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The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to 'modernisation'. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of governmental appropriation of professionalism: the specification by the Training and Development Agency for Schools of new 'standards' for both initial teacher training and teachers' subsequent career progression. It is argued that although this enterprise represents itself as a species of purely common-sense reform, it is in fact a mode of competency training that is rooted in selective appropriation of elements of postfordist management theory and a loose form of behaviourist psychology. The capacity of this training discourse to suppress awareness of its own presuppositions and of alternative or competing conceptions of professions and professionalism is explored.

This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this has involved discourse and policies aimed at transforming teaching into a 'modernised profession'. It is suggested that this appropriation of both the concept and substance of professionalism involves an attempt to silence debate about competing conceptions of what it might be to be a professional or to act professionally. The overall process is thus arguably one of de-professionalisation in the guise of re-professionalisation.

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