A Learning Profession?

This ground-breaking book uncovers a hidden history of the professional develop¬ment of serving teachers. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Wendy Robinson reveals an op¬timistic and liberal age of high class conferences in the 1920s and 1930s, in Lon¬don hotels and Oxford colleges, free from government control, where teachers from across the country and abroad, gathered for professional, intellectual and cultural ‘refreshment’. The status attached to these occasions was signified by the celebrities who graced them, including royalty, public intellectuals, educational practitioners and politicians. Professor Robinson then shows how post-war training became more instrumental, taken over by the Ministry of Education with its centrally-prescribed advanced courses, and, from 1970, by Local Education Authorities’ invention of ap¬parently democratic Teachers’ Centres. This analysis is complemented by face-to-face interviews with teachers and other practitioners once active in professional development. Fascinating, detailed inter¬views brilliantly capture teachers’ lived experience of professional development and its influence on their teaching, career development and professional identity. Fresh and original, lucidly written by one of the leading historians of education in Britain, A Learning Profession? is essential and engaging reading for those inter¬ested in the development of a teaching profession.