A high school teacher’s experience of local school management: A case of the ‘system behaving badly towards teachers’

The move to local school management (LSM) in its various formations is one of the most significant educational policy moves to occur in recent times in western countries. Although something is known about the effects on governance, budgeting and resource decision making, relatively little is known about the rhetorical and actual ways teachers' work is affected. Even the proponents admit this, albeit in terms of the little known relay effect on student learning. Drawing on the narrative biography of a single high school teacher, as part of a larger multi-sited ethnography, this study revealed the level of policy incoherence to be such that most of the worst excesses of accountability and marketisation accompanying LSM were minimised. Emerging from a deeply held set of pedagogical values and convictions, this instance confirmed a robust view of teacher identity as lying beyond those of victim construction.