Recruitment and Transition of Construction Lecturers in Further Education

Introduction

In many ways, the construction industry and further education (FE) could not be more different. Construction is ‘tough work’, ‘real work’ dominated by men, where ‘physical labour, dirt, discomfort and even danger are believed to be the necessary concomitants of true manhood’ (Ness, 2011: 8). Here, workers live within (and reproduce) a discourse that sees men as animals (Paap, 2006), that simultaneously provides a legitimation of politically incorrect behaviours as well as the expectation that such workers will engage in demanding and dangerous work. Here we find the ‘mythology of the masculine reputation’ (Willis, 1979) where workers define their solidarity through ‘humour and language in the workplace, distrust of abstraction or of theory, and devaluing or denigrating the work of women, minorities, and non-manual workers, such as managers and professionals’ (Saucedo and Morales, 2010: 637–638). In such a context, with masculinity reproduced as the normative standard (Simpson and Lewis, 2005), men engage in ‘border-work’ Denissen (2010: 1055) that ‘activate[s] and maintain[s] gender boundaries in highly bifurcated, stylized, and stereotyped ways’. Furthermore, the hypermasculinity of construction is not only discursive: ‘girl-watching’, fighting, the use of force and the suppression of emotions are equally evident (Iacune, 2005). How different, then, the world of FE. Here, in stark contrast to construction, 63.7 per cent of the FE workforce is female (Lifelong Learning UK, 2011). While the building trades are seen as tough, dirty and physically arduous occupations, teaching is more often positioned as a caring profession with practitioners engaged in emotional labour (Avis and Bathmaker, 2004; Isenbarger and Zembylas, 2006; Salisbury et al., 2006). Here, rather than physical toughness, heterosexuality and exclusion, the discourse concerns diversity (Leach, 2011; Lumby, 2009), equality and inclusion (Doughty and Allen, 2008; Williams, 2008), essential elements of the commitment to students at the heart of the professionalism of the teaching role (Jephcote and Salisbury, 2009; Robson and Bailey, 2009).

However, as different as they may ostensibly be, there are some similarities between the culture of construction and the culture of FE. While the majority of staff in FE may be female, it is argued that the managerial culture of colleges since incorporation has become highly masculine (Kerfoot and Whitehead, 1998, 2000; Leonard, 2000). Here we find the competitive-masculine subject (Thomas and Davis, 2005) that foregrounds aggression, competitiveness, entrepreneurialism and target-orientation in the approach to the marketization of the sector, values also embedded within the hypermasculine norms of construction (Saucedo and Morales, 2010). However, such privileged organizational masculinities (Collinson and Hearne, 2001) also extend to the ability to cope with one’s work – while the ability to cope with the physical demands of their work is often a point of pride for construction workers, the ability to cope with emotional labour is prioritized among FE staff (Page, 2013; Orr, 2012). Yet, though there may be similarities based upon notions of masculinity, this is not to suggest that the expression of masculinity is the same. Rather than an essentialist conception, the majority of gender scholars refer instead to masculinities as a plural concept (Connell, 1987; Hearn 1987), that is, ‘changing and historically informed around dominant discourses or ideologies’ (Whitehead and Barrett, 2001: 15). From this perspective, while within the same paradigm, the masculinity on a building site is very different from the masculinity in a college.

Given the stark differences between the two cultures, the transition from construction to FE is an important focus for managers within colleges, especially the heads of construction (HoCs) who are required to manage the process. Having completed the transition successfully themselves and being responsible for the quality of construction provision, HoCs are ideally situated to provide an insight into the issues of recruitment and transition. As such, the objective of this study was to investigate the recruitment and transition of new construction lecturers from the building site to the FE college from the perspective of HoCs.

Transition

With a need to recruit lecturers who possess contemporary industrial skills, the management of the transition from vocational tradesperson to vocational teacher is an important area of focus. Several studies have focused on professionals moving from their practice field to become lecturers in higher education and the majority focus on the reconstruction of identity. In a study of recently appointed nurse and midwifery lecturers, Smith and Boyd (2012) found a supportive culture underpinning the admittedly challenging transition. The new lecturers were highly motivated by their contribution to the development of their students but held on to their original identity as clinical professionals, as did the STEM transitioners in Grier and Johnston’s (2011) study. However, other studies have highlighted transitions from professional to academic that have been less effective: Blenkinsopp and Stalker (2004) detailed the anxiety of new lecturers in terms of teaching and academic credibility; and Gourlay (2011), admittedly in a study of a single academic, reported issues of alienation and emotional and subjective struggle that forced the newly appointed lecturer to leave.

Despite the routineness of transition from industry professional to FE, there are few studies concerning its nature. Avis and Bathmaker (2006) highlight the ‘brokenness’ of many transitions to FE with teacher training graduates struggling to find full time positions and starting with part time and temporary contracts. Again, the previous professional identity shaped how the participants made sense of their new environments in a process of ‘continuity and change’ that ‘utilizes an understanding of change that is mediated by and not in contradiction with earlier orientations and forms of identity’ (p183). Such a construction was also evident in the work of Tigchelaar et al. (2008) who argued that continuity during career transitions was at the level of beliefs, while change was primarily experienced in terms of adjusting to new work environments and processes. However, the participants of Avis and Bathmaker’s (2006) study had attended a pre-service PGCE programme; more common for industry professionals moving to FE is to be appointed on the basis of their industrial expertise who are then required to undertake in-service teacher training. The result, for Orr and Simmons (2010), is a dual identity as practitioners simultaneously fulfil roles as both teacher and student. However, given the number of studies than have emphasized the continuing influence of previous industrial experience, perhaps it might be more appropriate to consider in-service vocational teachers as possessing three concomitant identities adding an even greater potential for role conflict. This issue of transition is a key focus of this research.

In a study focusing entirely on construction lecturers in FE, Le Gallais (2006) found that the majority of participants in her case study came to teaching for pro-social reasons (Grant and Parker, 2009): teaching was a way of passing on the skills and knowledge that they acquired from their own teachers, a way of leaving a legacy. However, altruism was not the only antecedent of their transition; pragmatic reasons were also evident with some entering teaching for financial reasons. Once in a teaching role, construction lecturers were found to occupy a liminal position of restricted dual professionalism (Peel, 2005) which prioritized their vocational background:

Tensions between these lecturers’ professional and occupational identities are inevitable and the stress upon the importance of their vocational experience by employers, students/trainees and by the lecturers themselves serves to perpetuate their identification with their previous trades. (Le Gallais, 2006)

Here, then, the foregrounding of their construction identity precluded full participation in the academic community of practice (Viskovic and Robson, 2001), which potentially reinforces the dichotomy between ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’. The extent to which new construction lecturers become fully participating members of the new community of practice is another key focus of this article.

However, the transition from construction to teaching should not be considered solely through a lens of professional identity – issues of cultural change must also be addressed. With its emphasis on emotional labour and caring, together with the contested notion of feminization of management at first tier levels (Leathwood, 2006; Ozga and Deem, 2000; Prichard and Deem, 1999), it is possible that the transition from a hypermasculine culture will create further tension. In a study of working-class men transitioning to service jobs that were considered ‘feminine’, Nixon (2009: 309) argues that men experienced threats to their masculinity: first, they were unable to establish the same ‘homosocial relations that characterize masculine work cultures’; second, they were afraid of becoming feminized; third, they feared stigmatization arising from their new employment. As a result, men reconstructed their new service roles as more masculine, foregrounding masculine characteristics such as ‘hard grafting’ and overt resistance to management. In a complementary study, Simpson (2005) also documented conflict between traditional masculine identities and the feminine associations of new roles. What is significant here is that jobs were appraised according to the extent of femininity – in teaching, the inherent notion of caring and emotional labour may indeed be perceived as feminine characteristics compared to the hypermasculinity of the building site. It was not necessarily the appraisal of the femininity from the individual themselves – the ‘role strain’ was more often from their peers and resulted in emphasizing those aspects of the job that were considered more masculine – masculinity is thus ‘both partially subverted and maintained’ (Pullen and Simpson, 2009). The impact of masculinity is another key area of concern in this article and provides a context within which the transition can be understood.

There are, however, limitations in applying these studies to the transition of construction lecturers. First, although FE contains a majority of female teachers, it is not as female-dominated as the subjects of these studies (nursing and primary school teaching). Second, FE colleges are factionalized workplaces of vocational tribes (Becher and Trowler, 2001) that provide collections of sub-cultures. Here, then, schools of construction may preserve a culture of masculinity much more readily. As such, the extent to which teaching construction in a college is feminized is debatable. Certainly elements of the role, such as pastoral care, may potentially be perceived as feminine but the extent to which such responsibilities are embraced after transition is another key focus of this article.

Key to the transition of lecturers from the building site to the college are the middle managers who oversee construction provision. Living with vulnerability (Shain, 2000) and positioned as a ‘buffer’ (Gleeson and Shain, 1999) between senior managers and lecturers, the paradigms of organizational strategy and the pragmatic concerns of everyday practice (Leader, 2004), middle managers in FE enact five roles according to Briggs (2003, 2005): ‘corporate agent’ negotiating cross-college understandings at the structural and systemic level; ‘implementer’ of college policy; ‘staff manager’, fulfilling human resource management procedures and attending to the differentiated needs of lecturers; ‘liaison’ among the lateral and vertical interdependencies between sections, departments and functions; and finally ‘leader’, engaged in role-modelling, selling a vision, motivating staff and entrepreneurship. In such a pivotal position, HoCs are responsible for managing the entire transition process from recruitment to induction to a full teaching role. Perhaps more importantly, they are also responsible for the management of the cultural transition from the hypermasculinity of the building site to the caring environment of the FE classroom/workshop, facilitating the reconstruction of identity by their staff. As such, HoCs offer a valuable perspective on the issues of moving from one world to another and the strategies for ensuring a successful transition.

Methodology

The aim of this research was to gain the emic perspective of HoCs, ‘the insider’s view of a particular group or community’ (Savage, 2006: 384–385), and so adopted an interpretivist approach. Purposive sampling was used to identify colleges that provided a range of construction courses and which were also distributed geographically. The HoCs were contacted directly after access was granted by the college principals and informed consent was gained. In total, 14 HoCs were recruited. Although this represents a small sample, data saturation (Guest et al., 2006) occurred at an early stage and so it was not considered necessary to recruit additional participants. All of the participants were males aged from 37 to 58 with an average age of 48. The length of role incumbency varied from the newest who had been HoC for just 3 months to the longest serving at 12 years. The size of the schools similarly varied with staff numbers ranging from 20 to 100 including a mixture of first tier managers, lecturers, assessors and technicians. All of the schools included brickwork, carpentry, painting and decorating, plumbing and electrical; the larger schools also included associated trades such as plastering and gas engineering. Data were collected via two semi-structured interviews with each participant of between 45 and 90 minutes – two HoCs that were within relatively local proximity were interviewed face-to-face, the rest were interviewed via telephone. All interviews were recorded and transcribed in full. The analysis of the transcripts began with open coding (Corbin and Strauss, 1998) to identify the initial categories and themes before selective coding occurred (Moghaddam, 2008).

Heads of Construction – Pen Portrait

All of the managers came from a construction or engineering background except Patrick who had previously worked in catering and found himself managing construction as well when the two sections were merged. Around one-half came to teaching via a ‘broken transition’ (Avis and Bathmaker, 2006), teaching part-time for a period before securing full-time employment; the other half were able to secure full time employment straight away. However, there was a wide range of reasons for changing career. For the majority, the decision to move into teaching was pragmatic – many of the participants had become dissatisfied with the construction industry and teachers were considered to be financially secure and to enjoy greater non-financial benefits than construction workers: Mike:

Primarily I was self-employed, had my own business and quite a number of contracts I’d been involved with over a period of 18 months, the major contractors had gone into liquidation and owed me quite a substantial amount of money. So I thought about it and thought there must be an easier way – not necessarily easier but a little less risk involved.

However, underpinning their dissatisfaction with industry were reasons that were pro-social (Grant and Parker, 2009) and altruistic: Gary:

I had a little bit of money in the bank and decided I would take a massive pay cut to try and put something back in, invest in other people’s futures.

What was also significant was that the desire to teach was also influenced by their own experiences in FE on vocational courses and also their experience of working with apprentices in site. Many of the HoCs reported that they had left compulsory education with few if any qualifications having failed to apply themselves. For them, FE was educationally redemptive and not only offered them a different career path but re-engaged them with learning.

Dual professionalism (Peel, 2005) was highly evident in the managers’ discussion of their identity; the majority defined their identity as located within an educational paradigm but the links to their previous industry were still maintained, even if only at the level of a past-time: Pete:

I do see myself as an education manager but I’ll always see myself as an engineer, from when I repair my car, that’s my trade, that’s my background but I’m very much about education now.

However, although all of the managers appeared passionate about their work and the transformative potential of FE, for some their current role still was not considered a ‘proper’ job: Elliott:

I still don’t view this as a proper job. I do in the fact that I get up and do a day’s graft but it took me a long time to sort of reconcile that different type of tiredness that came round at the end of the day. But I didn’t ever see [education] as a pressurized environment. I’ve been in education for 10 years and people do get stressed and people do struggle at times but I came from a world where I had to find twenty grand for a VAT bill every three months or I’ve got five daughters and if I didn’t work they didn’t get fed so that was the type of pressure I was working under when I worked for myself or worked in construction.

At play here is the embedding of masculinity in work – and therefore in their own identity – that is hard and tough both in terms of physicality but also in terms of hardiness in the face of financial pressure. By implication, FE is intrinsically less pressured and less hard work. As such, we find echoes of the males in Cross and Bagihole’s (2002) work who struggled to see their new job in what was perceived to be a feminine environment as proper work.

However, while their identities may have retained elements of the masculinity of construction, their management style – reportedly – avoided the managerialist masculinities usually associated with FE (Kerfoot and Whitehead, 1998, 2000; Leonard, 2000). The majority of the participants suggested that openness, honesty and directness were the predominant features of their management practice: Jeff:

Open and honest. I talk straight to the staff, they can talk straight to me. My door is literally always open and people will just come in for a chat or air grievances … I think it’s important to keep it as informal as possible because you learn more about them and you get buy in from them.

In addition to openness, the HoCs were also keen to resolve issues quickly; evident also was the metaphor of ‘fixing’ things: Mark:

Whatever the issue is I want to try and sort that out now … a straightforward, forthright, ‘let’s do it now’ type of thing rather than sitting on the backburner. I don’t like going home with issues or thinking about issues, I like to have things sorted in discussion, I like to open it to the floor.

All of the HoCs reported that they enjoyed good relationships with senior managers in the college who were described as generally supportive and mirrored the openness so prized by the participants. In addition, the HoCs were given a large degree of autonomy in how they managed their schools. Accountability was foregrounded in their responses but not in punitive terms.

The Problem of Recruitment

One of the main concerns of the HoC role was the recruitment of lecturers. Before the global economic crisis, there was reported to be a severe shortage of available staff in all trade areas. As HoCs suggested, with the high earning potential that existed at the time, tradespeople were reluctant to move into teaching and taking the associated pay cut. The altruism reported by construction lecturers in Le Gallais’ (2006) study was apparently not widespread when pay for a bricklayer could be as much as £1000 per week; the earning potential for other trades such as plumbing and electrical engineering was even greater. The first main area of investigation in this project was therefore that of recruitment, which was found to be a series for dilemmas for HoCs as they struggled to ensure optimal staffing levels.

Recruitment was seen as inextricably tied to the economy for construction, perhaps more than any other subject area in FE. In the middle of a recession, there were now a large number of tradespeople who were seeking alternative work and teaching seemed to be a preferred route: Lee:

If you’d have asked me four years ago I’d have said [recruitment was] very difficult. Obviously with the state of the construction industry now everybody suddenly wants to be a teacher but just because the numbers are there, doesn’t mean they have the real desire that’ll see them through the job. It’s just the fact that there’s no work in the industry.

However, while the HoCs had apparently benefited from the recession in terms of numbers of applicants, the quality of staff who were applying had deteriorated. A number of HoCs reported that few applicants had any form of teacher training or experience of working with young people. The difficulty was finding staff who possessed a blend of three things: the temperament to work with sometimes challenging students; good trade-knowledge and skills; finally, some form of teacher training or the academic ability to complete in-service training. The response of colleges was to prioritize the retention of high quality staff: Elliot:

What I’ve found over the last couple of years is the economy is shaky and the cream tends to rise to the top – the people who are good stay in jobs and the people who are not so great find themselves out of work. But if I need to recruit for a role the quality of CVs that I’ve been getting over the last two years is probably not at the standard it was five or six years ago. The good folks are retained and are maybe riding out the storm or they’re valued by their institutions and they stay and perhaps those that aren’t the best teachers go back into the tumble drier and go into this pool of people that just goes round the houses – they tend to be a little bit lower quality in what they bring to the table.

However, while for trades such as brickwork and carpentry the number of applicants had risen, other specialisms such as plumbing and electrical installation remained difficult to recruit to. Apparently industrial employment in these areas was still relatively buoyant and there were fewer tradespeople in these areas than in the ‘biblical trades’. Even more scarce were staff to teach in newer areas of provision such as environmental technology and telecoms: Mike:

Getting staff who can deliver that curriculum at this moment in time is a nigh on impossible, they’re just not there. The industry hasn’t developed in such a way that they’ve got qualified staff out there. It’s a chicken and the egg so that is very difficult.

When the college-managed methods of recruitment failed – advertising in the trade and educational press, building supply stores, and so on – HoCs often turned to employment agencies. This, however, was seen very much as a last resort and one which they often approached reluctantly: Rob:

I think one of the main recruitment sources is agencies and they’re terrible. I’ve had some really unpleasant experiences with recruitment management people – they tend to just give you the dross and see if you’ll put up with it rather than trying to filter through people that are really good, that have relevant industrial qualifications, that have relevant experience, that have relevant academic qualifications. They just give you all sorts of rubbish really.

All of the HoCs suggested that the quality of agency staff had deteriorated over the years to the extent that they replicated their formal recruitment procedures with agency staff as well, conducting additional interviews and even observed teaching sessions before they were given any teaching hours. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that colleges were now even keener to take on temporary staff – the financial insecurity in the sector meant that the planning of future provision was severely curtailed and so taking on permanent staff was seen as a gamble.

The result of these difficulties meant that HoCs were often faced with a dilemma: they could not recruit at all which meant cancelling an area of provision with the inevitable reduction of student numbers, an option they all ruled out given the precariousness of the sector; they could try to cover classes with existing members of staff which meant risking the good-will of lecturers they were desperate to retain; alternatively they could take a chance on an applicant they had doubts about. The final option was often, reluctantly, chosen: Chris:

We’ve appointed people because we’ve been desperate. We try not to do that because you know the problems you’re opening up for yourself but when you’ve got a post vacant for 18 months and you think ‘shall I take a chance on this guy?’ Quite often you do and 50 per cent of the time you live to regret it.

However, the dilemma of recruitment also meant that HoCs had begun to look at other methods of getting the right staff, employing a ‘grow your own’ strategy in Fred’s terms. In Fred’s school (as in most schools) there were staff at various levels: technicians, assessors and lecturers. Those employed as technicians who had the potential to become lecturers were able to undergo a staged period of training beginning with ‘taster sessions’ where they taught alongside an experienced lecturer. If they proved able, the HoC supported them through their teacher training and into a full time lecturer position. Alternatively, others would take on those without any teaching experience but who possessed the right qualities to become a lecturer – training and inculturation would then become internal matters. Sam actually preferred to employ those without teaching experience: Sam:

Sometimes it’s better to take on somebody new that you can say ‘well this is the way we do it’ … Every college is different in the way they work things and it’s quite difficult to adapt to a new, different way. We’d rather get new people in and teach them the way we want.

Recruitment was therefore a major issue for the HoCs. While the recession had increased the number of construction workers who were looking to become lecturers, this in itself was problematic and was presented as a series of dilemmas. First, was the issue of motivation: did applicants want to teach for altruistic reasons or were they just looking for any work? Given that many of the HoCs themselves had become teachers for financial security, the extent to which this was a concern was debatable but one which particularly exercised those who made the transition for pro-social reasons (Grant and Parker, 2009), similar to the lecturers in Le Gallais’ (2006) study. Second, was the issue of teacher training: some HoCs preferred to recruit skilled tradespeople who had the necessary characteristics and attributes to become good teachers – often those who had been trained in another college were ultimately less able to change their practices to fit with their new employer. However, employing lecturers without teaching qualifications placed an additional burden upon the new member of staff who then had to undergo in-service teacher training as well as adjust to a new culture. The third dilemma was whether to engage in desperation recruitment: to not recruit would mean stretching already busy existing staff or losing valuable student numbers by cancelling courses; to recruit a poor lecturer would risk student success and well-being and challenge the equilibrium of the staffroom.

The Problem of Transition

On a Friday they’re putting a roof up and on a Monday they are 22 hours a week teaching with a young person disclosing to them that their father beats them up or whatever … To get someone from a construction background with that empathy is very very difficult and I’m not sure FE has a strategy to move people from a trade background to a teacher. (Mark)

Coming from a dirty, tough and physically demanding context of construction, it would perhaps be anticipated that lecturers would engage in cultural transfer, bringing the norms of the building site to the college. Yet this was only evident in a minority of cases. When it did occur, it was challenged swiftly and directed: Mark:

I think especially some of our associate lecturers they can be a little bit rough round the edges. They do bring some of that site language to the workplace and the office and it’s just about me as a manager stamping on that very quickly.

More commonly transferred from construction were notions of appropriate behaviour and discipline. Several HoCs suggested that construction lecturers found college disciplinary systems too ‘soft’ with students being given chance after chance as they progressed through the multiple stages of disciplinary action. Mike:

Dealing with disruptive students, that’s a prime one because obviously on a construction site they’re possibly more used to giving them a kick up the backside and clip round the ear and they can’t do that, so those aspects, for some staff, it does take some getting used to.

While the cultural norms of the building site, the stuff of ‘men’s work’ (Denissen, 2010), appeared to be relatively easy to leave behind, adapting to the role of lecturer in FE proved more problematic. HoCs suggested that no matter how much they tried to prepare new staff, no matter how much detail they provided in terms of what teachers actually do, the reality still tended to come as a shock. Most common was the shock of workload with new lecturers seemingly unprepared for the extent of bureaucracy, systems and administration that accompanied the teaching role. The result was a workload that often exceeded that which they were used to – the realization that teaching was not a 9 to 5 job often came as a surprise. What compounded these issues was the fact that many of the tasks of the FE lecturer, especially administration, were seen as traditionally ‘women’s work’ (Lupton, 2000). The difficulties of adapting were further compounded for those staff without teaching qualifications as they were required to complete in-service teacher training. Many new lecturers, especially those from the ‘tool trades’, experienced difficulty with the academic demands of the course: Pete:

They struggle with the academic writing side of things. They have all struggled with their Cert. Ed. [teacher training qualification] in terms of the writing for that because they’ve never had to do it and writing a lesson plan or a scheme of work – it’s a completely new language for them.

For Elliot, this situation was even more difficult for the older members of staff, many of whom had not been in formal education for a number of decades. The younger lecturers, he suggested, adapted to continued study far more easily:

To come into a role and suddenly be asked to write an academic essay at level six and you need to Harvard reference it and you need to read these books, I think some of the guys and ladies have certainly got the brain power but lack the systems or the processes of working through that whereas the younger age group tend to be much more in tune with that.

The struggle with teacher training can here be understood by reference to the culture and epistemology of the construction site: Saucedo and Morales (2010) argue that the ‘masculinity narrative’ of the building site includes a ‘distrust of abstraction or of theory’ that may serve as an impediment in regards to teaching training in which an understanding of the theories of teaching and learning is essential.

The difficulties of adapting to the lecturer role also included a pedagogical dimension. Many of the lecturers had worked with apprentices on-site and so they were comfortable teaching in a practical setting, in a workshop. Where a significant number struggled was teaching ‘theory’ lessons in a classroom, a finding supported by Ofsted (2008): Chris:

I bet everybody has said ‘you go to a workshop and yep, they’re like pigs in poo’, they love it, they know how to relate to the students and you can get them to churn out good work but put them in the more academic theory-based environment and they find it difficult … a lot of construction staff struggle, they’re quite traditional in the classroom, chalk and talk rather than interactive learning.

All of the HoCs maintained a split between theory and practical lessons which was driven partly by curriculum necessity in terms of learners having to complete exams and assignments and partly by the limitations of workshop space in the colleges. In areas such as brickwork, 30 per cent of lessons would usually be classroom-based with the remainder in the workshop; in more ‘theoretical’ trades such as electrical installation, the split would be nearer 50:50. It was perhaps the artificiality of the division between theory and practice that caused difficulty for lecturers, an artificiality that, it was suggested, did not exist on site where practice and theory were integrated – construction lecturers were, after all, ‘practically minded people’ (Le Gallais, 2006). However, the difficulty of teaching theory lessons was not uniform – some lecturers preferred it and had become theory specialists in their school. For others, theory lessons were preferred in times of inspection as lecturers felt they could display a wider range of teaching and learning strategies in a classroom which would attract a better grade, an indication, perhaps, of the inculturation into the managerialist masculinity of FE that foregrounded performativity (Kerfoot and Whitehead, 1998, 2000). However, the split between theory and practical was not the only pedagogical difficulty encountered by new lecturers. Some struggled with the paperwork involved in terms of creating appropriate lesson plans and schemes of work; others were ‘computer-phobic’ and experienced difficulty with integrating ICT into lessons.

However, rather than seeing this pedagogical difficulty as an issue of the members of staff, it can instead be seen as the result of an artificial division of knowledge and practice that is not mirrored in industrial contexts. In some cases, when timetabling allowed, lecturers were free to choose when they used classrooms and when they used workshops. In this way, teaching and learning was dictated by the needs of the learners and the more organic process of development. However, more common was the imposition of epistemological divisions by the timetabling system: there were far more classrooms than workshops and so this dictated the structure of vocational learning. There was evidence that colleges in this sample were addressing the issue by renting other premises, often in industrial parks, where more workshop space was available to increase the autonomy of lecturers in choosing the most appropriate setting for the current learning. However, this strategy created other issues such as the separation of staff from the facilities at the main sites and reduced the amount of time that HoCs could oversee construction provision.

Tutoring was another aspect of the teaching role that proved challenging but this was by no means common to all colleges. For some HoCs, tutoring was anathema to construction lecturers (often including themselves) and was rooted, somewhat stereotypically, in the identity of tradespeople and in the masculinities of the construction site: Chris:

I have many issues with [tutoring] – we’re not cuddly types of people normally, we haven’t got a listening ear, we don’t understand personal problems [laughs] so I think we need somebody who can relate to students and go into their backgrounds to understand why they’re twenty minutes late every morning rather than just give them the proverbial bollicking that some of them get.

In these cases, tutoring responsibilities were given to non-tradespeople who often happened to be female tutoring specialists from other parts of the college. This practice was reported to be highly successful – students appreciated being able to receive support from a tutor that was independent of the subject team and, as specialists, these tutors were able to fulfil the procedural requirements of the role effectively: individual learning plans, target setting and monitoring reports were all completed to the satisfaction of the HoC. The participants also suggested that these specialist tutors, despite being non-construction staff, were fully integrated in the subject specialist team and worked seamlessly. Indeed, Pete was convinced that the recent increase in the retention of students was in large part due to this strategy of engaging non-construction tutors. Here at least, it appeared that there was no evidence of the ‘border-work’ (Dennisen, 2010) that construction workers engage in to restrict the entry of women into their work domain. The practice of engaging pastoral staff from outside of construction was even more common when it came to delivering the ‘enrichment’ element of tutoring such as delivering sessions on topics such as healthy eating and sexual health. Here, the majority of HoCs reported that they had encountered considerable resistance from their lecturers. However, there were also many cases where construction lecturers took active ownership of personal tutoring for a specific group, especially in terms of one-to-one support for their learners: Kevin:

They’re quite territorial. Each tutor will have between 30 and 50 learners in their tutor groups and they become – they’re quite competitive over which group is doing the best, they are. It is good, it is good. Don’t have any problems at all … I think they’re all quite proud to be tutors actually.

Crucial to the transition of new lecturers was their induction in the first few weeks of employment. With a keen understanding of the difficulties of transition between the building site and the college, HoCs had designed a range of strategies for managing the process which often began at interview. Several HoCs discussed the importance of rigour at interview but also that it provided, for the successful candidate, the beginning of the transition. The emphasis here was on stressing just how different the cultures were and, perhaps more importantly, just how much the new lecturer had to learn, especially for those highly skilled tradespeople who were sometimes egotistical, the ‘prima donnas’ in Lee’s terms. Once in post, HoCs had designed a package of support that was considered quite separate from the college induction procedures which were considered to be ‘box ticking’. In-school, each new lecturer would be allocated a mentor, an experienced member of staff, who would be an informal guide and ‘sounding board’. While the mentor would often conduct teaching observations, in many cases the HoC also observed or team-taught. Fred would go even further and, as well as allocating a mentor, each new lecturer would have a ‘buddy’. The mentor would be responsible for introducing college systems and procedures related to teaching generically while the buddy would be a subject specialist who would provide pedagogical support.

HoCs would also provide more functional support for new staff: Sam would provide schemes of work and lesson plans for each new lecturer; Jim would provide a reduced teaching timetable which built as the lecturer became more competent and confident; David would ensure new staff went home at a reasonable time and would stop new staff taking on additional roles until they were more experienced. What was evident throughout their responses was the separation between the formal and generic college induction procedures and their own strategies for managing the transition based on their understanding of the needs of new construction staff. After all, they had themselves once experienced the transition and so were best placed to manage the process now.

Key to managing successful transitions was the autonomy which every HoC in the study suggested they enjoyed. As well as maintaining supportive relationships with senior managers in the college, HoCs’ autonomy allowed them to tailor the management of lecturer transitions by creating a flexible approach to staffing that allowed for team-teaching and remission from a full teaching timetable. Also essential was their relations with existing staff who could be called upon to offer additional support to new lecturers with everything from pedagogical advice to assistance with teacher training qualifications.

The transition of new construction lecturers was, then, often problematic, but not in terms of moving from one culture to another. Instead, the main difficulties experienced were in terms of adapting to a new type of work. HoCs reported that lecturers faced particular difficulties in meeting the administrative demands of their new role as well as engaging with teacher training, pedagogical and pastoral duties. Key to the success of the transition were the HoCs who were responsible for designing the processes of transition and induction and a range of strategies were highlighted, most importantly the role of mentoring.

Discussion

Given the vast differences between the building site and the FE college, it could be imagined that the transition would be difficult. One day the prospective lecturer is engaged in a context of traditional masculinity that emphasizes toughness, dirt and physicality, the next they are in a FE college, a place of inclusion, diversity and emotional labour. On the building site, construction workers enjoy considerable autonomy as they exercise their expertise; in college they enter a culture of managerialism and bureaucracy while they once again take on the role of apprentice, only this time as a teacher. However, this study has suggested that the transition from construction to FE is not necessarily as problematic as the differences between the sectors may at first suggest. While schools of construction are within colleges – places of inclusion, diversity and emotional labour – they are still staffed by ex-construction workers that provide a very different sub-culture than that found within a school of hair and beauty for example. The schools of construction in this research were also, significantly, male-dominated with very few female trade lecturers. Where women were employed, it was more often in tutoring and pastoral roles. As a result, the extent of culture-shock arising from the transition may be minimized. Instead, it is more appropriate to think of new construction lecturers moving from a more traditional culture of masculinity to one that has been reconstructed (Cross and Bagilhole, 2002) within a college environment. Tutoring provides the ideal example of such reconstruction: as much as the resistance to tutoring reported to HoCs can be seen within a masculinities framework, so too can those responses that were positive and highlighted notions of tutorial competition between lecturers who were keen that their students should achieve more than their colleagues’ students. Competitiveness is seen as a key form of masculinity within construction (Saucedo and Morales, 2010), a competition for power that takes the form of ‘one-upmanship’ (Iacune, 2005) that reconstructs former notions of masculinity (Nixon, 2009) within a new setting. As such, the embracing of tutorials is, paradoxically, just as embedded within the culture of masculinity as resistance against tutoring.

Here then, the transition of construction lecturers can, to an extent, be seen within Avis and Bathmaker’s (2006) notion of continuity and change: continuity is provided by the replication of a construction community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) within a college environment. However, while Avis and Bathmaker (2006: 183) argue that the change involved in transition is ‘mediated by and not in contradiction with earlier orientations and forms of identity’, in construction at least this conception is limited: the transition from the building site to the college does involve contradictions with prior identity. For example, elements of the construction identity such as swearing, aggression, sexism and risk-taking are all identified as routine within the community of practice on the building site yet are completely unacceptable within colleges and were swiftly challenged by HoCs. As such, the transition of construction workers does involve some elements of contradictory change. Therefore, individual level transitions involving the reconstruction of identity must be seen as a matter of necessity to enter a reconstructed community of practice that provides continuity from the building site in terms of those characteristics that are congruent with FE such as competitiveness and hard work, while simultaneously rejecting those characteristics that are incompatible. What is compatible and incompatible, understood here as privileged organizational masculinities (Collinson and Hearne, 2001) is, to a large extent, determined by the HoCs; as the middle managers responsible for construction provision, HoCs are responsible for the boundaries of the community of practice regulating both the admission of new members and the behaviour of those within. Their role largely determines the nature of the change required in transition for each new lecturer which is shaped by their own identity as both a tradesperson and an educational manager. Thus we see the variations between the respondents here from those who see tutoring as integral to the lecturing role to those who see it as incongruent with the masculine nature of construction workers and place it in the hands of specialist tutors. Similarly, while some separate their staff in terms of ‘classroom teachers’ and ‘workshop’ teachers, others argue that lecturers should be able to master both contexts. Here, then, HoCs play a key role in the nature of the transition of new lecturers providing a framework of what constitutes a construction lecturer in terms of identity, skills and behaviours that shapes both the nature of entry and the development of their staff. This may account for the reported success of ‘grow your own’ approaches to recruitment with staff being taken on as assessors and technicians then, once integrated into the community of practice, beginning to teach. Here, the norms and values of the school prescribed by the HoC could be instilled before teaching responsibilities began.

What is unclear, however, is the extent to which lecturers from such vastly different trades can operate as one coherent community of practice. What was clear in this research was that schools of construction are not homogenous environments; each separate team appeared to retain their own separate identity that was actively differentiated from their peers: engineering lecturers were often graduates who resisted any notion that bricklaying lecturers were their equivalent; bricklayers in turn saw themselves as more skilled than painting and decorating lecturers. As such, it can be argued that several overlapping communities of practice operated within the schools, each one shaped by the industrial heritage of its members who retained distinct standards, norms and values that sat within the larger community of the school. As such, while HoCs may be responsible for admission to and the leading of the larger community, mentors, an integral element of transition in each of the colleges investigated, acted as guides to the norms and values of their cognate subject teams. What is not clear is the extent of dissonance between each department and the wider school – as middle managers, HoCs are removed from the underground realities of the workplace, the ‘cracks and crevices of inter-subjective relations and other quiet subterranean realms of organizational life’ (Fleming and Sewell, 2002, p863). As such, it is possible that competing practices were in place. The accounts of the HoCs suggested that in most cases identities had been successfully reconstructed within the framework of their devising. The extent to which lecturers would agree, however, is still to be examined.

Although this research has focused on construction lecturers, it also has implications for other vocational areas – the recession has affected all industries and so it is likely that newly unemployed workers from a range of areas may seek employment as teachers. For colleges, transition must become a key focus to enhance both the success of new lecturers and also the likelihood of retaining new recruits. Central to this is understanding the culture of the previous industry and finding points of continuity and change, whether contradictory or otherwise.

Conclusion

The position of Head of Construction in FE is one of dilemmas. Tied inextricably to the health (or otherwise) of the wider economy, HoCs struggle to find lecturers with the appropriate blend of trade skills, temperament and academic ability to meet the needs of a student body that often has a high concentration of students who have not succeeded in compulsory education. Currently inundated with applicants seeking teaching as a salary rather than a vocation, HoCs are responsible for creating rigorous and often creative recruitment strategies. But recruitment is only the first stage in a long process of transition that sees new lecturers moving from a culture of hypermasculinity to one of emotional labour, from a tough, dirty context to a caring and inclusive setting. Constrained by timetabling systems that force an artificial divide between theory and practice and the demands of generic teacher training qualifications, they must induct new staff into a reconstructed community of practice possessing a reconstructed masculinity. This research has begun to explore these dilemmas but more work is needed to examine the perspective of new construction lecturers and the experience of being managed through the transition and the cognitive reconstruction of personal masculinity.