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Professionals were once considered to be the civic leaders, the deliverers of the - 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 pours 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 agreement-making 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 based 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers in Tasmania, Australia, gave accounts of their experience of increased workload in the 10 years between 1984 and 1994. They reported working longer hours, teaching more students and having increased professional, pastoral and administrative duties. The reasons for this increased workload include: (1) less money being spent on education; (2) changes in student assessment from a norm basis to a criterion basis; (3) a change in the administrative structure within the state colleges in which most respondents teach; (4) a change in the student population. The result, they reported, was that their workload was both increased and extended (intensified), leading to a much more complex workplace. Significantly, complexity was also produced by the attempt of teachers to maintain their professional commitment while adapting to the economic rationalist policies of administrators. However, loss of teachers through redundancy, stress and a move to part-time work has meant that those teachers remaining have had to rationalize their work and reduce their professional commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]