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Book review: Teachers Under Siege

What does it mean to be a teacher in today’s post-industrial society and, more importantly, what does the future hold for teachers? This essentially is the core theme of Sandra Leaton Gray’s book, Teachers Under Siege, published by Trentham Books in Stoke-on-Trent. It therefore contributes both to the sociology of education and to the pressing political issues of how teachers see themselves in today’s society, especially in relation to increasingly dirigiste governments and how education professionals in general perceive their ability to shape events. The traditional image of the school teacher harks back to the novel, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, by James Hilton. This portrayal, brought to life in film by Robert Donat shortly after the publication of the book, appears to provide a lost paradise of what teaching should be throughout the book. But while Hilton’s novel is a romanticisation of the realities of teaching in both the preand postwar periods its real objective is to form a polar opposite with teaching as it has evolved since the 1988 Education Reform Act. This Act is seen as a watershed in that it fundamentally shifted teaching from being a semi-autonomous, if not autonomous, vocation to being a structured career path subject to an externally imposed discipline based on the National Curriculum and the Ofsted audit. The rise of managerialism within the context of education thus forms the first part of the book and the issues that arise from this shift are well put. The middle section of Teachers Under Siege deals with the empirical research undertaken and the responses that were obtained from teachers and other education professionals. It seeks to consider the issues that confront teachers through a survey which consisted of broad, open-ended questions around a series of issues. These issues are: policy, for instance the future of school inspection; economics, in terms of the amount and nature of future funding; social, the future role of parents for example; and technology, given the accelerating use of information and communications technology. The data resulting from this survey was then subjected to analysis, the results of which formed the third part of the book. The first part of the analysis uses a standard business-based tool designated by the acronym PEST (political, economic, social and technological). Responses by participants were then examined in terms of the key drivers for change, as Leaton Gray terms them.This initial examination was augmented by two further levels of analysis in the following chapters. The first of these was through a linguistic analysis of the responses of teachers and other education professionals, such as LEA officials, in terms of their usage of personal pronouns.This highlighted certain differences within the personnel operating within education. The second level of analysis derives from what is usually Book review Teachers Under Siege