Living with Thatcher : Resistance, Accommodation and Compliance Among Public Sector Professionals

This book examines the effects of Margaret Thatcher’s policies through the experiences of teacher educators - the first group of public professionals to be subjected to her governments’ regulatory regime. It dives into their workplace culture to discover the lived realities of policy is complied with and resisted ‘on the ground’. This window onto educational and political history brings with it a wealth of insights into public management, the relationship between politicians and those they employ, and above all, how our political world got to where it is now.
Andy Pickard uses the teacher training staff at Manchester Metropolitan University as his case study. Their experiences help us to understand those of public professionals more generally - the civil servants, medical staff, the teachers, the police officers who felt the raw impact of radical Thatcherist policymaking during the 1970s and 1980s. The remarkable creativity shown by politicians of the right as they sought to dismantle the political settlement of 1945 was mirrored by teacher educators as they were in turn forced to create new ways of reconciling educational theory and educational practice. Laying out an archive of largely unpublished sources, Pickard paints a vivid picture of this creativity and the lessons that it holds for today’s teachers, teacher trainers, and policymakers.