Procedures as a way of handling capability problems in the teaching profession and implications for more general application

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to describe research, commissioned by the UK Department of Education and Skills, on the effectiveness of procedures to improve performance by unsatisfactory schoolteachers.

Design/methodology/approach

Research was conducted first by telephone interviews with a sample of local authorities in the UK to understand the scale of procedure usage. This provided a large and representative selection of authorities, which differed geographically, by size and by socio‐economic characteristics. In total, 56 case studies were then carried out in schools where procedures had been used.

Findings

The paper finds that the procedure usage was very low. In some authorities there had not been any cases at all and there was widespread reluctance to adopt the approach that procedures were seen to embody: legalistic, bureaucratic and “lacking the human touch”. Case studies consistently showed ineptitude in handling procedures and frustration that they took so long. The findings were reviewed against the background of the large literature on employment law and human resource management, as that was the type of expertise that the research sponsors wished to deploy. Further reference was made to the literature on school leadership as well as to the concept of emotional labour.

Originality/value

The value of the work in this paper is to show how reluctant both managers and employees are to enter procedures and to show how some of this reluctance may be overcome. The research sadly uncovered very little good practice in schools, although some local authorities had excellent HR practitioners.

Citation

Torrington, D. (2006), "Procedures as a way of handling capability problems in the teaching profession and implications for more general application", Employee Relations, Vol. 28 No. 4, pp. 387-397. https://doi.org/10.1108/01425450610673439