Introduction

The following quotation is from a headteacher:

What is being articulated is a standpoint about the importance of professional agency that interrelates knowledge production and ethical questions within a wider context of democratic renewal: how the professional is a knower about the purposes of education and their role in shaping inclusion. This headteacher speaks to what Arendt (1958) identifies as action, but is now retired because of the demand that headteachers deliver reforms through labour and work. Such experiences need to be contextually sited at a time when there has been a shift to ‘the importance of production of needs’ (Norris 2011, p13), where professionals are trained for and recruited into a segregated school system that identifies, categorises and so meets their own and children's needs. This has impacted on trust networks and notions of what it means to be an expert and to do a good job, with teachers re-positioned as enthusiastic performance followers. So the teacher is not only labouring on a data and form-filling production line that fixes and labels children as a form of biopolitical distinctiveness but is identifying and responding to consumer demands in ways that render exchanges about public service values obsolete. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity (EPKP) to the reform of the teaching profession in England is a site where it is possible to examine direct interventions by the state as a form of depoliticisation by consumer-authorised inaction, where practices are controlled and underpinned by particular ideologies regarding what it means to be a professional, and these practices and ideologies are promoted by globalised policy-oriented networks.

Common knowledges?

Working with learners regarding learning processes, achievements and outcomes through teaching, pastoral care and accreditation is the remit of teachers with professional qualifications and credentials.