Job Ads and the Construction of Identity in Contemporary English Primary Education

The chapter looks at the discourse of job advertising and analyses a small corpus of job advertisements placed by English state sector primary schools in the same 2007 issue of the Times Educational Supplement – for many years the most important employment forum in English education – in order to study the ways in which the schools define and shape their own identity. The chapter illustrates a range of techniques that the print ads use to attract and recruit potential candidates, yet at the same time to define the school’s identity and project it to the outside world. The dichotomy between the shared features in the recruitment ads and the schools’ need to compete with each other in order to attract the most suitable applicants gives rise to considerable differences within what might be expected to be a comparatively limited (sub)genre. Furthermore, since many of the schools use the ads to state their current and future policies and ambitions, they also reveal much about the current nature of primary school education in England.