Unequal Partners: teachers under indirect rule

This paper argues for a historical analysis of the relationship between teachers and the state. The historical analysis demonstrates the ways in which strategies of teacher management shifted according to circumstances. In the first period, the 1920s, restrictions on teacher autonomy were removed, and ‘indirect rule’ used as a means of moving teachers away from the labour movement. In the second period, after the 1944 Act, a restricted ‘professional’ autonomy was encouraged. In both periods equality of status for teachers as ‘partners’ in the educational enterprise was offered in return for teachers’ acceptance of a limited or licensed professionalism. Current developments in the management of the teaching force suggest that the abandonment of indirect strategies of management may result in a return by teachers to less restricted ‘professional’ behaviour.