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