Primary headship, state policy and the challenge of the 1990s: an exceptional story that disproves total hegemonic rule

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Abstract
This paper celebrates the life and work of one teacher over the past decade or so. As such, it reasserts a degree of indeterminacy, contestation and contradiction into analyses of schooling. It presents data obtained from ethnographic conversations with a headteacher of a working‐class, urban primary school. His intellectual and moral vision, his theories and his practices, are set in the context of recent state policy. The relationship between his manifest and latent identities is explored, which, it is argued, presents a powerful immunological response to the state's attempted policy ‘grafts’. In conclusion, the paper moves from the particular to an exploration of the usefulness of the head's responses as a model for the understanding of teachers’ experiences of the New Right project generally.