Schools can no longer be thought of as institutions principally staffed by teachers. The categories of staff who work in English schools and their proportions relative to each other have changed radically over the last ten years within the context of ‘Workforce reform’. Thus while the number of primary teachers has increased by roughly 3% and secondary teachers by 14% the number of teaching assistants in primary schools has grown by 153% and in secondary by 358%. For support staff other than teaching assistants, such as administrators, technicians and premises staff, the growth has been smaller but still substantial (Blatchford et al 2006). These changes have huge implications for the way schools work, and researchers have begun to investigate some of these, particularly in relation to the role of teaching assistants (e.g. Kerry, 2005; Blatchford et al, 2006) and the professional identity of teachers (e.g. Wilkinson, 2005). Far less attention has been paid (by researchers at least, if not government agencies such as Ofsted, 2006) to the way schools are beginning to consider the training and development of the whole school workforce. In this paper, we will draw on findings from a two-year study of the Training and Development Agency for Schools' 'Testbed Project' (Coldwell, et al, forthcoming). Through this project 45 maintained schools across England were encouraged and supported to develop strategies and specific interventions to enhance training and development for their whole workforces. This paper will address the question: What are the organisational and cultural conditions under which the development of the whole school workforce is likely to be achieved most effectively? There is a growing literature on the organisational conditions which facilitate learning in the workplace, with important emerging concepts such as ‘affordances’ for learning (Billett, 2001) and ‘expansive’ or ‘restrictive’ learning environments (Fuller and Unwin, 2004). However, most studies of schools follow the more general work on school culture by focussing almost entirely on teachers (e.g. Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2005). This paper takes a broader perspective in exploring the ways in which staff other than teachers are integrated - or not - into the wider organisational culture of the school (Martin, 2002) and the implications of this for their training and development. It considers the ways in which schools frame the concept of the ‘whole school workforce’, the different strategic responses that they make to these frames and the ways in which these responses are translated into specific approaches to workforce development. Many of the schools in the Testbed project took a relatively narrow view of the wider workforce, focusing primarily on teachers and teaching assistants – in other words those staff playing a pedagogic role in relation to children. This paper will focus on schools whose vision was wider – those which genuinely sought to engage all their staff in the development process - and for whom, therefore, the challenge was correspondingly greater.

The study used a combined method, multiple case study approach. We visited 45 schools three times and systematically gathered a range of qualitative and quantitative data to build up a rich picture of the work of each school, including group and individual interviews with Testbed project team members, senior leaders, teaching and support staff. Documentary evidence was gathered during the visits and from other sources and a series of case records constructed. These reports provided a powerful principal resource for our analysis and a sample of these case studies will provide the data for this paper.

The paper will draw out two key themes. One is the different strategies that schools use for whole workforce development and the implications of these. For example, we distinguish between approaches that view the school as a ‘workplace’, as a ‘community’ and as an ‘educational enterprise’. Secondly, we will explore some detailed aspects of those schools which are proving successful in implementing whole-school workforce development, such as leadership, structure, communication processes and understanding the needs of all staff groups.