Teach First organisational discourse: What are Teach First teachers really being trained for?

Introduction

Teach First is a particular model of initial teacher education, based on Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America, which was conceptualised in her 1989 Princeton thesis and then realised, with financial support from Exxon Mobil, in 1990 (Exley, 2014; Kopp, 2011). It involves ‘non-profits’ recruiting ‘top’ graduates from ‘top’ universities (in England, predominantly from Russell Group universities) and training them intensively for a short period, before placing them in schools in areas of disadvantage, where they work on a salaried full-time basis, whilst being prepared for ‘leadership’ (Straubhaar and Friedrich, 2015). The graduates are expected to commit to the programme and to teaching for a minimum of two years, after which they are encouraged to ‘challenge educational disadvantage’ for the rest of their lives, in whatever professional capacity they may choose. Teach First is part of an international network of 48 member organisations that sit under the umbrella of Teach for All, which was co-founded by Kopp and the first chief executive officer of Teach First, Brett Wigdortz, and launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007 (Teach for All, 2017). Each of Teach for All’s member organisations, whilst situated in geographically, politically, historically and educationally diverse contexts around the world, has this same structure and model of initial teacher education. Each member organisation is also connected to a number of national and international business, public sector, philanthropic, socially entrepreneurial and educational endeavours that offer various levels of financial or ‘in-kind’ support to the organisation and the schools that it is partnered with.

In England, Teach First has positioned itself strategically within the landscape of initial teacher education as a cost-effective route into teaching which meets a number of the recruitment needs highlighted in the House of Commons (2017) and Nuffield Foundation (Allen, Belfield, Greaves, Sharp and Walker, 2014) reports: it increases the pool of beginner teachers by attracting high-calibre graduates who may otherwise not have considered teaching (Blumenreich and Rogers, 2016; Friedrich et al., 2015; Kopp, 2011; Price and McConney, 2013); it recruits participants for the shortage subjects of English, Science, Mathematics and Modern Languages; it places its participants in schools in geographical locations that otherwise struggle to recruit teachers; and it fast-tracks its participants into leadership, which helps meet the higher demand for leaders in multi-academy trusts. Yet, compared to teachers trained on the Postgraduate Certificate in Education route into teaching, 31% fewer Teach First teachers remain in the profession after four years (Hitchcock et al., 2017: 65), and Sam Friedman, Teach First’s Director of Research, Evaluation and Impact, acknowledged that ‘one of the most common criticisms of Teach First is that many participants see it as a stepping stone to something better’ (Teach First, 2017). At the same time, multinational organisations that are major Teach First donors, such as Accenture (2018), PricewaterhouseCoopers (2018), Procter and Gamble (2018) and Deloitte (2018), offer successful Teach First ambassadors an automatic place onto their graduate programmes.

In order to explore the networked nature of Teach First and the Teach First teachers’ role within this, this article starts with a consideration of the literature relating to Teach First and Teach for All. It then goes on to examine data gathered from Teach First documentation and interviews with people working at different levels of the organisation. Critical discourse analysis is used to make sense of the data in order to gain an understanding of the ways in which teachers, teaching, leadership, professional aspirations and networks are constructed through the Teach First institutional discourse. The article goes on to consider the implications of this discourse on Teach First teachers’ ideological positioning, and explores the particular set of values which they may take with them into influential positions within the public and private sectors, facilitated by the wider Teach First network.

Teach First and Teach for All literature

Price and McConney (2013: 99) claim that organisations under the Teach for All umbrella have a shared ‘set of beliefs about schools and teaching … which construct schools, students, teachers and teachers’ work in a particular and deliberate way’. They note that Teach for All arose in an era that was increasingly dominated by political and social ideologies promoting individualism, social entrepreneurialism and a marketised economy, ‘on the heels of nearly a decade of Reaganomics and Thatcherism’ (99). Other commentators have also reflected on the neo-liberal ideological foundations of the model (Ahmann, 2015; Barnes et al., 2016; Blumenreich and Gupta, 2015; Friedrich et al., 2015; La Londe et al., 2015; McConney et al., 2012; Rice et al., 2015; Scott et al., 2016; Straubhaar and Friedrich, 2015). Its focus on the individual, choice, deregulation, competition, corporate-style leadership, business and market forces has been noted repeatedly (Ahmann, 2015; Friedrich et al., 2015; Rice et al., 2015; Scott et al., 2016). La Londe et al. (2015) suggest that Teach for All teachers act as embodiments of neo-liberal ideology, with assumptions about ‘meritocracy and credentialism as means and method of individualistic economic competition’. This is supported by Rice et al. (2015), who explored the values that 76 teachers from the Teach for Australia programme would take into the workplace after their two years on the programme. They discovered that these were overwhelmingly underpinned by a neo-liberal notion of the individual ‘exceptional teacher’ needed to overcome inequality, with only one person mentioning broader societal change, such as banning private schools. Olmedo et al. (2013: 497) claim that Teach First’s Leadership Development Programme produces a ‘new kind of professional and teaching subject’. The organisation’s success in securing governmental, corporate and philanthropic support has also been commented upon (McConney et al., 2012; Scott et al., 2016), along with its ‘highly successful and internationalised marketing strategy’ (Price and McConney, 2013: 105).

Most notable of all, according to some commentators, is that Teach for All has ‘accomplished the impossible’ by making the teaching profession attractive to a large number of people who could easily choose other high-achieving career options (Labaree, 2010). This success is attributed to a number of factors. The first of these is Teach for All’s highly successful marketing campaign, which rebrands what it means to be a teacher. Commentators see these recruitment campaigns as being framed as ‘ambition meets conscience’, appealing to a make-a-difference sense of social justice and altruism which creates the idea of the ‘hero’ teacher (Blumenreich and Rogers, 2016: 24; McConney et al., 2012; Rice et al., 2015: 498). Ahmann (2015) judges that Teach First teachers are told that they are ‘saving children’ and part of a ‘moral project’; others comment on the trainees embarking on a ‘crusade for justice’ (Friedrich et al., 2015), as they challenge educational inequality, doing a noble, missionary-like ‘redemptive service through giving back to the community’ (Price and McConney, 2013: 105).

The second factor, which is related to the first, is the market position of Teach First as a brand. The organisation creates a sense of its teachers as elite and special. Price and McConney (2013: 98) write of Teach for All teachers as ‘the best and the brightest’; Labaree (2010: 54) suggests that Teach for America has ‘staked out a position for itself as the Harvard of teacher preparation programs’, with Kopp having successfully cultivated an ‘aura of selectivity’ and a widespread perception of the teaching profession as a high-status, prestigious career (Blumenreich and Gupta, 2015: 93). The assumption with the Teach for All model of training is that ‘teaching could be “picked up” on the fly by “smart” people’, setting it apart from, and making it superior to, traditional initial teacher education routes (Blumenreich and Rogers, 2016).

A third factor is the repositioning of teaching as a transitory venture rather than a career for life. The period of commitment in the Teach for All programmes is short term (two years). There is an emphasis in the Teach for All materials on the transferability of skills, which is attractive for those who consider teaching to be a ‘stepping stone to a different career’ (Price and McConney, 2013: 106). McConney et al. (2012: v) point out that Teach for All teachers see their time within the organisation as an opportunity for ‘short courses, networking and future career options’. Rice et al. (2015) comment that many of the trainees move into leadership roles in policy, business and education after they have completed their two-year teaching commitment. Labaree (2010: 48) writes of Teach for All teachers moving on ‘to their real life of work with high pay and high prestige’ after their two-year stint as a ‘kind of domestic peace corps’ – a sentiment which is echoed by Scott et al. (2016), who suggest that participants view their time in teaching as an interim period before continuing on to more ‘high-prestige’ career options.

A fourth factor is the access to a wider network that Teach First teachers are granted. Ball and Junemann (2012) examine ‘the space where philanthropy and business meet’ (68) – the web of interconnectedness between different actors from within Teach First – describing the organisation as ‘an influential social enterprise’ mobilised around philanthropic solutions to educational problems, deeply embedded within and between the communities of business and government (114). A league table of platinum, gold, silver and bronze corporate and individual philanthropic sponsors of Teach First exemplifies the extent to which business, philanthropic, socially entrepreneurial and educational endeavours have aligned within one organisation in a truly networked and symbiotic way. This network creates a new ‘epistemic community’ of Teach First teachers and actors migrating from business, wishing to address educational problems through market solutions and social entrepreneurial activities. With this community comes new language, practices and values, which are changing the discourse around education (124). Such an eclectic combination of agents within the same network can, Ball (2012: 68) argues, ensure a ‘hearing’ within government for policy ideas which are developed in ‘policy micro-spaces’ – the formal and informal meetings which take place over coffee and in corridors. La Londe et al. (2015) claim that Teach for All has helped to spur a ‘massive, global Intermediary Organisation Network’ which serves to spread Teach for All’s underpinning neo-liberal ideology in public and private sector networks around the world.

With this commentary in mind, I move on now to offer an analysis of a data set generated between January 2015 and July 2016. This data set consists of training resources for the intensive summer school, the Teach First website and recruitment videos, and nine interviews with Teach First students and staff. The interviewees were a Teach First senior executive, a Teach First middle manager and seven Teach First teachers in training. These interviews were transcribed, coded and thematised. The data set was analysed using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013; Gee, 2005; Rogers, 2011; Van Dijk, 2008; Wodak and Meyer, 2009) with the intention of, firstly, exploring the claims made by Teach First and the commentary made about the programme and organisation. The second, and broader, aim of this analysis is to understand better the organisational discourse and the impact that this may have on the teachers’ understanding of themselves and their sense of agency as they enter the wider business, philanthropic, social enterprise, education, policy network that Teach First facilitates access to.

The organisational discourse of Teach First

Four clear but interconnected themes emerged from the critical discourse analysis.

Discussion

The common phrases, terms and language coming from the Teach First teachers, managers and documentation create an organisational discourse (Wodak and Meyer, 2009), which constructs a particular type of teacher. Critical discourse analysis scholars assert that not only does activity create discourse, but also that the reverse is possible: discourse can drive, influence, shape and create activity and practice. Exploring this can expose power differentials in situations which may otherwise appear neutral (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 2010; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012; Fairclough, 2013; Gee, 2005; Jones et al., 2015; Rogers, 2011; Van Dijk, 2008).

The erosion of the word ‘teacher’ through the pervasive messaging in the Teach First institutional discourse, along with the positioning of the Teach First teacher as a ‘hero’ on a ‘mission’, sets them as other than, and apart from, the traditional teacher. This discourse serves to reinforce the binary of ‘traditional’ versus ‘alternative’ routes into teaching, casting the traditional teacher as ‘other’ and almost certainly inferior (Barnes et al., 2016; Blumenreich and Gupta, 2015; Labaree, 2010; La Londe et al., 2015; McConney et al., 2012; Rice et al., 2015). The repetitive replacement of ‘teacher’ with the word ‘leader’ suggests that the Teach First teacher is superior to and more powerful than other teachers. Teach First teachers and teachers are doing the same job, yet the Teach First teachers are encouraged to see themselves differently, which serves to separate them off from teachers, not fully identifying with the profession. This disconnect is captured in the musings of one interviewee who was struggling to grasp that the work she was doing as a Teach First teacher was different from that of any other teacher: ‘I get that we’re going into schools, but we’re still doing a job, that, in the schools, that someone else would do that was just working’. She goes on to refer to Teach First as ‘a company I work for; it allows me to go and teach in a school, to do a job sort of thing’.

Along with this sense of otherness and special status, of being someone who is doing more than just ‘working’, comes the membership of the wider network which spans above and beyond educational circles. The networks embedded within Teach First, and indeed within all the ‘Teach for’ organisations under the Teach for All umbrella, serve to normalise private participation in education (Olmedo et al., 2013). Ball (2007, 2008, 2012) suggests that these different agents create a ‘network governance’, where individuals from within the companies have access to shaping the policy and vision of the organisation, sometimes by sitting on the management board, and sometimes by more informal means. Symbiotically, Teach First teachers also know they have automatic and easy entry into the network when their time in the classroom is up, as the routes privileged for Teach First ambassadors into the multinationals Accenture, Proctor and Gamble, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Deloitte suggest.

The short-term nature of the commitment in the classroom, construed as a journey into leadership either within education (including the wider Teach First organisation) or the network more generally, also helps to create a particular kind of Teach First teacher who, whilst young, enthusiastic and prepared to give her all to the classroom for two years, is actually already half out of the door, looking for bigger and better ventures. The ‘Where next?’ for these participants – not all, clearly, but a significant proportion – is mapped out. Reflecting on the ease with which Teach First Deutschland (the equivalent programme in Germany) ambassadors slip into influential positions within multinationals, Olmedo et al. (2013) comment that the programme serves as a useful way of getting able, trained and upskilled graduates into multinationals at the taxpayers’ expense. This article argues that these graduates are also shaped and moulded within the organisation’s neo-liberal ideology, and that they then are likely to take a particular set of values with them into any future work that they do.

The casting of the Teach First teacher as a hero has also acted as a motivating factor for some to leave. Realising that there is a dissonance between the ways in which the institutional discourse has framed their work and the stark reality of actually struggling with the usual difficulties of any beginner teacher in a challenging school, Teach First beginner teachers have reported feeling overwhelmed and incapable of doing what they were tasked to do. They do not identify as the heroes they are expected to be, but instead feel that the mission is impossible (Ness, 2004; Rice et al., 2015). It is unsurprising, then, that many take refuge in the readily available alternative (and possibly less immediately challenging) career options that are offered from within the Teach First network.

The influence and reach of this discourse, which reimagines the teacher as an elite, heroic leader and teaching as a charitable mission, can be seen in the UK government’s 2016 education White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. The White Paper describes a ‘National Teaching Service’ which seeks to ‘support elite teachers and strong middle leaders to move to work in some of the nation’s most challenging areas’ (Department for Education, 2016: 33; Adams, 2016). This proposal was aborted due to a lack of applicants to the programme. Teach First’s discursive impact, nonetheless, is powerful. Ball (2012: 77) writes of ‘boundary spanners’ – individuals who straddle different organisations within a network by, for example, working for one and playing a role on the board of others. He argues that such individuals are in positions to influence, potentially at a high level, the different organisations. The Teach First network, Ball (2012) argues, is rife with such individuals, who sit at the same tables as those in financially and politically powerful positions. The language used in the White Paper reflects the ‘enacted, inculcated and materialised’ (Rogers, 2011: 124) nature of the Teach First discourse, as conversations in boardrooms and coffee bars about teachers and teaching flourish and appear in different contexts. Through its pervasive organisational discourse, Teach First is in a strong position to keep its neo-liberal agenda current and on the lips of those in influential political, business, charitable and educational circles.

Conclusion

This article has argued that Teach First has positioned itself effectively within the initial teacher education landscape in England in 2018. It attracts strong graduates, who otherwise might not have considered teaching, into shortage subjects and places them in schools which struggle to recruit teaching staff. Teachers are framed as ‘leaders’ within a context that has created more leadership roles due to the rise of multi-academy trusts (House of Commons, 2017). Despite Russell Hobby, the chief executive officer of Teach First, with his commitment to improve Teach First teacher retention (Hazell, 2017), another, almost oppositional agenda is actually revealed through a closer scrutiny of the Teach First institutional discourse. Within its organisational discourse, teachers are constructed – and construct themselves – as elites who are other and better than teachers, doing heroic, philanthropic, life-changing work. They are leaders and they are looking for the next challenge, which may or may not be in teaching. They are members of a national and global network with stakeholders, amongst others, in multinationals, businesses and social enterprises, as well as in education. The messages about not really belonging to the profession, about short-termism and better professional options are thoroughly and unembarrassedly embedded throughout the organisation. With its neo-liberal ideological underpinnings, Teach First shapes its already privileged ambassadors into its own image, creating a Trojan army of mini neo-liberalists, empowered to move onwards and upwards from the classroom to the boardroom, taking with it its elitist sense of entitlement and a heroic, individualistic, meritocratic approach to the work that it does. Teach First and its missionaries are then strategically positioned to gain influence within powerful national and international educational, political, business, socially entrepreneurial and philanthropic organisations at the expense of those outside of the project.