The Workforce Strategy for Further Education: The Professionalization Agenda and the Inclusion of Support Staff

This thesis explores the positioning of FE support staff within the professionalization agenda, through a Critical Discourse Analysis of a key text: The Workforce Strategy for the Further Education Sector in England, 2007-2012, Lifelong Learning UK, (2009). It will ask where non-teaching staff are positioned within and by this improvement agenda and how is this positioning achieved. The study initially considers traditional, New Public Managerialist and alternative (dialogic) models of professionalism and the influences on and characteristics of these. Utilising an eleven stage analysis framework, the study will deconstruct the Strategy and its sister texts, to explore language-use techniques and how they are employed to secure the professionalization of the FE workforce. Findings show micro level lexical devices, working with a meso level of validating, legitimation techniques, within an over-arching macro level of theoretical influences, such as Social Constructionist and CDA approaches. At the start of undertaking this investigation, experience and early readings of the texts postulated a position where support staff were excluded from the professionalization agenda and its associated benefits, including from the ability to be able to secure a recognised professional status. However, CDA analysis and deconstruction, revealed support staff as being absent, rather than overtly excluded, within the texts. A finding which offered a radical space for considering the possibilities for future investigation of alternative models of professionalism for FE support staff.