Towards a learning profession: Changing codes of occupational practice within the new management of education

Professionals were once considered to be the civic leaders, the deliverers of the good society. However, the old order has cracked under the pressure of social change, leaving a very different relation between professionals and their publics. This paper addresses some of the questions occasioned by these changes: Where does the altered power relation between parents, students and teachers leave the notion of teacher professionalism? What is the role of professionals within the emergent order? The paper is a product of the ESRC-funded New Forms of Education Management Project (Local Governance Programme). It argues that, within the new management of education, the professional codes and practices point to a changing relation between teachers and what has traditionally been seen as their specialist knowledge. An outcome of this altered relation is the empowerment of parents and students in relation to teachers. However, the new relation depends upon new shared understandings and new sets of agreements; and these in turn depend upon new processes of agreement-making and a radically altered power relation between parents, students and teachers as they jointly develop these processes. The paper reviews the changing purposes of professionalism during the second half of the 20th century and outlines a new version of teacher professionality bared upon the enabling of learning, the accommodation of difference, and the practice of agreement. Agreement is then 'theorised' in terms of the nature of agreement and the institutional structuring of agreement.