rather tense ourselves and we thought, ‘We can’t cope with any more of this.’ No, but it has been very supportive—people kept asking how we were going and we have had positive support from the head, who would come in and take the children from time to time…For the person who got proposed for assessment, the head would come in and when the head took her class she would come and take the children to at least release one of us. People were very sympathetic on the whole, and interested, but we did have one staff meeting where we described some of the things we were going to have to do and they were quite appalled at the thought of having to do it, and also thinking of themselves in a year’s time. No, they have been very supportive on the whole. (Fran) Support from colleagues varied in proportion to their understanding of what assessment entailed: What about support from colleagues? Token, really. I don’t know whether it was on the basis of being scared of what we were doing and just wanting to ignore it because it will go away. I think they were worried to see what the implication of it was. I think it was because we were not running around appearing to be particularly stressed by it that they thought they just wouldn’t get involved in it. It just seemed to be working OK so they ignored it. We didn’t have the support of people coming round and saying, ‘If you need this or need that, you can have it.’ The reason I say it’s ‘token’ is because, when you actually came to the point where there was a need to ask for something, it really caused quite a stir. For example, we had the

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large number of school balances for three weeks and they were not available for other people. It did not make us popular and I could see why not. But, by the same token, we were trying to do things in this particular time-scale and that caused us quite a few problems. In general then, we did have things offered to us, but I think there was always a certain amount of resentment. There was resentment that SATs over-rode everything. The way the head was dealing with it certainly gave us the impression that we could run round school saying, ‘SATs, SATs, we get our way, hard luck everybody else!’ And we could have done that—perhaps at times we did, and perhaps that’s very unfair—but it backfires on you in the end because people start resenting SATs and resenting you because they think you shouldn’t be able to do that. (Fran) This is a picture which raises questions about the common stereotype of the deeply caring attitudes to colleagues held by the teachers of young children. FAIR TESTING? In order to make SATs practicable and valid in infant classrooms, the teachers adopted a variety of strategies. They took great care in presenting the tasks to the children: I gave my full attention to every child, I worded everything in as many ways as I could because I knew my children by the time the SATs came round. Certain children you can speak to very simply and they understand, others need a lot more of explaining and a lot of thought, different words used, and I used that really as my tool when I was guiding them through the SATs. (Eva) They also gave very careful consideration to where the tests should be conducted in order to give all children a fair chance: We did most of our assessment out of the classroom. We tried some of it in the classroom but that was very difficult. The [Local Authority] assessment co-ordinator talked very glibly about this, saying that it was all down to classroom management. Yes, well, fine! Try telling that to a stroppy 6-year-old who just has to tell

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you something! Or a fight might break out in the corner—they sometimes do, you know—somebody throws a pencil and you have to do something about it. So we used support staff to take the classes and that meant the children…felt that our attention wasn’t on them all the time. (Carol) Thus, although the teachers were adopting strategies to enable the pupils to show what they had achieved, as TGAT intended, it did mean that the way the tests were administered varied from teacher to teacher. For this reason, the reliability of the test results must be questionable, a point also raised by Broadfoot et al. (1991). They identified the possibility that variations in the presentation of identical tasks would produce different results. Our teachers used variation in presentation in order to allow for individual differences amongst the pupils, that is, they worked out strategies to administer SATs in such a way that all children had a fair chance to achieve what the teachers felt they were capable of. The teachers were more concerned with fairness than with the technical reliability of the testing procedure. It is questionable whether the notion of reliability was one to which they gave any consideration. The teachers interviewed had had help from a variety of staff including Section 11 staff, supply staff, ancillary helpers and headteachers during the SATs period. Only one teacher had managed with no support at all. The ENCA 1 project (SEAC 1992) reported that just under half of the headteachers in their sample had made significant changes in the organisation of classes during SATs. The question which this raises is of the resource implications of diverting either Section 11, supply or headteachers, into classrooms for the purposes of assessment which, in theory, was supposed to be an integral part of classroom teaching, drawing on no classroom support other than that normally provided for the particular class. PERCEIVED INFLUENCES ON TEST PERFORMANCE The criticism voiced by Murphy (1990) and Gipps (1990) is that the model of learning underpinning national curriculum assessment is a linear, hierarchical one which does not accurately reflect the learning development of children. Although this is a criticism of the 10-level scale rather than the tests themselves, it was echoed by our teachers who expressed it as a concern about the timing of the tests in relation to the

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differential needs of their children. The time spent by them on administering national tests had opportunity costs, borne largely by those pupils who needed extra attention: I’m very conscious of the fact that I’ve lost time with the children, it’s almost tremendous; that is one-sixth of their school year while they were, as I would say, at their most impressionable age—6, 7—[the] formative years…That term for me is the term I spend with my slower readers, my less numerate children, and I give a great deal of input to them—then this half of the term I give them work to support what we’ve just done. Now I’ve missed that and I am trying to catch up on that ground, and I can’t manage. (Eva) The assessment work is very late—we didn’t know what we were going to do until the last minute, really. It meant that we weren’t teaching the children if we spent a whole half term [on assessment], which is an important term in the summer term because it’s when the children often take on a spurt. (Fran) The teachers were reflecting a more general position than that of their own schools. The analysis of the 1991 SAT results by Dorset LEA also highlighted the importance of these factors (TES 28.2.92). NFER (1990) noted in its evaluation of the pilot SATs that, in terms of TA, older children did ‘significantly better’ than younger, and children who had been in school longer performed better. This reflects the earlier findings of the Assessment of Performance Unit studies (Gipps and Goldstein 1983) and of the ENCA report (SEAC 1992) on the 1991 Key Stage 1 SATs, ‘For all attainment targets in all subjects, the eldest children in the year-group showed significantly higher levels of achievement than the younger ones.’ They added the rider that, Although the results of this analysis [age and length of time in school] showed significantly higher levels [of attainment] amongst those who had spent longer in school, it is impossible to determine whether length of schooling or age group was the more important factor. (SEAC 1992, pp. 67, 70)

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If schools are being effective in what they do, then the tendency for children who spend longer in schools to achieve at significantly higher levels than those who have attended for a shorter time, may be taken as a measure of the success of the schools. However, in the process of testing itself, the teachers saw this tendency as unfair to particular pupils. Similarly, teachers were concerned about the influence of external factors on children’s performance: Some schools which may start off further along the road— perhaps children can all read when they come into school—are obviously going to do a lot better than schools where there are tremendous social problems, where for children to even come to school and sit down at a table on a chair and do some work is a bit of a miracle anyway. They are not going to have such good results as the other schools, and that is a worrying thought. (Fran) The Times Educational Supplement (13.12.91) reported that children in inner-city schools had performed less well on SATs than children in the suburbs. This was a point which the ENCA report (SEAC 1992, p. 227) also highlighted: ‘A consistent pattern of scoring also emerged with regard to social background. There was a declining pattern of performance with declining status of residential neighbourhood.’ The report also identified other issues which had an impact on performance. These were that: 1 children from different ethnic backgrounds showed different patterns of attainment; 2 there was a consistent pattern of lower scoring from children whose first language was not English; 3 the performance of children with special educational needs was significantly lower than children not so designated. None of these findings was surprising, but they illustrate a further source of stress on teachers who wished the testing process to be fair.

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QUESTIONING PROFESSIONAL JUDGEMENT Our teachers’ views were similar to the reactions of the 1990 pilot teachers and the 1991 teachers, as reported in ENCA 1 (SEAC 1992), that, although in general the tests did not tell them anything about their pupils which they did not already know, they sometimes gave the teacher pause for thought, because the results were surprising and brought into question the teacher’s previous professional judgements: With most of the children I knew (what level they were at) and most of the SATs have come out as I forecast they would, with the exception of handwriting and some of the English things, because I think that they got away with murder, they achieved Level 3 and I don’t think they should have done. (Eva) This judgement may reflect a view that the tests were pitched too low and thereby helps explain the common finding (SEAC 1992) that TA scores were lower than SAT scores when there was discrepancy. That is to say, it would be argued that this teacher had herself misjudged the level which her children were capable of attaining by underestimating their abilities. We do not know whether her judgement was correct because it is difficult to see how she could arrive at an accurate view because it was not possible to know whether the attainment targets were ‘properly’ pitched. A recent project evaluating the implementation of the Statutory Orders for English, and the subsequent recommendations of the National Curriculum Council to amend those orders, indicated that there was room for doubting the accuracy of the levels in some respects (NCC 1992). The inherent ambiguity of the statements of attainment, the subjectivity of the criteria applied, the multiplicity of activities to assess and the individuality of the administration of the SATs caused teachers generally less concern in 1991 than in the 1990 SATs. The ENCA project found that the SATs were ‘a well-received package of activities’ which pupils themselves found enjoyable (SEAC 1992, p. 71). However, our teachers felt that there remained questions about what the tests were measuring. Fran, for example, was concerned with test validity, though she did not use that term:

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They [the SATs] need to be looked at again because some of the things, for instance, were tremendously time-consuming. One of the maths ones was making a gauge…one of the questions there is what it was assessing. Was it ability to work in a group? Was it who had the loudest voice? My colleague had a lot of very interesting things come up on that—some children [whom] she thought were really very good at maths did not show up particularly well on that because they were rather shy…I think some of them [the test items] are rather unbalanced. The level of difficulty in quite a few of the assignments is not the same. In one of the maths ones my colleagues felt that the Level 3 was easier than the Level 2, which is not the right way round. (Fran) In this sense, if in no other, the testing process was contributing to the ‘reflective practice’ promoted by many critics of the national curriculum assessment arrangements (e.g. Pollard 1991). SUMMARY We cannot be sure about how far the six teachers interviewed for this chapter were typical of infant teachers generally, although much of what they said echoed the findings of national evaluations conducted by, or on behalf of, the Government agency charged with responsibility for advising the Secretary of State on the assessment arrangements for the national curriculum. What characterised their perceptions was a frenetic obsession with test management and with the details of administering the tests, doubtless due to their novelty. Overload—excessive time devoted to the overall testing process and stress arising from uncertainty—dominated the teachers’ perceptions. There was some limited change in classroom organisation towards more group work in order to free teachers to concentrate on individuals and small groups being tested, and this was seen as adversely affecting pupil behaviour and teacher-pupil relationships. Against this, teachers thought the pupils enjoyed the SAT activity and the increased personal attention they received when being tested. Support for teachers during the testing period varied in ways that brought reliability into question. Despite the main preoccupation with manageability, the tests provoked some critical reflection from the teachers focused on fairness, social influences on pupil performance, and the technical validity of the tests.

4 PERCEPTIONS OF THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

How teachers perceive educational reform or innovation is influenced by their experience of how it is introduced and implemented. Most analysts attach much significance to the meaning of educational change. Fullan (1991) distinguishes between the objective reality of change and the subjective realities of those involved in the change process, and both Marris (1974) and Rudduck (1991) emphasise the need for shared meaning to be developed if change is to be implemented successfully. This chapter examines the degree of congruence between our teachers’ subjective realities and the process of implementing the national curriculum, and discusses the extent to which, in this context, there is justification for Fullan’s (1991) claim that ‘change is usually not introduced in a way that takes into account the subjective reality of teachers’. We present our teachers’ perceptions as they relate to three levels of national curriculum implementation: that which emanated directly from central government, that which was LEA-initiated and that which was school-initiated. At each level, the implementation process was judged by our teachers according to its effect on their own delivery of the national curriculum, and we identify those factors which they saw as facilitating or impeding their purposes. CENTRALLY INITIATED MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE Despite their general approval in principle of the national curriculum (see Chapter 2), the aspects of the government-initiated management of change to which our teachers referred were, without exception, identified either as impediments or, at least, as being unhelpful to their own implementation of the national curriculum. Four issues were

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raised: speed of implementation, poor communication, frequent modification and inadequate resourcing. Speed of implementation Most teachers (19:0:5) felt hampered by the government-imposed timescale within which the national curriculum was being introduced. This was considered to be far too short for successful implementation. New statutory orders and assessment procedures were, it was felt, being introduced far too quickly and there was a pervasive sense of having been rushed: In the beginning it seemed to come in wave upon wave of thick folders, and we just didn’t seem to have enough time to sit quietly and sort out the folders in some logical way. (Ann) I really do think it was very bad in the way that they implemented it all so very quickly. I think the amount of documentation we’re expected to read and implement came out so quickly, and I don’t think anybody has any idea, unless they actually teach young children, how shattered you are by the end of the teaching day, and to suddenly start reading documents—it really is difficult. And most primary school teachers still have 100 per cent teaching timetables, they don’t get a break. Sometimes you’re lucky to have time to go to the loo during the day! (Jane) It’s the ‘Bang! Let’s do it all now’, instead of bit-by-bit and learn and improve as we go along. (Vivienne) The consensus was that a much more gradual implementation would have given teachers greater confidence and competence by allowing them to get to grips with one or two subject documents at a time. A few (5:0:10) teachers suggested that, in particular, assessment had been introduced far too soon in the implementation programme: They’ve tried to push everything through far too fast. They’re not giving us time to digest one thing before there’s another thrust at

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you. And to start assessment this year!—well, it’s just a nonsense, in my view. (Patrick) We feel we’ve had it all thrown at us too fast…I think we could’ve done with running it for two or three years without doing these SATs…just to get us into the way of working like that. You could see where you hadn’t covered an attainment target, and how you could possibly cover it, how you could organise your classroom to cope with all this assessing which is going to be done. But we’ve had one year of doing it and then this year we’re into the SATs and we don’t feel we’ve had the time to cope with it at all. (Brenda) The speed of the implementation of the national curriculum was often interpreted as the fundamental deficiency of the process from which several others emanated. In particular, it allowed insufficient time for government agencies to communicate their ideas and intentions with clarity in a way which allowed teachers to feel involved (see Rudduck 1991, p. 30). In this respect, our findings corroborate those of Relf (1992): Without doubt the most common response was to criticise the actions of the politicians in charge of education in this country. Secretaries of State for Education were condemned for their shortsightedness, failure to plan ahead, and disinclination to value the advice of professionals within education. Poor communication Other interviewees (7:0:17) complained of the government’s failure to involve teachers in the decision-making which was integral to implementing the national curriculum. Not only was this perceived as insulting, since it implicitly called into question teachers’ professionalism and expertise, but it was seen to result in an inappropriate and unhelpful implementation process which had failed to take account of the practicalities involved: The lack of consultation. I feel it’s all being done without me saying anything and I find that insulting because I’m a teacher.

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I’m at the sharp end of it and I’m not being asked what I think and ‘Will this work, or will this not work?’ We’re just being told to get on with it—do it—and that’s been the thing which has really annoyed me the most, I think, and really made me feel, ‘Why should I do it?’ (Sheila) We, as professionals, had little idea as to what was going on. We were supposed to justify what we were doing and we were supposed to educate parents, but we’d no idea and we’ve had to go back on some things…we never really were sure what was happening. So, I think that the fact that it came in so quickly without our being consulted was something that upset a lot of people. (Tricia) The sense that an erosion of their professionalism was being effected by the government’s lack of consultation over the implementation of the national curriculum was made explicit by a substantial minority of our teachers (6:0:18). It is an issue which is also raised by Kelly (1990, p. 103) who attributes lowered teacher morale to: the undermining of their professionalism and the reduction in their scope for exercising their professional judgement which the introduction of the national curriculum, and especially the planning of it with little reference to the teachers, have brought about. Furthermore, it reaffirms Fullan’s (1992) suggestion that a notion of the passive professional underlies many intensification-type reforms. He warns that such reforms: focussing on narrowly defined and imposed curriculum and teacher competencies repel good people from entering and/or staying. Bureaucratic reforms may be able to guarantee minimal performance, but not excellence in teaching… and advocates interactive professionalism, whereby teachers would be much more involved in the development of reform. There is an important mismatch here between objective and subjective realities for our teachers: the statutory orders were technically sent out for repeated

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consultation but, particularly because of limited consultation time, the teachers themselves did not perceive that they had been involved in an authentic way. Teachers (6:0:18) reported that information and directives which they considered necessary were consistently slow in arriving. As Tricia’s comments, above, implied, this caused concern about appearing illinformed to parents. She continued: We had to learn about which books children were going to read and when they were going to be tested for the SATs from the Daily Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, under such headings as, These are what the bright children will read’ or ‘This is what the average child will read.’ And…parents would say to us, ‘Well, what’s this national curriculum?’ and we had to look them straight in the eye and say, ‘We haven’t seen the documents…’ We hadn’t had any of the documents. We didn’t know when it was happening. Moreover, it was felt that the inefficient dissemination of advice was creating unnecessary work, as Christine explained: We’re trying to do everything at the last minute. The moderators who were running this training last week had only had the stuff two weeks themselves. They’d been breaking their necks to put it into a form that would make it easily understandable for Year 2 teachers, and now we’re having to implement it when we’d already started on the job. So it’s changed some of the things we’ve already done. I think that if we could’ve had this information this year to use next year it would’ve made the job a lot easier as we’re trying to do it in retrospect all the time. Unclear communication, conflicting advice and directives, and inadequate information, were all reported as deficiencies of the implementation process which were undermining teachers’ efficiency: I found, actually, finding my way around the documents extremely difficult. I think you could’ve done with an ‘Idiot’s s Guide’. (Ann)

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Documents from SEAC tell you things like, to get to Level 2 in writing a child has to use two sentences with a capital letter and a full stop…but they’re not all in one document, they’re all over the place and they tend to send another document which supersedes what you’ve already got. (Christine) Our findings corroborate those of Silcock (1990); many teachers shared a ‘profound feeling that no-one has really checked out in advance the practicalities of national curriculum implementation’. This perception was reinforced by the various alterations and re-adjustments which many teachers were having to accommodate. Frequent modification As design faults manifested themselves, the national curriculum was modified with a frequency which frustrated and demoralised teachers. Tricia’s comments illustrate the extent to which those involved had come to accept constant changes as part and parcel of the implementation process: I went on a course and one of the lecturers joked, ‘Well, as far as I can tell, there was nothing on the radio this morning so I think the national curriculum has stayed the same!’ But the frequent modifications were regarded by our teachers as beyond a joke. They were perceived as vindication of their concern that the national curriculum should have been designed by those who have experience and understanding of the practicalities involved. Several teachers (5:0:19) were resentful of having wasted time on activities which, as a result of modifications, later proved to have been unnecessary. Some reported adopting revised tactics, which essentially involved waiting until as late as possible before responding to directives and other documentation to safeguard against wasted effort. Some went even further, adopting the ‘sod it’ response, which Helen’s comments typify: When you’ve responded to something they change it. They keep saying they’re going to trim a bit off that and they’re going to change this—forget the number you first thought of!…and, in the end, I’ve just put the technology document on my shelf and I

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haven’t opened it. And I guess the others will now take the same place…The first ones that came out, you know, I sort of pored over them—he midnight oil job. But now I just think, ‘Sod it!’ Relf (1992) describes how his sample responded to the reduction in the number of mathematics national curriculum attainment targets: Teachers in many schools spent a great deal of time adapting and cross-referencing existing syllabuses to that [first] version. Their frustration on being told that it all had to change has been deep and widespread. The extent of resentment expressed has been considerable—the words ‘irresponsible’ and ‘incompetent’ have been used by several teachers to describe those in charge of the changes. What is particularly regrettable is that it has been the hardest working and most conscientious teachers that have suffered most. Those that did little and adopted a wait-and-see attitude appear to have taken the wisest course of action and suffered least disruption. At the time of writing, the NCC (1993a) has, yet again, proposed changes to the national curriculum content in response to evidence that its reported unmanageability was inhibiting fulfilment of the aims and purpose of the Education Reform Act 1988 (see also Pascall 1992). The proposed reduction of content in each Subject Order to a ‘core of essential knowledge, understanding and skills’ (NCC 1993a) may demoralise teachers much more than the ‘constant tinkering’ (Winkley 1992) which was a feature of the earlier stages of the implementation process. Many schools, as Campbell and Neill (1992) point out, have already invested considerable time and effort trying to organise effective delivery of the national curriculum, only to discover, now, that much of it is to be jettisoned. Any smugness which teachers may have felt on realising that their predictions of overload and unmanageability have been fulfilled is likely to be overshadowed by the frustration and anger at having wasted so much time. It is also possible, as Black (1992) reported of science teachers after the revision of the science orders, that teacher commitment to the principle of the reform process itself might be eroded.

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Inadequate resourcing Exacerbating the problems of overload of curriculum content were those of inadequate resourcing, to which several teachers referred (9:0:15). The most frequently identified problem was that of teacher-pupil ratios which inhibited what most teachers perceived to be satisfactory implementation of the national curriculum: Smaller classes would be a God-send…If we had smaller classes we could keep greater tabs on the children. (Nina) The only thing I’d like, really, is smaller classes so that we could do more group work. (Kathy) I’d have twenty if it were a perfect world and I could choose. I’d just have twenty children in the class and I could do wonders then. (Denise) Once your class size gets over twenty-four I think it begins to get unmanageable. (Ellen) I think thirty children for introducing the national curriculum and teaching them to read is beyond a joke! (Angie) Whilst most called for a reduction of class size, some teachers (5:1:18) suggested the alternative of extra teaching or ancillary help: …please, if you want me to implement the national curriculum, can you put two teachers in every classroom? (Rose) Perhaps an extra pair of hands, if that would be possible. (Patrick) We can see from Appendix I, Tables 1p and 1s, that this balance of viewpoint was reflected in the questionnaire responses about the

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perceived obstacles to implementing the national curriculum and the use to which extra staffing would be put. But the general feeling was one of disdain and, to some extent, incredulity, that the government had tried to introduce a major educational reform with minimal expenditure: It comes right down to the bottom line, it comes down to money. If you want the national curriculum to work and if you want teachers to deliver the best they possibly can to the best of their ability you’ve got to support them, I say, financially. But I’m not talking about salary…but it’s got to be there, where it really matters. It’s got to be there for the classroom. It’s got to be there in the shape of other people to help you, people to relieve you for non-contact time, to make sure your resources are there, so you haven’t got to devote your energy to scrounging them. Twenty minutes on the ‘phone trying to raise money is twenty minutes when you could’ve been doing something else. ‘If you’re going to do it, for God’s sake don’t do it on the cheap’, I think that’s what I’d like to say to Kenneth Clarke if I had the opportunity—‘We agree with you, but go back and find some more money!’ (Patrick) Fullan (1991) reminds us that we ought to consider, at least in part, government’s perspectives in implementing reform, since this may elucidate the reasons for what might otherwise be considered unrealistic time-scales for the process. Nevertheless, even allowing for the necessity of working to parliamentary, and possibly electoral, deadlines, it was evidently the case that what our teachers perceived to have been lacking from the government-initiated management of change is some conception of how the national curriculum might be efficiently delivered at school and classroom level. The subjective realities shared by our teachers were not accommodated within the government’s agenda for change. It is perhaps ironic that a White Paper, Better Schools (1985), first indicated that primary schools needed improved staffing; that the House of Commons Select Committee (House of Commons 1986) argued that primary schools could not be expected to raise standards without improved staffing; and that, in 1993, another Select Committee investigated the disparity in funding between primary and secondary schools.

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LOCAL AUTHORITY-INITIATED MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE Some analysts of educational innovation suggest that neither top-down, centralised, mandated reform, nor bottom-up, school-initiated change are effective (Fullan 1992; Louis and Dentler 1988). Top-down reform is susceptible to ‘slippage’ between the statute books and the classroom, and it also seldom accommodates individual, idiosyncratic, local requirements (Louis and Dentler 1988). Moreover, centralised reform— particularly what Fullan (1991, 1992) identifies as ‘intensification’, which involves ‘Increased definition of curriculum, mandated textbooks, standardised tests tightly aligned with curriculum, specification of teaching and administrative methods backed up by evaluation’ (Fullan 1991)—generally fails because it is only able to standardise effectively and appropriately with respect to very narrow goals (Fullan 1992). Clearly, then, if centrally-initiated reform does not boast a good track record, and if placing the onus of responsibility for change on individual schools is similarly doomed to failure, some half-way agency would potentially play a significant role in the management of change. Both Fullan (1992) and Louis and Dentler (1988) identify possible solutions which relate to Canadian and United States contexts. Fullan (1992, p. 120) emphasises the critical role of the district, while Louis and Dentler (1988) favour a school-focused knowledge-use strategy. An integral component of this is ‘social processing’, which is partly a dissemination process and partly an adaptation and modification process; a means of reaching workability through consensus and compromise. In the context of England and Wales, the most obvious parallel to these ‘half-way house’ strategies is the use of local education authorities (LEAs) as agencies for social processing of a similar type to that identified above. This is partly because LEAs have taken a major role in defining ‘good practice’ in their schools (see Alexander 1992) and because they have been the initial mechanism for earmarked in-service training for the national curriculum. However, in their provision of inservice training and dissemination geared towards the national curriculum, the local authorities were perceived by our teachers to have performed with diverse degrees of competence. It was a minority of interviewees (6:15:3) who suggested that certain aspects of their In-service training had been good enough to be categorised as facilitatory:

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I’ve been very impressed with the amount of in-service that we’ve had. I think it’s a good idea because it’s been good to have a lot of discussion about the preparation for the national curriculum and assessment. I think it’s been very good…I think we wouldn’t have taken the new ideas on board without that, really. (Ursula) I think some of the best in-service that I’ve been involved in has been when an adviser has actually come into our school, or somebody from the advisory team has come into school—like the technology people—they were wonderful, they were very good. They came and showed us things and we actually did things. I thought that was very good indeed…I think it was something we were worried about and didn’t realise we were doing very much of it already…The maths advisory team have made some super documents helping you with the national curriculum document itself, and broken things down and put practical activities, which has been great…the maths has certainly been super! (Denise) The Authority has certainly made it a lot easier. They’re always very much on the ball and they’ve sent the inspectors in to help us and give us advice and set us on the right path. (Irene) I’m very lucky because there was a lot of in-service training, getting to know the documents, and science work, and that really did help, going through it with other teachers rather than independently. (Penny) Similarly, two teachers (who worked for the same Authority) both reported how the Authority’s initiative to promote ‘negotiated learning’ to encourage pupil autonomy in classroom routines within its schools (see also Chapter 5) had helped implementation of the national curriculum. One of them explained how it had helped: it gives you more time because the children decide themselves, they don’t come up to you and say, ‘Can I go in the sand?’, ‘Can I go and do a painting?’ They decide themselves…it does actually work…you don’t get these children coming up to you and saying,

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‘Shall we draw?’…you do have more time to sit with the children through all these assessments…it’s a change for the better but it does involve a lot of work…they said it was going to help us and I think it has helped. (Felicity) On the other hand, many responses (15:6:3) to local authority initiatives were considerably less complimentary: The in-service training is very friendly. It’s a valiant effort but I don’t feel it’s very successful. It just focuses your attention more on the problems, or raises more problems than it tries to solve. (Rose) So-called advisers, I don’t think, know any more than we do and can’t advise at the moment. We have got one who we are doing this assessment with and I feel he isn’t half a step ahead of us, and it really is just a waste of time…When you’ve been in the job so long there’s not a lot they can tell you that’s new, and most of the time they’re trying to get ideas out of us. They come and say, ‘Right, we’ll split into groups and you’ll do this and you’ll come back and report.’ All they want to do is pick our brains and then go off to the next school with the idea. (Patrick) I think, on the whole, it’s [in-service training] been very poor— very poor, too late, and even when we’ve gone on courses it hasn’t really met the needs we’ve had…I’ve been mainly to maths—you’ve tended to go to your own curriculum area…and the advisers and the people at the courses said that they didn’t really know much more than us. And I felt I was one step ahead of them anyway, sitting there and thinking, ‘Yes, I know this.’ I was actually sent back from one course that I went on because the first half was exactly the same as I’d had the last time, although it was meant to be a follow-on! So I went back to school. Most of it, in terms of training, in the end we developed ourselves how we were going to fit the schemes in because the Authority’s provision for training is that poor! (Olive)

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As we repeat elsewhere in this book (see Chapter 5), it was their own delivery of the national curriculum which was the main concern of our teachers. When the statutory orders were released and found to be prescriptive in terms of content only, with limited and varied nonstatutory guidance for curriculum delivery, and even less advice on assessment and record-keeping, teachers looked to their local education authorities to provide practical ideas for making the national curriculum work. In the light of research findings (Barnes and Shinn-Taylor 1988; see also Wragg 1991) which revealed teachers to be lacking confidence in their ability to teach national curriculum science, music and technology, there was clearly a need for much national curriculumfocused in-service training. Yet, in the case of our sample, this need was seldom met satisfactorily. It needs to be borne in mind that only a minority of those leading the training were likely to have had experience at Key Stage 1, and by definition it is certain that none had had to deliver the whole national curriculum. In the many cases where our teachers deemed their local education authorities to be deficient, the role of the schools in the implementation process became crucial. SCHOOL - INITIATED MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE Whilst school-initiated innovation has seldom been found to have lasting success (Louis and Dentler 1988; Fullan 1992) the role of schools in the reform implementation process is crucial. Even legislated reform is at the mercy of school- and classroom-level implementation, as we illustrate in Chapter 5, where we examine different degrees of national curriculum implementation. Much has been written about how teachers’ work and attitudes are affected by what Pollard (1987, p. 107) describes as: ‘a collectively and historically evolved set of practices, cultural assumptions and beliefs which are relatively taken-for-granted as “the way we do things here’” (see, for example, Goodchild and Holly 1989; Nias 1989; Evans 1992a, 1992b). Pollard (1982, 1987) labels this ‘institutional bias’, whilst others call it ‘school culture’ (Goodchild and Holly 1989; Nias et al. 1989). We could use both terms interchangeably, accepting both Pollard’s (1982, 1987) preference for a term which incorporates consideration of the significance of power differentials, and Goodchild and Holly’s (1989, p. 139) distinction between ethos—‘the intended dimension…what people ought to value’; culture—‘the effective, actual, practice-based dimension’; and climate—‘the school’s tone or

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atmosphere…which constitutes the linkage…between ethos and culture’. A more inclusive term for this collection of factors is the ‘workplace culture’, and we follow Evetts (1990) in adopting this term. Our teachers’ comments revealed the extent to which their delivery of the national curriculum was facilitated or impeded by the workplace culture in their schools. More specifically, we have identified two distinct, but inter-related, factors; collegiality and leadership, which both affect and are affected by school culture. Collegiality Collegiality is a contested concept in relation to primary schools (see Campbell 1985; Southworth 1989; Hargreaves 1990). We are using the term in a simple sense: working with colleagues collaboratively. The importance of moral support from colleagues is discussed in Chapter 7, where we relate it to teachers’ capacity for coping with stress. But some of our teachers (4:3:17) also highlighted ways in which the degree of practical support from one or more colleagues influenced the implementation of the national curriculum in their schools: Support from colleagues is good…we try and team teach a little bit so, at the end of the day when it’s story time, instead of everybody doing a story we couple-up for story. And when SATs are on we’re going to treble-up. (Ursula) Not all comments relating to colleagues were positive. Complaints about colleagues illustrated how national curriculum implementation could be impaired by shared negative attitudes, or by those with key roles, such as curriculum coordinators, neglecting their responsibilities: The maths co-ordinator—the only thing she’s done for me is given me some Unifix cubes that have come, and that’s all she’s done. And she’s brought in some strips of numbers that I can stick on my table if I want to—which I don’t want to…The science post-holder is supposed to have responsibility for science but when I wanted to do electricity I had to go and buy fuses. I had to go and buy all this stuff because we hadn’t got it in school… there’s just no organisation. (Angie)

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My colleague, who was involved in a team meeting with the Year 2 teachers—because they were doing assessment—and had a team meeting with them, ‘phoned me after school, Friday, to say that she’d arranged for someone to cover me this morning so I could go in and chat with them because they’re planning to do a little assessment activity tomorrow morning. So I went into school, that was fine; it’d all been set up, the Head was going to take their classes for a joint assembly, I was going to talk to the teachers concerned, so we got it all set up, went across to their rooms at 11. 30—and they knew nothing about it!…The other teacher then spent the rest of the session apologising—but it’s just things like that…nobody actually has a clear role, nobody knows who’s organising what…everything you do is a cock-up. (Helen) I went to a seminar at the teachers’ centre yesterday, fed it back to the senior management meeting last night and then had this fairly unproductive little seminar with the staff this morning. And reporting to parents, of course, is the next thing—the Primary Heads group in the City are actually working on a pro-forma which will go throughout the City if people want it—and I fed this back, and all I got was, ‘Ooh, Umm, Ooh—how are we going to cope?’ I mean, that’s the level it’s at as regards all of it—so the national curriculum’s being ignored—and they hope it’ll go away! (Helen) However, whilst collegial support was identified as an important component of school-initiated implementation of the national curriculum, considerably more significance was attached to the leadership in schools, not least because it is capable of influencing collegiality. Leadership The attitude and behaviour of headteachers and, in particular, the ways in which they shape the workplace culture in primary schools has been found to be a key determinant of teacher morale and job satisfaction (Nias 1980; Evans 1992a, 1992b), and this issue is discussed in more depth in Chapter 5. In terms of directly and indirectly facilitating or impeding implementation of the national curriculum, it is clear from our

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teachers’ comments that headteachers played a crucial and usually positive role. As Winkley (1990) points out: The National Curriculum does not obviate the need for the head to develop a climate in the school which has its own sense of values and independence of mind. The old problems and challenges of leadership remain. The leader needs to encourage participation, to build on staff strengths, to help evolve a vision amongst staff— this remains the primary challenge of leadership… A substantial minority of our teachers (7:5:12) were full of praise for their headteachers and specified the various practical ways in which they had played an important part in promoting positive attitudes to national curriculum implementation: we have a head who’s very understanding, you know. I think some teachers I know work for very demanding heads, and ours is very understanding. She’s allowed us to go on courses and allowed us to do things to help us get to grips with the national curriculum. (Brenda) We have a very enthusiastic headmaster who does all he can to be helpful and supports teachers all the way…We’re in a fortunate position in that our head will take some classes and has organised the time so that we have some time… (Linda) we’re very well resourced, purely because our head takes that very seriously. If we need equipment it’s provided because we’re self-managing in our Authority, so I suppose we don’t have any problems in that respect. We’ve had a massive influx of science equipment which we didn’t have. If we go to her and way, ‘Look, we need this and this and this’, she’ll provide it for us, so that’s a great help. (Rose) For some teachers, though, their headteachers’ approaches to national curriculum implementation were reported as much more constraining than enabling (5:7:12). There were reports of over-zealous heads whose evident commitment to a ‘by-the-book’ implementation of the national

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curriculum placed considerable pressure on their teachers and undoubtedly increased their workload beyond what could be considered realistic parameters (see also Chapter 5). The greatest disdain, however, was directed at those heads whose ‘head-in-the-sand’ or ‘paying lip-service’ attitudes to implementing the national curriculum (Chapter 5) frustrated and angered teachers whose own delivery of the national curriculum was being thwarted as a result: I feel that I would have dealt better with all this national curriculum assessment stuff working with someone like my previous head. The problem is definitely lack of management; we have got people in management who don’t really understand it… At the moment, would you believe, we haven’t got a school development plan. The head and deputy cannot organise themselves and get it together, so everything seems to be carrying equal weight, whether it’s that this dinner lady was away today so that class was unsupervised, to the assessment orders that have just come in—it’s all equal…Nobody was there saying, ‘Well, OK, we don’t actually like the national curriculum but let’s look seriously at what we are doing and how we can incorporate it, and if anybody comes along and challenges us, we can say, “Yes, we are considering this and this is how we are going it.”’ But there was no response made to it at all, so nothing was done…and I have tried and tried to get the head to give me a job description and to discuss with me what he thinks we, as a school, should be doing as regards assessment, and I can’t get anything out of him because he’s no thoughts about what he wants to see happening in the school. He’s got no kind of educational vision or educational philosophy so we’ve got nothing in place, no educational policy in place, nothing in place…not for anything…absolutely nothing! (Helen) In such cases there was little that dissatisfied teachers could do to compensate for what they perceived as their headteachers’ ineptitude and, as we discuss in Chapter 7, disempowerment of this kind was a major source of stress. Amongst our sample, Helen’s views represent minority cases, but they nevertheless serve to illustrate the conventional wisdom (as in Alexander et al. 1992) which takes the view that effective implementation of educational reform ultimately depends upon individual headteachers.

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SUMMARY Overall we need to set our teachers’ readiness to approve and implement the national curriculum, illustrated in Chapter 2, against the blunting of their enthusiasm in the process of implementation. We interviewed them towards the end of the second year of implementation, but many of the factors seen as impeding them, such as the pace of centrally directed change and its constant amendment, inappropriate professional development and training, and inadequate management of change at school level, persisted. If there was an ‘implementation dip’ in their perceptions, it lasted for longer than the initial stage of implementation, even though we captured the teachers’ difficulties when they were most freshly felt. The most generally powerful blunting instruments were the perceptions of unrealistic and unrealisable government initiatives, wrongly paced and frequently changed. The facilitating elements, collegiality and leadership particularly, for our teachers in 1991 were the factors most directly experienced on a day-to-day basis, but where they were missing or ineffective the teachers were largely powerless to bring about change. The two elements seen in the literature as potentially empowering for some teachers were equally disempowering for others, since analysis of effective collegiality and leadership offer little in the way of guidance about how teachers may move the culture of their workplace to these desirable states if they do not already exist.

5 CURRICULUM PLANNING AND CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Only when educational reform becomes operational does it take on meaning. In the case of curriculum reform it is teachers who are fundamentally responsible for translating documented policy into workable practice, as Olson and Eaton (1987, p. 193) point out: it is they who must find a way of making new ideas work; it is through their taking new ideas seriously that the innovators can assess what new ideas mean in practice. As we report in Chapter 2, most of our teachers were taking the national curriculum seriously and trying to make it work. This chapter presents their accounts of how they were going about the day-to-day business of planning the curriculum and implementing it in their classrooms. FOUR APPROACHES There was considerable diversity in the ways in which the national curriculum was put into practice. We have identified four very broad categories which, for the most part, reflected attitudes towards the national curriculum. We refer to these as: ‘head-in-the-sand’, ‘paying lip-service’, ‘common-sense’, and ‘by the book’. The ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach Essentially this represented non-implementation. It was typified by those many schools which, according to HMI (DES 1991) reports, by the summer term of 1990 had no scheme of work for Key Stage 1 in one or other of the core subjects. There was only one such case amongst our sample.

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Helen’s school was effectively ignoring the national curriculum, with the headteacher and many of the staff, according to Helen, ‘hoping it will go away’. Planning for its implementation, therefore, had been minimal: We’ve tried to keep a broad curriculum going, thematically based, but it just hasn’t been related to the national curriculum, and people are just beginning to panic now, when the first assessment is in sight. Furthermore, since delivering the national curriculum is the collective responsibility of the whole school, particularly at the planning stage (see, for example, Alexander et al. 1992), an individual working on her own faced mainly frustration. Helen’s individual attempts to make it work were being undermined by her colleagues’ attitudes: I planned as I had before with reference to the documents after I’d done the planning—to see which areas were being missed out, mainly…That’s what’s supposed to be being done as people plan for their different age groups, their different teams. But we’re trying to leave the attainment targets until last to see which ones perhaps we need to plan more specifically for. But, again, you see, we’ve got members of staff who’re supposed to be writing up schemes of work retrospectively, after we’ve planned the work and written up notes about how it’s gone. Then those notes are handed to colleagues who are supposed to write up the schemes of work with the attainment targets built in. But, you see, some of the members of staff who are supposed to be doing it don’t do it. Thus, if key members of staff had their heads in the sand, the national curriculum had very little chance of being implemented effectively. The ‘paying lip-service’ approach To some extent this was a defiant, almost grudging, approach, which some teachers perceived as a means of coping. It was ex-emplified by token gestures, by partial, measured implementation. For various reasons, teachers adopting this approach were very selective of what they were prepared to take on. What generally resulted were cosmetic changes, typified by those observed by HMI (DES 1991): ‘Where

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schemes had been revised, revision sometimes consisted of little more than indicating how activities could encompass attainment targets.’ Patrick’s account of his school’s planning suggested a similar process. Like most of our examples of this approach, it features the ‘justificatory discourse’ (Reynolds and Saunders 1987) which was used to explain teachers’ varied reasons for carrying out minimal implementation: It’s the school topics that we follow and, fortunately, they’ve fallen in quite nicely with the national curriculum…When we knew that science was coming we devised a science scheme for the school and we already had topics organised so all we had to do was change one or two, bring them down from junior to top infant. I think the only one we had to change was ‘Magnetism’. Christine’s comments sum up the ‘paying lip-service’ approach: We will do it, but in our way…I carry on with what I’m doing until I absolutely have to do something about all the paper that’s landed on me. And then I’ll give it lip-service, change my ways a bit, perhaps fill in what it asks for and carry on in a slightly different way… And Rose described the discretionary approach which her school had adopted: We’re taking the national curriculum and saying. ‘Yes, look, if that supports us we’ll use that.’ But in a number of cases over the past few months we’ve said, ‘If s in direct conflict with what we’re trying to do and we don’t think it’s serving the children or their parents to do that.’ We won’t ignore it, we won’t throw it out of school, or whatever, but we won’t give it as much importance as other elements. Paying lip-service thus enabled the teachers to appear to be meeting statutory obligations, even where, for one reason or another, they were not committed to doing so. It also allowed them to convince themselves that they were protecting their own professional priorities.

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The ‘common-sense’ approach Many of our teachers made conscientious efforts to accommodate the national curriculum, involving, to use Ann’s words, ‘giving it my best shot’. But the process was controlled by either the realistic expectations of headteachers or by limitations imposed by teachers themselves. Industriousness and diligence were very much in evidence, but were tempered by the realisation that it would not be disastrous if some degree of compromise were incorporated into implementing the national curriculum. Essentially, common-sense intervention curtailed unrealistic demands. This degree of implementation is described by Marsh (1990, p. 182): The provision of the National Curriculum is akin to a driver being given a road atlas. It is useful in that it provides a broad perspective, but in the reality of the journey the effective driver is able to leave the atlas to one side in order to be free to ‘read the road’, adapt to the challenge of diversions and make judgements in relation to traffic flow and the behaviour of other motorists. With the walker, a pre-occupation with the map would merely serve to obscure the reality of the actual terrain. The ‘common-sense’ approach often involved short-cuts or time-saving strategies: We work on a topic system which is either as long or as short as you want to make it. Well, this term I’m making it last! (Mary) our plan for this term will be mine for the same time next year and I put on the attainment targets by hand—all those attainment targets that I could see were covered by my plan. So, week by week, I haven’t been doing them. (Nina) Or sometimes teachers would be prepared to invest a lot of time and effort if this promised to reap benefits later: I’ve got what I call a ‘planning board’. You take a photograph of children doing all these activities and then you stick them on the board and underneath you have four screws and they hook their

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name on it. So, if, say, four people at a time are allowed in the sand and when they go there all four hooks are filled they know they have to go somewhere else. An awful lot of planning went into it, but once it’s working you can sit back and watch it work. (Felicity) Most frequently, though, teachers’ common sense manifested itself through their flexible approach to teaching. They were not afraid of incorporating spontaneity on occasions and, where appropriate, deviating from the content in the statutory orders: it shouldn’t be the ‘be all and end all’. It’s like a framework and you should be able to fit things round it—like when we had the snow. We ignored what had to be done and went out and built two snowmen. Actually, we were laughing because we felt sure it covered some attainment target. (Mary) Thus the common-sense approach enabled the teachers to accept the changed objectives of the national curriculum, but to incorporate existing practices where they were appropriate. The ‘by the book’ approach In contrast to Mary’s illustration of how she was prepared to drop everything to pursue what she considered a justifiable activity, Sheila described how she felt bound by the statutory orders: I’ve had to cut down on things which I, personally, felt were very important for this sort of age, things like sharing news—and time, just having time to sit and chat and talk. Sharing books, things like, when it snowed we all wanted to go out in the playground and do footprints and things like that, but you feel, ‘Can I really justify the time?’ This exemplifies the ‘by the book’ approach to implementing the national curriculum which many of our teachers seemed to have adopted. It represented an uncompromising rigidity and pressured commitment towards delivering the contents of the subject documents to the last letter and, out of fear of running out of time, to the exclusion of what may be termed ‘non-regulation’ activities. It was similar to

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what Hudson (1966) called the ‘syllabus-bound’ attitude, and it treated the statutory orders as letters of the law, to be implemented down to the last iota. The ‘by the book’ approach manifested itself by lack of spontaneity in selecting learning activities: ‘You can’t just go off at a whim and do a topic, you have to stick to what you’ve planned, to make sure you cover everything’ (Sheila) and by rigid planning, record-keeping and timetabling which, for the most part, were whole-school initiatives, usually reflecting the seriousness with which individual headteachers regarded the national curriculum. Olive’s school was a typical example: ‘it’s resulted in a rigid curriculum. I try and juggle it around a little bit but the timetable is there that we’re meant to follow.’ Ann’s description of the complexity of her job illustrates what was clearly underpinning implementation of the national curriculum to this extreme: What’s really hard is where you have an attainment target which has various components, and isolating those components…the content within each attainment target in some categories is quite considerable and so, to achieve that attainment target, the child has to achieve all of these, and so you’re juggling, fitting in bits and pieces whereas, before, you wouldn’t have taken so much notice of those details…now you’re being pinned down to, categorically, ‘Have they achieved it or have they not?’ Underlying the ‘by the book’ approach, was a relentless determination to acquire the requisite information for quantifying pupils’ progress in terms of individual national curriculum statements of attainment. The ‘common-sense’ approach was much less narrowly focused. It had statements of attainment continually in view, but stopped to take in other interesting sights on the way. The ‘paying lip-service’ approach was content to have an aura of national curriculum-ness about it, but it implemented the national curriculum as much by accident as by design, whilst the ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach was almost oblivious to the national curriculum. The diversity of degrees of implementation, as we have already suggested, generally seemed to have been determined fundamentally by headteachers’ attitudes to the national curriculum and, at the next level, by the extent to which these influenced individual teachers. Ann confessed how she had made the head’s priorities her own priorities:

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I think the secret is to find out what the headteacher considers important. The head is very keen on the forecast file and so files which are submitted are quite a considerable piece of work and they far exceed the allocated time given in the schedule. But because I know great emphasis is placed on this I’d certainly put a lot of time into that, whereas, sometimes, some of the literature which is around I wouldn’t give time to that. Similarly, Kathy attributed her school’s serious approach to her headteacher: ‘he does like us to keep records and to present records and be organised’. Whilst Mary’s ‘common-sense’ approach seemed to have been influenced by a rather more laissez-faire head: the one good thing about our head is that she’s insisted, as we call it, that we have fun…I think her attitude to the national curriculum is right, it shouldn’t be the ‘be-all-and-end-all’. However, not all of our teachers reproduced their headteachers’ attitudes so faithfully. Helen did not, since she recognised that implementing the national curriculum effectively needed to be a wholeschool, cohesive activity, and there was little that she could do to alter the ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach. On the other hand, teachers who favoured a lesser degree of implementation than that which prevailed in their schools were much more successful as deviants. ADJUSTING CLASSROOM PRACTICE The different degrees of implementation determined the extent of change which was being effected. The nature of the changes, however, was much less diverse between schools and we have been able to identify three features which illustrate adjustments in curriculum planning. They were adjustments to the teacher’s role, to curriculum balance, and to strategies for curriculum delivery. Adjusting the teacher’s role The School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions of Employment Document (DES 1987b) identifies three professional duties which make up the instructional aspects of teachers’ work; planning and preparation; teaching, including setting and marking of work; assessment, recording and reporting. This is a conventional breakdown of the teacher’s role but

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most of our teachers, whilst implicitly acknowledging the three-way division of their professional role, identified a strong link between planning and record-keeping, which arose out of the necessity for planning with a view to being able to record pupils’ progress in terms of statements of attainment. Effectively, our teachers’ distinction was between teaching and those tasks which may be described as documentation of their teaching, and of which planning and recordkeeping were the main components. As we have shown in Chapter 1, the documentation dimension occupied at least as much time as teaching in the teachers’ working week. The requirements of implementing the national curriculum had generally altered the nature of curriculum planning by establishing clearly defined parameters within which teachers were to operate. Depending, of course, on the degree of implementation, focus had shifted from what was essentially curriculum planning focused on the individual teacher, to ensuring that intended teaching and learning activities were regulated by a whole-school focus. The implications of this were clear in Kathy’s comment: You’ve got to be aware, all the time, of these attainment targets and you’re thinking, ‘Am I covering this attainment target? Am I covering that attainment target?…I think you’ve to be more aware now…that you’re covering each subject in the right way…You’re always thinking, ‘Now, would that go under attainment target twelve or attainment target fourteen?’ Teachers’ professional culture has traditionally afforded teaching much higher status than planning and record keeping, especially in a period when professional accountability was stronger than market accountability in Troman’s (1989) terms. Documentation of teaching tended to be regarded as a peripheral activity, probably since it was not seen to be of direct benefit to the pupil. Detailed, comprehensive recording has generally been done grudgingly or half-heartedly, constituting unnecessary accountability and a chore. Clark and Yinger (1987) point out that planning ‘is rarely claimed as an important part of the repertoire of experienced teachers’ and this is borne out by Jackson’s (1968, p. 131) teachers. Alexander (1988) suggests that it is informal ideology which prompts teachers to reject long-term planning as being ‘incompatible with flexibility and spontaneity’, although his own samples proved to be exceptions. Our teachers’ perceptions, too, challenged the traditional view; many of them appeared to have been

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informal practitioners who, since the introduction of the national curriculum, had made detailed, extensive written plans and records. Ann’s implementation of the national curriculum was, in most repects, ‘by the book’, but hers was by no means the only case of planning which was complex, involved and time-consuming: …in writing out our forecasts, we now have to annotate them to show cross-curricular influences and we have to write the attainment target by the side of each particular teaching area in the colour of the document, so that Science is red, and we have to annotate it ‘attainment target 3’, for example, so that when anybody looks at the document they can see at a glance by the multicoloured nature of the annotations in the margin that we’re working in a cross-curricular way. (Ann) HMI (DES 1991) suggested that curriculum planning has generally benefited from the introduction of the national curriculum but that the rate at which schools were progressing varied greatly (p. 14). Alexander et al. (1992, p. 16) made the observation that national curriculum planning is proving to be excessively time-consuming. It was evident amongst our sample that the composite structure of teachers’ jobs had undergone an adjustment, re-prioritising the ‘non-teaching’ tasks. Record-keeping had clearly intensified to enable teachers to fulfil their perceived legal requirement to record and report pupils’ progress in relation to specific attainment targets and statements of attainment. This, in turn, called for more precise planning. But the nature of the process of classroom planning also appears to have been affected in three ways. First, there is evidence that, whilst, traditionally, teachers typically avoided detailed written planning, their teaching was guided by extensive mental planning (see, for example, Zahorik 1975; MorineDershimer 1979; McCutcheon 1980). McCutcheon (1980) described this as ‘complex mental dialogue’, as ‘reflective thinking’, which she likened to ‘a rehearsal of the lesson, an envisioning of what would happen’. She provided an illustration: During an odd moment, one teacher might wonder, ‘How can we tie together social studies and art? What art project can we do about the transportation system?’ Another might consider, ‘How could I handle Jerome’s misbehavior differently? What might work?’ Driving home from school, or standing in the shower one

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morning, or walking down the aisles in the grocery store, or sitting on the beach in July, the teacher might reflect on the past and plan for the future…When teachers ‘take school home’ they are reflecting on what happened that day and what to do the next day or next year. This reflective process will undoubtedly ring true to anyone who has been a teacher, but it is one whose prominence in the process of curriculum planning was potentially reduced in the early years of unfamiliarity with the national curriculum subject documents, by processes which were more constraining and perhaps less creative. As one of our teachers explained: ‘at the moment it’s not in your head, you have to keep going back through loads and loads of papers to check up on it’ (Christine). Again, this will be dependent upon degree of implementation, but until teachers reach the stage of having committed most statements of attainment to memory,—of ‘having them in the head, instead of the handbag’ as Ann said—mental planning was no longer adequate as the only part of the planning process. Teaching and learning activities could no longer be plucked out of the air and mentally rehearsed; they could only be relied upon to meet the ‘regulation’ by checking them off against subject documents. In effect, this meant that the ‘free-range’ element of mental planning had been curtailed. As Vivienne pointed out: We now have to have more written planning, more thoroughly written planning, than we ever had before. We’re almost back to student teaching practice for setting out aims and objectives. We appreciate that, even before the introduction of the national curriculum, teachers may have been required to accommodate agreed curriculum policies in similar ways to those in which they were accommodating the national curriculum. However, we suggest that the lesser degree of accountability and rigidity which such policies typically incorporated left much more leeway for what was predominantly ‘freerange’ mental planning. The essential point is that national curriculum planning generally incorporated at least two elements which previous planning frequently did not necessarily incorporate: consultation of detailed common documents and detailed recording. As two of our teachers explained:

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A lot of things that we used to do, sort of informally, or keep mentally, now have to be set down on paper…there’s a lot more paperwork involved. (Ellen) I always planned before. I always kept records. I always assessed. But I think it was obviously in a completely different way…It was done almost as part of your daily work—your assessment gave rise to your daily planning the next day. (Tricia) Second, resulting from the shift of emphasis from mental to written planning, much of which was on a whole-school basis, there seemed to be a trend towards less incremental and more comprehensive planning. Incremental planning accommodates modifications to meet pupils’ changing or emerging needs. It is typified by Wells Kyle’s (1980) illustration of how one teacher ‘adjusts her plans in response to her students’ academic and behaviour problems’: English—although I had planned to introduce a new lesson, after grading the previous assignment, I decided to review the previous lesson and give another practice assignment. Health—planned discussion in health. Students were very loud and uncontrolled—finally decided to make it a silent written assignment. (p. 83) This type of spontaneity reflects the flexible approach to teaching which many of our interviewees felt was no longer viable (although many did report having to ‘mop up’ or ‘sweep up’, which involves having to repeat previously planned coverage of specific statements of attainment with pupils who had not ‘achieved’ them). Incremental planning can be more long term, involving multiple options which may have been thought out at a rudimentary level, to be adopted or discarded as appropriate. However, both unfamiliarity with specific statements of attainment and insufficient time to plan anything other than what was likely to be pursued, resulted in much of the planning reported by our teachers being comprehensive and uni-directional. Third, whilst research indicates that teachers pay little attention to objectives when planning their teaching (Taylor 1970; Zahorik 1975;

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McCutcheon 1980), our study suggests that the requirements of implementing the national curriculum effected a re-focusing on planning towards objectives. Essentially, national curriculum statements of attainment constitute specific objectives and therefore teachers who planned their teaching to incorporate them were carrying out objectivesfocused planning. Ursula made the point: ‘People plan in a lot more detail now because they’ve got to match their attainment targets and their activities.’ The major distinction, however, between the conventional objectivesfirst model and the one necessitated by implementation of the national curriculum is that, for the latter, objectives are pre-specified. Adjusting curriculum balance The national curriculum had made all of our teachers examine curricular content and, to varying degrees, set about re-adjusting curriculum balance. New areas of specific subjects were being incorporated into teachers’ repertoires to ensure that what was taught matched what was prescribed in the statutory orders. Teachers frequently referred to this process as ‘filling in gaps’. At the time of our study the statutory orders for English, science, mathematics and technology were applicable. Of these, science and technology and, to a lesser degree, mathematics, were reported by most of our teachers to have been increased in content. Science HMI (DES 1991) reported on the 1989–90 implementation of the national curriculum: ‘the clearest improvement in the quality of work was in Science in Year 1. That improvement resulted in part from teachers reviewing their practice in a wide-ranging way.’ This was borne out by our findings which revealed that much effort had been made, though not only in Year 1, to bring the science curriculum in the school into line with statutory orders: in the sciences, the content we were doing we were doing well. I think it was certain areas of science we weren’t covering so well, like electricity or forces…I certainly think it’s made me teach a lot of things I hadn’t done before, and drawn attention to a lot of areas I hadn’t done before. (Ann)

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We had to increase a lot of our science. (Ursula) I think the science, the breadth of it, has affected what we’re doing…because you tended to have your favourite little slots, you know. I like electricity, for example. (Olive) Our findings also corroborate the (Alexander et al. 1992) assertion that ‘Prior to the national curriculum, Science was neglected in very many schools’: I particularly think that science wasn’t taught enough in primary schools and I’m very pleased now that I’m actually teaching more, because it’s such fun once you’ve got it right. (Jane) We were never made aware that we should cover Science before, but now, for instance, all the time we’re aware of it. Before, for instance, we’d concentrate on the nature table and looking at nature…but there were gaps—things that we didn’t do before… (Kathy) Perhaps, in the past, you tended to teach your favourite things, and that was all right as long as another teacher wasn’t doing the same. But some things never got done, such as science. (Linda) Technology If science was the subject which required the most effort to be implemented as prescribed, technology seemed to come a close second. For some teachers this was clearly a ‘new’ subject; several confessed that they had great anxiety about having to teach it and some simply did not understand many of the statements of attainment—a confusion recognised by the National Curriculum Council as a reason for revising the order almost before it had been implemented. In some cases, it seemed that the timing of the release of the technology subject document was unfortunate insofar as it coincided with what was generally emerging as a widespread national curriculum-generated exhaustion and document fatigue: ‘I don’t know the technology—I mean the ring binder—I don’t

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understand what it means, so I’ve not much chance of teaching it well’ (Ursula). For those who were making a conscientious effort to incorporate it, though, technology seemed to have added a new dimension to what might previously have been categorised as craft lessons. Jane described the effects of introducing technology in her classroom: I certainly wouldn’t have used the saws and the workbench stuff to do it, before. I mean, we’ve always done junk modelling and stuff like that but, no, I’ve had to do a lot more. I mean, I’ve never done electricity before, but I’ve made circuits and things now—so it’s made me do a lot of these things. Felicity’s teaching had been similarly modified: ‘We do technology now. Before, we used to make things and stick them together.’ And Brenda had clearly become more aware of ways in which technology could be incorporated into her teaching: Now, I don’t say, ‘We’re going to paint a picture’, I say, ‘You’re going to design me a package’ or ‘Design me a picture’ and a lot more emphasis is put on children now to go away and think of a design before doing it. Mathematics HMI’s (DES 1991, 1992a) observations that most schools were still relying heavily on commercially published mathematics schemes found support in our findings, and it is probably this factor which placed mathematics behind science and technology in terms of the extent to which teachers were finding it necessary to supplement their existing curriculum content. In general, modifications were few and not very wide-ranging, typified by those described by Kathy: We were always very well organised in our school, in number anyway…but, for instance, we thought that there wasn’t enough ‘estimating’ in our scheme; we thought that might be a gap when we looked at it in the light of the national curriculum. So we put more [estimating] into it.

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Reading, speaking and listening There was, however, overwhelming agreement that two traditional infant school activities, hearing children read and hearing children’s ‘news’, were being relegated from what had often been daily priorities to much less frequent events. Although there was universal agreement that these were ‘threatened’ activities, teachers differed in the extent to which they were prepared to allow them to be squeezed out. Individual reprioritisation seemed generally to be determined by perceptions of children’s needs and by personal interests and expertise. Those teaching socially disadvantaged children, for example, would tend to make reading and oral communication a top priority, whilst those teaching children from middle class, professional families might focus more on mathematics and science and rely heavily on home-reading schemes. The dichotomy was clearly illustrated by two very different responses to the threat to reading: The actual hearing children read and doing the background work to reading so that they’re being read to, that sort of thing is being missed out. (Nina) I make time to listen to readers because I think it’s essential. If they can’t read, what’s the point of doing everything else? (Jane) Where reading was ‘going by the board’, it seems that it was giving way to the much more explicit national curriculum directives, once again illustrating some teachers’ evident preoccupation with making good headway through the ‘regulation’ curriculum and with ticking off individual statements of attainment. Curricular balance It often seemed to be the case, however, that filling the gaps in some subjects resulted in others being neglected. Most of our teachers identified curricular areas which, they felt, were frequently ‘going by the board’ as they became aware that it was impossible to squeeze everything in. This was when subject hierarchy came to the fore, since our teachers typically made the core subjects, and often technology, their priorities, allowing Drama, PE, RE and others to be squeezed out:

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You’re very careful to bring your Technology in and your Science, whereas, before…you could leave it out and let it go for a bit…I think PE tends to go by the board a bit. (Denise) Not all of our teachers gave the core subjects priority; sometimes their own pet subjects were given high profiles, sometimes the headteacher’s priorities were accommodated, and sometimes teachers were governed by what they considered to be their children’s over-riding needs. Those who felt that the teaching profession had ‘gone science mad’, for example, reflected this concern in the way in which they balanced the curriculum: ‘My science went this week. It just went; there wasn’t enough time for it…because my priority was other things’ (Ellen). Clearly, the degree of implementation which individual teachers were prepared to undertake was an important factor. Those who were trying to implement the national curriculum ‘by the book’, those whom elsewhere we categorise as ‘over-conscientious’ (p. 148), were trying to deliver all subjects uncompromisingly, with as little as possible being squeezed out. Others, who were either more complacent or more realistic, re-prioritised as they felt appropriate. ADJUSTING CURRICULUM DELIVERY The readjustments to teachers’ roles and to curriculum balance called for reappraisal of the process of translating curriculum into learning activities. We refer to this process as curriculum ‘delivery’, a term which, some writers suggest, does not do justice to the idiosyncratic flair which teachers exercise in performing the complex and intricate operation of putting policy into practice. Reynolds and Saunders (1987), for example, feel that ‘the metaphor of curriculum “delivery” inhibits sensitivity to what is really involved’, whilst Devaney and Sykes (1988) associate the term with standardisation of knowledge and technique. We accept these conceptual reservations but believe that ‘delivery’ is an appropriate metaphor to apply to the process whereby many of our teachers, at the time of our study, were taking an unfamiliar, standardised curriculum and making it work in ways which were necessarily systematic and quantifiable. We intend the term to refer to the transaction of learning activities, as distinct from planning and recording. Curriculum delivery in this sense is shaped by what Alexander et al. (1992) refer to as teachers’ ‘organisational strategies’ or by what

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Dreeben (1970) labels ‘personal strategies for running classrooms’. Those organisational strategies which featured in our teachers’ implementation fell into two broad, inter-related categories: organising children and organising the curriculum. They were focused on achieving organisational effectiveness which, at the time, entailed the most costeffective delivery of the greatest number of statements of attainment, since our teachers were generally at what Elmore and McLaughlin (1988, pp. 45–46) identify as the survival stage of readiness to implement change; the stage of ‘uncertainty about why learning new practices is important and how to function at a minimal level of competence’. There was, however, a countervailing consideration to that of costeffectiveness which was teachers’ perceptions of children’s needs and interests. These prevailed over organisational and pragmatic considerations and, with a few minor exceptions, remained fundamentally uncompromised. In effect, when faced with a choice between implementing the national curriculum in ways which were time- and labour-saving for themselves and in ways which kept children’s interests paramount, our teachers gravitated towards the latter: I won’t let my classroom suffer because of all these things that have to be done. So, instead of doing less time in the classroom, I’m still doing all that time plus the extra time on top. (Sheila) This tendency was evident in both organisation of children and organisation of the curriculum and, though they obviously overlap, we present them discretely below. Organising children In contrast to the Alexander et al. (1992) suggestion that implementation of the national curriculum had led to an increase in the proportion of whole class teaching, some of our teachers (7:0:17) reported either sustaining or increasing the amount of group or individual teaching undertaken: I suppose it’s made me even more, sort of, work in groups. (Jane)

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we have the children grouped, and the red group will do one set of activities suitable for them, but the pink group will do something suitable for them. (Betty) This conflicting evidence may simply reflect the different levels of commitment to informal education which typically distinguish Key Stage 1 from Key Stage 2, upon which the Alexander et al. report was predominantly focused. However, it also suggests that, for the most part, teaching had undergone much less profound change in response to the national curriculum than had documentation of teaching. We suggest that the main reason for this is that, whilst many teachers may confess to having given low priority to written planning and recordkeeping before the introduction of the national curriculum, very few would consider themselves to have similarly neglected their teaching responsibilities. Our teachers seemed to have developed teaching styles and techniques with which they had become comfortable and to which they were, for the most part, committed, since these reflected their ideologies and professionality. As far as they were concerned, there was room for improvement to documentation of teaching but not to teaching itself. Certainly, there appear to have been changes, as we report below, but they have generally been surface changes, reflecting lower, rather than higher, degrees of implementation. There is little evidence that underlying philosophies have been significantly altered: The national curriculum advisers have advised us that the best way of being able to release ourselves to work with groups of children and be able to sit with children for assessing purposes is that we operate an active learning day, which I like very much. I’ve always worked an integrated day and this just takes it one step further, really. The children become very independent and they can help themselves a lot more and it does release me. (Grace) Changes were, without exception, initiated by practical considerations. They were adopted with a view to increasing organisational effectiveness, which predominantly related to those tasks constituting documentation of teaching: ‘you can’t have an input with a group while the other twenty-six are running riot, so we really have had to look at our management’ (Vivienne).

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Vivienne’s comments illustrate how the requirements to carry out practical assessment activities, either as part of the teacher assessment exercise or as a rehearsal for the administration of SATs, precipitated teachers’ adoption of group or individual teaching approaches and practice also noted in Chapter 3. If this was also the driving force behind the changes referred to by Alexander et al. (1992), the differences between Key Stages 1 and 2 might be attributed to teachers’ estimation of their pupils’ age-related capabilities and aptitudes. In response to the problem of what to do with the bulk of a class of thirty whilst a small group is engaged on teacher-directed tasks, infant teachers may typically provide an array of activities for their children to select, whilst junior teachers may more readily resort to wholeclass work. Felicity described the organisational changes which had been developed by her local education authority’s encouraging a more childcentred approach in order to help in national curriculum delivery: We’ve taken on Negotiated Learning in our Authority…We didn’t have to do it…but we felt it would help us with the national curriculum…because it gives you more time because the children decide themselves, they don’t come up to you and say, ‘Can I go in the sand?’, ‘Can I go and do a painting?’ They decide themselves…It’s to help you manage the class better so you have more time to sit with the children through all these assessments. Not all of our teachers organised their children’s learning in such ways, but the very few who did not experienced or anticipated problems. Olive did not appear to be aware of the possibility of having to change her way of working: You know that we’ve got these SATs to do? Well, we haven’t got round to that yet, so I’m not quite sure how that’s going to work. We do know that we have to work in groups of four at a time. Quite what the other twenty-six, or however many there are, are going to be doing at that time…that’s going to be interesting! But to work with four at a time over three weeks is going to take some doing, and I…well, I think it’s scandalous, because it’s three weeks’ teaching time out, and that’s a lot in a 6 or 7-year-old’s life, and I think it’s most unfair!

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Those who were already committed to informal teaching methods, however, envisaged few organisational problems. This was the case in Helen’s school which, despite its head-in-the-sand approach to implementing the national curriculum did, at least in Helen’s opinion, have the right form of organisation in place: we have always worked with children in groups, we’ve always done integrated day group teaching, so that does help when it comes to assessment. We’re not suddenly having to stop doing a class lesson to focus on a few children, like some schools are doing— like when people at the in-service meetings say, ‘What do you do with the other twenty?’ Some teachers who organised children in groups relied heavily on adult help to ensure that things ran smoothly. Nursery nurses, ancillary assistants and even parents were incorporated into modified ways of working and given responsibility for tasks such as those which HMI (DES 1992b, para. 18) identified as typically taken on by qualified nursery assistants: I have some help during the week from a nursery nurse…and she’s wonderful! And, say, if I start a writing activity off and I do the stimulating and that sort of thing, I can leave her to be the dictionary, you know. In that way you do have to use other agencies because children of 5 do need a lot of help individually… so then I can go off and do something else with another group. (Denise) A lot of time has to be spent observing the children, assessing them and actually making notes about the assessment while you’re actually on the job. Things like listening to reading, which used to be a really high priority—and still is, in my view…but I’ve had to use other adult helpers. I’ve had to train up mums. (Tricia) Some teachers had reservations about how well group or individual teaching worked in practice: Even if you give them a well-structured, well-planned activity, they’re just normal children and, if they’re not supervised, they just don’t do it. It’s as simple as that.

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(Linda) There were concerns that the type of activities intended to require little or no adult supervision were insufficiently challenging: It’s such low-level work that you give them that, really, it’s just bin-fodder. (Irene) …the other children are just going to have to do time-wasting activities; baby-sitting things, in a way, because I’ve got to take these other children and record what they’re able to do. (Denise) This issue is addressed by Alexander (1988), whose research provides evidence that, contrary to some of his teachers’ fears, low teacher investment of attention need not necessarily yield undemanding work for the child (see also Evans’s 1991 assessment of her informal approach to teaching the national curriculum). Indeed, many of our teachers considered themselves to be successful in running informally organised classrooms whilst maintaining high educational standards. Felicity revealed what seemed to be the secret of success: The national curriculum can’t work unless you’ve got good classroom management, which needs low-input and high-input activities which you can give the children…A high-input activity is, say, mathematical, where they’re always coming to you all the time, or an assessment activity where you’re with them and can’t do anything else. We do a lot of low-input activities. We have sheets which we call ‘ordering and sequencing’, where we have six candles with bands on…say, you have green, blue and red, and it’s how many ways they can put the colours on, changing them around. It takes them an awful long time. Once you talk to them and have discussed each activity on the carpet they can go off and do it. Evidently, organisational effectiveness depended upon providing carefully chosen, well-planned, highly structured activities which do not require a high level of teacher input, even though ‘multiple focus’ teaching led to difficulties in class management in Leeds (Alexander 1992). However, in deciding which types of activities to designate

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high-input and which to designate low-input, teachers were influenced by their perceptions of the curriculum and how it should be organised. Clearly, organisational effectiveness depended as much on strategies for organising the curriculum as on those for organising children. Organising the curriculum As with the organisation of children there were no sweeping changes, but modifications were reported and these involved incorporating different emphases or becoming a little more adventurous and innovative. We found that teachers who had already had experience of it expanded their cross-curricular or integrated teaching either by doing it more frequently or by incorporating more subjects. Our findings support Brehony’s (1990, p. 119) speculation that integrated approaches might take precedence over teaching through separate subjects because there is insufficient time to teach all of the subjects required. Kathy explained that she felt the only way to get through the sheer volume of content in the subject documents was to do cross-curricular teaching and she suggested that this, in turn, had made her more aware of the opportunities for subject integration: When we go outside to fly kites and things like that, we’re listening to the birds at the same time and we’re looking round at the trees. We’re covering a lot of attainment targets, as it were, at the same time…Before the national curriculum, when you did art or something like that, you’d think, ‘Now I’m doing art’, you know. But now you think, ‘Where’s the science in this?’ ‘Where’s the geography in this?’ ‘Where’s the technology in this?’ And you’re aware now, if I do this or ask them to do that, or if we talk about this or get them to plan that, I’m covering that and, instead of being a bind, after a bit you feel that you’re enriching the children’s lives more. If you go outside and take rubbings of things, you’re saying, This is rough’ or This is smooth, isn’t it?’ In the national curriculum, in the science, you get them to feel this and feel that and compare that. ‘How does this wood feel?’ You’d say, ‘What’s this?’ first, to see if they actually knew it was wood. Whereas before you’d just let them do fancy patterns and rubbings, put them up, and that would be it.

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And Penny suggested: ‘I think you can only teach the national curriculum through an integrated day, otherwise you run out of time.’ Some of our teachers (8:0:16) reported undertaking more topic work since the introduction of the national curriculum, since this presented opportunities for subject integration and for multiple attainment target coverage: We did a mini-science topic recently. The children each brought in a toy and had to find out what it did and how it was made, etc. And we had a number of charts that they filled in, so this made a piece of work which does quite a number of Science things and quite a number of Maths things as well, which is quite useful. (Christine) Topics were often shared by several classes or even by entire schools. This facilitated the process, which some schools favoured, of allocating different attainment targets to different year groups as a means of ensuring full coverage of the national curriculum, whilst avoiding repetition: We’ve changed to a whole school topic approach in our school, which we didn’t used to do before, we used topics of our own choosing…So now we’re planning a whole school topic and seeing where we can fit these attainment targets into the topic. Sometimes they don’t fit in and sometimes we have to artificially put them into the topics, then we know we’ve covered them. (Brenda) Not all of our teachers integrated different subjects. The separate subject teaching which Alexander et al. (1992) suggest should increase, even at Key Stage 1, if the national curriculum is to be implemented effectively, was already in evidence to some extent amongst our sample. Moreover, discrete subject activities did not necessarily indicate more formal teaching. Multiple focus teaching, called Negotiated Learning by two of our teachers, was an approach where separate subject identities were emphasised by grouping children round subject tables or areas: We’ve taken on Negotiated Learning…We started really last September by moving our classrooms around to have designated areas. That’s one of the things they asked you to do. And then we

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labelled all the drawers so that they know that that’s technology, that’s science, and so on. We covered all our tops, so they know that maths is blue, science is red and so on…We don’t negotiate everything; we’re sticking to our main maths and our main English and we tell them they have to do that and then they can negotiate. (Felicity) It also seemed that certain subjects retained their separate identities because teachers found them difficult to integrate easily into topics. Mathematics was the most frequently mentioned example, although the heavy reliance being placed on commercially produced schemes was clearly a significant factor. In both integrated and multiple focus approaches there was a danger, unacknowledged by the teachers or by Brehony, that the problem of inadequate time for worthwhile learning in each subject was being disguised rather than resolved. This problem is explored in the first volume in this series (Primary Teachers at Work). Not only was there evidence of separate subject teaching, but several of our teachers also reported some degree of subject specialisation. This took the form of team teaching, for which we adopt Rosenholtz’s (1989) definition; ‘an organizational arrangement in which two or more teachers share responsibility for the instruction of a particular group of students’. Within this mode of organisation, which is not uncommon at Key Stage 1, curriculum organisation accommodated individual teachers’ subject interests and expertise: We’ve taken the partition down so we’re team teaching…I have the maths and the technology and the large toys for construction, and Jenny has the language and the motor control and the science and the library at her end, and we work out a set of activities for the week around our topic—but we don’t do it all around a topic, I have my structured maths scheme and she has her structured language scheme and so the children move through these…the system’s working beautifully! (Betty) In a similar way, Jane, who taught in a small rural school, shared subject expertise with Key Stage 1 colleagues in four other neighbouring small schools, apparently anticipating Galton’s (1993) proposal that clustering small schools would be necessary if subject expertise was to be deployed appropriately in them.

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We’ve got, for example, a lot of construction toys that we share and pass round and we get together to work so that our children, at least once a term, go and work with the rest…At the moment we’re planning an art and drama thing for the summer term, which is going to be super…if one of us can do something we tend to give one another a hand in the way that you would work in a big school. Whilst this seems to represent a move in the direction of federating small schools under one head and governing body but on split sites, which Alexander et al. (1992) support (see also Berliner 1992), it also seemed to be, from Jane’s account, much more of an optional cooperative, than a structured, strategy. In general, however, the team-teaching approach to subject specialisation seems to have been confined to within very small groups of teachers, usually pairs who teach the same year group. Most of our teachers taught, independently, all of the core and foundation subjects; a mode of organisation which one detractor has labelled the ‘scatter gun’ approach to teaching (Anon. 1992) and which Alexander et al. (1992) believe ‘makes impossible demands on the class teacher’. Many of our teachers did complain of impossible demands, as we discuss in Chapter 8, but these were very rarely directly attributed to demands relating to subject knowledge and expertise. As with other issues, the problems perceived to be particularly significant for Key Stage 2, were not necessarily seen as the most important at Key Stage 1. SUMMARY Teachers’ curriculum planning and classroom practice were strongly affected by the approach to the national curriculum and assessment taken in their school as a whole, with the attitude of the headteacher in particular being seen as influential in the ease and extent of implementation. Although there were perceived adjustments to the teachers’ role, curriculum planning and curriculum balance, the major change was in the documentation kept about planning and recording of teaching rather than in teaching itself. There had been various responses to classroom organisation, with some teachers reporting changes in grouping, in collaborative teaching and in both integrated and specialist subject teaching. This variation was to be expected given the differences in previous practice and school settings. The changes in grouping practices to engage in Teacher Assessment reflected the

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findings, in Chapter 3, about grouping practices for national testing, perhaps indicating one source of consistency between the approaches adopted for both kinds of assessment.

6 THE USE OF TEACHERS’ TIME

TWO MAIN CHARACTERISTICS In this chapter we show how the teachers perceived the use to which their working time was put. Although for some of the teachers (14:2:8) there was a connection between the use of their time and stress, we have deliberately treated these two issues separately. This is partly because they are conceptually distinct, since teachers who work long hours are not necessarily stressed. They may work long hours because they enjoy working. But it is also because the issues were empirically different for our teachers. As we illustrate later in this chapter, it was not the fact that they had to spend long hours working to which they objected in itself. Indeed, most teachers (20:2:2) pointed out that they had always worked long hours. The major difficulty for the teachers was the use to which their time was put, with substantial parts of their working week being spent on activities to which they objected or in which they would not have voluntarily engaged. Their perceptions of the use of their time had two common characteristics: intensity of time pressures, i.e. the sense of never having enough time to meet all that was asked of them; and a loss of control over how their time was spent. It may be wrong to exaggerate the novelty of these perceptions since Nias (1989) has shown that lack of time was a common perception of primary teachers about their work before the national curriculum. Moreover, from a comparative perspective, according to Paine (1990), Chinese teachers’ working lives are seen as characterised by time shortage and overwork.

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The running commentary syndrome Nonetheless, for all the teachers (24:0:0) there was an overwhelming sense that their working lives, especially in the school day, were characterised by never having enough time to do things properly. As we shall show in Chapter 7, this often led to stress, but it was always a feature of the mental state in which the teachers’ work was carried out. One of them, Ann, illustrated this state of mind by using a simile which we have called, following her, the ‘running commentary’ syndrome. There are two elements to this syndrome; a commitment to working very hard, doing one’s best out of conscientiousness, linked to a lack of a sense of achievement in their work, despite the effort, because there was always something else to be done. Ann, who had a rich, if mixed, set of metaphors to illustrate her perceptions, had thirty-two children, Year 1 and Year 2 combined, in her class: Well, what is frightening is that we are being blinkered now into the national curriculum and so everything else is hanging on by its fingernails really. That’s how I feel at the moment—the sheer amount of time required to cope with what you hope to achieve— it just seems to be expanding to fill the day and I am constantly getting to the state where I am noticing it far more now that I never complete what I hope to achieve. There is always, like, a carry-forward so that you never get the feeling at the end of a session or the end of a day, ‘Great, I’ve done this that I hoped we would do’, there is always something else. Is that what you used to do then? No, I didn’t used to feel that, I didn’t used to get to the end of the day and think, ‘Oh, gosh, I haven’t done this’ or ‘I haven’t done that.’ I used to get to the end of the day and think, ‘Oh, great, we have done this’ So this has been a major change as far as I am concerned. So there is this running commentary, really, in the background, saying that, ‘You haven’t done this’ or ‘You haven’t done that’, which I find very annoying considering that you work so hard. How do you deal with that—do you just say, ‘Oh, well, in the end I’ve done my best’, and that’s it and…?

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I’m trying to do that—but I am fighting it really because I am quite conscientious and I obviously want to give it my best shot. Despite a tendency under imposed change to invent a Golden Age in the past when everything was better, we think that the running commentary syndrome was an important aspect of what it meant to be a contemporary teacher at Key Stage 1 during this period. Mary, more prosaically but just as clearly, put it this way: I think it’s just the pressure. You start the week with things you’ve got to get done and at the end of the week you seem to have more things on the list that you haven’t done than you had on at the start of the week. You just feel that you can never, ever finish. As the year goes on you just seem to get more and more behind. It’s just incredible. One consequence was that teachers were having to ‘snatch’ time in the school day from other important activities, for example, by not participating in assembly: We have two short assemblies per week where the head takes the children. That is usual, but if anything comes up they are quickly dropped. It is two 15-minute sessions, but I usually find in that time another teacher will come along and ask if they can use the computers or (have help with) maths, or we are doing something to the hall, or we are doing something for the resource area. So, although it is non-contact time from the children, I am usually busy with somebody else. (Rose) Others did not have a reasonable lunch break in an attempt to do what was needed: Technically we get an hour and a half [lunch]. In fact, three days this week I have had a meeting during the lunchtime, so I have had to grab my lunch on the run, so to speak. (Nina) One disillusioned teacher was particularly disapproving of what she thought was an over-reaction to the national curriculum demands:

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We have lunch from noon until 1.15 pm and 10 minutes at either end of that is meant for classroom preparation. But, nine times out of ten, I will go to the staffroom for my lunch at 12.30 pm, say, and there is still hardly anyone up there, and at 12.50 pm teachers are rushing in to have their lunch and go out again at five past one to go and get their class set up for the afternoon…The school that I am at is basically only surviving because they have got a lot of workaholics…a teacher came up at five to one and said, ‘Oh, I forgot that we have got a shorter lunch break because we are going home early.’ So she had five minutes for her lunch because we stopped at 1 pm. She had spent all that time in her classroom preparing for the afternoon. (Angie) Again, it is wrong to exaggerate the novelty of this response. In his study of curriculum co-ordinators before the national curriculum was introduced, Campbell (1985) identified ‘snatched time’ as characterising teachers’ work in school-based curriculum development. However, a more important consequence of the daily pressure on time was not simply a sense of personal or professional frustration; it also affected the quality of the pupils’ learning and the nature of the teachers’ planning: and I think, as teachers, we don’t feel we can do an area properly because we are so pressurised to get all these ATs covered that you can’t teach them properly. You feel that you are dashing from one to another and then you haven’t covered that properly and, whereas before you hadn’t got this pressure on you and you might do, for instance, ‘time’, a subject like that, you might do it for a month and you would do it well, and the child, at the end, may be able to tell different times on the clock. Now you feel, ‘I haven’t done “time”, I must do a bit of measuring, I must do a bit of this.’ (Brenda) Quite honestly, if you are in the middle of an activity of science or maths or something and you’ve got hall time coming up, you think ‘Oh, I’ll just leave the hall time.’ And those kind of things, the PE and drama, suffer and I feel that those are very important at this age and they shouldn’t suffer. But, because of the pressures, you feel that to get through those targets and the various work systems those are the things that go.

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(Sheila) This perception that teaching and learning was becoming rushed and superficial was supported later by the publication of a report by HM Inspectors (Ofsted 1993a). The Inspectors cited headteachers’ views of the ‘near impossibility’ of teaching to sufficient depth and that if schools were over-stretched in delivering the national curriculum ‘depth was likely to be sacrificed in pursuit of breadth’ (para. 30). Thus, the issue cannot be interpreted merely as a matter of teachers ‘whingeing’ under pressure; their perceptions, later supported by Ofsted, were that the pressure of time in the school day had become so great that the quality of pupils’ learning was suffering. Loss of control over time The second major characteristic was a sense that the teachers were no longer in charge of how their time was used. The way schools organise the curriculum and the teaching methods employed by teachers were not subject to statutory control (NCC 1992). Despite this, most teachers (17:0:7) perceived that the requirement to deliver the statutory curriculum was affecting their autonomy over how their time, especially time with pupils, could be spent. The variety and spontaneity in a teacher’s day had been identified in previous studies of primary teaching, (Jackson 1968; Hilsum and Cane 1971; Hilsum 1972; King 1978; Galton et al. 1980a; Berlak and Berlak 1981; Pollard 1985; Hartley 1985; Desforges and Cockburn 1987; Woods 1987; Cortazzi 1991). However, for our teachers there was what they saw as the forced redirection of their time. Thus, as we have seen already on page 104, Sheila expressed her sense of reduced autonomy as follows: I’ve had to cut down on things which I personally felt were very important for this sort of age, things like sharing news—and time, just having time to sit and chat and talk, and sharing books. The typical school day has an overall, planned framework within which teachers conventionally operate in a sufficiently flexible way to be able to exercise their professional judgements to respond to pupils’ needs as they emerge; to capitalise on the interest shown by the children in order to deepen their knowledge and experience of a particular concept. It is a moot point whether this view of primary teaching is idealised rhetoric rather than actual practice (see Alexander 1984, Chapters 1–3).

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Nonetheless, it typifies many infant teachers’ implementation of the work they have planned, an approach which King (1978) called ‘playing it by ear’. That is, although there is generalised advance planning, these plans have not been so detailed, structured or rigid as to prevent the teacher from flexibly responding to the vagaries of classroom life. The teacher’s advance planning is modified by the interactive experience of the classroom (Jackson 1968). We saw the significance of this conception of planning in Chapter 5. A particular concern expressed by most of our teachers (20:0:4) about the impact of the national curriculum was that its structure and specified objectives were severely limiting spontaneity and variety, and thereby constraining their classroom autonomy: Before, when something came up which was interesting and exciting, you could explore it, and now we are getting to the stage where [you say], That’s really fascinating, but sit down and do this Maths’, or ‘We must do this English.’ (Ann) Reduction of pleasure The sense of reduced control over their time had affected the emotional tone in classrooms for the worse, in most teachers’ eyes, so that there was reduced pleasure for them and their pupils. Thus, again, the problem was not merely a complaint that might be interpreted as arising from self-indulgence; it arose from concern for the quality of classroom life. Nearly all our teachers (20:0:4) reported that the introduction of the national curriculum and assessment was making their classrooms less pleasant and enjoyable for them as teachers and, perhaps more importantly, for their pupils. There were two aspects to it, viz. a more instrumental approach to curriculum activities, and a more cognitively pressurised relationship between teacher and pupil. Many teachers (17:0:7) reported that the kind of curriculum activities that they had introduced, or planned to introduce, had, or would, become less interesting and less motivating for the children. This resulted from the national curriculum, which they perceived as forcing them to concentrate upon activities that, while certain to help them hit the attainment targets, were safe and dull. Teachers generally (17:0:7) tended to feel impelled to prevent pupils being side-tracked away from the planned task in hand, as did Mary:

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Yes, I suppose there is not really so much time to talk to them any more. If a child comes up and makes just a comment, or has something to show, it’s, ‘Sorry, haven’t got time now, save it for showtime or playtime.’ And of course they’ve forgotten, very often I’ve forgotten as well, so, yes, it’s the talking, it’s the talking and the listening and giving some of the children the attention that they need [that have suffered]. One or two were more explicit. Betty, for example, said, ‘I don’t sing as often in my class any more’, meaning that she spent less time with her reception class singing songs and rhymes because of her perceived need to press ahead with what she saw as more cognitively oriented activities. Personal warmth extended to children had also been affected, according to Kathy, another reception teacher, though it might be imperceptible to the children: It is because you don’t have the time these days to talk to children about what they’ve had for their birthday—to make time. You know there is time in the day when you have got that class together and that is a prime learning time. You can actually do a teaching activity, albeit in a group or in a class, and when a child sort of comes in clutching a cuddly toy that he has had for his birthday, you have to find time for it, but you do it with perhaps not quite the same enthusiasm. You’re quite aware that there is something else you ought to be doing at the same time and maybe, even though you don’t mean to be, you are sometimes a little dismissive with the children. This change was not what the teachers wanted, and was in conflict with their notions of how they should relate to children. We think the explanation is in the sub-text to much of our interview sequences where there was an uneasy notion of accountability; the. notion that someone, somewhere, would soon be checking up on the teacher to see if she was getting on properly with pushing the children through the prescribed curriculum. Those checking up might be parents, inspectors or the head, but in the minds of the teachers there would be someone. Around some corner, soon, would come Key Stage Cops, chasing up the teachers. This paranoiac and fearful attitude appeared to be infecting relationships and curriculum activities in classrooms in ways that, despite themselves, teachers found pervasive. Thus, the perceived loss of

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control over how classroom time was used may reflect a more generalised sense of reduced control. Pleasure in the company of young children, responsiveness to the emotional life in classrooms is a major source of satisfaction for many primary teachers, as Nias (1989) found. If the tendency for reduction in pleasure in school life—for pupils as well as teachers—were to become widespread it would generate the most potent damage to the motivation of teachers and the tone of classroom existence for pupils. Other research has found this kind of perceived change (Broadfoot et al. 1991; NCC 1991). The PACE project (Broadfoot et al. 1991) designated it as the ‘dead pigeon’ syndrome since, previously, if a child brought a dead pigeon to the notice of the teacher, the opportunity could be seized for spontaneously developing a lesson round the find; now the pigeon might have to be consigned to the waste paper basket as an unwarranted distraction from the specified curriculum. Reduced time in spontaneous learning was accompanied by its mirror image, increased time on planning and preparation: I’m doing less of the qualitative preparation work—which is what reception work is all about—than I used to. I’m putting it down on paper but it’s for nobody…We always used to plan before, now we’ve got to plan in terms of attainment targets and we’ve got to make sure that each attainment target is covered. We then have had to devise assessment tasks for these levels we are covering, and that in itself is an horrendous task. (Betty) The bureaucratisation of working time Teachers (20:0:4) identified aspects of the national curriculum, such as assessment and recording and the need for extra planning, as contributing directly to the increase in time spent on work because they had to spend time familiarising themselves with the national curriculum documents: I’ve got an awful lot more reading to do. I feel that, as things are presented to me, I must read it and get on top of it. (Sheila)

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Well, first of all, [we had] to become familiar with the content of the documents, which took a considerable amount of time, and also the supplementary documents which were issued. Explaining the other ones…? Yes, that’s right. That also took some time, and then the documents which superseded those documents, and having to insert those and make amendments certainly took some time—and I still don’t feel confident that I am fully au fait with all the contents. So that was a major component of extra time, actually becoming familiar with the documentation; and running alongside that, of course, there was a lot of input on assessment from various sources. (Ann) In addition, teachers had been spending more time in meetings, on paperwork, and in in-service training: and then suddenly the paperwork hit us—the training days, the forms you have to fill in, the forms you have to be aware of…It’s just got totally out of hand, I’m afraid; I’ve got file upon file upon file of all these papers and pieces of paper and documents—and it’s the only way to keep them in any sort of order, never mind to read them, to do something about them. (Patrick) I have to spend a lot more time on INSET. I’ve had a lot more courses to go to, two or three. My planning has taken me longer, but that might become easier because I’m all the time having to think about attainment targets, how my projects fit into those attainment targets and how my future plans are going to have to accommodate what I haven’t covered, that sort of thing. So that’s taking me a lot longer, and it’s also taking me quite a while because getting round the documents took an awful long time. So I think reading and out-of-school work, is what’s increased most. (Sheila) It’s all the paperwork and checking up you have to do on all the little things. The national curriculum has broken down the things we teach into such small pieces that you read through it and you

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think, ‘Yes, I teach that’, and then you think, ‘Ah, have I done that bit, have I done that bit?’ And you have got to go back checking up all the time, and I think in ten years time, if we have still got the same thing, it will probably be OK because we will know all the attainment targets and it will be in your head. But, at the moment when it’s not in your head, you have to keep going back through these loads and loads of paper to check up on it. (Christine) Christine’s condition (‘if we have still got the same thing’) for optimism turned out to be important. In 1993 the national curriculum and assessment arrangements were subject to wholesale review and revision. The mismanagement of time in school The explanation for the long working hours was only partly the immediate demands of the national curriculum. Other pressures came from local and institutional sources. Teachers felt that poor use was made of their time by heads and INSET trainers. Where this happened it evoked considerable anger, and even contempt, from teachers already under great pressure, especially when time was wasted by poor school management. We found teachers who reported that their heads simply had not kept up with the documents and therefore had added to the workload that their Key Stage 1 teachers had to take on: I think one of the problems with working with a head, like I am at the moment, is that you end up dissipating time and spending a whole evening doing something that should have been done much more efficiently. So, yes, I do envisage that the two terms are going to be busy with the assessment and the reporting, mainly because I think I am going to have to do an awful lot of being available to staff, and helping them through, and talking them through, and sorting out their problems and their concerns. (Helen) The problem was seen as the head’s failure to set priorities that matched the demands of the national curriculum. When pressed to illustrate what was needed, the teacher gave the following commentary:

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I think what I would have liked to have seen in management was somebody who was on top of all the paperwork, was able to filter it. I do think this is something that heads have to do; they have to read everything that lands on their desk and to decide priorities. Yes, I think that is what I would want to see—somebody who would be able to say, ‘Right, this is a priority for others and as a management team this is what I want to deal with.’ At the moment, would you believe, we haven’t got a school development plan, they cannot organise themselves and get that together. So everything seems to be carrying equal weight, whether it’s the dinner lady was away today so that class was unsupervised, to the assessment orders that have just come in—it’s all equal. (Helen) Headteachers who had not kept up with change and had landed their staff with extra work were strongly criticised, especially in infant sections of JMI schools where the head and deputy had left the infant teachers to fend for themselves. The following story from a reception teacher in a JMI school was extreme, but was echoed in three other schools where Key Stage 1 teachers had been given only minimal support: We’ve got a male head and a male deputy, both of whom are feckless. The Authority is actually running an assessment meeting in a fortnight for all the heads of primary schools and he’s not going! And so the deputy said, ‘Well, if he’s not going, I’m not going’, so at the moment we’ve got nobody going. So, I mean, one teacher who is in Key Stage 1—and she is absolutely frantic because she’s getting no support—she keeps going to these meetings, coming back, trying to get what she’s trying to do across—and she gets nowhere because the head pulls out his diary and says, ‘We’ve got to arrange the May Fair’ or ‘We’ve got more important things to do.’ He doesn’t even know what we are doing in terms of this assessment—he doesn’t know what we’re doing, but we can’t, in turn, turn round and say, ‘Well, he’s not doing it so we’re not going to do it’—we can’t do that. I mean, it would be easier…no doubt that there are some teachers in the juniors doing just that, closing the door—‘He’s not bothering so why should we?’ And the deputy, he’s got nowhere to go and disapproves of the head—doesn’t like him—they are barely on speaking terms. We are just hoping that if we get it set up in the

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infants the juniors will take it on board—but they don’t really know what we are doing. No, it’s frustrating, we are working in a vacuum. Having said that, the adviser who comes in is totally bewildered by what we are doing. He’s very…he’s a lovely, charming gentleman and he comes in and asks us…and he’s very encouraging—but we are telling him, he’s not telling us—he’s not in a position to advise us. (Betty) This aspect of the time problem was not one caused solely by the national curriculum. Nias (1980, 1989) also identified as ‘dissatisfiers’ for the teachers she surveyed, before the reforms, working conditions such as administration and communication, the managerial style of the headteacher and the lack of professional support within the school. We highlighted the fact that the teachers felt particularly in need of support at this time in order to fulfil their new obligations. A substantial minority (7:5:12) saw things differently; they were in well-managed schools which had provided positive support and encouragement. This interview sequence illustrates their position: So the implementation of the national curriculum isn’t causing you any real problems? No, that’s right. Everything’s being handled very well in our school, it’s all, sort of, running really smoothly. The head’s got it very well organised…we have three-year plans. So it’s a case of good management? Well, it is, yes, but basically I think I’d put it all down to the Authority. There’s no room for inefficiency in our Authority, they’d step in quickly if that happened. They’re really on the ball and they’ve gone all out to make sure the national curriculum is done properly in all their schools. The inspectors are always in, they’re very helpful, you get good support. (Ursula) Some teachers were grateful for the supportive management style of their headteachers, even when, of itself, it did not help reduce their working time:

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Our headmaster…I wouldn’t criticise him at all because he’s very understanding and he takes the attitude to do as much as you can of it, and he’s always encouraging, you know; he’s a great one for saying, ‘You’ll do it, you’ll do it’—you know, he builds up your confidence. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re already doing it’, and you are if you think about it. But he does like us, on the other hand, to keep records and to present records and to be organised, which I agree with. I mean, this is why I spend…I wouldn’t have to spend three hours, I suppose, every night doing it, on average…I mean, some nights I wouldn’t spend three hours, you know what I mean. (Kathy) These were in a minority, but they showed how, under more effective or sympathetic management, the time-wasting could be reduced and the skills and confidence of the teachers could be boosted. Where teachers saw the school as effectively managed by the head they felt immensely supported by it. Mismanagement of time in in-service training The most bitterness, however, was reserved for time wasted on inservice training. There were some teachers who saw what was provided by the LEAs as helpful, but most (15:6:3) teachers regarded it with something approaching contempt for the waste of their time: I also have to place on record that the quality and the content of the courses we have been given from the LEA have, in the main, been abysmal—they have done nothing to increase our confidence in the national curriculum, given us any realistic guidelines that we had used, or left us feeling that we could have used the time in a constructive way, and that has added, really, to the stress because we don’t seem to be receiving any quality instruction from people who we would expect to be leading us forward. Why do you think that is? Well, I don’t think they know what they are doing, basically. I would say that, on the whole, over the past year I have yet to be on a satisfying course. There have been some elements in science, for example, where I have gone on a course which has been run

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for a specific purpose, such as ‘variables’; in fact, the science team have come out better than the other two. Whether it is because they have been able to do the specific work which illustrates the points and they have been able to sit back and discuss it, I don’t know. But the overall courses on the English document or the maths document were very, very disappointing. And also the quality of the presentation from the members of staff—and really this is coming to a head now—I am sitting back and looking at these people who are, in the main, serving teachers or who have had serving experience, and wondering about the quality of education I am receiving from these people. (Ann) Teachers were also suspicious of the motives of those doing the training: If I felt it was all worthwhile I wouldn’t mind, but such a lot of it is just absolute nonsense, it’s an absolute waste of time. These five ‘Baker Days’, as we call them, and the two extra days that we had to have last year and this year, I have honestly learned nothing new; no-one has been able to tell me anything that has helped me in my job at all. (Helen) On occasion the training was seen as undermining the teacher’s confidence: The question that kept coming up was, ‘What do you do with the rest of your class while you’re doing them, and the useful, consuming work that the children not being assessed were doing?’ Well, I don’t know whether people who organised this have ever worked in an infant classroom but you are made to feel inadequate, and you feel, ‘If they are doing it right, why aren’t I?’ Most of my colleagues feel the same and yet, there again, you think, ‘I had better not mention it because I feel inferior.’ So that’s how it [training] affects me anyhow. (Brenda) The HMI report (DES 1990a) on the implementation of the national curriculum highlighted the need for focused, well-delivered INSET. Our teachers’ views were reinforced by the NCC report (1991) on the implementation of the national curriculum core subjects. The report

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noted problems in provision which echoed our teachers’ voices, though in more restrained language: several teachers and heads were dissatisfied with the general provision of National Curriculum INSET because it failed to advance their existing knowledge. A number of teachers and heads referred to the inappropriateness of their early Key Stage 1 training. There were comments on it being ‘too general’, ‘insufficiently focused on real needs’, or not properly taking account of teachers’ differentiated needs…All this suggests that there is a substantial training need for teachers at Key Stages 1 and 2. Alternative forms of INSET require investigation. (NCC 1991, p. 72) Mismanagement of time in assessment and recording Assessment and recording of children’s performance created difficulties mainly because the teachers perceived the government, Local Authority and school policy on these issues to be in confusion and regularly changing. Most teachers (19:2:3) simply did not know what was expected of them: Well, I suppose it’s the way you go about it; I think we are all pretty much in the dark, we really don’t know. What one teacher is doing is probably very different from what other teachers are doing…You don’t know really what the situation is at the moment, you don’t know how much the people, the advisers or the other people know, so it is the ‘blind leading the blind’. Are they saying we have got to do this, to just get on and do it in your own way, or are they just not giving us the training? You know that they do want certain requirements but they haven’t got the time or the money to give us the training. I don’t know at the moment, it’s just unclear. There are so many different sorts of views and opinions of what we should be doing and how we should be doing it, and in the end you just don’t know what to do. (Ellen) The teachers (23:0:1) interviewed talked of teacher assessment as being separate from teaching and, as such, needing to be planned for separately. Teacher Assessment was seen as an additional requirement, not as an integral part of classroom practice. Harlen and Qualter (1991)

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have argued that if teachers were to see assessment as being an integral part of planning, preparation and classroom practice, it would be easier to do. However, for our teachers, planning for teacher assessment was not carried out in a climate conducive to rational planning, since they did not know what was expected or what common practice was developing in other schools: So I come home and I start to plan what I am doing, and I think, ‘Have I covered that Attainment Target?’, and I think, ‘Right, well, I have done all that I am doing for the next day.’ And then I have got to think about what I am going to assess as well, and then how I am going to hear my readers. All the time I am thinking ahead to where I am going from here and what I am doing, and am I getting it right basically, and are other teachers finding it as hard as me to keep up with it? (Brenda) In the policy vacuum at local and central government level, most teachers were inventing new recording systems in addition to existing ones, sometimes with the advice of LEAs. Our teachers wasted enormous amounts of time on inventing and filling-in systems of recording. For our teachers it was as though, not having received clear guidance about what to assess and how to record assessments, they were assessing and recording as much as possible, usually in addition to other record systems already in place. Silcock (1992) found that teachers were developing such complex record systems that they could not be properly filled in. Our teachers’ (16:0:8) experiences supported his view. Brenda, like several other teachers, had been asked to use a system involving circular shapes with segments for different levels and targets: Yes, these wheels are a new innovation. We have always been a school that has kept records, a sheet for each subject—reading records, maths records to do with the maths scheme. Now, of course, we have to keep records of achievement as well. Mind, the children can fill those in but we have got to be aware of these records of achievement and the record-keeping. I have done some of the record-keeping, as I have said before, because I know the children and I know what they can do, but on specific things on which I am not sure, like, can they write their numbers to 100, can they write in the number box, I have got to sit down because we are not doing that aspect all the time. I mean, they do follow a

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maths scheme, but I have got to check specifically that’s been done and then record it on my wheel. And this takes a lot of time, and especially for the Year 2 teachers now because we have had to fill in the wheel from reception up to Year 2—so we have had these fluorescent pink pens to fill in chunks of it where we think they can cope and then ‘dot’ when we don’t know whether they know it or not. So the record sheets are only just coming through, if you see what I mean. (Brenda) Headteachers or LEAs who had invented, encouraged or insisted upon the use of complex systems in particular, added to time burdens. But teachers also responded by inventing complex systems for themselves: Whatever work you decide to do with your children for that particular week, you have to decide each week what you are going to assess them on. You have to ensure that you tick off what you have done. Have you got your own check sheets? We have an LEA assessment sheet on which we fill in little boxes, but apart from that, being in reception and middle, we make our own up as we go along in what we call a ‘Day Book’. Obviously, you have always done the reading but now you tick everything off. If there is a computer game on, you make sure you tick everybody off and on as they go there. This is on a separate list from the LEA, is it? At the end of each term we fill in the little boxes, as we call them. Apart from that we keep a daily record of everything the children do, whatever task you have given them—I am just saying a computer—whatever activity you have given them for their technology that day. You make sure that you notice them going to that table and tick off that they have completed that activity. So you assess, or know that they can’t be assessed, on any level now. At least you know that they have, what we call ‘visited’ it. You know that they have done that piece of work if you have ticked them off and if you think they have completed it satisfactorily. Though to say they understand or know what they are on about is

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another matter altogether. We make up in the book a list of names, a page for maths, a page for technology, a page for science, etcetera—you just tick it off when you know they have been there. A lot of ticking, I can tell you, now! We keep these records ourselves and from these we can fill in the ‘boxes’ for the assessment. Who else would look at them other than you? Nobody, really, unless somebody came in and asked, and that is proof that they have done it. But apart from that it is just a record to tell me what the children haven’t done. (Felicity) The pointlessness of time spent in this way created the most resentment. Teachers (16:0:8) felt that they could be spending their time more productively: I was thinking about it the other night and I would say that I have always spent a lot of time on teaching, and I would always go in during the holidays and do work because I could see why I was doing it, and I enjoyed doing it. Now, I am not so sure whether I do actually spend a lot more time on it now—but I am begrudging it because I am not enjoying the work and I don’t see a lot of point to what I am doing. (Brenda) Directed time On the whole, the division of time into directed and non-directed time, despite being embodied in the legal framework of teachers’ pay and conditions, for all practical purposes had been reduced to a minimalist system of ensuring that everyone had in their diaries key meeting times, whether the weekly staff meeting, INSET days, AGMs or parents’ evenings: I don’t take any notice of directed time, how on earth can you? Most days I am up there until half-four to five o’clock—you can’t do your work in a quarter of an hour after school, it’s impossible. I mean, if we worked to those number of hours—whoever it was

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that first gave us that list—you would stop work after six months because you would have run out. (Rose) We work as professionals—I work, I do non-directed time, I put in my quota at home where I can work much quicker without distraction, or I work first thing in the morning. (Patrick) We have to be there for 8.30 am, we have to stay behind on Tuesday evenings to see parents. Preparation—we have team meetings every morning. When we have a professional development day we are directed as to what we have to do on that day. Most of us are there until 3.45– 4.00 pm most days, or if we have staff meetings we are there until later. We have staff meetings at dinner times. (Brenda) All but two teachers worked in contexts where directed time was seen as no longer relevant, and this included teachers in the very few schools where the school day was formally directed: What about non-directed time and directed time—is it still operating? Yes, ours is very much operating; we have specific hours to work. We must be there in our classrooms at ten minutes to nine and we work until five minutes past twelve, and then from ten past one until four o’clock on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a quarter to five on Mondays, half past four on Thursdays, and we can go early at a quarter to four on Fridays, so we know exactly where we stand. Now Mondays, which is the long day, and Thursdays are the staff meeting days or base meeting days, you know—sometimes they are free to do what you need to do, like displays or whatever, but mostly they are kept for meetings so we know very much what’s directed time. So you have got a very clear picture of what you do? Yes, and that is our 1,265 hours per year.

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Do you prefer that? I didn’t like it to begin with but I do now, yes—when you think about how some schools are. You don’t find that inflexible? It is a change from the way in which people used to work. Well, it worked badly to begin with because people thought ‘Oh, we are forced to work these hours and I’ll stick to these hours and I won’t damn well do any more.’ I mean, everybody is there from half past eight, a lot of people are there earlier, and I don’t think anybody (maybe apart from one person) ever leaves before half past fourish even on the days when you can go home. People do work hard, I don’t know anybody really—I only know one person who swings the lead a bit, but I mean it’s quite a large staff and everybody works. (Denise) Yes, it does still run on directed and non-directed time but no-one talks about it because we have always done it. Everyone does a lot more than the directed time—in fact, if we could just do the directed time and number of hours it would be a part-time job, wouldn’t it? (Tricia) Personal time Not surprisingly, an increased workload affected aspects of teachers’ lives outside school. Although not asked directly about how much school work impinged on home and personal lives, most teachers (20:3: 1) revealed through their answers to other questions that the increased amount of time spent on work was intruding unduly into their personal and social lives. There is a risk of presenting the interview evidence melodramatically, and we therefore give the straightforward example of Jane. Jane was frequently too tired to relate to her family: The job doesn’t suffer but the rest of my life does, and then I resent it very much, like being wiped out the first week of the Christmas holidays. I was just too tired to do anything, and I think it’s very bad for my family.

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Twenty-three of our twenty-four teachers were women, and for many of them (14:3:7) there was a clash with what they saw as their domestic responsibilities. Olive, a deputy head who had no children, perceived the problems that the workload posed for the over-conscientious woman with children: I must say that I love my job but the hours I am putting in, I think, are totally unrealistic and I shouldn’t have to do it—but I put it in because I think I must do a good job on this and I must do a good job on that, but I think they are totally unrealistic hours and I couldn’t do it if I had children. No way could I have children and then, say, go back to a job that I am currently doing—I couldn’t do it—and that’s only going to be bad, particularly for women, and the effect is that men will get all the top positions. Whilst that isn’t a hobbyhorse of mine, that is going to be one of the effects, that women with young children will not be able to hold down deputy head and headship positions. And that’s with a very, very understanding husband—I have not done any shopping for three weeks because he has done it all—he has had to! Teachers have always perceived their job as being one which demanded a lot of commitment from them in terms of the personal time spent on such things as planning and resourcing their classrooms (Lortie 1975; Elliott 1976; Nias 1989). The perceived differences in this study were that the time was spent involuntarily, and that the time was being spent on activities which were not helping them achieve what they saw as their priorities: It’s what I have to spend time on that I’m worrying about. At one time I was very confident that I spent this time and it helped, it was definitely obvious I spent more time and I had a good classroom and I felt I was a good teacher. But now I am not so sure any more because I am side-tracked by all the things I am not able to concentrate on—I am not sure that I am using it wisely or that I don’t get the choice. I have to spend so much time on things that I don’t actually want to do, covering meetings and other things, and the big thing now is that—I suppose people have said this—because society doesn’t value it. When you talk to people and you say you are just going home to do some work, they

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just say, ‘Oh yes?’, and you think, well, you just wonder, don’t you, whether it’s worth it. (Ellen) THE OVER-CONSCIENTIOUS AND THE SANE What emerged from the interviews was a strong sense of teacher passivity or deference to heavy time demands—the perceived lack of control over their time even when what they were doing conflicted with their professional values and intruded unduly upon their personal lives. We have already drawn attention to ‘the passive professional’, assumed by Fullan (1991) to be the basis for state-directed change (see Chapter 5). We made a crude distinction, based on the impressions of the interviews between those teachers lacking a sense of control (the ‘overconscientious’ as we dubbed them) and those taking some control (‘the sane’) over how their time was used. The former were the vast majority (twenty-one), with only three teachers falling into the latter category. Why so many teachers seemed ready to give in to what they saw as unrealistic or inappropriate demands is worth explaining. The most common reason (17:3:4) was that the teachers themselves simply accepted that they had to do what was required of them as well as they could. They had a strong personal sense of obligation to their own professional standards and the needs of the children. In order to do their work to the standards they set themselves, teachers simply had to lose time from their personal life. For example, Jane, who worked in a small rural school with a mixed-age class, explained that although she had too heavy a workload, she did not see it as causing her stress since she herself created part of the workload by her own conscientiousness: No, it hasn’t been the reason for any extra stress. No, I think that most of my pressures really are self- imposed in that I don’t like to half do the job—I can’t bear to do something badly, I think that’s my personality. You know, if I am going to do something I want to do it properly. I like doing all our displays and things and I get, ‘Why do you spend so long doing it, can’t you just stick them on the wall?’ But I work a lot from the wall, I use it very much as information and display. I mean, our buildings are old, Victorian, and not too wonderful to work in really, and not designed brilliantly for children—like outside loos—and they look pretty horrid when there is nothing up but they are transformed with a bit of the children’s work. They take such a

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pride in their work and they comment, you know, if they come after the holiday and I haven’t even put the backing paper on the wall, they will say, ‘Isn’t it awful’, and they can look back after two or three weeks and say, That looks wonderful now’, you know. And it’s not just the appearance of it, you know, it’s a lot of care, and a lot of effort and a lot of hard work has produced it. Unfortunately, it’s hard work on my part as well as theirs! Tricia, with nursery and reception children, had responsibility for the infants’ section in her school and showed how the extra workload had spilled over into her relationships with her family, supportive as it was: We find it very difficult to recruit the right sort of people, so I suppose that’s another worry that’s affected short-temperedness— long staff meetings, that type of thing, taking it out on your family—that’s where the stress comes out with me. Endless phone calls to ask, ‘What are you doing?’, ‘Why are you doing that?’, ‘You’re not going on another course, are you?’ Obviously there’s family stress, there are problems in any family; I have a very supportive family who are as ambitious and as keen for me to get on as I am for myself—I know that’s not the case in some families. Nonetheless, later in the interview Tricia accepted that part of the problem was her own conscientiousness. Although she thought she needed non-contact time, there were some strict conditions to be met before she would be prepared to take it: Even though I have talked about non-contact time, I don’t want non-contact time unless the person in my class is me, or a clone of me, or someone who is going to be able to go in there and carry on or do something which will enhance those children who are learning for half-an-hour a day or one day a week, or whatever, I don’t want someone going in there just doing a holding job, because then, suppose somebody was to say, ‘You can have one day off a week to do record-keeping, to do administration work, that sort of thing, go on courses.’ I mean, unless I could really be sure that that person in my class for that one day was doing meaningful things, carrying on and continuing with the national curriculum and bringing something to these children, I would

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rather do it in my own time at home if I had to, because then I’d cram five days into four. Grace, talking about the impact of accountability, said, untypically for our teachers, that it was less influential than her own internal sense of professional standards: It is not as if you feel there is some ‘big brother’ watching you, watching what you do. Maybe I am just the sort of person who feels it’s there and I should be doing it, and if I am not doing it I punish myself because I think I should be doing it. Because it’s statutory, something that is required? No, I feel that if I am doing my job properly I should do it—I suppose it’s a professional way of looking at it. I want to do my job properly and be considered a good teacher, and therefore I must cover all these things and do them properly. The second category of teachers (‘the sane’) were teachers who had decided to limit their impulse to over-conscientiousness. They were conscientious about their work, but they were also anxious to protect their own time, their ‘sanity’, and their personal and family life. They were a minority (three out of our twenty-four). For Angie, the consequences for her professional relationships were not good because she was running against the workplace culture of conscientiousness. We might compare Angie’s view with Denise’s, given earlier (p. 146), which suggested that Angie’s attitude would be regarded as ‘swinging the lead’: At first I felt pressurised to keep up and then, after Christmas, I decided, ‘Right, I am going home at 4.30 pm every day, I am not staying to 5.30 pm I am going to have a lunch and I am going to be up there at 12.20 pm every day and I am having a proper break or else otherwise, if I don’t, I am going to go under.’ I had to make those rules for myself regardless of what others were doing. I know that it doesn’t go down well. And if I don’t feel well I am not going into school. I have decided that there are certain rules that I have got to stick to because I don’t think the government are going to thank me for giving up my lunch hour or staying on after school. I feel that the school that I am at, most of the teachers are

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either young probationary teachers or teachers who are climbing up the ladder and see themselves as little notches on the way. I don’t really feel like that at all, I just want to be a good class teacher and be happy in my job. I don’t feel that that is what’s happening with me at the moment. The other two teachers felt that they had made sensible coping strategies, even if they did not always do all that they were asked to do. Both estimated that they worked between 40 and 50 hours a week, estimates that were some 10 hours less than the majority’s. Christine discussed her strategy as follows: I frequently have to say, ‘No, I can’t do that’, especially when other members of staff want my time for something, something that they are doing, I just haven’t got the time. The Headteacher doesn’t get everything she wants either—if she asks me I say, ‘Yes, I’ll try’, and if she comes back a couple of weeks later I have to say, ‘Sorry, I haven’t had any time.’ How do you feel about that? I would like to have more time to help other members of the staff but I think, when it comes down to it, your own class has to come first. You have to do your best for your own class, you can’t take your time out to do things for other people in school if you haven’t done what you should do for your own class. We are all experienced teachers, we haven’t got any probationary teachers, so I don’t feel that much of an obligation to do things for other members of staff. Christine had established a cool, no-nonsense approach to the new demands. If they took longer than people were expecting them to take, then people would have to put up with it: I still find it a very satisfying job, yes. Well, I can see that I can still teach the way I want to regardless of the national curriculum—in fact, I won’t allow the national curriculum to change me that much. I always feel that you have to move forward, make progress with new ideas and so, but I like to take the best of what’s new and add to it what I have already got rather than going overboard for a new idea. And I think the national curriculum is

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much the same, you know—we will be able to assimilate most of it and, hopefully, not make it too burdensome in the future. So, yes, I am very satisfied with the job—nothing would induce me to leave teaching and if they don’t like the way I teach they will have to sack me, and that would be that. She had taken the same view of meetings and in-service training and paperwork: Don’t you have to spend more time in meetings and things like that? We did, but we have cut it down a lot—we just say, ‘No, we are not going’, and that’s it. Yes, we were much more depressed a year or eighteen months ago—we couldn’t see our way out of it, but I think we can now and we are not bothered about it. As for assessment and recording, she had decided not to do things prematurely: Are you not assessing differently from the way in which you assessed before? Well, yes, I suppose I am but I don’t find that it gives a different result, you know, I only find that it comes to what I thought in the first place. Would it be wrong—I’m trying to capture what it is that you are saying —is it true that you would be, to some extent, going through the motions then in the business of assessment itself? Yes, definitely. Because you have got a very clear notion of where…? Well, also I am waiting to see what happens because we are getting new directives all of the time, and I have come to the conclusion that one way—well, the only way—to cope with it, I suppose, is not to do anything until you absolutely have to, because next week it will all change and you will have done it for nothing. So I carry on with what I am doing until I absolutely

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have to do something about all this paper that’s s landed on me, and then I, well, I give it lip-service, change my ways a bit, perhaps fill in what it asks for, and carry on in a slightly different way—and I will only change slowly. I don’t think changing rapidly does anybody any good—you only find you are doing the wrong thing or something that is worse than what you were doing already. If I am to change I want it to be better. Christine added that the assessment, as SEAC had suggested, was being trialled and that was how she intended to treat it, ‘Otherwise you’d go crazy, and what good are you to the children if you’re crazy?’ It has been conventional to analyse teachers’ attitudes to teaching according to Hoyle’s (1975) concept of ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ professionalism; the former defining their work as primarily teaching, the latter responding to a broader set of professional expectations, including theorising and working in professional development activities (see also Chapter 9). The polarisation is, of course, somewhat false, and in any case relative, but it is interesting to turn the value assumptions of Hoyle’s analysis on their head. For three of our teachers, restricted professionalism put a brake on otherwise unrealistic time demands and enabled them to obtain or regain a greater sense of control over their working time. For the others, an extended sense of professional obligation removed the brake and left the use of their time at the mercy of an uncoordinated and confused set of policy initiatives frequently mismanaged by LEAs or headteachers. For these teachers, their own conscientiousness was a source of exploitation. SUMMARY Teachers saw their working time as increased, and time powerfully affected, by the introduction of the national curriculum; intensification of time pressures in the school day led to a reduced sense of satisfaction with teaching and the cognitive pressure from the curriculum specifications led to a reduced sense of control over the use of their time. There are continuities in these respects with primary teaching before the introduction of the national curriculum, but teachers perceived these changes as significantly different. One consequence was the reduction of pleasure in classrooms, which had previously been derived from taking time to engage with pupils’ social and emotional concerns. As we showed in Chapter 5, the concentration on documentation had led to perceptions that teaching was becoming

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bureaucratised. Distinctions were made between time demands arising from the national curriculum and those following from poor school management and inappropriate professional training and development. Excessive time on recording pupil attainment arose from confusion and lack of guidance on record-keeping requirements. Teachers’ conscientiousness had also contributed to long working hours, and the model of the ‘extended professional’ upon which the national curriculum delivery has been based may have to be treated problematically.

7 STRESS

The task of implementing the national curriculum took its toll on every one of our teachers at an emotional level. In saying this, we acknowledge Nias’s (1989) view that stress characterised primary teaching before the introduction of the national curriculum. However, our interviews were designed to elicit teachers’ perceptions of the stress directly generated by attempting to implement the reforms. Coopers and Lybrand Deloitte’s (1991) analysis of the costs of the national curriculum recognised the considerable strains imposed upon teachers: The major effect of stress, in our view, is reflected in teachers’ lives inside and outside the classroom and not in their absence from it. We think that these effects, and their costs, are real; but clearly they cannot be quantified from an analysis of this type. Our research too revealed how teachers’ lives inside and outside the classroom had been affected by stress. Emotional responses to the pressures of implementing the national curriculum were varied. Not all were entirely negative. Some reflected hopelessness and despair, some, resignation and some, resolution. There is always the danger of representing symptoms of stress, because of the ways in which they are referred to melodramatically, and we run that risk in this chapter. However, the stress was universal among our teachers, and needs to be reported. It also, of course, needs to be seen in the perspective of general approval, reported in Chapter 2, for the national curriculum. Indeed, it could be argued that without such approval and commitment there would have been little stress, since the teachers would not have been trying so hard to implement the curriculum changes.

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TEACHER STRESS We have adopted Kyriacou and Sutcliffe’s (1987, p. 146) definition of teacher stress as: The experience by a teacher of unpleasant emotions, such as tension, frustration, anxiety, anger and depression, resulting from aspects of his work as a teacher.’ This broad definition appropriately reflects the range of emotional responses reported by our teachers. The individual transcripts of the interviews convey a complex compound of emotions, such as feelings of incompetence, giving rise to guilt, which led to anxiety and developed into anger or despair, or both. Almost every one of our teachers (23:1:0) reported being under stress, but this took diverse forms depending on individual circumstances. The commonly experienced (23:0:1) emotion, and one which seemed to underpin most others, was frustration. In nearly all cases, stress was seen to originate from the intensity of pressures in the school day imposed by the magnitude and complexity of delivering the national curriculum (see Chapters 5 and 6). Many teachers believed their delivery of the national curriculum to be a test of their professional competence, yet it was proving so demanding a task that they never considered themselves to have tackled it adequately. The feeling of never being ‘on top’ of their jobs, of being swamped by an oppressive workload, was pervasive. All teachers described their working day as characterised by having too much to do and therefore giving them a reduced sense of job satisfaction and increased stress. In Chapter 6 (p. 128) we illustrated the pressure on teachers through Ann’s use of the ‘running commentary’ analogy. Time and again this sense of being overwhelmed by work came through the teachers’ descriptions. Sheila, for example, knew clearly what was expected of her but could not realise her purposes: You feel you can never be on top of the job…never be able to meet the needs of the children in the way that you feel they should be met, because of so many pressures which the national curriculum has put on us and which just don’t seem to be recognised. These pressures just don’t seem to have been really fully taken into account, and I’d say that’s really at the root of everything. The time—there just isn’t any of it. I just constantly feel stressed by the fact that you know what you want to do, you know how you want to achieve it, but you can’t.

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Other teachers felt similarly overwhelmed: I keep saying to myself, ‘I must start doing these recording sheets this week’, but this week never comes. I think that sooner or later I’m going to have to spend one weekend doing it—blow family life. No, I must do something about it, it’s me, I know, putting off the evil day. I know I’ve got to do it and I have reports to write as well this year, and I dread to think what will happen next term as far as the children are concerned, because I wonder how much teaching will be done when you’ve all this other thing hanging over you. (Nina) All the time I feel that there’s this weight—that I’ve got to do this, this and this. That was never there before and it is a weight. (Brenda) I think there’s just a sense that we’re never going to get on top of the work. (Ellen) For one teacher the frustration took on a different guise. In Chapter 4, Helen identified some of the factors which she considered to be hindering her implementation of the national curriculum in her school and it is these which caused her stress. Her frustration arose out of what she perceived as her headteacher’s incompetence and his avoidance of the national curriculum: I think I was always more aware that the longer we left the national curriculum before we came to terms with it, the deeper into the mire we’d fall. She spoke of her headteacher: He’s hoping it’ll all go away, that’s how he seems to act, and it’s so frustrating—unbelievably frustrating…He never gives any instructions or anything, which adds to my stress. I do know quite clearly that the stress that I’m under is caused by inadequate leadership, inadequate management of the school.

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Helen’s preoccupation and concern were that what she felt should be being done was not merely incomplete, but had barely been started. For her, this was proving no less stressful than implementing the national curriculum was proving to be for our other teachers. The part played by headteachers in creating or reducing stress should not be underestimated. Previous research has found leadership and school management to be significantly influential (Nias 1980; Freeman 1986; Primary Schools Research and Development Group 1986; Evans and Johnson 1990) and our study corroborates these earlier findings. Helen’s case of stress resulting from perceived inadequacies in leadership was the most explicitly illustrated, but not the only one, amongst our sample. Thus, some of the stress might be most accurately attributed to a combination of the demands of the reform process and defective management, illustrated in Chapter 6. In every case, our teachers’ reported experiences fitted Kyriacou and Sutcliffe’s (1987) three-stage model of teacher stress: 1 the perception that demands were being made upon her, 2 inability, or difficulty, in meeting these demands, 3 failure to do so threatening mental and/or physical well-being. When stress is allowed to persist there grows a threat of burn-out (see Cunningham 1983; Kyriacou 1987). One of the crucial determinants of how real this threat may be is the capacity for coping of those who are under stress. COPING STRATEGIES Coping with stress has been found to take two forms; direct action and palliative techniques (Dewe 1985; Kyriacou, 1987) Direct action involves pro-active response to the source of stress whereas palliative techniques do not tackle the source but, instead, aim to alter the emotional response. Dewe’s (1985) study of New Zealand primary school teachers’ strategies for coping with stress revealed palliative techniques outnumbering direct action strategies very noticeably. This trend was also evident in our study, but our data were very difficult to quantify in the ways used by Dewe, since, for reasons of methodology, we were not able to rank our teachers’ responses.

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However, despite some reported coping strategies combining both, we have attempted to categorise them according to whether they are predominantly palliative or direct action techniques. Direct action Reorganisation of routine The most commonly used strategy in this category appears to have been some form of reorganisation of routine influencing teaching approach or classroom organisation and management. Sheila, teaching a class of Reception and Year 1 children, reported having to become less flexible in her interaction with children. She no longer allowed herself to be interrupted whilst teaching small groups. Similarly, Vivienne reported trying to reduce distractions and confining everything to its allotted time. Brenda, a Year 2 teacher, described her technique for reducing the interruptions arising from pupil demands on her: What I’m trying to do, I put a green band on and when I’m wearing this green band the children know they aren’t supposed to come to me for anything because I’m talking to other children. Clearly these were class-management strategies, which is not surprising in view of the fact that the stress reported was generally attributed to problems emanating from time constraints in the school day (see Chapter 6). As coping strategies, however, they had significant disadvantages because they effectively involved teachers placing their own interests above those of children in a way that ran counter to their normal professional practice and values. The result was that the benefits gained in terms of time saved were balanced against those lost in terms of feeling guilty or unprofessional. All the teachers quoted above, except Helen, expressed concern, dissatisfaction or anxiety about the measures they had felt it necessary to take. Where such measures ran contrary to the child-centred ideology often viewed as integral to infant teaching (see, for example, King 1978; Osborn and Broadfoot 1992, p. 13), the conflict of priorities that followed meant that the teachers exchanged one source of stress for another rather than eliminating it.

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Re-prioritisation These coping strategies involved teachers re-prioritising in such a way that their professional values were not compromised and they were offered more chance of success. Patrick and Rose had taken stock of their own situations and decided which things could go by the board and which were too important to skimp on. Patrick talked about his science teaching as follows: It’s taken time away from teaching which, I feel, is more important at this age. So I’ve perhaps been a bit naughty in that I don’t do as much science…. I get through all of it, I don’t leave anything out, but I don’t spend a great deal of time on it and I don’t always record it because I feel that if I don’t teach children to read they’re going to suffer next year…so I decided, at the beginning of last year, that my job as a middle infants (i.e. Year 1) teacher was to teach these children to read and to know numbers, especially numbers to ten, and that the other things, yes, we’ll do them, but they’re not my priorities. I decided for my own sanity that I had to do that, and so that’s what I’ve been trying to do last year and, so far, this year. Rose had decided to cut down on her paperwork in the interests of what she saw as her principal priority: As far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to sacrifice the children this year. I’m not trying to get some sort of bureaucratic exercise right when I don’t think it’s valid and I don’t think it’s been well thought out…my priorities have changed now, almost—well, not exclusively—I know I’ve got a certain amount of paperwork for the children’s benefit that I’ve got to get through as well. But I’m saying that I’ll put those files on one side, leave that reading until later, let that video wait; I’d rather hear the children read, so I’ll get that done first. So I’m afraid then, well…it’s a bit strong to say I’m a rebel, but I tell people that maybe I’m not doing assessment properly, or not ticking the right box, but I am going back to what I’m paid for. I’m going back to teaching. At this point it is perhaps appropriate to distinguish these direct action strategies, designed to reduce stress, from the adjustments to planning which many teachers considered necessary in order to deliver the national

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curriculum, which we have examined in Chapter 5. Both were clearly coping strategies, but the distinction lies in what they were intended to cope with; in the one case, change; in the other, stress. Where measures to accommodate the national curriculum had been successfully implemented the process whereby stress develops had been interrupted at the end of Kyriacou and Sutcliffe’s Stage 1 (see p. 158). However, where measures to accommodate the national curriculum had, to a greater or lesser degree, been unsuccessful, the stress development sequence was able to reach Kyriacou and Sutcliffe’s Stages 2 and 3, and strategies intended to reduce or eliminate stress were called for. For many of our teachers, direct action strategies were evidently considered inappropriate or unsuccessful. Essentially such initiatives represented a compromise of ideology and/or professional standards and some teachers were reluctant to try them since, however slight, this would be thought of as tantamount to failure or incompetence. It must be remembered, though, that some had initially made successful direct action responses to the problems of coping with the changes imposed by the implementation of the national curriculum (see Chapter 5) and that these had helped to nip in the bud the potential for increased stress. Others, however, had evidently preferred to take on the full force of the challenges of the national curriculum and tackle implementation ‘by the book’. This may have been due to conscientiousness, lack of confidence coupled with fear of accountability, or avoidance of feelings of having ‘cheated’, which was implied in Patrick’s and Rose’s re-prioritisation: ‘I’ve perhaps been a bit naughty’, ‘It’s a bit strong to say I’m a rebel, but…’ Without exception, though, those teachers who had, for whatever reasons, rejected direct action strategies for coping with change or stress were evidently under greater stress than their colleagues who had compromised earlier. For these teachers who reported increased stress, palliative techniques seemed to be the only appropriate means of coping. Palliatives Palliatives were not confined to teachers who had tried to take everything on board uncompromisingly, since many who had employed direct action techniques supplemented them with palliatives. This, together with the constraints imposed by implementation of the national curriculum, which limited the range of appropriate direct action strategies, meant that palliatives were not only the more widely reported but also the more diverse form of coping strategy.

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We were able to identify three broad categories of palliative: seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, putting things into perspective, and finding moral support. Seeing light at the end of the tunnel Several teachers (5:5:14) were sustained by an optimism that things would improve, once the dust had settled: It’s the biggest thing to hit teachers. There’s such an enormous change. I just think it’s got to sort itself out…I think once we’ve covered this year and part of next year’s SATs it’s all going to even out…I just think you’ll get used to doing it and get quicker at it and find ways of doing the same thing, but quicker. (Felicity) I think once it all settles down people will be a lot happier about it…At the moment everyone’s saying, ‘Oh, the national curriculum!’, but I think once it falls into a nice little framework it’ll be okay. (Grace) What is keeping me going is that all the furore will gradually settle down and we’ll be left with a realistic curriculum with realistic methods of assessment. (Ann) However, though anticipation of a better future may help to sustain morale, it is not clear how it contributes to alleviation of current stress. We do not know how teachers choosing this tactic coped with discovering, in the years since we interviewed them, that the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an on-coming reorganisation of the curriculum. Putting things into perspective This response had similarities with the direct action strategy of reprioritising, but it was distinct in that, as a palliative, it constituted an all-encompassing change of attitude to work, a new outlook, rather than a specific course of remedial action. The source of stress remained but the teachers learned to see it differently in that it controlled their lives

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less powerfully. Essentially, putting things into perspective involved a change of emphasis; teachers reappraised what was achievable and/or desirable and re-defined goals appropriately. This could be confined to individuals’ work in the classroom, or it could relate to their wider dayto-day routine. Putting the national curriculum into perspective There was a growing realisation that pulling out all the stops to implement the national curriculum ‘by the book’ was not humanly possible and that any attempt to do so would be likely to prove detrimental to teachers’ well-being. As a result, several teachers had settled for more realisable goals: You can’t perform everything. We have some record sheets to fill in and I’ve had to say, ‘Look, I can’t manage these with thirty-one children’…I’ve had to tell the boss, ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s too much’… You end up, you see, with mountains of sheets of paper which nobody’s going to look at and nobody’s going to use, so it’s not of any use at all. I did it for two weeks and then said, ‘No, sorry, I’m not going to do it any more’. (Denise) I think I’ve got it under control. There was a time when I felt there was just too much and I couldn’t get it organised, but I’ve reorganised my room recently…I keep the portfolios of children’s work in boxes under the table. The headteacher offered me a filing cabinet recently and I said, ‘No, thank you. What won’t go in the boxes will have to go in the bin.’ (Christine) Putting work into perspective This led on from reappraisal of the feasibility of some of the demands of the national curriculum and, in many cases, reflected anger at the extent to which work threatened to dominate teachers’ personal lives. A readjustment of professional conscience and attitudes was indicated by some teachers: I’m not a person to get colds or be unwell but I had ‘flu for the first time ever in my life and I had one cold after another and

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terrible headaches and all sorts of things. And I found that each holiday I was trying to get better to go back to school, and I thought, This is just ridiculous!’ So I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to do that. I enjoy teaching, I like children and I sorted out in my own mind what I felt my job was, and I do that. But then I feel that I also have a life outside school and that if I feel like sitting and knitting in the evening then that’s what I’ll do. You’ve got to have a break. You can’t work twenty-four hours a day. You’ve got to have a rest, you’ve got to have a break so that you’re fresh to go back, and that’s what I try to do. (Olive) I love my job and I like to put a lot of effort into it, but I’m not going to let it become the whole thing. I have hobbies and my family life. I like to go out and about with my family, particularly at weekends. I think the more we do, in many ways, the more the government will put on us. But I think we’ve got to say, ‘I’m doing that much and that’s it—no more’. (Vivienne) For others, putting work into perspective involved increased emphasis on other aspects of their lives: We try to get away most holidays, just to get away from it, because if I’m at home I have all my stuff in a room at the back and I just keep going and looking in. I can’t get it out of my mind… and I go swimming once a week. I make sure I go and take physical exercise. (Grace) I do like to get away. I like to go out for a walk at the weekends, like we went out and we saw some herons and it was lovely to get away. And then I like to get away on holiday. We often go to Ireland. This half-term we went to London. We went to the Tower and to a couple of shows. We went to everything and I had a wonderful half-term and I feel better now. I like to do that because I think you can get, towards the end of term, very niggly. (Kathy) Whatever distractions and alternative pursuits were used, they seemed to provide some success in enabling teachers to stand back from the

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stressful situations in which they found themselves, to allow them to organise their thoughts and their future plans and to see things in a different light. Putting things into perspective was often achieved independently; teachers implied that it was a process which they had undergone on their own, after mulling things over in their minds, wrestling with their consciences and reviewing their own situations. Some teachers, however, relied more heavily on others to help them cope. Finding moral support Our findings suggest that some teachers (5:0:19) found support from others a source of strength. This was also reported by Nias (1985), who found primary school teachers sustained by referential support from colleagues and friends from outside. Betty, an experienced teacher, found that team teaching with a young, enthusiastic, newly-qualified colleague managed to raise up her spirits: I’ve spoken to a lot of my friends. I’ve rung them up and they say, ‘I’m at the end of my tether’, ‘I can’t do it’, 1 can’t cope.’ There are a lot at that level. I’m not, I’ve got Julie to work with. She’s great. She’s a young probationer…We’re a good pair. She’s as daft as I am, you know. And if you’re working out these things together—we stay behind and do a lot of work together—it’s much easier…whereas, Barbara, who’s in the classroom next door, she’s trying to do the same as us on her own, but she’s very, very downhearted. Linda, a Year 2 teacher, spoke similarly of her Year 2 colleague: ‘one day she’s down and I chivvy her along, and vice versa.’ Others, rather than single out one particular soul-mate, describe how collegial teaching in the school helped them to cope: We have our little differences, everyone has got their foibles and we all laugh about it, you know, but it’s a very happy staff and we do support one another. The only odd one out is the head. She doesn’t fit in terribly well, you know. But the rest of us keep going, and the deputy is really very good at keeping the staff

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going together and looking after people and giving extra help to anyone who’s under pressure or feeling down. (Christine) Such were the pressures upon the teachers that some also needed support from people other than those with whom they worked. Colleagues from other schools, family and friends also played important roles. Many teachers, however, felt that the problems which they faced were incomprehensible to anyone outside the profession. Indeed, some suggested that non-teaching heads were unable to appreciate fully the nature of the stress. Support from family and friends was welcomed but generally its effectiveness at helping teachers to cope was limited. The coping strategies which we have identified were not necessarily consciously planned; many evolved haphazardly and inadvertently as teachers sought ways of easing their own situations. For most teachers, though, coping strategies were pointers in the right direction rather than solutions. They alleviated stress, but they did not eradicate it. LIVING UNDER PRESSURE Several teachers gave graphic illustrations of what living with the pressures of work meant for them: On this shoulder it’s like a grey cloud of the national curriculum, and on this one it’s school management. It depends on what’s happened, on which shoulder it is. I really, honestly, can’t say how stress manifests itself apart from there’s a lot more going home, throwing the bags down and having two stiff gin and tonics! It’s like an insidious thing, you don’t wake up one morning and it’s just there, it’s been piling up at a rate of knots. So you never really feel that you’ve come to the end of a particularly difficult piece, where you think, ‘That’s alright, because this is it.’ (Ann) Tiredness, irritability, waking up at night thinking, ‘I haven’t done that’, or ‘I must put that up’, or ‘I must talk about that’—not being able to get back to sleep again because of it. Constantly your mind’s buzzing over things and, because I’m unsure about whether I’m doing it right, I feel…you know, you think to yourself, ‘Well, why have they put this on us—all this?’ It’s a sort

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of dilemma. You think, ‘It can’t be right. They must be able to review it this year, they’ve got to see.’ (Betty) Something of the fluctuating intensity of stress was described by Grace, a Reception teacher who held an ‘A’ allowance for Music: It depends very much on the state of the term. I mean, if it’s towards the end of term I think, ‘I can’t spend another day like this, I’m glad the holidays are here’…School is never out of my mind any more. In fact, I’m glad I do music because I can sit down there and I can tell myself, ‘Yes, I’m still working because I’m playing now’…But it’s difficult to cope with. There are times when it gets me down and there are times when I could give it up tomorrow. But, then, I’d miss the children terribly, and there are times when I think I’m doing a really good job. For teachers experiencing the worst stress, it was their personal and domestic lives which generally suffered the most: I think stress shows more in the home than in school, because you just seem to carry on in school. I take it out more on my family than on the children in school. You’re really ratty at home. You spend far too much time doing school work. The first time my children have said anything is in the last year. My daughter’s in the fourth year at the comprehensive. At one time I thought she may have gone into teaching, but we’ve completely put her off. We haven’t said, ‘Don’t go into it’, she’s just seen us when we come home! (Felicity) Now, I used to love to read…two books a week was no strain on me, it was a good way of unwinding, like watching TV, and going out—we keep a horse to go out and ride—looking after the garden, or what have you…It’s just that so many of those things have gone out of the window because you’ll come in at the end of the working day and feel shattered. You haven’t even got the energy to read, and that’s a terrible thing to say, or, if you do, you think, ‘I should be looking at the latest HMI reports on the state of reading in the country.’ (Rose)

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For those who, in addition to teaching full-time, also shouldered traditional female domestic and family responsibilities, the pressures were often magnified, as we have shown in Chapter 6. Our findings might be adduced in support of David’s (1991b) assertion that the education reforms of the 1980s failed to take account of the changes which have occurred in family life over the last two or three decades. To a large extent stress has been an integral part of teaching for many years. Nias’s work (1989), carried out in 1975–7 and in 1985, revealed many of her graduate teacher interviewees to be victims of stress, which evidently manifested itself in very similar ways to that experienced by our teachers: The workload expected of and assumed by committed teachers left many men and women feeling ‘drained’, ‘exhausted’, ‘shattered’ at the end of the day…For thirteen teachers a corollary of these conditions, and of their own commitment, was ‘lack of time to have any kind of private life’. (pp. 110–11) Spencer’s (1984) two-year field study of the home and school lives of fifty women elementary school teachers reveals similar findings. Home and school lives were often indistinct. The volume of work was so great that, even when tackled at home, it was never completed: ‘All teachers were influenced while at home by school factors in ways that made their work an ever-present reality’ (p. 293). As our findings indicate, the advent of the national curriculum has not merely introduced new pressures on English and Welsh teachers, it has compounded those which were already integral to the job. It has added to the pile without removing anything, and some teachers were unable to cope with this. TOWARDS BURN - OUT We were able to divide our teachers into two categories; the ‘sane’ and the ‘over-conscientious’, depending on how far they allowed themselves to be governed or, indeed, swamped by the pressures which the national curriculum had added to their jobs (see Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of these categories). For the few ‘sane’ ones, a combination of coping strategies was allowing them to keep their heads above water, but the ‘over-conscientious’ appeared intent upon

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martyring themselves and many were sinking fast. In some cases these over-conscientious teachers showed signs of heading towards burn-out. Burn-out involves reduced commitment and motivation to one’s work; physical, emotional and attitudinal deterioration; disaffection, apathy and antipathy, feeling inconsequential (see, for example, Farber 1984; Kremer and Hofman 1985; Kyriacou 1987). Thus, the typical characteristics of the burnt-out are those of reduced conscientiousness, yet it was from amongst our ‘over-conscientious’ group that potential burn-outs were identified. This is because being burnt-out means that the high energy and high commitment characterising work and attitude before burn-out, disappears after it. We judged that several of our teachers were close to crossing this particular threshold. Revised career aspirations What may appear to be perhaps the most innocuous of the danger signs but, nevertheless, significant, was evidence that some teachers had put aside ambitions and plans for promotion. Denise, who held an Incentive ‘A’ allowance, spoke of her recent applications for deputy headships: I just feel grateful now that I didn’t get the jobs. I think having seen how hard our deputy head works—she’s divorced and she puts a lot of time into the school; and she’s really superb—I just don’t know that my family life would have been secure…So I’ve dropped that completely. I can do without the hassle, I feel. Nina’s attitude was very similar: Two years ago I was applying for deputy headships and on two of them I got to second interviews. I was quite keen to go further, but if I apply for a teaching post next time we move with my husband’s job I shan’t bother about anything more than perhaps an ‘A’ for music. I shan’t be looking for deputy headships…It’s ‘the buck stops here’ syndrome, sort of thing…I’m an acting deputy head this year, I’m a teacher-governor and also a union rep. I get an awful lot of input from each of those spheres to know what’s going on, not just in our school, but in other schools. I don’t like what I see heads are having to do, I don’t like it one little bit. These teachers, perhaps, had been ‘cooled-out’ (Clark 1961) rather than burnt-out.

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Weakened professional identity Kremer and Hofman (1985) associate high levels of teacher burn-out with weak professional identity. They refer to four basic dimensions of professional identity; centrality, the importance, meaningfulness and interconnectedness of the profession; valence, its value and attractiveness; solidarity, the readiness to share a common fate with one’s peers; and self-preservation, the willingness to own up to one’s being, say, a teacher. Amongst those of our teachers under threat of burn-out, weak professional identities were evident, relating to one or more of the dimensions identified above. Some teachers were disillusioned by the changes which primary education had undergone and was continuing to undergo and which diminished, for them, the importance, meaningfulness, value and attractiveness of teaching. In particular, concerns were expressed that child-centred pedagogy was threatened by the national curriculum. This was identified by Osborn and Broadfoot (1992) as a potential demoralising factor, but it was only partially borne out by our findings since we also found it to be the case that teachers who recognised the compatibility of child-centred, cross-curricular teaching with the national curriculum tended to report the greatest job satisfaction and the least stress. Helen articulated her fears about the future of primary education: Kenneth Baker did that visit to America. He saw the appalling education system, was it in New York or Washington? He came back and he said, ‘This is it. I’ve seen the future, and it works. This is what I want’, and he threw away—or attempted to throw away—the best primary school practice in the world—well, certainly the best infants practice in the world—and this is what we’re fighting against. There was consensus amongst this sub-group of our teachers that the nature of teaching had changed in such a way as to have removed much of the pleasure which it once held. Teachers’ own creativity was being stifled, it was felt, and much of the autonomy which had allowed them a certain degree of spontaneity in their curricular choices had been replaced by excessive accountability. The job was not what it once was and they were fast approaching the state of wanting none of it:

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I feel I’m not getting the time actually with the children, which was why I went into teaching. I enjoyed talking with children, seeing them progressing in little ways like that, and now I feel that my time with them is so pressured that I tend to get very stressed and ratty with them, through no fault of their own. I feel these pressures to achieve so much in each session, whereas, before, you didn’t have that. If a child started off doing an activity with you and it branched off to something completely different, that was fine and that was rewarding, and you really got to know the children. But there’s just no time for that now…I started off very enthusiastic and very committed, but more often now I’m finding myself frustrated, fed-up and just thinking, ‘What’s the point?’. (Sheila) So disaffected and disillusioned were some teachers (6:2:12) that their pride in their professional identity had begun to diminish and they were reluctant to admit to others that they were teachers: There isn’t the awe any more of being a teacher. Teachers are not held to be professional people at all—not like a lawyer, doctor, or even a dentist. You look up to a dentist more than to a teacher… Sometimes I don’t like telling people I’m a teacher—I’d rather not bother! (Brenda) I do feel it’s almost got to the point where people say, ‘What do you do?’, and you think, ‘I don’t want to tell them’, because we’ve got a very negative public image. You just think that it doesn’t have the kind of status it used to have. You’re definitely not regarded as highly as I thought teachers were when I went into the profession. At times I do think I’d like to try something else and, quite seriously, I thought, ‘Right, I’ll have a go at something else, I’m going to do something else’, because I just come home feeling stressed…I left university with a big group of friends and every one of them, without exception, is earning more than I am now. They work hard but they don’t do the same number of hours that I do, so I find that quite hard to deal with…So, I suppose, from when I first started thinking that it would be wonderful to be a teacher, I don’t think that so much any more. (Sheila)

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Enough is enough The most advanced stage towards burn-out was feelings of being at the end of one’s tether; of being unable to cope; an unwillingness to take any more pressure. It was the ‘enough is enough’ stage. Teachers for whom leaving the profession was a realistic option anticipated doing so: My great thing, when it was 1990 I said, ‘This will be the decade in which I retire.’ I’m 45 now and I really can’t see myself keeping up with this pace of work for more than another five or six years…I have to say that I’m consciously looking in the papers now to see what else there is that I’d like to do, because I feel so drained as a human being. I know I can’t go on at this pace indefinitely. (Jane) At the moment I feel that I’ve given up…Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I’m fast reaching the stage—if I haven’t reached it already—of saying, when appraisal comes in, ‘If I’m not doing my job they can jolly well kick me out.’ I’ve had enough…there was something in the Times Ed. last week that was non-teaching and I wrote off for it. I mean…blow it! (Nina) If I found a job tomorrow that paid the same and had the same hours I’d leave without a backward glance…I’ve come to the stage now when I think, ‘Enough is enough.’ (Rose) Others made it equally clear that they were approaching breaking point: I think, ‘Is it worth it? Is it really worth it?’, because I could be earning more and worrying less…Your commitment goes, doesn’t it? (Betty) You have days when you think that on Monday morning we’ll be handing our notices in, and I think that’s a general opinion. Everyone is looking for a way—it doesn’t matter how much you

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say you like it—I think people are saying, ‘Enough is enough. We can’t take any more.’ (Felicity) It is unclear to us whether these extreme expressions of feeling would actually lead to burn-out, or to the reappraisal of priorities, illustrated earlier (p. 160), but it was difficult to believe that these teachers, with this powerful sense of stress, could continue to help pupils to progress securely and to enjoy satisfying personal lives if their states of mind persisted. SUMMARY Stress affected all the teachers and arose from a deep sense of frustration at not being able to complete their work to the standard they thought they ought to do. The teachers adopted, or were forced into, coping strategies, either of a direct action or a palliative nature. Direct action included changing classroom routines and altering priorities; palliatives included putting the demands of the curriculum and work overall into perspective and finding moral support from colleagues. Neither strategy removed stress and the teachers lived with a constant feeling of being stressed. Many were in danger of becoming burnt-out. Although there is continuity with previous research into primary teaching, the intensity of stress experienced may be new.

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Part III CHANGING TEACHERS’ WORK?

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8 TEACHERS’ MORALE AND JOB SATISFACTION

INTRODUCTION The chapters in Part II of this book have illustrated teachers’ perceptions of the various effects on their working lives of the introduction of the national curriculum. This chapter amalgamates some of those different perceptions into an analysis of the national curriculum’s effect on teachers’ morale and job satisfaction. The 1988 reforms were greeted by predictions of widespread dissatisfaction and plummeting morale amongst those who would have to implement them. In particular, it was expected that the national curriculum would alienate teachers by reducing their autonomy and thus increasing their workload beyond what was reasonable. Clearly, change of any kind is potentially threatening to morale and job satisfaction, as Ball (1987, p. 32) explains: Innovations can threaten the self-interests of participants by undermining established identities by de-skilling and therefore reducing job satisfaction. By introducing new working practices which replace established and cherished ways of working, they threaten individual self-concepts. Despite this, it is only recently that the study of educational reform and innovation has progressed from considering the impact of change on teachers’ attitudes as peripheral in any evaluation of the implementation process. However, analysts such as Fullan (1991, 1992) now emphasise the subjective reality of the various participants in the change process. Attitudinal change amongst teachers may serve as a useful indicator of the reality of the change achieved, but it also has

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important repercussions on the quality of their working lives and their commitment and motivation. There are clear advantages in introducing educational reform which, both in itself and in the way in which it is introduced, builds up, and builds on, positive attitudes. In this chapter, using case studies to highlight specific influential factors, we examine the extent to which predictions of severe damage to teachers’ morale and job satisfaction were realised in our sample. We highlight the lessons to be learned from the introduction of the national curriculum and suggest ways in which ‘morale-friendly’ innovation may be achieved. MORALE AND JOB SATISFACTION: DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS The largest sources of literature on morale and job satisfaction are American research and writing, which appeared mainly during the middle decades of this century, and Australian work of the 1960s and 1970s. Locke (1969) estimates that, as of 1955, over 2,000 articles on the subject of job satisfaction had been published and that by 1969 the total may have exceeded 4,000. The literature typically incorporated, and sometimes focused predominantly on, conceptual analysis; a trend which appears to have been largely abandoned in later research. The wealth of earlier valuable discursive and analytical literature frequently remains untapped, an unfortunate outcome of which is that ‘morale’ and ‘satisfaction’ are not always defined in more recent work (see Nias’s comments on this problem, 1989, p. 83). Any assumption that there is universal agreement about what is meant by these terms is ill-founded. Amongst those who have made serious attempts to resolve the conceptual complexities of morale, for example, there is no consensus over issues such as the dimensionality of morale (see Evans 1992b) and whether it is an individual or a group phenomenon (Guion 1958; Stagner 1958). Indeed, the conceptual difficulties are notorious. Guion (1958) refers to the ‘definitional limb’ on which writers about morale find themselves and, as Smith (1976) points out, use of the term has often been avoided in order to eliminate the problems of defining it. Williams and Lane (1975), employing a chameleon analogy, emphasise the elusiveness of the concept. Redefer (1959) describes it as a ‘complex and complicated area for investigation’ and one which lacks a succinct definition, whilst Williams (1986) writes that ‘attempts at defining and measuring morale in the literature seem like a quagmire’.

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Conceptual analyses of satisfaction are similarly problematic and diverse (Schaffer 1953; Locke 1969). In particular, morale and satisfaction are sometimes used synonymously. Smith (1976) criticises American studies for confusing morale with satisfaction, or at least for failing to distinguish between them. His distinction is that job satisfaction is a static, shallow concept, whereas morale is dynamic and forward-looking. He illustrates this by pointing out that ‘high morale may exist in a situation where many job dissatisfactions exist and are being overcome’. Guba (1958), on the other hand, sees high morale as dependent upon achievement of a high level of satisfaction. Satisfying acts require less expenditure of energy than do unsatisfying acts, he argues, and so satisfaction is necessary to avoid expending the requisite energy for morale. The interpretation of morale which we adopt is that of Evans (1992b), who defines it as: ‘A state of mind determined by the individual’s anticipation of the extent of satisfaction of those needs which s/he perceives as significantly affecting his/her total [work] situation.’ This incorporates the notion of morale as an individual, rather than a group, phenomenon, and quite distinct from group cohesiveness which, Evans suggests, is often misinterpreted as morale. Evans’s distinction between morale and job satisfaction is one of temporal orientation; satisfaction is perceived as present-oriented and as a response to a situation, whereas morale is perceived as future-oriented and as anticipatory. Thus, for example, the state of mind which represents teachers’ responses to change in their working lives is job satisfaction, but their anticipation of how change will affect their job satisfaction in the future constitutes morale. This interpretation accommodates Smith’s (1976) explanation that high morale may exist alongside job dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with one’s headteacher, for example, does not preclude the high morale which may be precipitated by knowing that the head is due to retire shortly and be succeeded by a much more promising replacement. Job satisfaction, like morale, is essentially about the extent of the individual’s needs fulfilment. As Schaffer (1953, p. 3) writes: Overall job satisfaction will vary directly with the extent to which those needs of an individual which can be satisfied in a job are actually satisfied; the stronger the need the more clearly will job satisfaction depend on its fulfilment.

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Overall job satisfaction, as Schaffer describes it, clearly depends upon the extent to which the various constituent elements of the job each fulfil the individual’s needs. It is a composite of the effect upon satisfaction of specific job-related factors. DETERMINANTS OF TEACHER MORALE AND SATISFACTION Media coverage of low morale and dissatisfaction amongst British teachers generally attributes the problem to factors such as low salary, status, conditions of service and, in more recent years, to the changes effected by the Education Reform Act 1988 (see, for example, Garner 1985; Andain 1990; Blackbourne 1990; Gold 1990; Hofkins 1990). Such claims are largely impressionistic and, of necessity, based upon common-sense reasoning since there is a shortage, particularly in Britain, of up-to-date research into teachers’ morale and satisfaction and those factors which influence it. Examining the findings of pertinent research, though, provides a clearer picture of how significant as determinants of morale and satisfaction are the factors which commonsense reasoning typically identifies. A brief summary of the literature Much of the research evidence available suggests that, while teachers’ attitudes to their jobs may be influenced by factors such as salary, status and government policy, they are also influenced by situation-specific circumstances. Some researchers have identified specific categories of determinant factors. Herzberg’s (1968) motivation-hygiene theory is grounded in research into engineers’ and accountants’ job satisfaction and has been applied by Nias (1981) to primary teachers. Her study upheld, in part, Herzberg’s theory that job satisfaction arises out of factors which are intrinsic to the job, rather than contextual, but she also identified ‘negative satisfiers’ as factors which, if removed, would increase satisfaction, unlike the contextual ‘dissatisfiers’ which Herzberg identified. Nias found that, crucial in influencing teachers’ level of satisfaction, were leadership and compatibility between teachers’ ideologies and the prevailing school ethos. Almost the greatest single cause of dissatisfaction (Nias 1980) was found to be the frustration experienced from working in schools which lacked a sense of purpose.

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Similarly, Busher and Saran (1990) found ‘a close correlation between styles of leadership and management in schools and the morale of staff’, and Evans’s (1992a) composite study of primary school teachers’ morale and job satisfaction found school-specific factors such as headteachers’ behaviour, school organisation and management, and school professional climate to be far more influential on morale and satisfaction than salary and conditions of service. Lortie (1975) distinguishes between extrinsic, ancillary and psychic rewards as determinants of teacher satisfaction. Of these three, psychic rewards were the most frequently reported sources of satisfaction amongst his sample: in particular, the satisfaction arising out of having ‘reached’ pupils. Among the factors considered least important in terms of influencing satisfaction was salary. The Primary Schools Research and Development Group’s study (1986), using a sample of 135 primary schoolteachers, found teachers’ attitudes to be influenced by both school-specific and centrally-initiated factors. Responses suggested that morale was influenced by appreciation, a professional salary and career structure, good resources, good working relations with colleagues, the satisfaction of teaching, and support from parents, the LEA and the government. Stress, however, was seen to emanate largely from school-specific issues such as ‘aspects of the management structure’, ‘levels of communication and cooperation’ and ‘unsympathetic, insensitive leadership’. The importance of leadership was also stressed in an American study carried out at the Eastern Washington University. Particularly influential on teachers’ job satisfaction were ‘unclear communications and exclusion from the decision-making process’ (Shreeve et al. 1986). Although it tends to receive little attention outside academic circles, and is certainly overlooked by teachers’ unions and the media, the awareness that extrinsic factors are of limited influence on teachers’ morale and job satisfaction is certainly not new. Even before Herzberg had published his motivation-hygiene theory, the complexities of concepts such as morale, satisfaction and motivation were being closely examined in the United States. Chandler (1959, p. 107), for example, suggests: The profession needs to find out if salary policies and administration are related to teacher morale, pupil achievement, teacher turnover, job satisfaction, financial support for the schools, and attitudes of citizens towards teachers…

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and his own research revealed no significant difference in morale level, as measured by his Attitude Inventory, between schools grouped on the basis of type of salary schedule. Sergiovanni (1968) raises similar issues: We seem to be overly concerned with providing adequate salaries, benefits, facilities, and other ‘pleasantries’. Our attention seems to be focused on making sure that our policies and regulations are clear and are fair to all. We are concerned about the quality of interpersonal relations that exists in schools. We treasure supportive and adequate supervision. We insist on a healthy and happy group life for teachers. Yet these factors apparently have little potential to provide for adequate job satisfaction for higher-level need fulfilment. At best these efforts protect teachers from dissatisfaction in work and ensure that teachers will continue to participate as ‘good’ organizational members. The really potent factors, the factors with motivational potential, the real determiners of job satisfaction, are harder to come by. Precisely what these ‘really potent factors’ are, according to Evans (1992b), varies from individual to individual and, whilst being essentially determined by individual needs, reflects more specifically factors such as teachers’ professionality, comparative experience and realistic expectations (Evans 1992a). In the context of the implementation of the national curriculum, individual teachers’ morale and job satisfaction would be affected by the extent to which their jobrelated needs, as determined by factors such as those identified above, were being met within the new roles to which teachers found themselves having to adapt. Our findings: four case studies To illustrate the individuality of morale and job satisfaction, we present case studies of four quite different responses to the national curriculum. Where necessary we draw extensively on the interview transcripts, and this has necessitated incorporating some excerpts used in previous chapters in Part II.

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Jane Jane was one of two full-time teachers in a small rural school. She had responsibility for all of the school’s Key Stage 1 children, who made up a vertically grouped class of twenty-four. She represented the most dissatisfied and disillusioned of our teachers, as some of her comments reflect: I have to say that I am consciously looking in the papers now to see what else there is that I’d like to do because I feel so drained as a human being that I can’t go on at this pace indefinitely…I’m 45 now and I really can’t see me keeping up this pace of work for more than another five or six years. I just don’t think I could physically cope with it. I always used to be tired during the holidays—you know, the first couple of days you’re a bit tired, aren’t you?—but now it takes two or three weeks—I mean, Christmas, I was really, really tired! Now, if we can talk about your morale, which we’ve alreadytouched on… No, I’m sinking. Really? Is that how you’d describe it? Yes…and it isn’t an isolated thing. I haven’t found an infant teacher for years who’s said what a wonderful job teaching is. And the final depressing thought for me this Christmas was when my youngest daughter said she might consider teaching. And I’ve done everything I possibly can to persuade her not to because I wouldn’t wish this job on anybody! I mean, I’m a daughter of a teacher, loads of my family are teachers and I think perhaps it’s something that we’re quite good at. But certainly as it is now I’ll do all I possibly can to prevent her from becoming a teacher because I think it’s a soul-destroying, exhausting job at the moment. Jane attributed her dissatisfaction and disillusionment directly to the demands of implementing the national curriculum, and described her pre-national curriculum attitude: ‘I was quite happy, really. I just didn’t contemplate doing any other job.’ Her interview revealed strong

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evidence of her being a motivated, conscientious, hard-working and reflective teacher: I think, as teachers, you should always be considering what you teach and why you teach…and I think always we should be trying to broaden children’s horizons. Isn’t that the whole point of education? But these attitudes appear to have made a significant contribution towards lowering her morale by creating a model of perfection which Jane seemed to find increasingly unattainable alongside the demands imposed by the national curriculum. She was one of our ‘overconscientious’ teachers but was finding it impossible to achieve her ideal conception of teaching. Much of this, as she admitted, was selfimposed: You set yourself standards, don’t you? And once you find that, yes, you can do that, then you just keep squeezing more and more in, and when you get home at night you think, ‘Golly, I’m really tired’, and you look back and you think, ‘No wonder I’m tired!’ I think, in many ways, teachers are their own worst enemies, aren’t they? They think, ‘Well the children need to do this, I know how to do it, I must do it’, and you just go on spending longer and longer getting it ready and displaying it when they’ve done it, and it just takes more and more time. I think that most of my pressures really are self-imposed in that I don’t like to half do a job. I can’t bear to do something badly. I think that’s my personality, you know. If I’m going to do something I want to do it properly. I like doing wall displays and things, and I get, ‘Why do you spend so long doing it? Can’t you just stick them on the wall?’ Jane’s over-riding job-related need was to feel that she was teaching, not merely competently, but outstandingly, according to her own criteria of excellence, which included delivering the national curriculum ‘by the book’. Her job satisfaction diminished because of the pressures which trying to achieve this had imposed: It really is getting to the stage where you feel you just can’t take any more on board, and in the end you get so tired that you’re ratty with the children and that defeats the whole object of it,

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doesn’t it, if you’re not actually teaching well during your teaching day. But her morale, too, had plummeted because she was unable to envisage any improvement to her working life: I think that the next couple of years will be even worse. I mean, this trial run will probably be quite nasty, won’t it? And then I think they’ll do the odd bit of tinkering with it and next year will probably be equally horrendous. No, I can’t see it improving in the near future for me at all. There seemed to Jane very little in the near or medium term policy that would improve her position. In this respect, given the changes that continued to be introduced after 1991, her pessimism would seem to be appropriate. She was perhaps the best illustration of morale being dependent on anticipation of the future, as we have argued earlier. Brenda Brenda had a Year 2 class of twenty-six pupils in a socially deprived area of a northern industrial town. She was on the National Standard scale and shared the teaching of two classes with a colleague. For Brenda, the rewards of the job were clearly what Lortie (1975) categorises ‘psychic rewards’, arising out of an awareness of having ‘reached’ children and feeling responsible for having contributed to their development: ‘At the end of the year when you turn round and see where they set off from and where they get to—that’s where you get your kicks.’ She was concerned with the development of the ‘whole child’, rather than simply with academic progress: It never fails to amaze me when you see them growing up into second year infants…you forget how far back they were, and then you see them progress in confidence and independence and, ‘I can read!’, ‘I can count!’ You know…I’ve got a little girl at the moment who’s thumping other children and when you tell her off she curls into a shell. She reacts like this to all adults and yet she’s really trying hard to please at other times, and it’s how you get round this personality problem that she’s obviously had, and she’s a bright child. Now, these sorts of things preoccupy me. This is

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what the challenge is about. And then I have what I call my ‘red group’. Roy, who’s extremely disadvantaged from a very difficult home, and Kelly who has—we’ve had the children all through the school and they’ve all…come in poor. Now, if I can make that step in Reception, then they’re going to be more able to benefit… Now, she’s actually making progress…That’s the reward I get. It’s with the children…you won’t take that away. She derived enormous pleasure and satisfaction out of the personal and social education which she believed was an integral part of her job; as a consequence, sharing classes with another colleague had affected her slightly: When I had a classroom on my own and I used to go and sit opposite the door as they came in in the morning, and as they came in they’d hang their coats up and go and get their reading books, and I’d say, ‘Hello’ to each one, and I’d be hearing them read. And you’d see whether he came in miserable or whether he hopped in, and if he was miserable you’d find the time. Now, when there’s two of us I don’t feel I’ve got my finger on the pulse the same. You have to have this relationship. You have to know what’s going on at home. You have to know what’s affecting their learning, and that’s the assessment I’m doing all the time. That’s the assessment I value. This is a town where you can ask a mum to come and you can say, ‘Can you just hear him read a little bit more?’, or ‘Could you just ask him what he’s been doing at school and give him a little bit of encouragement?’, and so forth…That’s something a teacher does. I mean, I do it. I stand at the door as they go out, make sure their coats are fastened, and wave to the mums…that’s the bit I enjoy about the job, that you’re not just teaching the children but you’re dealing with the parents as well. She certainly admitted feeling constrained by the demands of the national curriculum and several times she described her response to these as frustration: I don’t know how many teachers went into teaching for the same reason I did, but I enjoyed it and I got paid for it as well…I can remember enjoying teaching…There’s a frustration in it now that

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there wasn’t before. I don’t sing as often in the classroom as I used to. I’m not as light-hearted. I’ve not as much energy to laugh with the children and to create the atmosphere I want to. The children should want to come to school. It should be a fun place to be in, but if you’ve been up until 11 o’clock sorting out your records, it’s very difficult to sing in the morning ‘Hi, Little Duckling’ with the same enthusiasm, and this is what you have to do with Reception, or with infants, to carry them along. You need the energy to relate to them. Our energies are going in the wrong direction. Now I mean, I’m going to stay in teaching—there’s no way I’m going to leave—but I shall sit and fight this corner because I very strongly believe that the Reception end is where it all starts. It’s a crucial end and I want to shape what goes on there, and I don’t think I’ll do it by going through the system…I don’t even want to be simply a Key Stage 1 teacher, I don’t want to be a top infants teacher, I want to be where it’s fun. I like Reception…I’m doing the most important job. If I can get it right then the children can benefit from the rest of education. Her frustration arose out of feeling unable to achieve all that she wanted to achieve: You can never do enough. You can’t get there. You set all your plans out at the beginning of the week and we’ll never get there, we’ll never achieve our objectives. And she explained how this was predominantly a post-national curriculum phenomenon: the things we’re not getting to are things we’re being told to do… it’s just that pure frustration. Before, if you didn’t hear them all read, but you tried your best, you could cope with that. Clearly, the reduction of pleasure in the job which she described resulted in lowered job satisfaction and morale, and this was, to a large extent, exacerbated by school-specific problems. She complained of the inefficiency and mismanagement of her headteacher who, she reported, lacked any real pedagogical awareness or any insight into current educational issues. When asked to identify what improvements might help her implementation of the national curriculum, she responded:

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A new head who knew what was going on. You can’t get round that. We’re batting on our own with no encouragement, no pat on the heads, no understanding…How the heads come to get like this I don’t know… I know there are a lot of intelligent, dedicated, committed teachers with integrity who’re working superb, structured play classroom situations where all the right things are going on, and the heads haven’t a clue what’s going on. On the other hand, and unlike some of the teachers whom we interviewed, Brenda was not pressurised by her headteacher, who evidently adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards implementing the national curriculum. Indeed, it seemed from Brenda’s reports that only a conscientious attitude on the part of the staff prevented the head’s ‘headin-the-sand’ approach (see Chapter 7) from shaping the whole school’s level of national curriculum implementation: Well, in our school we have a head who’s saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—he doesn’t know what Key Stage 1 is!—‘because it’ll go away. Close your classroom door, get on with it and just forget about it.’ So then we’ve been to the INSET meetings and listened to what’s going on and feel that we ought, at least, to have a stab at it. Essentially, though, this gave Brenda the freedom to implement the national curriculum in her own way and, whilst this did not entirely safeguard her from experiencing reduced job satisfaction and frustration, it meant that she did not have to contend with the problems arising from working for an over-zealous head, which caused stress amongst some of our other teachers. Brenda’s job satisfaction and morale had lowered as a result of having to implement the national curriculum, but she was by no means as desperate as Jane and, indeed, unlike Jane, had no intention of leaving her job. The reason for the difference in attitudes is that Brenda’s job had retained those elements which she valued: the challenges and feelings of satisfaction from having helped children, and the opportunity for social and personal education. Moreover, she did not perceive these to be under threat. Many of Brenda’s job-related needs could still be met, whereas Jane’s could not.

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Ann Ann had a mixed-age class of thirty-four Year 1 and Year 2 pupils from a largely professional class catchment area. She had had a range of jobs outside teaching and had returned to infant teaching four years before the interview period. Pervading Ann’s interview was her anxiety and frustration at being unable to achieve everything that she considered necessary for satisfactory implementation of the national curriculum: Do you think that your own sense of job satisfaction is greater or less than it was before the Education Reform Act? Personally, less. It’s been less because there’s a sense of not achieving, which is like a running thread, which is very disheartening. She continued: we’re being blinkered now into the national curriculum and so everything else is hanging on by its fingernails, really. That’s how I feel at the moment—the sheer amount of time required to cope with what you hope to achieve. But it just seems to be expanding to fill the day and I’m constantly getting to the stage where I’m noticing it far more now that I never complete what I hope to achieve. There’s always, like, a carry-forward so that you never get the feeling at the end of the session or the end of the day and think, ‘Oh, gosh, I haven’t done this’ or ‘I haven’t done that.’ I used to get to the end of the day and think, ‘Oh, great, we’ve done this!’ So this has been a major change as far as I’m concerned. So there’s this running commentary really in the background, that you haven’t done this or you haven’t done that, which I find very annoying considering that you work so hard. In this sense the nature of Ann’s reduced job satisfaction is like that of Jane. Unlike Jane, though, her problems are exacerbated by schoolspecific factors; in particular, an over-zealous headteacher who seemed intent upon implementing the national curriculum ‘by the book’: I think there’s a certain element of the nature of this particular school that creeps in…when the national curriculum first came in, and with the discussion documents, when I first saw the science

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document I was really excited by it, I thought it was such an innovation, particularly in the First School, and I was raring to go with it. There’s still an element of that, but I think it’s been bogged down in the morass of the assessment and the forecasts and colouring-in with coloured pencils. But she also referred to poor organisation in the school, which acted as an impediment to her implementation of the national curriculum: On this shoulder it’s like a grey cloud of the national curriculum, and on this one it’s school management—it depends on what’s happened, on which shoulder it is. The nature of the school seems to be ‘management by crisis’, so we don’t seem to get long-term planning of certain events, and there’s an element of ‘Plan A’ and ‘Plan B’, so very often you’ve planned for something which has to be abandoned through no fault of your own. Like Jane, Ann’s dissatisfaction arose out of feelings of inadequacy at failing to match up with her ideal professional self: I think you become disheartened when you feel that, despite all the hard work, you’re not doing a good job, for whatever reason. We constantly seem to be falling short of a mythical ideal, and yet we’re not given the resources to achieve it. In her case, this ‘mythical ideal’ was rendered even more unattainable by the demands of the school, which helped to shape it. Nevertheless, like Brenda, she, too, was by no means as desperate as Jane: I have a great white hope that things will shake down and the assessment will assume realistic proportions and we’ll be able to teach within the national curriculum, but also get this broad and balanced element which people keep mentioning but which we don’t seem to have time for, the way things are at the moment. That’s what’s keeping me going, really. As a whole, and as a career, I’m still enthusiastic and committed to it. As I said before, what’s keeping me going is that all the furore will gradually settle down and we’ll be left with a realistic curriculum with realistic methods of assessment.

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Ann’s comments illustrate very clearly the distinction between morale and job satisfaction. Her job satisfaction had been lowered, but her morale was considerably higher, allowing her to view her current dissatisfaction as potentially temporary. The distinction between her and Jane is that Jane interpreted the demands of implementing the national curriculum as heralding the shape of infant teaching in the future; she could see no improvements looming. Ann, on the other hand, perceived these demands, for the most part, as teething troubles. Kathy Kathy was on the Standard scale and had a Reception class in a large school in a socially mixed catchment area. She was distinctive amongst our teachers in representing the most positive attitude towards the implementation of the national curriculum: Would you say your morale is still high? Oh, yes, I think so. I can’t say I feel very stressed…I feel I should grumble a bit more. She approved of the principle of the national curriculum, as did most of our teachers, but she also felt at ease with it at a practical level, believing that she had mastered its implementation in her reception class: I’ve nothing against the national curriculum at all, except that it’s too dogmatic, as I keep saying—too many things that you have to keep writing down. The attainment targets, you have to be aware of this, that and the other, I don’t know. But, as I said, the more you get used to it I think that’ll bother you less. At the beginning it was dreadful, wasn’t it? You’d think, ‘How am I going to cope with all this?’, ‘How am I going to remember all these attainment targets?’, ‘How am I going to do this?’, ‘How am I going to do that?’ But, as time went on, I don’t think it’s that much trouble really. It’s good, the national curriculum. Maybe there were gaps. I don’t feel de-skilled. I think it has a lot going for it, really. I’ve come to like it more as time has passed. As I said, when I was first confronted with it I was more worried by it and thinking, ‘What’s the point of all this?’ I was a bit cheesed off with it. But I

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think as you come to be more familiar with it I suppose you get used to anything, this is the thing. The more familiar you get with things the more you, maybe not like them, but the more you’re able to agree with them. You get used to working that way. So, this is as good as any, I think. For Kathy, job satisfaction had not been significantly threatened because she had found herself able to accommodate the national curriculum within her classroom without diminishing those elements of her work which she valued and found satisfying: The main thing, of course, that I’m interested in is to see the children improving—to see them learning. I’m very interested in teaching reading. Now, I have a Reception class and I think sometimes that maybe I shouldn’t teach them reading as much as I do. But I love to see them just coming in, not being able to read, and then learning how to read. And, not only that, but going on to emergent writing, and at the end producing some nice writing. Things like that, that’s what really give me pleasure. I’m enthusiastic—I don’t know about organised!—but, I mean, I’m quite excited about it…I always like to see them doing well… we do a lot of things in technology, for instance, junk modelling… it’s surprising, the more you do it the better they get at it, and you’re excited to see it. Before, they couldn’t even join two boxes together, you know, they’d just say, ‘They’re falling apart!’, but now they’re used to getting out the sheets of newspaper, putting out all the things, getting them and organising them just how they want them…You know, their manual control is really, really good and their ideas are really, really good. This is what makes me excited. I love watching them improve. It’s the reading and writing—oh, I love it! I always encourage them to write and in the afternoon when they’re playing games, playing different things—they very often play offices. So we have an office set up and they’ll write me letters and they’ll bring them over and I’ll add a little bit, while I’m doing something else, on to theirs and they’ll go back and they’ll write me another thing, and I love these letters…and then this is what I’ll spend time on, very often, at home. I’ll come and take them all home and I’ll make a book. I make a book for each month and put it up, and then when it’s parents’ night they can look back. But we’re always making books and things,

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sticking them in in a nice way, and decorating them. It takes ages, but I like doing it. Indeed, these ‘psychic rewards’ which Kathy enthusiastically describes, rather than being merely sustained and complemented by the national curriculum, seemed to have been enhanced by it. In Chapter 5, we present Kathy’s explanation of how her cross-curricular teaching approach, which she had intensified in order to accommodate the national curriculum, had been so successful that she considered it to have improved the quality of her pupils’ learning experiences. She also spoke of the greater security and confidence in her teaching which she felt the national curriculum had provided: It gives you more confidence in a way because when you read up this, as I said, you recognise what you’d always been doing…and it tells you why you do it, you know, which is good. It gives you more of a basis—a rationale—really, that it didn’t have before, really. You know that they were learning and getting better control and that, but then you read up this you learned more about why they should be doing this and what it leads to—the next step, you know, progression—that kind of thing. I don’t mind, to tell you the truth, spending time doing it because I enjoy it. Moreover, Kathy spoke very positively of the management and organisation of her school and, in particular, of her headteacher, who seemed to be fostering the ‘common-sense’ approach to implementing the national curriculum (see Chapter 5). Clearly, she was neither constrained nor dissatisfied with schoolspecific factors, as were several of our teachers. In nearly all respects it seemed that her ideal professional self-conception was as close to being realised as she might reasonably expect. The national curriculum had done little to remove what she valued in her job; indeed it had enhanced it. She demonstrated both high job satisfaction and high morale. PATTERNS OF MORALE AND JOB SATISFACTION The most striking of our generalisable findings was our teachers’ concern with feeling professionally competent. This seemed to be the key determinant of the extent to which their morale and job satisfaction had been affected by the introduction of the national curriculum. It

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represented a need which was common to all of them, although interpretations of, and criteria for, professional competence varied within the sample according to factors such as teachers’ ideology, professionality, relative experience and individual job requirements. Thus, for example, those who demonstrated characteristics of extended, rather than restricted, professionality (see Hoyle 1975; Evans 1986) included in their conception of competence a need to rationalise the content and style of their teaching. Those who were committed to educating the ‘whole child’ included personal and social education and pastoral care as criteria for competence, whereas teachers with greater concern for academic standards valued the teaching of basic skills. Most of our interviewees held responsibilities other than class teaching so that, for them, competence may have included successful coordinating of a curriculum subject or fulfilment of an administrative task. But the extent to which teachers were able to feel professionally competent was influenced at least at two levels. First, it was influenced by school-specific factors, such as colleagues, the headteacher, the workplace culture of the school, the children whom they taught, parental attitudes, and even resources. Second, it was influenced by centrally-initiated factors, such as the legal requirement to deliver the national curriculum and the time-scale of the implementation process. Moreover, whilst on the surface it might appear that centrally-initiated factors fell outside of local, idiosyncratic influences, in reality, as our examination of the different degrees of national curriculum implementation illustrates (see Chapter 5), they were very much at the mercy of them. What this meant was that individual teachers’ delivery of the national curriculum, which, in turn, influenced their perceptions of their own professional competence, was affected, first and foremost, by school-specific factors. In this way school-specific factors were influential in determining levels of morale and job satisfaction. More specifically, our findings revealed that the feelings of diminished professional competence which our teachers experienced were, for the most part, attributable to two main factors: time and organisation. As the chapters in Part II of this book illustrate, time proved to be a problem because there was simply not enough of it and organisation was difficult to achieve. The problem of lack of time had two strands. First, the time-scale on which the government expected the national curriculum to be introduced and implemented was evidently unrealistic and had the effect of placing enormous burdens, in the forms of excessive

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workloads and unachievable deadlines, on teachers’ shoulders. Second, the vast amount of work which implementation of the national curriculum necessitated at classroom level, but for which there were insufficient hours available, resulted in the ‘running commentary’ syndrome which we have identified earlier. The problem of organisation emanated partly from that of time and may best be summarised as teachers’ bewilderment at how best to tackle the practicalities of implementing a new curriculum in ways which accommodated the specific statutory requirements without compromising cherished ideologies. This, very briefly, outlines what may be generalised as the major underlying cause of teachers’ reduced job satisfaction and, in many cases, morale. Yet it could almost certainly have been avoided had the process of introducing the national curriculum been tackled differently, in ways that took account of teachers’ existing practices and priorities, and moved implementation at a slower pace. The message to the government, in their role as change-initiators, is that those who are to be responsible for implementing change should play an authentic part in shaping the design of the change. In the case of the introduction of the national curriculum, lowered job satisfaction and morale resulted largely because the practicalities involved in implementation were not recognised through initial trialling at the outset. ‘Morale-friendly’ introduction of the national curriculum would have involved extensive consultation and negotiation with a widelyrepresented teaching profession. From the government’s perspective this would perhaps have created problems of a different nature from those which it experienced three years after the national curriculum’s introduction, but it might have avoided the need for substantial revision (NCC/SEAC 1993) and further inevitable disruption. The change process would have been significantly slower and it is likely that the changes attempted would have been less sweeping. But the cost would not have been a teaching force with damaged morale and reduced job satisfaction.

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9 DILEMMAS OF PROFESSIONALITY

Throughout the chapters in Part II the responses of the teachers to the semi-structured interview have illustrated their perceptions of the impact of the national curriculum on their working lives. There is also a larger focus for analysis in terms of the dilemmas faced by teachers under changes imposed on them. For this purpose we have used an adaption of Dilemma Analysis (Winter 1982) in order to identify the dilemmas experienced by our teachers. DILEMMA ANALYSIS: A BRIEF OUTLINE Dilemma analysis, according to Winter (1982), is guided by the concept of ‘contradiction’ based on the idea that social existence is prey to a series of paradoxes. Organisations, individuals and relationships are all open to conflicts of interest and mixed motives. Therefore, a statement of opinion may not be a straightforward representation; behind it there is an awareness of other points of view. Winter used this as a basis for analysing interviews from the point of view of the issues about which interviewees had opinions rather than the opinions themselves. In his original paper, Winter developed dilemma analysis as a tool for analysing semi-structured interview data gathered from students, teachers and supervisors trying to negotiate interpretations of student teaching. He argued that there was a need for specific techniques for interpretation of qualitative data, particularly when there were quantities of such data from a relatively small sample. To have such a specific technique would also help to counter the question of validity of interpretation. Although each context might be unique, the application of a specific technique to a variety of contexts might give the basis for wider generalisation and decision-making. Winter felt that the three usual methods—content analysis, thematic induction and theoretical exemplification—of interpreting distinctive

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and diverse material did not produce adequate tools of analysis. He rejected these methods of interpreting and analysing his data and turned instead to looking for a theoretical basis for the method of interpretation rather than the interpretation itself. He distinguished between ‘substantive theory’, which underpins the interpretation of data, and ‘formal theory’, which underpins the method of interpretation. Winter classified the statements made by the different participants in the teaching practice situation concerning their experience of teaching practice into expressions of dilemma, tension or contradiction, and classified them in a threefold way. These were: 1 Ambiguities An awareness of inevitable and deep-seated complexities in the situation which are not directly linked with a required course of action and which can therefore be tolerated. 2 Judgements in which decisions are made in awareness of the complexity of the ambiguities and tensions in the situation but which are not rendered wrong by such complexities. 3 Problems where the complexity of the situation, in terms of the tensions and ambiguities, actually seems to undermine the reasons for the required action. We found that although the concept of dilemma was one which was useful to organise the data, Winter’s definitions were specific to his research situation and, consequently, difficult to apply to the data we were considering. It was also difficult clearly to identify the interrelationships between the categories. Therefore, we simplified and redefined the categories in terms of the teachers’ perception of the impact of the national curriculum on their practice. 1 Ambiguities were defined as a perceived mismatch between teachers’ personal philosophy of education and the underlying philosophy of the national curriculum. This apparent mismatch need not affect their practice. 2 Judgements were defined as decisions teachers had made based on their personal philosophy of education. Teachers expressed firm commitment to these choices even though they might conflict with the perceived demands/requirements of the national curriculum. 3 Problems were those decisions over which teachers expressed uncertainty and concern. There was a sense that these choices were not ones to which teachers were fully committed and might possibly be subject to revision.

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The interview transcripts were re-analysed to see what was causing the dilemmas teachers were facing in each of the categories derived from Winter’s framework. What emerged from this re-analysis of the interview data was a central ambiguity for most teachers (20:0:4) regarding the nature of their pro fessional role, from which flowed a series of judgements and problems, all of which directly affected the teachers’ perceptions of the national curriculum and which accounted for some of the difficulties they were experiencing in implementing their statutory obligations. It was clear from the transcripts that the ambiguity was intuitively felt rather than formally conceptualised by the teachers. TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL ROLE There is wide-ranging literature on teachers’ definition of their professional role (Hoyle 1975; Ball and Goodson 1985). It is only rarely that evidence of primary teachers’ conceptions of professionality has been provided (Alexander 1984; Campbell 1985; Nias 1989). It was not an issue directly addressed in the semistructured interviews, although the general focus on the changes needed for the introduction of the national curriculum encouraged teachers to talk about how they saw their professional role being affected. The underlying concern of the teachers was the threat posed to their conception of professional autonomy, in terms of their ability to control definitions of their work. The model underlying the curriculum was broad-ranging and had engaged teachers’ support in principle. It was a model in which the needs of the individual and the social purposes of education coexist: The curriculum must also serve to develop the pupil as an individual, as a member of society and as a future adult member of the community, with a range of personal and social opportunities and responsibilities. (DES 1987c, 2:1) It was not exclusively concerned with outcomes or products since there was statutory concern for the development of understandings and processes as well as knowledge, as the Education Reform Act 1988 indicated:

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The curriculum…shall comprise the core and other foundation subjects and specify in relation to each of them: (a) the knowledge, skills and understanding which pupils of different abilities and maturities are expected to have by the end of each Key Stage… (b) the matters, skills and processes which are required to be taught to pupils of different abilities and maturities during each Key Stage…and (c) the arrangements for assessing pupils at or near the end of each Key Stage for the purpose of ascertaining what they have achieved in relation to the attainment targets for that stage. (House of Commons 1988, Section 2) Despite approval for such a model there was a fundamental ambiguity in our teachers’ perceptions. It reflected a mismatch between conceptions of children’s learning and the curriculum model, and there was also a difference in priorities. For most of our teachers (18:2:4) basic skills of literacy and numeracy were more important than the delivery of the broad curriculum of the 1988 Act. Brenda put it concisely, as follows: experience tells me that children don’t learn the way the national curriculum is set out. They learn in far more miscellaneous packages really. I think the job of an infant teacher is to get a child really wanting to come to school, really interested in things that go on there, to teach basic skills but not really to be concerned with this parcel of knowledge that the national curriculum is trying to teach. The teachers felt that within the statutory framework their judgements had to operate and that these judgements should be based on their professional expertise. Their commitment to the principle of the national curriculum, which we have shown in Chapter 2, and the exercise of judgements contradicting the principle of breadth at Key Stage 1, created the major ambiguity:

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It is certainly my professionalism that dictates that the children in my class come first, but of course I do have the statutory obligations now. (Tricia) I think my place in the infant school is to teach a child to read and write and be numerate. (Brenda) [It’s important that] children speak well, write well and express their thoughts and can think of methods of finding out more, enquiry methods. (Ellen) I decided at the beginning of last year that my job as a middle infant teacher was to teach these children to read and to know numbers, especially numbers to ten, firmly. The other things, yes, we will do them, but these are my priorities. (Rose) I don’t really see the curriculum for infant children in the same way the national curriculum writers seem to. I think that you have got to teach skills to infant children. You have got to teach reading, writing and number work. (Christine) What is interesting and perhaps ironic is that these echo the stated priorities of the government: Education is a continuous process. It starts in the home and may continue in play groups or nursery before school begins. It does not cease when formal education in school ends, but those schooldays constitute education’s foundation. The purpose of the school has always been to ensure that children acquire a basic knowledge and a capacity to learn, and that they enter the outside world as happy and rounded, as balanced and qualified as possible; that central aim will always be there, cascading down through the generations. (DFE 1992b, 1.2)

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Both teachers and central government documents therefore see the imparting of basic skills and knowledge as being within the professional repertoire of the teacher. The dilemma for the teachers resided in meeting the statutory requirements to provide a broad and balanced curriculum, and at the same time meet the priorities of raising the standards of literacy and numeracy. Undermined confidence One consequence of this ambiguity was that teachers came to doubt their professional abilities: We have all felt that what we have been doing for all these years just hasn’t been good enough and we’ve all felt, ‘Well, what else can we do to improve it, really, if what we are doing is not good enough?’ There seems to be more and more being asked of us, and yet we never seem to get anything back from it—and I don’t mean necessarily teachers’ salaries because if you did it for the money you wouldn’t do the job. You will get parents who do tell you all is wonderful, ‘She couldn’t read six months ago and now look at her’, so you’ve still got that morale boost, but the whole feeling of being a teacher and having a worthwhile contribution to make to society is just not there any more. (Tricia) This meant that although they could, and did, make judgements in their classrooms as to how to deliver the curriculum, they worried about exercising their professional autonomy: At one time I felt very confident that I spent this time and it helped…and felt that I was a good teacher, but now I am not sure any more. (Ellen) You know what you want to do, you know how you want to achieve it, but you can’t. It’s sort of a feeling of failure, I suppose, really, that’s the hardest. (Sheila) The professional self-doubt merged into personal self-doubt because the professional identity of teachers is closely bound up with their personal

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identity. Being a primary teacher is more than just a job, it is a way of life in which the self invests substantial personal involvement (Nias 1989; Cortazzi 1991): I am not good enough, I am not doing it right…are the children benefiting from this?…I feel very insecure about it all, very insecure and stressed about it…you’re very aware of your faults really and you are always putting yourself down, you know. (Brenda) A further area of professional uncertainty lay in the conception of ‘good practice’. Although the objectives and content of the curriculum have been laid down in statutory orders, teaching methods and curriculum organisation are the responsibility of the school, the governing bodies and the teachers. The uncertainty for the teachers arose from the statements in the non-statutory guidance they received that the national curriculum had developed from ‘good classroom practice’. This gave rise to an additional pressure on teachers; if the curriculum had been predicated on good classroom practice then the difficulties they were encountering implied that their own classroom practice was not ‘good’. To admit to difficulties was to acknowledge professional deficiency. The problem here is that ‘good practice’ is rarely analysed objectively (see Alexander 1992) and is often merely a set of idealised values defined so as to exclude common practice. In the context of curriculum change defined as based on good practice, however, the vagueness of the concept rendered teachers vulnerable. Previously successful teachers began to doubt the value of their professional experience. THE ENGINEERED CRISIS IN EDUCATION To professional ambiguity was added social doubts about the effectiveness of teachers. In the early part of the century Callahan (1962) noted that a crisis of confidence in education was manufactured by the popular press in America, and it acted as the basis for bringing models of ground-clearing business efficiency, derived from industry or commerce, into the management of American education. Similar crises have arisen in public rhetoric as the basis for change in English education (see Cox and Dyson 1969, for example) much of it chiming in with public concerns, as Jones (1983) has shown. The power of the press to insert doubts into the collective mind of a profession ought not to be underestimated. For our teachers there was an ill-defined sense that

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‘they’ (outside the profession) were criticising practice which they did not understand: You think, ‘Oh, yes, I’m doing my best’, but you don’t feel as if it’s good enough for them. You’re probably doing more than before, it’s just that, suddenly, they move the goalposts. Your best suddenly isn’t good enough and you think, ‘Where am I going to get any more reserves of energy or enthusiasm to meet that new target?’ (Rose) The ambiguity arising from a perception of low public esteem was wellcaptured in an interview with Sheila, a young teacher, under 25 years of age, whose interview was heavy with disillusionment: …At times, extremely negative. I do feel it’s almost got to the point where people say, ‘What do you do?’, and you think, ‘I don’t want to tell them because we’ve got a very negative public image’, and you just think it doesn’t have the kind of status it used to have—you are definitely not regarded as highly as I thought teachers were when I went into the profession. At times I do think I’d like to try something else and quite seriously I thought, ‘Right, I’ll have a go at something else, I’m going to do something else’, because I just come home feeling stressed. I’ve got friends doing nice jobs during the day and coming home and having nothing to do in the evenings and at the weekends, and they get paid more than I do. I left university with a big group of friends and every one of them, without exception, is earning more than I am now. They work hard but they don’t do the same number of hours that I do, so I feel that quite hard to deal with. I’ve got the same training, the same amount of education, why shouldn’t I be regarded as highly as they are? So, I suppose from when I first started thinking it would be wonderful to be a teacher—I don’t think that so much any more. I still do it because I enjoy being with the children and basically I like the job, but the actual morale of being a teacher and the status is not there at all. Maybe in a few years it will be a bit more settled—I wouldn’t like to say, the way things are changing so rapidly. Who knows, we just carry on, don’t we? For a few teachers the sense of not being understood had been transferred to their view of their accountability to the governing body.

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Those to whom they had been made accountable were no longer the ‘experts’ in the educational community but lay members of the general public: Our governors are very much on the ball, they are very committed to their part; we have no problems filling our governorships and they are very keen to do the job properly. So they are sort of a body watching over us and, of course, they are an unprofessional body and we’ve got to answer to them. But they’re not professional people who we can necessarily relate to—it’s not like being accountable to your headteacher, or an inspector, or an adviser—it’s being accountable to people who are, in fact, in a tremendously powerful position but who are not qualified teachers…It’s very difficult to talk about the things we need to talk about because they are in business or they are in a different job. (Tricia) Teachers have got to justify what they are doing to governors— selling, they think, what we are doing. Why should we have to justify to governors a maths scheme that we choose? We, as professionals, think it is the most suitable…I think a lot of teachers are having a great deal of difficulty in coming to terms with their changing role in the job they have held for so many years, and recognising the power that the governors have. (Olive) The dilemma here was that teachers accepted the underlying notion that they were, and ought to be, held accountable for pupils’ progress. As Irene said, acknowledging that she was a parent as well as a teacher: Well, to begin with, I thought it was a dreadful idea but as a parent, I’d have liked my child to have had the national curriculum because every child should get a fair deal… because, you see, the teachers have to attend to every child in order to write records on it. And Denise agreed that having material in a form which let her know for what she was accountable was a considerable improvement over the previously unaccounted-for curriculum:

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I have been helped to order my teaching better. I have a framework to work from, which I have always wanted and never had, only ones I devised for myself. I have worked in a lot of different schools over the country and every time I went into the school I would ask, ‘Have you got a syllabus, please? Can I see it?’ And they would say, ‘Oh, well, you know, that’s not the sort of thing you want, there’s a text book over there’, and that was the general idea. But now you know where you are going, you know what you have got to cover, and I think it’s a good thing. I think once it all settles down people will be happier about it. Conventional rhetoric holds that infant teachers operate with a childcentred model of teaching in which their professional role is conceptualised through their personal sense of commitment to the development of their pupils as individuals (Nias 1989; Cortazzi 1991). They identify with, and attempt to cater for, the needs of the individual. The erosion of confidence to which we have referred above had, nevertheless, not led to the abandonment of that central salience in their professional role. We have argued this in Chapter 8. The other side of being undermined is reflected in the strength of Irene’s views: I’m still very proud to be a teacher and no matter what people say I know that I am doing an extremely worthwhile job. I know that I’m helping to shape the future of the country, of the world, and I’m taking responsibility for children, not only their intellectual development but their social, personal and physical and their entire development—and there can be nothing more important than that. So I am still as committed and dedicated to the job as I ever was. Discussion The prime source of teachers’ dilemmas was the concept of professionality with which they were operating. The implementation of the national curriculum required teachers to define their work more broadly than teaching children; they had to participate in professional development and training, collaborate in planning with colleagues, engage in agreement trials on assessment in which they had to justify their judgements of pupil attainment. Moreover, they had to develop a view of the political purposes of the curriculum, generally an alien concern to primary teachers according to White (1982). Yet the focus of

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their professional identity was the classroom and their pupils. They had a more restricted view of professionality than the national curriculum implementation process assumed. This derives from Hoyle’s (1975) definition of teachers in terms of their professionality as either ‘extended’ or ‘restricted’. The restricted professional was one who: ● ● ● ● ●

had a high level of classroom competence, was child-centred (or sometimes subject-centred), had a high degree of skill in understanding and handling children, derived high satisfaction from personal relationships with pupils, evaluated performance in terms of her/his own perceptions of changes in pupil behaviour and achievement, ● attended short courses of a practical nature. The extended professional had the qualities attributed to the restricted professional but had certain skills, perspectives and involvements in addition: ● ● ● ●

viewed work in the wider context of school, community and society, participated in a wide range of professional activities, had a concern to link theory and practice, had a commitment to some form of curriculum theory and mode of evaluation.

Thus the dilemma for our teachers was not approval or disapproval of the new curriculum but the model of professionality it assumed. By generating the need for professional development activities in which teachers should engage and spend some of their time (e.g. in-service training, meetings, formal recording and assessment) the national curriculum was forcing at a fast pace the development of extended professionality. This interpretation would help to explain some of the ferocity of the teachers’ views on the waste of their time in extracurricular activities, most notably meetings and in-service training, outlined in Chapter 6. Underlying the hostility was antipathy to the implicit assumption that they would work as extended professionals. THE ISSUE OF PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY Densmore (1987, p. 133) argues that teachers are professionals or semiprofessionals because of the degree of autonomy they exercise:

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Autonomy on the job is taken as the cornerstone of professional working conditions, since it is through freedom from supervision and external controls that professionals are best able to apply their expertise. Against this, Carr and Kemmis (1986) argue that teaching can only be considered as a profession in a very limited way because teachers operate within hierarchically-structured organisations which do not permit the exercise of autonomy. In primary schools, until recently, both views would apply since, as Alexander (1984) argues, teachers exercised extreme autonomy in the classroom by surrendering any serious claim to participate in whole-school decision-making. The latter was seen as the headteacher’s responsibility. Although there is wide and continuing debate on the appropriateness of regarding teaching as a profession (Hoyle 1975; Gilroy 1989; Kogan 1989; Sockett 1989a, 1989b) there is little doubt that our teachers regarded themselves as professionals in a common-sense way, even though objectively their situation might not meet formal criteria. As we have seen, they often used the term to define and frame their dilemmas. However, they had not resolved the dilemma they faced as professionals claiming the right to autonomy at least in some aspects of their work, with the political and legal framework of accountability for the social purposes of publicly-funded education, at one extreme, and the ‘market’ of parents at the other. In the past infant teachers have been vulnerable, even more than other primary teachers, to claims that they possess no visible technical expertise (Lortie 1975) since their work can be more easily construed as merely doing better what other experienced adults, especially mothers, can do competently. In addition, their work is seen as not requiring a great subject knowledge (see Rumbold 1986), nor do they possess it (see Bennett and Carré 1993). The possibility that the imposition of the national curriculum might render those areas of expertise which are needed for their work publicly visible, remains intriguing. Under imposed change, therefore the teachers experienced dilemmas. It is, however, probable that the most powerful—the conflict over the curriculum priorities, and especially over time for the two basic subjects of mathematics and English—will remain the least resolvable since, as Campbell (1993a) argues, the modern, broad curriculum of the Education Reform Act sits uncomfortably with public perceptions, with political rhetoric and with professional salience at Key Stage 1. Against this, dilemmas arising from reduced professional confidence and esteem,

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and from reduced sense of autonomy, may come to be read as temporary, self-indulgent or anachronistic in a post-corporatist world where public servants, irrespective of professional status, are, perforce, accountable directly to their employers and indirectly to consumers. Moreover, it is possible to see the widespread disaffection in the interviews over time spent in staff meetings, in-service training, and in other kinds of professional development as in part derived from infant teachers attempting to resist the move towards the extended professionality such as is required for the understanding, delivery and assessment of the national curriculum. As we show in Chapter 1, this requires more time working out of contact with pupils and in contact with other professionals, and this shift in patterning of work may not be attractive to those who, as Lortie (1975) and Nias (1989) show, gain their prime satisfactions from work with children.

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10 THE KEY STAGE 1 CURRICULUM Continuities and change

INTRODUCTION In Part II of this book we have attempted to capture through the voices of the teachers the impact of the process of curriculum change upon them; what it felt like to be at the forefront of the change process. In this chapter we explore the links between their perceptions and two objectives of curriculum policy set in train by the Education Reform Act 1988. The two concern the ‘balanced and broadly-based’ curriculum and the assessment arrangements which, as we saw in Chapters 2 to 7, were a major focus for the teachers’ views. We develop our analysis by setting the subjective voices of the teachers against the more objective data reported in Chapter 2 in Part I of this book. We draw the conclusion that, at the stage when we were gathering the interview evidence, namely two years into the change process, there was less change and more continuity with previous practice in key aspects of the curriculum than the teachers thought. In respect of assessment there was substantial change, discontinuous with previous practice, as the teachers thought, but the move towards change was damaged by the political climate within which the teachers were operating. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for the implementation of educational policy.

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THE BALANCED AND BROADLY-BASED CURRICULUM: CONTINUITY WITH THE PAST Time allocations The evidence in Chapter 2 showed that for both years of the research the teachers allocated roughly 50 per cent of the time they spent teaching to the two basic subjects of English and mathematics. In the interviews a major issue in curriculum time allocation was the effect that introducing the national curriculum was seen to be having on the time available for the basics, most notably the time for ‘hearing children read’. Teachers reported that time for this basic activity within the basic subject of English was being reduced in order to ‘fit everything else in’, i.e. to implement the broadly-based curriculum of nine foundation subjects and Religious Education. Two questions arise from the above paragraph: how does the 50 per cent time allocation in this study relate to time allocation before the introduction of the national curriculum, and what was the national policy guidance on time allocations? The evidence about the first question is clear-cut and we treat this first. The policy guidance—there was no statutory allocation of time to different subjects—had an interesting history and we treat this question second. Research on time allocation: the ‘basic’ instinct The research evidence about time allocations in the primary curriculum is largely about time allocations as carried out in practice in classrooms by teachers. A summary covering much of the relevant research in the last fifteen years is provided in Table 10.1. As can be seen, the evidence refers to both Key Stage 1 (infant) and Key Stage 2 (junior), and where studies have covered both the data have been separated here. Table 10.1 shows data from a range of studies (in a format that we, not the researchers, have created to enable fairly simple comparison between the studies). We have combined data presented separately by the researchers for English and mathematics into Column (i) Basic subjects, and have combined all other subject time into Column (ii) Other subjects. Basic subjects in this table includes only English and mathematics, not science,

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Table 10.1 Proportions of time on basic subjects and other subjects in a range of research studies

Notes: 1 ‘Other subjects’ are expressed either as in the research data, or if data were not given, by subtracting ‘Basic subject’ percentages from 100. In the former cases (viz. the two Bennett studies and the Tizard et al. study) the proportions of time left for non-basics are consistently lower than in the latter cases. * Re-calculated from data in Appendix 4 of Galton et al., using 23.5 hours as the weekly total, rather than the 18 hours observed by the researchers, which showed 65 per cent of time spent in observed lessons on English and mathematics. ** Re-calculated from data in Chapter 4, Table 4.1 of Tizard et al., which shows 64 per cent of work in classrooms observed spent on English and mathematics, to take account of other curriculum activities.

the third core subject in the national curriculum, which is allowed for in Column (ii). Commentary: technical issues There are two kinds of comment to make on Table 10.1: technical and substantive. The technical ones arise from the research methods adopted, and we touch upon them briefly and, necessarily, simplistically. There are five important ones. The research studies employed different methodologies and did not use consistent, or necessarily identical, subject terminology or concepts. However, it is important for the argument to know that English tended to be defined rather narrowly, so as to include reading, writing in English time but not in Topic, and Oracy. Drama and media studies were usually, though not always, excluded. Some studies used observation of pupil time,

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others used teachers’ allocations, while Meyer et al. used official documents to arrive at proportions. It is not known how the DES arrived at its percentages. The Galton and Tizard studies excluded observation of work outside what Galton called the normal classroom base, such as PE, dance and games, TV programmes, etc. The teacher and pupil samples were of different populations and the time sampling varied both in amount of time researched and in the extent to which it could fairly be considered as representing a typical year. The proportions, moreover, have an air of spurious accuracy. What counts as 100 per cent when translated into hours per week varied. All these differences would constitute a weakness in any individual study. However, where a range of studies using different samples and methods over a fairly long period comes up with very similar findings, methodological differences constitute a strength because a convincing trend emerges through triangulation. In this case what is clear is that about 50 per cent of the curriculum time, however and whenever it was measured, was allocated to the two basic subjects of English and mathematics. Empirically, the phenomenon of 50 per cent time on these two subjects—what we might call the ‘basic instinct’ in the primary curriculum—is firmly established. Indeed, the study by Meyer et al., which is an examination of official elementary and primary curricula world-wide across this century until the late 1980s, argues that the phenomenon has been a global constant, irrespective of region, or political economy, or state of development. They show that the national language takes one-third and mathematics one-sixth of official curricula: one-tenth of time is allocated to each of science, social studies, aesthetic subjects, physical education and to moral/social/religious development. Commentary: substantive issues There are four substantive points to add to the technical ones. The first one sounds as though it is a technical matter also, but it is a substantive one for time allocation. It relates to ‘evaporated time’ (see Chapter 2) which is time technically available for teaching but used for non-cognitive purposes such as supervising children changing for PE, moving them from one location in the school to another, lining up and clearing away. It is important because it is assumed to be available for teaching, but in Column ii of Table 10.1 the studies that took account of this time by excluding it from teaching time, showed that something between 22 per cent and 8 per cent of teaching time evaporates in this way, the amount depending upon the age of the pupils and the physical

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layout and size of the school and the methodology of time analysis. In general, younger pupils and those in open plan settings may experience more evaporated time in small units of time in any one day, but in Chapter 2 we have shown that it was equivalent to nearly 10 per cent of the teaching time available and equal to the time allocated for at least one of the non-basic subjects. Second, the classroom observational studies make the point that, in general, subjects given large amounts of time are the ones in which lowest proportions of pupil time on task were observed. For example, Alexander’s study showed pupils ‘distracted’ for 21 per cent of time on average in all curriculum areas, with 26 per cent and 23 per cent of time spent in English and mathematics respectively ‘distracted’, but only 13 per cent and 10 per cent distraction in music and PE respectively. We cannot translate time formally allocated directly into time spent by pupils on learning the subject. Third—a point made elsewhere (Alexander 1992, Alexander et al. 1992)—the time spent does not necessarily reflect quality. Long hours spent on repetitive computation exercises do not necessarily mean challenging learning for bright pupils any more than do long hours spent by low-attaining pupils on tasks too difficult for them. Nonetheless, the fourth point is straightforward. There has been in the past no general problem in primary classrooms about the adequacy of time being spent on teaching and learning the two basic subjects before the introduction of the national curriculum. Our evidence about the practice of infant teachers in our sample as the national curriculum was being brought in is given in Table 1.11 in Chapter 1. It is obvious that, here too, most time was given to the basics. When the maximum hours in Table 1.2, Chapter 1, were turned into percentages of the 37.5 hours of subject time, only about 39 per cent of the teaching week was available for all the non-basic subjects as against 51 per cent for the two basics. Thus the pattern of time allocation was broadly similar to that in the studies by Bennett and by Tizard. The reasons for this sustained emphasis on the basics are three wellknown ones. First, as Ashton’s (1975) research showed, drawing on a national sample of 1,500 primary teachers in the early 1970s, the highest curricular priority was given to the basic skills of reading, oracy, mathematics and writing. Art, PE, music, sex education, science and technology and a second language were given low priority. A follow-up study by Ashton (1981), with a less representative sample, at the end of the 1970s showed, if anything, higher priority placed on mathematics and formal language competence. Thus, commitment to

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the basics is at a premium in the professional culture. Second, parents and governors also place highest curricular priority on the basics—as Thomas’s (1986) investigation of London schools showed—and the government has required greater teacher accountability to parents and governors. Third, there has been a long tradition, stretching back before 1988, of formal testing focused on reading comprehension and mathematics (see Gipps 1988b, for a detailed analysis of the scope and focus of LEA testing programmes), a tradition reinforced by national curriculum assessment arrangements, though it is now slightly broadened by the inclusion of science in the core. Such testing washes back into curriculum priorities. The basic instinct is sustained and reinforced by the workplace culture in primary schools. The introduction of the national curriculum had not led to time allocations different from previous practice in our teachers’ classrooms in 1990 and 1991. POLICY GUIDANCE ON TIME ALLOCATIONS AT KEY STAGE 1 There were few official documents issued on time allocations, but the issue was raised while the national curriculum was being created. The National Curriculum Consultative Document (DES 1987c) suggested that in schools where there was ‘good practice’ the national curriculum subjects typically took up 70 to 80 per cent of time. And Mrs Rumbold, then a Minister of State at the DES, was quoted in Hansard (17 December 1987, p. 209) as follows: As the legislation tries to set out the content of the curriculum….it is logical to suggest a time allocation for [the] subjects within the school week or term. During the consultation period we discussed how to achieve what is required in the core and foundation subjects within a given time and whether the time allocated to them should be 60 per cent during the primary years. She went on to say that, although they had ‘thought seriously’ about the allocation of time for the core and foundation subjects, they were not at that stage able to say how much time would be recommended for them. Starting from the idea that the two basic subjects plus seven other subjects could be provided in 60 per cent of time in primary schools was at best naive, given the research findings that the first two took up 50 per cent of it.

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There was, however, guidance given to the national curriculum working groups (see Education, 3 April 1992) to the effect that they should plan the statutory orders so that the basic subjects should occupy only 40 per cent of teaching time, as can be seen in Table 10.2. Thus the change process introducing the national curriculum, the objectives for which included the need to raise standards of literacy and numeracy, put in place policy guidance which would reduce the time previously spent by infant teachers on the basics, and especially on English, where the reduction of Table 10.2 Notional percentages and hours of curriculum time

Source: Adapted from Education, 3 April 1992

about one-third of existing time was proposed. In respect of time allocations, the policy guidance outstripped current practice in the schools for liberality and breadth. It offered a fundamentally different concept and ideology of curriculum balance. We can illustrate the point most sharply. The guidance given to the working group devising the English curriculum was such as to encourage infant teachers to reduce the time they typically spent teaching children to read and write from about 7 hours to little over 4 hours a week. This helps to explain the widespread stress reported in our interviews with our teachers, perceiving that, against their own professional judgement, they would have to reduce the time on hearing children read in order to fit in everything else. The fact that their perceptions were at odds with their actual time allocations as recorded in their diaries did not reduce the strength of the subjectively-felt stress. Support for our interpretation of the general policy guidance on time allocations came from the National Curriculum Council (1993b), though in respect of Key Stage 2. The NCC issued guidance on planning the

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Key Stage 2 curriculum in which three, presumably recommended, case studies of school planning were provided: two of them (Year 6 and 5 classes) suggested that the basics should be planned to occupy 41 per cent and 37.5 per cent of curriculum time respectively. The Year 5 class plan was developed into a yearly programme in which mathematics and English occupied 316 out of the 846 hours available, some 37 per cent of curriculum time in their terms. Schools were urged by the NCC to review the exercise, including reviewing whether the time allocations were appropriate. In this context, it was interesting, but confusing, to see that in the 1993 summer Update from the NCC, the curriculum planning in a Coventry primary school was celebrated: it initially used a plan which involved only 40 per cent of time on basics, but after trialling it changed to 50 per cent. Explanations How are we to explain this apparent paradox of government policy on the basics? First, it is likely that Conservative politicians drew their images of primary practice not from research studies, which according to Graham and Tytler (1992) they saw as suspect and carried out by egalitarian or left-leaning academics, but from the fantasised demonology of progressivism invented in their right-wing think-tanks. That is to say, the politicians believed in their own rhetoric that the basics were being neglected. From this perspective 40 per cent would look like an increase. Second, and almost as likely, the politicians busy reforming the curriculum simply did not pay attention to the detail but worked at the level of slogans on the back of envelopes. In terms of time for basics they, quite literally, had no idea about how what they were proposing related to the existing practice. Both these explanations find support in Graham’s account of his period at the NCC (Graham and Tytler 1992) where Ministers’ failure to understand detail is reported with candour. They also help explain the uncertainty about curriculum priorities that emerged in our interviews. The third possibility is that the policy guidance was deliberate, intentional and conscious; that the policy objective was that teachers should spend less time on the basics in order to allow time for other subjects. On this reading of policy the broad and balanced curriculum was more than rhetoric; it was a dramatically courageous attempt by the government to break the mould of the primary curriculum, with the guidance designed to encourage teachers to spend less time on the

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basics in order to achieve curricular breadth. Time ‘lost’ to the basics in this way would not be really lost if teachers were consciously to plan to apply the teaching of some reading, writing, speaking and listening to other subjects such as history and geography, and some mathematics to subjects such as science and art, rather as HMI urged them to in Primary Education in England (DES 1978). It is at this point that we would draw the connection between time allocation and curriculum ideology. Different time allocations, within broad limits, represent not merely variations in the time considered necessary to achieve subject aims; they also represent the allocation of different value and status to the subject aims themselves. Alexander (1992, p. 74) says of the process of allocating time frameworks to the curriculum: ‘to define curriculum balance solely in terms of subject time allocations is both superficial and misplaced’. What he says is true, of course, if the emphasis is upon the word ‘solely’. But the allocation of time to subjects in a national plan is not merely a mechanistic and superficial device: it acquires symbolic importance as it comes to signify the social and political values underlying the construction of the curriculum. It is the confusion and uncertainty about these values that has led to the problems of time, stress and overload reported in Part II. The messages to infant teachers about time allocations were contradictory: emphasise the basics but spend less time on them. Much has been made by researchers (e.g. Troman 1989) about the ideological tensions and contradictions in national assessment policy; most commonly the claim is that the summative and formative purposes cannot be achieved by a single set of assessment arrangements because they represent different and ideologically contradictory values and functions. We perceive something similar with the time allocations; they embodied an ideological compromise between the modernising, broad and balanced, lobby originally spearheaded by Keith Joseph and then Kenneth Baker on the one hand, and the atavistic minimalists (e.g. Letwin 1988) in the neo-liberal think-tanks who wished the government merely to specify a narrow curriculum in reading and number, and probably RE, and then leave the rest up to the schools’ parents to decide through the exercise of choice. The ideological and political compromise, which meant keeping all the subjects on board but allocating most significance to the basics, was bound to be unworkable. It is perhaps worth pointing out that progressive criticism (e.g. Brehony 1990) of the national curriculum—that it would narrow down primary curricular practice—was almost entirely misdirected, at least as

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far as time allocation was concerned. The time allocations underlying national curriculum planning were significantly more broad, modern and liberal than the practice and the priorities of the typical infant teacher, including those in our study. Moreover, the fundamental problem of manageability was not overload or over-detailed prescription, important as these were; nor was it the teacher workload. The fundamental problem was ideological, in that the broad and balanced conception of the curriculum ran counter to the essentially traditional, elementary ideology and practice of most infant teachers on curriculum matters. TOWARDS CHANGE DISCONTINUITY WITH PREVIOUS PRACTICE Teaching science The teaching of science in primary schools in England and Wales has had a chequered and mainly unsuccessful history. A sustained period of voluntary curriculum development in the late 1960s and 1970s had led, according to HMI (DES 1978), to only patchy implementation. Little change occurred during the 1980s, with the DES Primary Staffing Survey (DES 1987a) finding just over 6 per cent of time in junior schools devoted to science, nationally. Alexander’s study of primary education in Leeds over 1985–89 (Alexander 1992) found that the average pupil spent 8.5 per cent of time on science. In infant classes this would translate into about an hour and forty minutes a week. There was some evidence (DES 1989b) that greater coverage was beginning to be given to science in primary schools before the introduction of the national curriculum, and improvement in quality and increases in time allocated were reported in the first year of implementation (DES 1991). The introduction of science was predicated on the assumption that about 12.5 per cent of time would be devoted to science and technology combined (see Table 10.2). Moreover, science was incorporated into the core with mathematics and English and was to be subject to national testing. The core was expected to occupy 50 per cent of the time. As the two basic subjects were notionally allocated 40 per cent of time, the assumption seemed to be that science would occupy about 10 per cent of time. This strengthened emphasis on science and technology has been interpreted (Campbell 1993a) as a major attempt at modernising the

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primary curriculum. The data in Table 1.3, Chapter 1, show the teachers teaching science for between 5 hours (1990) and 6 hours (1991) per week. Translated into the percentage of the relevant total of subject teaching, the 1990 figure was near 13 per cent and the 1991 figure was 15 per cent of curriculum time. Both these figures represent substantial increases over previous practice, and the changes were reflected in the interview data with teachers expressing enthusiasm for both the statutory orders in science and the implications for practice in their classrooms (see, for example, Ann’s interview in Chapter 8, p. 190). In comparison, the attitude to technology was negative, with teachers not understanding the orders and beginning to sense the overload, as the quotations from Grace and Nina (pp. 46–7, Chapter 2) illustrate. Both Grace and Nina found the technology orders irritating and the Attainment Target covering ‘identifying a need’ peculiarly inappropriate for Key Stage 1 children. The reasons for the substantive change in the time given over to science, and the teachers’ commitment to it compared to previous practice in science, are complex. The most direct reason is that, contrary to approaches to curriculum development in the 1970s and 1980s, the national curriculum was statutory. Moreover, again in contrast to previous practice (see Gipps 1988b), it was to be statutorily assessed (a characteristicwhich technology did not share and which might help explain the differences in perceptions of the two subjects). Third, science had been the subject of ear-marked, nationally funded in-service training programmes and was seen by teachers as one of the subject areas in which they lacked most knowledge (see, for example, Bennett, et al. 1992; Bennett et al. 1993). A fourth element was the timing; science (along with mathematics) was put into statutory orders first and began to be implemented before teachers were in a position to realise the collective impact of all the subject orders. Although it is premature to allocate weighting to each element, it is clear that in the very short time of two years there had been dramatic, widespread and substantial curriculum changes in practice. It was, moreover, a change that had generated enthusiasm and commitment from the teachers. All this is in stark contrast to the general failure, despite individual take-up, of voluntary curriculum development through the Schools Council and other agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, and is an uncomfortable lesson for democratic curriculum developers who argue that authentic change cannot be successfully imposed on teachers in a top-downward, centre-periphery, manner (e.g. Lawton 1980). In the case of science at Key Stage 1, our evidence suggests they are wrong, though the

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implementation process was not simply a centre-periphery model given that it involved in-service training to support the centrally defined curriculum. Moreover, Fullan’s analysis (Fullan 1992, especially pp. 37–43) that changes in three aspects of classroom practice are required if real change is to be conceded, viz. in materials, teaching approaches and beliefs, seems both unnecessarily complex and inappropriately prescriptive. Our evidence shows changes in the time given to science, nothing about teaching approaches or materials and only some suggestive evidence about beliefs. Nonetheless, both the objective and subjective data coincide in showing authentic change, and the early national picture from HMI (DES 1991) supported our interpretation. Perhaps our model of curriculum change should reflect the experience of changes in drivers’ behaviour about the wearing of seat belts in cars. When in the 1970s the government attempted to persuade drivers through advertising the effects were patchy; when the wearing of seat belts was made statutory the practice became almost universal. Change in assessment practice The data in Table 1.2, Chapter 1 show teachers spending considerable amounts of time on Teacher Assessment; the data in Table 1.10, Chapter 1, showing Year 2 teachers spending very large amounts of time on marking and recording results. The interviews show widespread anxiety, confusion and even fear, over assessment policy and the implications it would have for their practice. There was, in addition or as a consequence, a shared view that much of the time being spent on assessment and recording was pointless, even though it had to be done for reasons of accountability. There was also the common view that teachers had always assessed children and that the national curriculum assessment was unlikely to tell teachers much new about their pupils. Insofar as these perceptions relate to Teacher Assessment for formative purposes, as promoted by the TGAT report (DES/Welsh Office 1988), they are difficult to evaluate against previous practice since there is very little evidence about formative assessment (despite its emergence in the literature in the early 1980s, for example, Shipman 1983). What evidence there is about LEAs’ assessment practice (e.g. Gipps 1988b) suggests that it was summative in purpose, drew heavily upon standardised, non-referenced tests and concentrated upon paper-andpencil activities in the two basic subjects of English and mathematics. It

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was unusual, to put it at its highest, to find systematic assessment for formative purposes in subjects such as science or history and geography. Indeed, if the teachers’ perceptions that they had always been involved in such assessment intuitively, and that they had little new to learn from it, were actually true, it is difficult to explain the emergence in the interviews of anxiety, and the excessively detailed assessment and recording systems newly invented by both teachers and headteachers in order to meet assessment arrangements. Obviously the use of Standard Assessment Tasks, reported in Chapter 3, was new and constantly subject to review, and set in the frame of a market-led accountability: but our evidence is that Teacher Assessment for formative purposes also reflected substantive change for these teachers in terms both of the time allocated to it, the significance they attached to it and the systems they invented to record it. Change was also reflected in the reorganisation of classrooms designed to enable teachers to observe small groups of pupils at work and to record their observations, sometimes for planning purposes. In these senses they met, and went beyond, Fullan’s (1992) criteria for authentic change, noted earlier. The irony here was that the change occurred again very quickly in the two-year period of this study, but in a context where government policy was confused, changing and uncertain as to the policy purposes of the assessment system. The failure to provide such a clear framework—indeed the refusal of the policymaking agencies of the government to provide even a standard recording format—did not prevent the implementation of change in assessment practice in classrooms. The lack of framework may even, given the teachers’ driving conscientiousness, have led to more schoolbased change than might otherwise have occurred. However, the confusion over assessment policy was accompanied by the creation of a climate of anxiety following from the prominence given to the intention to publish results of national assessment and testing, and to encourage the use of the results by parents as a basis for school choice. Indeed, in the period of the study the central government symbolised its intention by publishing a ‘league table’ of national results at local authority level, with the Secretary of State claiming that the table showed that a quarter of children at Key Stage 1 could not read without help. What the tables showed was that 27 per cent of pupils were on Level 1, a broad category of performance which included both the not-yet-literate and those whose performance approximated to Level 2. Allied to the policy intention of increasing the frequency of inspecting schools, the political climate induced a kind of professional

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moral panic about assessment and recording, with the consequence (as we have seen in the interviews in Chapters 3 and 6) that teachers who might usefully have continued to develop their emerging skills in formative assessment devoted themselves, as HMI (DES 1992a) described it, to a ‘frenetic but unfocused’ range of recording activities, concerned to protect themselves and the school against an imagined programme of external monitoring. This was despite the logical and logistical impossibility of inspectors monitoring at the level assumed by the teachers. None of the foregoing is to imply that some of the teacher anxiety was not appropriate. In a review of the working of the assessment arrangements in 1991 and 1992, Shorrocks et al. (1993, pp. 176–177) pointed out that there were genuine difficulties in assessment practice arising from the standard tasks and the scale, incorrect location of levels, comparability of levels across subjects, context of assessment, and need for dependable standards. All of these points, save the last, surfaced in our interviews. Shorrocks et al. (p. 181) also found it worthwhile attempting to explain why ‘teacher responses to the manageability and usefulness of the assessments have been mostly negative’. They noted the general difference between SAT and TA judgements, and the positive attitudes to the assessment tasks themselves from both teachers and children. They also argued (pp. 48– 49) that formal summative testing had been common before 1988, citing an NFER study (NFER 1992) which reported that ‘62 per cent of LEAs administered formal reading tests, most commonly Young’s Group Reading Test’. What was new in their view was ‘the systematic and overt’ way formal testing had to be carried out, and the focus, in formative approaches, on what children learn rather than what has been taught. Their view, derived from national evaluations, is therefore close to our own in recognising the implementation of substantial change in assessment practice, especially in respect of formative assessment, even though its usefulness and manageability were doubted by the teachers. As with the change in science, the causes were complex, but the statutory force of the assessment arrangements played a large part in the teachers’ perceptions in bringing in the changes rapidly and nationwide. The difference from the case in science is whether the change will persist if, as was later proposed (NCC/SEAC 1993), the requirement to publish results at Key Stage 1 were to be abandoned. Equally, if testing is simplified to concentrate narrowly on reading, writing and number, as is also proposed (NCC/SEAC 1993), the changes detected in using assessment for formative purposes may also be short-lived. As

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Shorrocks et al. (1993, p. 186) conclude, ‘Any decisions which move assessment tasks toward more streamlined, pencil-and-paper forms are less likely to save the goals of the development of teachers’ skills and the improvement of teaching and learning’. CONCLUSION We are left with the view that little substantial change had occurred by 1991 in the structure and breadth of the Key Stage 1 curriculum. There had been change in science of a substantial kind, and change in assessment which was perhaps more fragile. Yet our teachers perceived themselves to be in the midst of a whirlwind of change, over much of which they had little control. Part of the explanation for this contrast between the objective continuities and the subjective sense of discontinuity may lie in the pace and statutory force of the reform process, and in the massive detail of the curriculum prescribed. Another part may lie in the teachers perceiving changes—and they were massive and constantly amended—to documentation, and the weight of documentation sent directly to schools, as automatically meaning that the curriculum would also change. Yet another part may lie in the experience of increased working hours and intensity of the working day, recorded in Chapters 6 and 7. It would be difficult to experience such pressures and stress and remain sure that little change was occurring to the curriculum as a consequence. All these part explanations, if true, would mean that teachers were mistaking educational turbulence for curriculum change. Yet if, in 1995 when the revised curriculum at Key Stage 1 is implemented, the only curriculum change that has occurred at Key Stage 1 remains the change in time on science, it will be reasonable to ask whether the time, effort and stress involved for the teachers was worth it. The lesson, therefore, for the politics of curriculum change is a very strong one. Two years into this attempt to change the curriculum, it was widely supported in principle by teachers who, according to the interview evidence, had conscientiously attempted to make it work. The failure of the change process, if that is what eventually emerges, was fundamentally a failure of policy-making; failure to clarify national ideological positions on the curriculum; to connect change objectives to existing practice; to pace implementation against practical realities in schools; to build on professional commitment. Above all, the policy failure arose from inventing a curriculum in committees which separated the development of each subject from the others. This almost

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guaranteed the invention of a curriculum that, because of the unmanageable time demands and confusing ideological priorities incorporated into it, was bound to be undeliverable, even by the excessively conscientious and committed teachers that, as we have seen, ‘gave it their best shot’ because they thought it was in the interests of their pupils to do so. Because of the failure of the politicians sensitively to capitalise on such professional commitment and expertise, the opportunity genuinely to reform the Key Stage 1 curriculum by moving it from its historical, elementary form, may have been squandered.

Appendix I DETAILS OF PARTICIPATING TEACHERS

Table I(a) Sex of classteachers

Table I(b) Age of classteachers

Table I(c) Years of experience at relevant Key Stage

224 APPENDIX I

Table I(d) Salary status

Table I(e) Incentive allowance

Table I(f) Type of school

APPENDIX I 225

Table I(g) Number of pupils on roll at school

Table I(h) Number of pupils registered in class

Table I(i) Age composition of class

226 APPENDIX I

Table I(j) Year 2 of the national curriculum

Table I(k) Non-contact time allocated

Table I(l) Time spent with colleague in class

APPENDIX I 227

Table I(m) Time spent with at least one paid assistant

Table I(n) Responsible for co-ordinating an area

Table I(o) Areas co-ordinated

228 APPENDIX I

Table I(p) Main obstacle to national curriculum delivery

Table I(q) Time spent this week compared with the rest of the term

Table I(r) Time on professional development compared to other weeks of the term

APPENDIX I 229

Table I(s) Priority use for extra teacher time

Table I(t) Reasonable hours for non-directed time

Table I(u) Volume of work compared to same time last year

Table I(v) Number of employing Authorities

230

Appendix II THE SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

INTRODUCTION Settle in, and confirm the right to tape-record if the interviewee agrees. Assure the interviewee of absolute confidentiality; she/ he will be able to see the interview transcript and to correct it if she/he thinks it is inappropriate. Nothing will be written up in our report that will enable her/him to be identified. ‘Before we start the interview proper, may I just check a few details about your current job?’ (Ring correct answer.)

‘Can you give me a rough estimate of the time you spent per week this term on all aspects of your job, including teaching, preparation, administration, in-service, and anything at all to do with your work? Would it be: ?’ Less than 40 hrs

40–50

50–60

60–69

More than 70

232 APPENDIX II

Check that she has had the interview outline in advance and knows that we would like her to create the order in which the topics are dealt with, according to her sense of their importance for her. Start the interview proper by saying: ‘You can see that we are interested in four broad areas of your work as it is affected by the Education Reform Act 1988. The four broad areas are: 1 Your workload 2 Your conditions of work 3 Your morale, commitment and job satisfaction 4 Standards in the curriculum Please talk about how you see things—and not about how you think teachers generally see them—because it is your own individual view in which we are interested. We are especially interested in changes to your work that have been brought about by the Education Reform Act and about your feelings and attitudes towards these changes. Is that OK?’ 1. ‘May we talk about YOUR WORKLOAD and the way it has been affected by the National Curriculum Statutory Orders? In general, would you say that they have increased or reduced the amount of time you have spent on work?’ (Why?) (Feelings?) (Priorities—yours or the state’s?) (Any orders especially time-consuming?) (Time management changes?) (Conflict between time on curriculum and personal social development?) (Feelings about the national curriculum?) (Quality of INSET?) 2. ‘May we now deal with WORKING CONDITIONS? By this we mean things such as: Class size Non-contact time Time within the school day

APPENDIX II 233

Support from your colleagues Resources and equipment The use of directed and non-directed time Do you see any factors in your own working conditions that hinder your implementing the National Curriculum and assessment—or any factors which help its implementation?’ (School specific?) (Resources?) (Non-contact?) (Directed time?) (Time in school day?) (Experience of other school management style?) (One improvement in conditions?) (How do you cope with time shortage in school day?) (Curriculum balance?) 3. ‘May we talk about the topics of MORALE, COMMITMENT AND JOB SATISFACTION? Would you say that your job satisfaction is greater or less than it was before the Education Reform Act and the National Curriculum? Can you say why?’ (De-skilling?) (Morale over past two years?) (Committed to job?) (Aspects of ERA affecting morale, satisfaction/commitment?) (Stress?) (How is stress shown?) (Governors/parents?) (How do you relate to job?) 4. ‘May we now deal with the issue of raising STANDARDS, and the effect that you see the national curriculum having on the quality of children’s learning and your teaching? Would you say that, in general, the effect of the Statutory Orders has been to improve, reduce, or not change the standards of children’s learning in your class?’ (Why?) (Planning?) (Whole school?) (Differentiation?) (Assessment and record-keeping?) (Children’s behaviour?) (Your relationship with children?)

234 APPENDIX II

‘Finally, is there anything about teaching as a job that we have not covered but which you think it is important for our project to know about?’ Express thanks, and remind the teacher that she/he will get a transcript of the interview on which to comment if she/he requires: YES (send transcript)

NO (don’t need to)

APPENDIX III Coding system

1. TEACHING Include activities where you are in direct contact with children, helping them to learn. There are five codes: TM TE TS TO TA

Teaching Mathematics and Number Teaching English, Language, Reading, Talking, Listening Teaching Science Teaching other subjects Assessment and/or recording for the National Curriculum carried out during teaching.

Do not try to go into great detail. If there is any Mathematics going on in a given teaching session, simply enter TM. Some sessions could have all five codes entered. 2. PREPARATION/MARKING Include activities in which you prepare or mark children’s work but are not in direct contact with them. There are three codes: PR

Preparing and planning f or children’s learning, writing lesson plans, forecasts, schemes of work, organising the classroom and resources in it, briefing classroom assitants, parent helpers, etc. PM Marking children’s work, writing comments on it, recording results

236 APPENDIX III

PO

Organising or collecting resources, organising visits/trips. 3. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Include formal and informal activities intended to help in your professional development, such as training days, all courses (including those leading to a further qualification), conferences and workshops. There are five codes: IN IT ID IS

Organised courses, conferences, etc., but not non-pupil days. Travel to organised courses, conference, etc. Non-pupil days Staff meetings, informal consultation with colleagues, advisers, advisory teachers IR Reading of professional magazines, journals, National Curriculum documentation and other sources of information. 4. ADMINISTRATION Include activities concerned with the routines of school work. There are nine codes: AP AD AS

Discussion/consultation with parents Mounting displays Supervising children before the school day begins, at break/ lunch, end of school day, etc. AL Liaison meetings/activities with teachers in other stages, other schools etc. AW Attending/participating in assembly/act of worship AB Lunch, coffee/tea breaks—free of work AF Lunch, coff ee/tea breaks—which were not free of work /// Registration and collecting dinner money, and/or mov ing children from one location to another (e.g. from class to hall, playground to class, school to swimming baths), tidying up, etc. (The code for this is simply to fill diagonal lines in the time space, thus //////, since these are sometimes short time spaces).

237

AN

Non-contact time which is free of work; otherwise enter appropriate code. 5. OTHER ACTIVITIES

OG Attendance at meetings of governing bodies. OA Activities that you cannot easily allocate to one of the other codes, e.g., filling in this record, dealing with lengthy interruptions, and other things. OS Work with sports teams, drama productions, orchestras, clubs and all educational visits etc. outside timetabled lessons.

238 APPENDIX III

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250

AUTHOR INDEX

Alexander, R. 36, 54, 95, 97, 127; basic subjects 13, 208; classroom organisation 66, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120; ‘good practice’ 87, 198; national curriculum 35–7, 46; planning 104; Plowdenesque ideology 46, 57; professionality 194, 203; science 108, 216; time allocations 214; time ‘wasted’ 210 Andain, I. 175 Armstrong, M. 40 Ashton, P. 211

Brown, N. 69 Brown, S. 35 Busher, H. 176 Callahan, R. 198 Campbell, R.J. 36, 54, 55, 194, 216; collegiality 18, 91; frequent modification 84; professional dilemmas 204; snatched time’ 125 Cane, B.S. 11, 126 Carr, W. 203 Carré, C.G. 204 Chandler, B.J. 177 Clark, B.R. 165 Clark, C.M. 104 Clarke, K. 66 Cockburn, A. 126 Coopers and Lybrand Deloitte 11, 150 Cortazzi, M. 126, 198, 201 Cox, C.B. 198 Cox, T. 41 Cunningham, W.G. 153

Ball, S. 173, 194 Barnes, L.R. 90 Bassey, M. 13, 208 Beattie, N. 44 Bennett, S.N. 13, 204, 208, 217 Ben-Peretz, M. 35 Berlak, A. 126 Berlak, H. 126 Berliner, W. 120 Black, P. 59, 67, 84 Blackbourne, L. 175 Blenkin, G. 3, 9 Brehony, K. 36, 38–39, 56, 57, 215; integrated teaching 55, 118 Broadfoot, P. 65, 73, 129, 155, 166 Brown, M. 65

David, M. 35, 47, 163 Densmore, K. 203 Dentler, R.A. 87, 90 DES 54, 216, 218; Circular 5/89 3, 14, 17; Consultative Document 3, 194–195, 211; 251

252 AUTHOR INDEX

Primary Staffing Survey 13, 208, 216; Standards in Education 59; Teachers’ Pay and Conditions 103; see also HMI Desforges, C. 46, 126 Devaney, K. 112 Dewe, P.J. 153, 154 DFE 196 Donaldson, M. 46 Dreeben, R. 112 Dyson, A.E. 198 Eaton, S. 96 Elliott, J. 143 Elmore, R.F. 112–17 Evans, K. 189 Evans, L. 91, 93, 117, 174, 174, 176, 177 Evans, V. 153 Evetts, J. 91 Farber, B.A. 164 Freedman, E. 65 Freeman, A. 153 Fullan, M. 49, 78, 87, 87, 90, 173; criteria for authentic change 217–2, 219; implementation 3, 35, 37; passive professional 81, 143 Galton, M. 13, 120, 126, 208, 209 Garner, R. 175 Gilroy, P. 203 Gipps, C. 56, 57, 74, 75, 211, 217, 218 Gold, K. 175 Goldstein, H. 75 Goodchild, S. 91 Goodson, I. 194 Graham, D. 36, 213–18 Guba, E.G. 174 Guion, R.M. 174

Hargreaves, A. 18, 91 Harlen, W. 137 Hartley, D. 126 HMI 104, 110, 116, 136, 214, 219; approaches to change 96–1, 98; implementation of national curriculum 3–4, 4–5; science 108, 216, 218 Herzberg, F. 175 Hewlett, M. 47 Hilsum, S. 11, 126 Hofkins, D. 175 Hofman, J.E. 164, 165 Holly, P. 91 House, E.R. 35 House of Commons Select Committee 38, 87 Hoyle, E. 18, 148–4, 189, 194, 202, 203 Hoyles, C. 56 Hudson, L. 101 Hughes, A.S. 35 Hughes, M. 46 ILEA 17 Jackson, P.W. 104, 126, 127 Johnson, D.J. 153 Jones, K. 199 Keith, J.J. 35 Kelly, A.V. 35 Kelly, V. 35, 81 Kemmis, S. 203 King, R. 126, 127, 155 Kogan, M. 203 Kremer, L. 164, 165 Kyriacou, C. 151, 153, 164 Lane, T.J. 174 Lawton, D. 217 Letwin, O. 35, 215 Locke, E. 174, 174 Lortie, D. 143, 176, 180, 203, 204

AUTHOR INDEX 253

Louis, K.S. 87, 90 Lowe, B. 11 McCutcheon, G. 105, 107 McIntyre, D. 35 McLaughlin, M.W. 112–17 MacNeil, C. 47 Marris, P. 78 Marsh, L. 56, 99 Meyer, J.W. 208, 209 Morine-Dershimer, G. 105 Murphy, P. 74 NAS/UWT 11 NCC 77; content 53, 55, 84; INSET 136; teacher time 126, 129; time allocations guidance 213 NCC/SEAC 49, 191, 220 Neill, S.R.St J. 55, 84 NFER 59, 74–7, 219 NFER/BGC 60, 62 Nias, J. 91; headteachers 93, 153; morale 133, 174, 175–1; professionality 194, 198, 201, 204; stress 150, 160, 163–9; time 122, 129, 143 NUT 68 Ofsted 53, 126 Olson, J.K. 96 Osborn, M. 155, 166 Paine, L.W. 122 Pascall, D. 39, 40, 48–49, 53, 55, 84 Paul, D.A. 35 Plowden Report 36, 57 Pollard, A. 77, 90–4, 126 Poulson, L. 39 Primary Schools Research and Development Group 153, 176

Qualter, A. 137 Redefer, F.L. 174–9 Relf, S. 37, 56, 80, 84 Reynolds, J. 98, 112 Rogers, E.M. 35 Rosenholtz, S.J. 119 Rudduck, J. 49, 78, 80 Rumbold, A. 204, 211–16 Saran, R. 176 Saunders, M. 98, 112 Schaffer, R.H. 174–30 SEAC: ENCA report 65–8, 67–68, 68–1, 75, 76, 77; pilot SATs 60, 61, 70; see also NCC/SEAC Sergiovanni, T.J. 177 Shinn-Taylor, C. 90 Shipman, M. 218 Shoemaker, F.F. 35 Shorrocks, D. 219, 220 Shreeve, W. 176 Siegel, S. 6 Silcock, P. 56, 65, 84, 138 Simons, H. 50, 51 Smith, K.R. 174, 174 Sockett, H.T. 203 Southworth, G. 91 Spencer, D.A. 164 Stagner, R. 174 Sutcliffe, J. 151, 153 Sykes, G. 112 Taylor, P.H. 107 Thomas, N. 211 Thornton, M. viii Tizard, B. 13, 46, 208, 209 Torrance, H. 68 Troman, G. 15, 103, 215 Tytler, D. 36, 213–18 Ward, D. 41

254 AUTHOR INDEX

Wells Kyle, D. 106–11 White, J. 202 White Paper, Better Schools 87 Williams, G. 174 Williams, K.W. 174 Winkley, D. 40, 48, 49, 84, 93 Winter, R. 191–8 Wood, D. 46 Woods, P. 126 Wragg, E. 40, 48, 54, 90 Yinger, R.J. 104 Zahorik, J.A. 105, 107

SUBJECT INDEX

accountability 15, 16, 200–6 administration 236; time 11, 16–18 anxiety 63–7; climate of 219–4 appropriateness of curriculum 45–49 approval in principle 38–39 assessment 15; change in practice 9–9, 218–5; implementation problems 4–5, 79–3; mismanagement of time 136–5; teachers’ workload 20–7, 30; see also recording, standard assessment tasks, teacher assessment attainment targets 41, 60 autonomy, professional 203–9

career aspirations, revised 165 centrally initiated change 78–9, 87 change see educational change child-centred education 44, 166 child development 45–8, 48 class size 85 classroom organisation 112–25, 219; children 113–22; curriculum 118–5; impact of testing 65–69 classroom practice 102–16 coherence, curricular 37–9 collegiality 18–19, 91–6, 161 ‘common-sense’ approach 99–4, 101 communication, poor 80–6 confidence 188; undermined 197–3 consultation, lack of 80–5 content, curriculum 39–49; appropriateness and manageability 45–49; frequent modification 84; likely effects of national curriculum 53–6; overall design 39–5 control over time 126–6 coping strategies (stress) 153–66 crisis in education, engineered 198–6 cross-curricular teaching 12–13, 55, 118–3 culture, school 90–4, 176 curricular breadth/balance 9–9, 53–6;

‘back to basics’ campaign 53 balance see curricular breadth/balance basic skills/subjects 55, 63; professional dilemmas 195–2, 204; time allocations 207–19 behaviour, pupil 67–68 breadth see curricular breadth/balance breaks 16, 16–17, 17–18 bureaucratisation of time 130–6 burn-out 164–74 ‘by the book’ approach 100–5, 112, 156 255

256 SUBJECT INDEX

planning 107–16; policy guidance on time allocations 211–19; time allocations 207–15 curricular coherence/entitlement 37–9 curricular content see content curriculum delivery 112–25 curriculum planning see planning delivery, curriculum 112–25 design, curriculum 39–5 dilemma analysis 191–9; crisis in education 198–6; professional autonomy 203–9; teachers’ professional role 194–198 direct action (stress) 153–62 directed time 140–7 display, time for 16, 30 ‘distracted’ time 210 Education Reform Act (1988) 195 educational change 9–9, 78; continuity 207–19; discontinuity 216–5; failure of policy-making 220–6; implementation see implementation; and morale 173–8, 190–6 English 13, 209, 210, 212–17; see also basic skills/subjects ‘enough is enough’ stage 167–4 entitlement, curricular 37–9 ‘evaporated time’ 209–14 extended professionalism 149, 202–8, 204 fairness, testing and 72–6 frequent modification 84–7 frustration 151–7, 182, 184; see also resentment future-oriented morale 174, 180, 185–1

‘good practice’ 198 governors 200, 211 group work: classroom organisation 113–21; testing and 65–9, 69 ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach 96–1, 101 headteachers: attitudes to national curriculum 101–6; implementation of change 93–8; mismanagement of teachers’ time 131–9; morale and 183, 185; stress and 152–8 ideology 214–19 implementation 78–96; attitudes to 96–6; central government-initiated change 78–9; LEA-initiated change 87–3; school-initiated change 90–8; speed of 79–3 in-service training (INSET) 87–1, 89–3, 234–9; mismanagement of time 135–1 incremental planning 106–11 integrated teaching 12–13, 55, 118–3 interviews 5, 229–7 job satisfaction 9–9, 173–96; case studies 178–94; determinants of 175–2; and morale 174–80; patterns 189–6 judgement, professional 63, 76–9 leadership 93–8, 176; see also headteachers ‘league table’ 219–4 learning 74: impact of testing 65–69;

SUBJECT INDEX 257

as result of SATs 70 lesson planning see planning local education authorities (LEAs) 218; change management 87–3; see also in-service training low-input activities 116–1 lunch breaks 16–17, 124–30 manageability of curriculum 45–49 market accountability 15, 16 marking 234; time on 14–15, 29, 30; Year 2 workload 20–7; see also assessment, recording mathematics 13, 84, 110, 209, 210; see also basic skills/subjects meetings 18 mental planning 105 mismanagement of time 131–45 modification, frequent 84–7 moral support 160–6 morale 9–9, 173–96; case studies 178–94; determinants of 175–2; and job satisfaction 174–80; patterns 189–6 multiple focus teaching 88–2, 115, 118–4 national curriculum 3, 35–58; attitudes towards 96–6; content and form 39–49; likely effects 49–9; principles and values 35–39; putting into perspective 158–4 needs fulfilment 174–80 negotiated learning 88–2, 115, 118–4 New Right 35–7 objectives-focused planning 107 oral communication 110–15 organisational strategies see classroom organisation

‘over-conscientious’ teachers 143–51, 164, 179–5; see also ‘by the book’ approach palliative techniques 153–9, 157–6 parents 211 ‘passive professional’ 81, 143 ‘paying lip-service’ approach 97–2, 101 performance, test 74–8 personal life 163–9 personal time 142–8 planning 102–16, 156; curriculum balance 107–16; for TA 137; teacher’s role 103–11; time on 14–15, 22 pleasure, reduction of 127–5 policy: failure 220–6; guidance on time allocations 211–19 preparation 51, 234; time 11, 14–16, 19; Year 2 workload 20–7 pressure, living under 162–9 principles, curriculum 35–39 professional autonomy 203–9 professional development 11, 18–19; Year 2 teachers 20–7 professional identity 165–2 professional judgement 63, 76–9 professionalism: morale 185, 188–4, 189; national curriculum’s effects 50–4; restricted and extended 148–4, 202–8; testing 44, 59, 63, 76–9; undermined 80–4 professionality 9–9; dilemmas of 191–204 ‘psychic rewards’ 176, 180–6, 187–3 public esteem 198–5

258 SUBJECT INDEX

pupils: behaviour 67–68; classroom organisation 113–22; learning and SATs 65–69, 70; likely effects of national curriculum 57–9 putting things into perspective 158–5 reading: professional 19, 23, 26; teaching 56, 110–15, 213 recording 4–5, 42–4, 103–8; mismanagement of time 136–5; stress 64–7; time on 14–15, 29, 30; Year 2 teachers 20–7 registration/transition 16, 17 re-prioritisation 155–2 resentment 62–5, 84–7; see also frustration resourcing, inadequate 85–9 restricted professionalism 148–4, 202 routine, reorganisation of 154–60 ‘running commentary’ 123–31, 151

and learning 65–69, 70; overload 61–4; pilot 59–2; professional judgement 76–9; resentment of time spent on 62–5; stress and anxiety 63–7; support 70–4, 73–6; and TA 61, 219; teachers’ concerns 43–5, 57–9; teaching to the test 56, 67 statements of attainment 41–3, 101 stress 122, 150–74; burn-out 164–74; coping strategies 153–66; living under pressure 162–9; SATs 63–7 subject-based format 40–2 subject specialisation 119–5 subject teaching 118–4 supervision 16, 17, 30 support 116, 133–9; collegiality 18–19, 91–6, 161; moral and stress 160–6; and SATs 70–4, 73–6

‘sane’ teachers 143–9, 146–3, 164 school culture 90–4, 176 school-initiated change 90–8 science 13, 54, 108–13, 216–2 ‘seeing light at the end of the tunnel’ 157–3 ‘snatched time’ 124–30 social background 75–8 social processing 87 speed of implementation 79–3 spontaneity 126–2, 128–4 staffing 85–9 standard assessment tasks (SATs) 3, 30, 58–78, 219; benefits 69; fairness 72–6; impact on classroom organisation 65–69; influences on performance 74–8;

Task Group for Assessment and Testing (TGAT) 58–1 Teacher Assessment (TA) 3, 20, 30, 58, 60; change in practice 218, 219; planning for 137; results and SATs 76, 219; time on 13, 25, 61, 218; see also assessment, standard assessment tasks teacher’s role: classroom practice 103–11; professional dilemmas 194–198 teaching 234; time 11, 11–14, 22–6 teaching methods 56–8 teaching styles see classroom organisation teaching to the test 56, 67

SUBJECT INDEX 259

team teaching 119–5 technology 54, 109–14, 217 testing 211; see also assessment, standard assessment tasks time, teachers’ 3–4, 10–30, 122–54, 190; categories of work 11–20; directed 140–7; loss of control over 126–6; mismanagement 131–45; 1990-91 comparison 26–30; over-conscientious and sane teachers 143–54; personal 142–8; pressure of 123–31; SATs 61–5; wasted during modifications 84; Year 2 teachers’ workload 20–7 time allocations 4, 207–19; policy guidance 211–19; research 207–15 topic work 118 training see in-service training transition/registration 16, 17 values 35–39, 214–19 whole-class teaching 67, 113 work, putting into perspective 159–5 workload: overload 61–4; Year 2 teachers 20–7, 27; see also time