Teachers' Unions and Interest Group Politics

Teachers are amongst the most highly organised of English workers. They campaigned in the 1960s for educational expenditure of an unprecedented size; and they apparently cast aside a century of professional exclusiveness and hostility to manual unionism through their affiliation to the TUC in the seventies. The reasons for these radical changes in the behaviour of organised teachers and their significance for British politics in the 1970s, are assessed in this important study - a serious and comprehensive attempt to describe and explain the activities of all the major teachers' associations in England and Wales. The author relates his main theme to the behaviour of organised groups outside the education sector. In particular, his arguments on the determinants of interest group behaviour and analysis of white collar militancy are couched in terms applicable to a variety of organisations that faced governments in western democracies.