Everyday austerity, quasi-events and relational comparators: examining English schoolteachers’ everyday experiences of austerity in, beyond and across the workplace

This paper examines the everyday affective and social consequences of working as a teacher in the English education system. In so doing, I advance scholarship on everyday austerity by extending analysis to the category of occupation. Drawing on an analysis of the 2018 BBC documentary School, and interviews conducted with teachers in the North of England, I investigate how austerity has materially and affectively reconfigured schools as workplaces, expanding expectations of the role and normalising excessive labour-time commitments. I interrogate how and why teachers remain in their role despite these intensifying pressures. I propose two conceptual lenses for examining teachers’ experiences. Drawing on Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of quasi-events, I show how mundane instances of teachers going above and beyond can be examined in their plurality as part of a larger structure of austerity that normalises sacrifice and endurance. Drawing on Sarah Marie Hall’s relational austerity framework, I analyse how teachers endure in their role in part by comparing their current working conditions against those of schools perceived as worse, bolstering their subjective perception of their situation and enabling them to overlook increasing workplace demands. Together, I argue that these lenses play a synthetic role in illuminating how and why teachers’ deteriorating working conditions may go largely unnoticed. The paper concludes by calling for greater attention to teachers’ working conditions within research on the geographies of education.