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Paperwork and Pressure in Educational Settings

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Summary: This ESRC-funded project explores the impact of increased textualisation in two contrasting educational workplaces, examining the literacy practices associated with target-driven audit culture.

Project Description

Contemporary social trends like the shift to a knowledge-based economy and the development of an audit culture mean that many types of work have come to require more and more involvement with written texts of various kinds. This project explored the impact of paperwork demands on people's experiences in two contrasting educational workplaces. It focused on two case study sites: an adult and community college, and an early years education centre.

The broad aim of this project was to understand more about how changing textual processes are transforming the nature and experience of work in contemporary society. Its more specific objectives were:

1. To document the literacy practices of workers in contrasting educational environments, focusing particularly on paperwork perceived as being generated by external demands.

2. To develop understandings of the effects of these demands on workers' experiences, identities and social practices in the workplace, from their perspectives.

3. To develop understandings of how these demands have changed in recent years, and the impact of these developments.

These questions were explored through interviewing people about their workplace practices, observing them in the workplace and making detailed fieldnotes, and asking people to keep logs of the paperwork they encountered over a one week period.

The dataset was analysed with the support of the qualitative analysis software Atlas-ti. The analytic strategy taken was to code the data exhaustively and comprehensively, following a question-driven initial framing, constantly testing each new document against the existing framing through the codes generated, producing new codes as new ideas were emerged, and using comment and memo functions extensively to capture thoughts and insights.

The paperwork faced by staff has been documented. In both sites, paperwork served a range of purposes, including planning, recording and evaluating activities and learning, and fulfilling health and safety requirements. In both places, the nature of the paperwork was shaped by the demands of policy and funding structures, mediated through systems of inspection, and constructed at the immediate level by local management. However, beyond these broad similarities, many aspects of the two systems were quite different.The single integrated system of the Early Years Centre was quite different from the multiple, repeated, sometimes conflicting demands faced by college staff.

Analyses to date have explored the effects of paperwork demands on experiences, identities and workplace practices by identifying patterns in the coded data. A range of specific issues took different forms in each site, giving insight into local factors which play an important role in shaping the experiences of paperwork demands.

The first of these relates to factors which make paperwork more or less possible to complete. Most participants in both sites expressed difficulties in managing their paperwork load, to a greater or lesser extent, feeling overwhelmed at times by the volume of paperwork, particularly when this was evaluated as excessively complex or disproportionate to the task. Most found paperwork had, at times, a negative effect on their working practices, taking time away from what they saw as their central responsibilities. Time and space were particularly important factors here, in shaping whether people felt the demands they were faced with were possible. Time and space allocation was very different in the two sites.

The second area relates to the purpose of the paperwork, and its relationship with the other purposes of the job. At the Early Years Centre, while staff were more likely to evaluate the paperwork as being difficult or complex, they were also more likely to express positive evaluations and pride in their paperwork. The purposes of the paperwork in planning, reporting and structuring their work were generally recognised. At the college, staff were more likely to talk about experiencing active conflicts between the purposes of 'the job' and 'the paperwork'.

The third key area affecting participants' responses to paperwork relates to the proximity or distance of the source and recipient of the paperwork. Where the source or the recipient of the paperwork was local, an organisation or individual known to the participant, with an existing relationship and a known and valid reason to request the paperwork, their experience of the paperwork was very different from when they spoke of paperwork requests coming from a faceless 'they' whose purposes were unknown (a particularly common turn of phrase among the college participants).

A final area which influenced responses to paperwork was in the professional identities, relationships and situations of people in the sites. At the Early Years Centre, 'doing a good job' and being a competent childcare practitioner meant, in part, achieving what management asked. It was seen as wholly legitimate for management to interpret policy requirements and to make recording demands on people. Staff in this site were much more likely to talk about divisions of labour in dealing with paperwork demands, producing planning as a team, and supporting one another in the learning process.

In the adult and community college, on the other hand, tutors generally had a history of working relatively autonomously as individuals - planning their own lessons in their own formats, for example. Many tutors had a sense that this autonomy had gradually been eroded as more and more of the paperwork they were doing came from above and was expected to be in particular, prescribed formats. At the same time, most people were working without the day-to-day 'horizontal' support of working in teams, and were responding to these paperwork demands without having other people sharing their load. Work conditions and particularly job security inflected these responses quite considerably.

Papers based on this work have been presented at conferences including Ethnographies of literacy: an Anglo-French dialogue, BAAL UKLEF meeting, Lancaster University, 8 May 2008; Linking Learning to Literacies: Sites of Learning, Lancaster University, 14th July 2009; Literacy Inequalities, University of East Anglia, September 1st-3rd 2009. Outputs include 'Eruptions of interruptions: managing tensions between writing and other tasks in a textualised childcare workplace', a chapter in Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually Mediated Worlds, eds D. Barton and U. Papen, Continuum (in press).

The project has been guided by the British Association of Applied Linguistics' recommendations on good practice.

Purpose of Research

Academic Research - Externally Funded

Project Funder

ESRC

Associated News Stories

Karin Tusting presented in Paris, "Literacy Studies: une approche ethnographique"

Date: 8 September 2011

On 8-9 September 2011, Karin Tusting from the Literacy Research Centre was the invited European opening speaker at the conference "Tracer / auditer le ... Read more»