Learning Profession? Teachers and their Professional Development in England and Wales 1920-2000

This ground-breaking book uncovers a hidden history of the professional development of serving teachers. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Wendy Robinson reveals an optimistic and liberal age of high class conferences in the 1920s and 1930s, in London hotels and Oxford colleges, free from government control, where teachers from across the country and abroad, gathered for professional, intellectual and cultural 'refreshment'. The status attached to these occasions was signified by the celebrities who graced them, including royalty, public intellectuals, educational practitioners and politicians. Professor Robinson then shows how post-war training became more instrumental, taken over by the Ministry of Education with its centrally-prescribed advanced courses, and, from 1970, by Local Education Authorities' invention of apparently democratic Teachers' Centres. This analysis is complemented by face-to-face interviews with teachers and other practitioners once active in professional development. Fascinating, detailed interviews brilliantly capture teachers' lived experience of professional development and its influence on their teaching, career development and professional identity. Fresh and original, lucidly written by one of the leading historians of education in Britain, A Learning Profession? is essential and engaging reading for those interested in the development of a teaching profession.