The paper is a study of the responses of educational trade unions in Greece to governments’ moves to implement new reforms intended to achieve fundamental change in the management and working practices of teachers.  The paper explores the policy context of teacher evaluation post-2010 and the situated reasoning of those who resist it.  In doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of educational contestation in the current period.

 The themes of the global reform movement in education have been vernacularized (Hall et al. 2015: 494).  As Verger, Fontdevila and Parcerisa (2019:249) put it: ‘despite their globalizing dimension and neoliberal origins, the reception and evolution of … governance instruments needs to be seen as context-sensitive, contingent and path-dependent.’ This paper aims to make a contribution to this suggested agenda.  In doing so the paper addresses the puzzle of the “late” development of Greece (see OECD 2018) as an “adopter” of global education reforms.  

 For forty years the objective of raising teacher quality has been an important part of the European reform agenda in education, elaborated by national governments and international organisations alike (Grek 2019). It is an objective which has been pursued by various means, including results-based accountability, performance related pay, stronger measures of school inspection and formal mechanisms for evaluating the quality of work of individual teachers.  (Grimaldi 2019). 

 Yet there is room for further research.  Its broader political and economic context tends to be under-analysed; the importance of austerity and in some cases of structural adjustment programmes for the shaping of policy on questions relating to teachers and their working conditions has not been fully understood (Traianou & Jones 2019; Traianou; 2021).  Likewise, analysis of the tensions between policy actors to which programmes of teacher evaluation have given rise is limited (Stamelos, Vassilopoulos, & Bartzakli, 2012; Barzano & Grimaldi, 2013; Sifakakis, Tsatsaroni, and Sarakinioti, 2015;Flores; 2018). A close attention to the perspectives of policy-makers tends not to have been matched by an equal interest in the positions, experiences and motivations of those who have questioned, criticized and sometimes opposed programmes of change (UNESCO Global Report 2021). Verger (2021) alludes to this problem in his claim that existing literature on theories of globalization ‘does not sufficiently focus on the connection between globalization and changes in teachers’ status, labour conditions, and career pathways—including issues of teachers’ shortages, turnover and attrition and the different causes and manifestations of these phenomena in different world regions’. A study of teacher evaluation policy in a particular national context offers a way of researching these issues and placing them more securely in the repertoire of concepts that have been developed in the course of research into global/national relations.

 Within this framework, the following research questions will be explored, through documentary analysis and interviews:

•  What is the relationship between policies for teacher evaluation in Greece and the policies advocated by international institutions? In particular, in this paper I ask:

• How are policies for teacher evaluation related to the programmes of structural adjustment and the Memoranda of Understanding between international Institutions and Greek governments implemented in the post-2010 period (Traianou 2021)?

• How is teacher evaluation, in the form embodied in government policy, understood by teacher unions in Greece? What are the terms of resistance to it? In what way do they relate to teachers’ experiences of austerity and to their historically-embedded ideas of status and roles?

This is an empirical paper which reports the findings from a preliminary analysis of narrative interviews with six key policy actors. The actors represent the three teacher unions involved in contestation over the character, purpose, and timing of teacher evaluation policies in Greece. The data draw from a larger project on the global/national interplay in a key period of structural adjustment (2015-2018, see Traianou 2021). Employing a historical case study, I focus on the ways in which policy actors contribute to education policy formation under conditions of prolonged austerity and mandated reform. The interviews focus on the actors’ views about the problems with the Greek education system, the ways in which policies for teacher evaluation evolved to address these problems, the implications of the policies for teachers’ status and conditions, and the responses to evaluation policy on the part of trade unions and teachers more generally. Complementing the interviews I analyse documents related to teacher evaluation (e.g. major education acts post -2010), to its broader policy context (e.g. memoranda of understanding, OECD reports 2011; 2017; 2018) and to the official positions of teacher unions (e.g. websites of the primary and secondary teacher unions). This combination of methods will allow me to access narratives of stakeholders. To all the data, I apply what has been called ‘conventional qualitative content analysis’ (Hsieh and Shannon 2005) in order to identify themes. These themes relate to how national actors interpreted, explained, evaluated and responded to attempts at policy implementation. I am particularly concerned to explore those areas of policy where the difference in perspective between national policies and teacher trade union perspectives seems especially marked: around questions of accountability, management and educational quality.

The paper will provide a situated account of the development of policies of teacher evaluation in Greece. Through linking detailed empirical research to analysis that draws from contemporary research on global/national relations, the article will contribute to understanding of: the politics of teacher evaluation in Greece and explanation of the ‘lateness’ of Greek policy development in this area; policy contestation and the vernacularisation of global policy agenda; the politics of structural adjustment programms as significant elements in the motivations and strategies of political actors; accountability, school and teacher evaluation and new public management in general as ‘works-in-progress’ (rather than finished systems) subject to adaptation in the light of social and political circumstances.

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