Everyday austerity,quasi-events and relational comparators: examining English schoolteachers’ everyday experiences of austerity in,beyond and across the workplace

Introduction

In 2018, the BBC aired School, a six-part documentary series chronicling the experiences of pupils, teachers, parents and school leaders at Castle School Education Trust (CSET), a multi-academy trust in South Gloucestershire. ¹ The series sought to display the impacts of continued austerity measures on the English education system, exposing how budget cuts, rising operational costs and falling staff numbers have (re)shaped the everyday workings of English schools. Reviewers praised the series for highlighting ‘the funding crisis affecting schools across the country’. ² The series received particular praise for its depiction of how budget cuts to student support services ultimately mean that ‘it’s our children who suffer’. ³

This privileging of young people when discussing schooling is present not only across these reviews but also in geographic scholarship. In cultural geography, schools are typically conceptualised as institutions of social reproduction, with researchers centring student subjectivities and experiences. ⁴ Even within calls for a critical geography of education, little recognition is given to schools as sites of waged labour and exploitation. ⁵

Yet, schools are workplaces in which teachers are increasingly overstretched and overworked. School starkly illustrates this in one scene where Will Roberts, CEO of CSET, addresses teachers about their school’s financial circumstances, remarking, ‘we’re being asked to do more at a time when we have less’. One learning support teacher responds by describing how her department is ‘picking up lots of children with emotional and social problems because you’ve cut the assistant head of years, and we’re finding people being sent to us . . . on a daily basis’. Amidst their rising responsibilities, there is a sense of mounting frustration and exhaustion among the staff at CSET. The teachers are depicted as tired and approaching their limits, with another teacher warning that ‘a lot of the goodwill is going to be exhausted’.

These expressions of frustration and exhaustion are far from exceptional, with data suggesting that they are representative of the broader teaching landscape. In England, ‘educator wellbeing has been continually reported as lower than the general population since 2019’ and continues to deteriorate year-on-year. ⁶ During the 2022–2023 academic year, 78% of schoolteachers reported feeling stressed, and 41% disclosed experiencing a mental health issue. ⁷ Whilst difficult working conditions are not a novel phenomenon for schoolteachers, ⁸ already-existing difficulties are ostensively being intensified by disinvestment and affective atmospheres which push teachers to do more with less. Consequently, the present moment is marked by mounting disillusionment in the teaching profession, with only 59% of teachers remaining in their role a decade after qualification. ⁹ Put simply, existing data shows that austerity is having a considerable detrimental impact on school workforces in England, with teachers facing ‘ever decreasing funding and ever increasing demands’. ¹⁰

What this paper offers, via a small-scale empirical study of schoolteachers in the North of England, is a story of the everyday affective and social consequences of working as a teacher that enriches these statistical accounts of teaching in England. ¹¹ It describes how austerity has materially and affectively reconfigured the school as a workplace and, consequently, expanded the demands placed on teachers. It also questions how and why teachers stay in their role despite expectations of excessive labour-time commitments and the deleterious effects that follow. In so doing, this paper opens up an analytic space to consider the cultural geographies of ‘everyday austerity’ within, beyond and across schools as workplaces.

Specifically, in this paper, I contribute to cultural economic geography by proposing two conceptual lenses through which to analyse teachers’ everyday experiences of austerity. Firstly, I draw on Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of quasi-events ¹² to understand how the shifting demands placed on teachers may appear trivial or mundane in isolation, yet in their plurality form part of a larger structure that normalises sacrifice – often in the form of excessive labour-time commitments – and endurance. In this way, ‘going above and beyond’ becomes not an exceptional aspect of the teaching role, but an unremarkable and expected feature of the job. Secondly, engaging with Sarah Marie Hall’s lens of relational austerity, ¹³ I suggest that a focus on relational comparators can account for teachers’ endurance in their roles. I argue that teachers actively compare their current working conditions against experiences, stories and imaginaries of schools perceived as worse. These relational comparators bolster their subjective experience of their present situation, ultimately compelling endurance.

Together, these concepts have a synthetic importance in understanding how teachers’ workplace experiences have been (re)shaped by austerity. The unspectacular and dispersed nature of quasi-events allows the deterioration of schoolteachers’ working conditions to continue with minimal attention and normalises going above and beyond as an inherent part of their role. Simultaneously, this same quality enables teachers to de-emphasise their personal experiences, whilst comparison directs attention to the fact that it could always be worse elsewhere. By proposing these two lenses, I advance debates around everyday austerity in the workplace by providing a conceptual language for how teachers manage and rationalise the demands to sacrifice and endure placed upon them.

This paper begins by drawing on education studies literature to discuss how austerity measures have materially and affectively reshaped the English school system. I bring this work into discussion with Hall’s writing on everyday austerity to consider how austerity has become embedded in and across teachers’ everyday lives as they are lived in and through the geographies of the school. I then discuss the methods used in this research. I then advance the two main contributions of this paper: Firstly, I examine schoolteachers’ narratives of their everyday working lives, engaging with the concept of quasi-events to be attentive to the mundane instances of being asked to do more with less. Secondly, I examine their narratives of keeping going in these conditions of excessive labour-time commitments. Using the lens of relational austerity, I analyse how teachers compare their present workplace experiences to experiences, stories and imaginaries of other schools in order to justify endurance.

Everyday austerity and English schools

First materialising in the wake of the 2008 financial crash as a series of fiscal reforms, austerity names a political and economic agenda which seeks to reduce the government budget deficit by cutting the state’s public expenditure. ¹⁴ By the mid-2010s austerity had come to be seen as an economic and political norm in the UK, with its impacts bleeding into the fabric of everyday geographies. ¹⁵

Austerity policies represent what Peck and Theodore ¹⁶ describe as ‘an audacious exercise in doubling down’ on the neoliberal agenda. Policies of government downsizing, ongoing privatisation and fiscal retrenchment serve to extend the market into all domains of life, economic and noneconomic – promoting competition, individualism and privatised risk across all facets of society. ¹⁷ These neoliberal rationalities condition a socio-political system in which all forms of social value are reduced to market value. Social investments that lack clear market returns are viewed as both economic and moral failures. ¹⁸ Consequently, social worlds are conjured, shaped and evaluated according to technocratic logics of efficiency, productivity and profitability.

In the context of English schools, these rationalities led to an estimated 9% real terms spending cut per pupil between the 2009–2010 and 2019–2020 academic years. ¹⁹ Whilst, as a state-led political project, austerity may have been declared officially over, these budget restrictions continue to severely affect the day-to-day management of schools: the number of teachers and support staff has been reduced; access to support services diminished; and schools have plugged much of the gap left by the loss of social welfare services previously provided by local authorities. ²⁰ Put simply, schools are being ‘stretched’ by austerity. ²¹ Critically, these cuts have not been uniformly realised across the country; rather, their adverse impacts are unevenly distributed, disproportionately affecting schools in deprived areas. ²²

The uneven impacts of budget cuts have unfolded alongside major education reforms, which sought to consolidate public finances ‘by providing a more cost-effective alternative to the traditional model of state schooling’ through cultivating an independent state sector in the form of academies and free schools. ²³ Whilst still state-funded, these ‘market-like solutions’ shift the costs of services formerly delivered by local authorities (e.g. administration, school improvement, IT management) onto non-state providers through a process of exogenous privatisation. These reforms have been justified through market discourses that promise a self-sustaining, cost-effective education system. In practice, however, they have fragmented England’s school system, with objectives of keeping schools working and achieving excellence being supplanted by economic objectives and corporate interests. ²⁴

Processes of disinvestment and privatisation have been ‘accompanied by neo-conservative pressure to regulate content and behaviour through such things as national curricula, national standards, and national systems of assessment’. ²⁵ The activities of teachers are increasingly subject to regimes of audit and accountability, especially regarding pupil progress and exam results, ²⁶ which leaves them constrained by stringent parameters both explicit in national curricula and implicit in discourses of ‘teacher worth’. ²⁷ Ofsted, in particular, exerts considerable control over what is seen as legitimate teaching/learning activity through its inspection system. As such, the impact of austerity on English schools is more than a matter of simply fiscal policy: austerity has reshaped how everyday life is lived and experienced in schools.

A focus on the more-than-economic qualities of austerity has been popularised in geography under the banner of ‘everyday austerity’, a lens which examines ‘the lived, prosaic elements of contemporary austerity’. ²⁸ Everyday austerity is attentive to how austerity envelops and conditions the everyday moments and spaces in which people live, meet, and – importantly for this paper – work. Operating at the scale of the everyday brings into focus the affective atmospheres of austerity that reshape individuals’ day-to-day practices. ²⁹ An everyday austerity approach to schools, therefore, requires recognition of how cuts and reforms to education are lived and felt through those ‘everyday objects, relationships, places, and feelings’ which (re)configure teachers’ interactions, relationships and spatial practices. ³⁰

From an everyday austerity perspective, austerity-based education policies do more than produce a series of material lacks: they delimit how teachers experience the school and relate to their work. Crucially, because atmospheres circulate without fixed boundaries, the affective force of austerity permeates all educational institutions regardless of direct state oversight. In other words, as the expectations of teachers shift in one institution, this circulates across institutions to shift collective cultural expectations of teachers. This is not to say that austerity’s effects are uniform, but rather that austerity is felt by all teachers across the schooling landscape, albeit differently.

For Pulsford, austerity’s affective atmospheres cultivate a managerialist drive that compels teachers to conform to centrally controlled government policies, practices and performance metrics. ³¹ He describes ‘neoliberal teacherhood’ as marked by a regime of value ‘constituted by ideas of individual worth that have become tied to the logic of commodity and exchange’, whereby those teachers who can fabricate performances that satisfy the requirements of neoliberal surveillance are rewarded. ³² The import of market-based logics and the incorporation of business practices into school management pits members of school communities against one another in pursuit of improved standards and efficiency, requiring teachers to continuously increase and justify their own usability. ³³ Teacherhood has consequently come to be marked by individualism and competition, whilst collegiality, mutual respect and compassion are eroded in the workplace. In this context, teachers experience austerity not only through the insufficiency of resources to meet schools’ widening responsibilities, but also through the reworking and expansion of their expectations and responsibilities.

These atmospheres create situations in which teachers are expected and expect themselves to endure, to sacrifice and to do more with less. It is through this continual exposure to austerity’s atmospheres that teachers’ labouring bodies are fatigued and teachers become vulnerable to exhaustion. ³⁴ As such, pushing themselves to do more with less serves as a mode of capitalist exploitation for teachers, deriving value from their ability to persist in deteriorating conditions and piece together insufficient resources to meet neoliberal performance expectations.

Having outlined the existing research on austerity’s impacts on English schools, I now provide an overview of my research design before presenting an account of how teachers’ workplace experiences are (re)shaped by austerity using my empirical data. I locate austerity as woven into the fabric of teachers’ workplace practices through a series of quasi-events, felt as the expectation to do more with less.

Research design

This research project examined work and its social consequences for teachers in the North of England. The study is situated within a moment of mounting disillusionment in the teaching profession, with only 59% of teachers remaining in the profession a decade after qualification. ³⁵ Specifically, it is concerned with how schools, as workplaces profoundly affected by austerity, shape subjectivity and how teachers make sense of their work and working conditions. The everyday geographies of austerity have been extensively researched within the sub-discipline of cultural geography – for instance, examining the dramatisation of women’s getting on and getting by in the North East of England, ³⁶ the lived and lively role of mobile phone materiality among families in Greater Manchester, ³⁷ and the relational and tasted landscapes of Food Bank Britain. ³⁸ While these studies offer valuable insights into how intersections of class, race and gender shape experiences of austerity, this study instead focuses on the category of occupation, given the centrality of work as a site of subject formation. ³⁹ This project, therefore, seeks to understand how austerity unfolds and is experienced in, through, and across workplaces.

This study involves two forms of empirical data analysis. Firstly, I conducted a thematic analysis of the 2018 BBC documentary School, seeking to draw out and make sense of the shared meanings and collective experiences of teachers presented in the series. My analysis focused on the representation of teachers in the series by examining the practices of teaching and the affective atmospheres of the schools. Secondly, given that documentaries are constructed representations of reality – shaped by filmmakers’ narrative and creative choices rather than serving as an objective reflection of a single ‘truth’ ⁴⁰ – I triangulated this analysis by conducting interviews with schoolteachers to develop a more comprehensive understanding of teachers’ workplace experiences. Between August and November 2023, I conducted a series of in-depth semi-structured narrative interviews (n = 5, 60–130 minutes each) with teachers in the North of England to elicit deeper and more focused narratives of teachers’ experiences of work. Given the social and spatial emplacement of austerity, ⁴¹ as well as the disproportionately damaging impacts that austerity has had on the region, ⁴² I selected the North of England as the site of my research. This also offered a contrasting site of enquiry to School, which was filmed in South West England.

Following Worth, ⁴³ I identified narrative interviews as an ideal way to centre the voices of teachers and their personal experiences of work, and to explore the interplay of work and life. Narrative interviewing involves participants sharing their own stories in their own way, allowing them not only to recount factual details about their work but also to engage with and make sense of the complexity of their experiences – discussing what they do, why they do it and how it makes them feel.

The documentary analysis shaped the direction of my fieldwork and played a pivotal role in the formulation of my interview guide. My guide was structured around a series of ‘tell me about . . .’ questions designed to elicit narratives about the participants’ personal experiences. ⁴⁴ I developed questions around key themes identified during the documentary analysis: professional identity, student interactions, colleague interactions, school environment, personal and emotional wellbeing and work-life balance.

Participants were recruited using a snowball sampling strategy, utilising personal connections to make initial contact. The schoolteachers I spoke to span a range of career stages, from student teacher to recently retired. Ages of participants ranged from their early 20s to 60s. They had experience teaching across various institutions, including community schools, academies, faith schools, private schools and special schools. My goal was to engage participants with teaching experience in a meaningful discussion about their experiences, opinions, motivations and feelings. While the sample lacked variation across domains of social difference – all participants being white women – this composition is consistent with this demographic’s overrepresentation in the profession. ⁴⁵ Nonetheless, this homogeneity does foreclose insight into the role that race and gender, as well as other axes of social difference, play in shaping experiences of austerity in the workplace.

Given the limitations of this study in terms of sample size and representativeness, I am unable to claim the extent to which my analysis reflects the broader lived experiences of schoolteachers in England. As a small-scale qualitative study, this project is exploratory in nature, seeking to develop conceptual insights rather than provide generalisable findings. ⁴⁶ Although I cannot claim transferability with certainty, findings need not be dismissed as inconsequential, as exploratory work of this kind can offer empirically informed analytical insight that lays the foundations for more intensive investigation in the future. I therefore position this paper as a plausibility probe that tells a story of the everyday affective and social consequences of working as a teacher rather than offering a universal account of the teaching experience in England.

Although I have not worked as a schoolteacher myself, the use of a gatekeeper proved advantageous in mitigating my position as an outsider to the field, creating a sense of familiarity between myself and the participants, which facilitated a rapid establishment of rapport. This being said, awareness of the teaching profession through prior informal conversations afforded me a degree of contextual familiarity with the issues discussed, enabling me to engage meaningfully with participants’ narratives. As a result, the interviews elicited were in-depth and personal. Nonetheless, there may have been aspects of their role that I did not know to ask about or that they may have deemed me not to have relevant knowledge to discuss. As such, my interpretation of interviews is partial, shaped by my inexperience in the teaching profession.

After transcribing the interviews, I employed a process of open and axial coding to analyse my data, drawing out recurring themes and concepts. ⁴⁷ Key themes of ‘being asked to do more with less’, ‘going above and beyond as part of the job’ and ‘keeping going’ were identified and followed across transcripts. I connected these emic codes to etic codes from the literature on everyday austerity, which allowed me to build the conceptual argument that forms this paper.

‘Going above and beyond’: quasi-events of austerity

The third episode of School focuses on Marlwood School after it was placed in ‘special measures’ by Ofsted, a designation indicating that the school had failed to provide an acceptable standard of education and had not demonstrated the capacity to make necessary improvements. The episode conveys the felt impacts of CSET’s restrictive financial constraints, with the trust pursuing staffing reductions in order to ‘balance the budget’. Redundancies, changes to curriculum, and restructuring are dubbed ‘the usual thing’ by one teacher, whilst another remarks that the school has faced ‘cut after cut after cut’. Staffing shortages are shown as reshaping the teaching/learning environment: recruitment difficulties meant teachers were working outside their areas of expertise; the lack of supply teachers resulted in individuals without a teaching qualification covering lessons as a ‘way of saving money’ and large class sizes of 40–50 pupils were proposed as a way of managing the staffing shortfall.

Teachers’ discussions with the film crew often included criticisms of the workload, with one teacher emphasising that ‘there’s less staff and there’s still the same amount of work’ and another noting that ‘there’s a lot to do and there’s not many people around to do it’. A theme of leaving the profession also runs throughout the episode. One scene features the faculty head of humanities learning that he may face a pay decrease as his leadership and management responsibilities could be cut. ‘It feels like another kick in the teeth’, he tells the camera. ‘I don’t feel valued at all . . . I look at alternatives and think more closely about when I can retire or go off and do something else . . . It upsets me really what a state we’re in’.

What is analytically significant about these various moments is their seeming mundanity. There is no climactic scene that distils the struggles of teaching into a single explosive moment. Rather, they represent what I shall describe in the rest of this section as quasi-events: occurrences which, in isolation, appear trivial and unremarkable, yet collectively can be identified as constitutive of a larger structure of austerity. Teachers’ struggles are depicted as simply part of the daily task of getting on and getting by in the contemporary English school landscape. Crucially, the content of this episode accords with the existing data on budget cuts and staff retention outlined earlier in this paper. This underscores that austerity is far from an abstract or distant force but is, rather, woven into the fabric of the workplace itself, reshaping the school as an occupational environment. It was these mundane experiences of teaching and how they correlate with already recognised larger-scale trends that I sought to further understand through conducting interviews.

During my fieldwork I spoke to Sandra, ⁴⁸ an older teacher who took early retirement after being diagnosed with depression. Over her more than 20-year teaching career, she had loved her job, especially ‘seeing just how quickly the children developed’. However, because of structural changes in more recent years – including governmental educational requirements ‘raising the bar with higher academic expectations . . . so high that you wouldn’t achieve them’, a lack of classroom resources and assistance, a lack of support from the senior leadership team and a school management that would not appreciate success outside of measurable academic schemes of work – Sandra described how the atmosphere of her school changed. She felt like ‘teacher bashing’ in which ‘everybody blames the teachers: the parents blame them, the press blames them, the governor blames them’ for school failings had become prevalent. Correspondingly, the school ‘turned into a very negative place to be’ with a ‘finger blaming culture . . . [which had] a very very detrimental effect on the staff’. She described how this created an atmosphere in which teachers pitted themselves against each other and particular teachers ‘would deliberately undermine others to make [themselves] look better’. As a result, Sandra stopped enjoying teaching. The expectation to ‘go above and beyond’ as simply ‘the nature of the job’ started to take a toll on her. She felt exhausted, unhappy, underappreciated, and overworked – slowly realising she could no longer continue working as a teacher. She described how:

The school made me depressed, and I think I did the right thing getting out when I did. You know, it’s really sad because you keep going and keep going and you want to do a good job. And I think teaching, you wear yourself out . . . It was making me depressed, and I stopped really caring about what was going on in my life.

Sandra’s narrative illustrates various affective atmospheres of austerity (e.g. competitive culture, excessive demands, lack of support and technocratic success metrics) which cohere with the existing knowledge about teachers’ workplace experiences. She narrativises the role of these atmospheres in modifying her capacity to feel and act in the everyday, describing the increasing difficulty of maintaining the love she had felt for her job.

The temporal framing of Sandra’s slow wearing down is particularly noteworthy. She did not experience austerity as a singular event, budget cut or institutional reform, but instead as a diffuse and extended process woven into the fabric of her work. Austerity was not a continuously felt presence, but rather something encountered intermittently through a series of quasi-events in which she felt expected to do more with less. She narrates her inability to continue teaching as the result of various affective intensities (e.g. frustration, sadness, underappreciation and overwork) which accumulate throughout her everyday practices.

This concept of quasi-events, which I borrow from Elizabeth Povinelli, provides a name for moments in which teachers are required to endure in the face of insufficient resources and inadequate support. In isolation, these moments dissolve into the fabric of the everyday, appearing as trivial and mundane incidents that are never fully materialised into objective occurrences, instead occurring just below the level of accountability. However, when considered in their plurality, they can be identified as part of a larger structure of austerity’s organisation and expression of power in the form of chronic demands to sacrifice and endure – or, in Sandra’s words, to ‘go above and beyond’ as ‘part of the job’. It is through such quasi-events that austerity is rendered intelligible; they constitute the very moments in which the well-versed rhythms and practices of the workday are disrupted as teachers are expected to invest time and energy into meeting the expanding expectations of their job in scenes of insufficient resources, support and recognition.

This notion of quasi-events, though not termed as such, can be identified in existing literature on everyday austerity. Hall, for instance, recounts her participant Selma’s experience of counting the last of her coins at the supermarket check-out, describing this as a small moment in which the need to get by in times of austerity reshapes the rhythms and tempos of daily life. ⁴⁹ She argues that while this may not constitute a moment of crisis in Selma’s life, considering such moments cumulatively highlights austerity’s toll on individual bodies–for instance, conditioning experiences of tiredness. I suggest that attending to such moments as quasi-events resists a totalising account of austerity, which flattens its variations and contingencies across time and space, by instead focusing on the lived, prosaic and contextual elements of contemporary austerity.

While Sandra’s experience is specific to the context of her school, her narrative strongly resonates with patterns evident in existing data on teaching and across my research findings. In the rest of this section, I discuss instances in which other participants similarly felt compelled to ‘go above and beyond’. Among my participants, quasi-events involving excessive labour-time commitments emerged as the most tangible expression of austerity’s impact on teachers’ everyday working lives. This workload, and the long working hours it demands, is what appears to leave teachers vulnerable to psychological consequences commonly associated with the profession: exhaustion, stress and compassion fatigue, among others. ⁵⁰

Discussion of long working hours was a recurring theme across my interviews. When I spoke to Nancy it was after 8pm and she had ‘only just sat down now’ after staying late to mark books and prepare resources for the next day’s classes. She told me that it was not uncommon for her to be getting home this late. When I asked about what takes up time as a teacher, she outlined what she called the ‘invisible’ parts of teaching:

Things like duties, after school clubs, marking, planning, assemblies, general paperwork, safeguarding paperwork, form time, writing reports, parent’s evenings. There’s lots and lots of things that you do that is part of a job of a teacher that’s not teaching . . . you are expected to [do them] . . . and you know, all of that takes time.

She stressed that much of this work was increasing as schools removed support staff, requiring teachers, for example, to take on more breaktime duties at the expense of their own break or completing other work. These instances of having to invest additional time and energy to meet workplace expectations constitute quasi-events. Importantly, Nancy describes these moments as ‘expected’: even though they represent an expansion of her role and require working beyond contracted hours, completing these tasks is taken-for-granted as simply part of being a schoolteacher. It is through their invisibility and taken-for-grantedness that quasi-events become mundane, and austerity becomes woven into the fabric of the workplace.

Mollie echoed similar sentiments regarding her extended work hours during our conversation, describing it as ‘definitely not possible’ to complete her work within her contracted hours. She found herself having to sacrifice breaks and lunch to complete paperwork. More than this, however, Mollie’s investment of excessive labour-time into her work was being materially supported by the school administration. She described how, aware of her workload, the school ‘gave me a laptop and I was taking that home to do work’. While this laptop seemingly addresses the issue of her not being able to complete her planning and preparation whilst at school, its provision actually reinforces the expectation for Mollie to exceed her contracted hours and work longer, facilitating a ‘presence bleed’ of her work into the domains of home and leisure. ⁵¹ This seemingly generous gesture by the school functions as a spatio-temporal fix, extending Mollie’s productive capacities and labour possibilities beyond the spatial confines of the school and temporal restrictions of the workday. ⁵² Additionally, even during supposed time off, Mollie found herself required to work: ‘[holidays are] a time where you have lots of work to do . . . [teachers spend the summer] setting up their classroom for the next class coming in’.

For the teachers I interviewed, the investment of time and energy into their work appeared primarily as an attempt to hold their ground in the present and meet the expectations of their role despite the underfunding of their schools and the increasing responsibilities placed on them. In other words, these are quasi-events of endurance where teachers laboriously plough on in the face of everyday hardship. ⁵³ Their narratives resonate with Raynor’s analysis of gendered precarity under austerity, in which women, faced with shrinking resources for unpaid care and mounting demands, orient their hopes not towards upward mobility but towards maintaining their position and ‘keeping going’. ⁵⁴ Teachers’ frequent exposure to the ‘micro-cracks’ of austerity renders their everyday lives increasingly consumed with trying to stay afloat, becoming fatigued as their capacity for active resistance and contestation is progressively eroded. ⁵⁵

Given their long working hours, it’s unsurprising that tiredness and exhaustion were recurring themes across my conversations. Heather, for example, described feeling ‘ready to go to bed straight after coming home from school’. She explained that teaching often feels like ‘putting on an act and exaggerating things’ – narrating experiences of observing teachers expecting her to act like a ‘Disney caricature’, adding that ‘it’s so mentally draining to do that all the time’. She outlined the exhausting qualities of an implicit ‘professional conduct’ in which she feels compelled to hide her emotions, ‘leave everything at the door and just teach’. Such emotional labour – where one is expected to manage outward emotional expressions in response to ‘appropriate job-related expectations’ – is one of the strongest predictors of strain, burnout and emotional exhaustion. ⁵⁶ Yet, rather than being recognised as harmful, it is normalised and framed as the ‘nature of the job’.

Evelyn similarly told me, ‘I get really tired when I get home. I want to sit down and not really do anything . . . you don’t get a break during the day. It’s sometimes really hard to find the motivation to keep going’. This physical and emotional exhaustion extends Evelyn’s experience of austerity beyond the classroom and into her home. The lack of breaks during the day, whether imposed by the school due to a staffing shortfall or self-imposed in order to have the time to meet expectation requirements, are quasi-events which, in their plurality, configure this experience of exhaustion.

I use exhaustion here to refer to a form of social suffering produced by the neoliberal imperative for individuals to continuously monitor and optimise their own performance. ⁵⁷ It goes beyond individual stresses and strains to highlight an affective atmosphere that compels teachers to exert themselves endlessly in pursuit of fulfilling workplace expectations, even in conditions in which this necessitates excessive labour-time commitments – leaving them, over time, exhausted. Therefore, not only is this exhaustion conditioned by endurance, but their exhaustion must be endured, becoming the context in which they work and persist. ⁵⁸

This, then, begs the question of what it is that makes teachers ‘keep going and keep going’ despite austerity’s deleterious impacts.

Relational comparators and endurance

At the outset of this paper, I referenced a scene in the documentary School where Will Roberts describes the present moment as one in which educators are ‘being asked to do more at a time when we have less’. Whilst this scene conveys the growing frustration and exhaustion of teachers as they are increasingly overstretched and overworked, I believe there is also a moment which offers an insight into why teachers may endure in their role despite the negative impacts of their work. Roberts’s statement is met with fears that the ‘good things about the school’ are failing to be protected, with the elimination of educational trips cited as a specific cause for concern. Roberts responds by asserting that ‘we’ve been a bit protected at [this school] from some of what other schools have had to deal with much earlier’. In making this statement, Roberts uses comparison as a means of defending the reduction in funding: he attempts to quell concerns surrounding the erosion of the ‘good things’ by suggesting that the teaching/learning environments of other schools have worsened at a faster rate. He essentially compels the teachers to keep going and endure by rhetorically positioning them as fortunate because their working environment is better than that of other schools.

The notion of comparison is already established within research on everyday austerity. In Sarah Marie Hall’s work on everyday austerity, she describes personal conditions of austerity as ‘knotted within personal inventories of important life experiences, relational comparators, and memories, of social, emotional, or financial hardship, which resonate strongly’. ⁵⁹ She advocates for a relational approach that attends to how differences across and between spaces shape everyday interactions, relationships and practices. ⁶⁰ For Hall, austerity is not experienced in isolation but is understood relative to individual and shared histories of getting by. Memories of previous hardship serve as reference points through which people make sense of present conditions. A relational approach to austerity thus positions comparison as central to how people navigate and interpret their everyday experiences of economic instability.

Existing research has already identified English schools as spaces in which the relationality of austerity is rendered acutely visible. Warnock examines the impact of austerity on access to special educational needs and disability support, finding that parent carers of disabled and neurodiverse children have vastly different experiences of navigating the same services. A core insight is that perceptions of advantage or disadvantage do not occur in a vacuum but are formed ‘in relation to who and what they see around them’. ⁶¹ Although focused on parents rather than teachers, this research underscores that comparison plays a key role in shaping subjective experiences of the English school system. My research suggests that comparison is equally consequential in shaping teachers’ experiences.

This section focuses on the role of relational comparison in shaping teachers’ perceptions of their workplace. Comparison, I argue, is a specific form of relationality that shapes perceptions of the school as a workplace and compels teachers to endure in their role. I did not explicitly invite participants to compare their experiences to those at other schools, instead allowing them to narrate their working lives in their own words. However, during analysis, the theme of comparison emerged prominently. Participants frequently compared their working conditions to those elsewhere, drawing on both previous personal experience and reports from colleagues. These moments of relational comparison stood out as a discursive mechanism through which endurance was sustained.

Across interviews, stories and memories from different workplaces were offered by participants as a means of bolstering depictions of their own workplace experiences. Sandra, for instance, told me about her son, also a teacher, who would often be logging ‘safeguarding issues until after midnight. And you know sometimes it’s night after night after night’. By narrating this story, Sandra affirmed that, despite the adverse impact teaching had on her, she felt lucky to have taught at her school as ‘the demands on [teachers at other schools] and the kinds of children they have is more [difficult] than what I had at my school’. Nancy echoed this sentiment, stating: ‘I hear people around the lunch table that have worked in other schools that talk about how horrendous the behaviour is . . . So, I think I feel quite blessed to be working where I’m working’. Similarly, Heather recounted a conversation with a peer further along in their teacher training, who had been placed in a school with significant behavioural challenges and had sustained ‘scratches on her arm’ after being attacked by a student. Reflecting on this, Heather expressed relief that in her school placements she did not work directly with children with ‘severe needs’, stating that it ‘would stress me out’ and was something she felt she ‘couldn’t do’. These instances of comparison suggest that the teachers I interviewed rationalised their own negative workplace experiences by passing them off as not as bad as they could be if they were working at another school or in another role.

Relational comparators were also made within personal histories. Drawing on her previous experiences as a supply teacher, Mollie expressed gratitude that her fixed-term contract was at a ‘two-form school’ where there are two classes instead of one for each year group of students. She described how this alleviated some of the work-time commitments she would have otherwise experienced at a one-form school, as she could work collaboratively with the other teacher and create a division of labour for lesson planning, describing how her colleague ‘would do all the English lessons, and I would do all the maths lessons’. Evelyn similarly contrasted her current workplace with a previous role at a different school, which she described as marked with chronic understaffing, frequent leadership turnover and continual policy changes. She recounted students’ poor behaviour, describing experiences of being ‘verbally abused and pushed and shoved as groups would try to get past’ – summarising the experience as making her feel like ‘sometimes going to work felt like going to war’.

Despite my participants narrating experiences of long working hours and feelings of exhaustion and underappreciation, the interviews also contained instances of relational comparison, which elicited feelings like luck, blessing, and relief at their present working conditions. It was these affective resonances of comparison that allowed participants to overlook the demands of doing more with less and going above and beyond. I suggest that comparison may play a significant role in teachers enhancing their subjective perceptions of the current teaching conditions and enduring in their role.

It is important to note that my participants’ relational comparisons are predicated on geographies of unevenness wherein there exists a differential presencing and absencing of the effects of austerity across schools in England. This can be explained by the fact that neoliberalism’s ‘actually existing manifestations are (and indeed can only be) partial, polycentric, and plural . . . marked by friction, contradiction, and endemically uneven geographical development’. ⁶² Consequently, the disinvestment of English schools is marked by geographies of unevenness with government cuts and savings not spread evenly across schools but influenced by contextual factors, such as school size, location, poverty and ethnic diversity. ⁶³ It is this unevenness that provides the conditions for relational comparisons to be made and for teachers to perceive themselves fortunate, lucky or blessed in their current role even as they experience objectively harmful working conditions.

Conclusion

In November 2022, Ofsted conducted an inspection of Caversham Primary School in Reading, England. For those being evaluated these inspections are high-stake with the results significant for the public reputation and standing of a school. ⁶⁴ Following the inspection, Caversham Primary was downgraded from ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Inadequate’. School leaders were informed of the results and shown draft copies of the report but were not allowed to discuss the judgement publicly. This left the headteacher at the time, Ruth Perry, stewing over the result. According to her husband,

[she] was terrified that she would lose her job. She knew that an inadequate judgment meant the end of most headteachers’ careers. She kept repeating that she’d let everyone down, her staff, the school’s children and parents, and her family. ⁶⁵

Over the next month Perry’s mental health deteriorated, and on 8th January 2023 she killed herself. An inquest designated the inspection a contributory factor in Perry’s suicide, with her sister characterising the death as exposing the ‘brutal inhumanity’ of the ‘callous, perverse, and inhumane’ Ofsted inspection system. ⁶⁶

I begin my conclusion with an overview of Ruth Perry’s death not to reduce the argument of this paper to an individual tragedy, but to mark the real-world consequences of a broader political configuration in which teachers are expected to do more with less, to go above and beyond as part of their job. This account of Perry’s death serves as a reminder of what is at stake as the demands and expectations placed on teachers intensify in conditions of austerity.

Drawing on both the 2018 BBC documentary School and teachers’ narratives from the North of England, I have told a story of the everyday affective and social consequences of working as a teacher that enriches existing quantitative data. I have described how austerity has materially and affectively reconfigured the school as a workplace and, consequently, expanded the demands placed on teachers. I have offered two conceptual lenses through which to analyse teachers’ everyday experiences of austerity. I offered quasi-events as a lens for understanding how, when considered collectively, the seemingly trivial and mundane demands placed on teachers under austerity can be identified as part of a larger structure that positions going above and beyond as an essential part of the job. I offered the lens of relational comparators as a way of understanding how and why teachers’ endure in their role by contrasting their current workplace experiences with those of other schools in an attempt to enhance their subjective perceptions the present and, in so doing, compel endurance.

Through my proposition of these two lenses, I advance debates around everyday austerity in the workplace by providing a conceptual language for describing how teachers manage and rationalise the demands to sacrifice and endure placed on them in the context of an education system (re)shaped by austerity. The lens of relational comparators offers an affective explanation for workers’ decisions to remain in a job despite its deleterious impacts – conjuring ideas of desirability, fortune or luck within experiences of employment that are objectively harmful.

This paper has also allowed me to analyse how the school shapes subjectivity and how teachers make sense of their work and working conditions. In so doing, I have emphasised the importance of occupation in discussions of the everyday geographies of austerity. There is, however, scope to expand this inquiry beyond my explicit focus on occupation into how it intersects with various axes of social difference, as experiences of work are greatly impacted by the construction of identity and the production of difference. ⁶⁷

The harms of teaching cannot be reduced to institutional failure alone. Attention must be directed to the cumulative weight of expectations placed on teachers, and to the everyday expectation to sacrifice and endure. It is for this reason that whilst a critical geography of education is pertinent for analysing the ‘confluence of social processes’ that shape schooling arrangements, ⁶⁸ it is incomplete without consideration of the labour geographies of the school and of schoolteachers as active geographical agents. Geographers must account for the contemporary working conditions of teachers, going beyond recognition of their work as stressful, frustrating or underappreciated and grappling with what it means to work in a school environment reshaped by austerity.