Various surveys have confirmed that there is a crisis of recruitment and retention of teachers in schools. This article examines the government response to this crisis, in particular to what is commonly cited as the main cause--unmanageable workloads. What it describes as the workload challenge has certainly not been ignored by the DfE, which in…

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective on the intricacies of the work life in schools that motivate and satisfy teachers. The authors review the literature related to the improvement of school environments and the concept of "flow" as defined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990). He describes flow as a "state in which people are…

This article reports on a study of teachers in New South Wales (Australia) and their practices surrounding outcomes assessment and reporting, which took place in 2003 and 2004 as a follow-up to a major study in 1995. The study explored whether the main focus of a teacher's work involves planning, teaching, assessing, rewarding and sharing in their…