Teahers and leaders : created or creative?: a Scottish-English comparison

"In an earlier paper written with English colleagues, we suggested that the modernisation of the teaching workforces in Scotland and England, while sharing some features of a global agenda towards standardisation, nevertheless demonstrates significant differences. Simply put, we contrasted the ?developmental? approach to teaching reform in Scotland, with the performative and ?assessment-oriented? approach in England. Drawing on an ESRC funded study of Threshold Assessment of teachers in England, we compared the Threshold process with the process of becoming a Chartered Teacher in Scotland. Both of these are policies which relate to teachers who have completed or are completing the first stage in their careers.
In this paper I draw on a wider range of studies to explore and develop this theme further. In particular I seek to draw on studies of educational leaders carried out in both countries, as well as further work on teachers and in teacher education, in order to examine whether the same characteristics may be applied to the wider range of locations within the teaching profession.
In some sense therefore this is an exploration of developing views of teacher and headteacher autonomy in the two situations and an attempt to ascertain the extent to which teachers and heads are encouraged to be creative in their work or on the other hand, the extent to which heads and teachers are created by a national policy context. The paper is therefore concerned with structure and agency in the context of education policy and practice. As well as autonomy, the paper will invoke the concepts of trust, risk and authenticity, analysing Ball?s account of ?Barberism? presented as the SERA Lecture in 2004."