The National Government is in its second parliamentary term of implementing a policy package of National Standards into New Zealand primary schools. For better or for worse, the Standards will impact on the learning of children. Theywill also impact on the work of teachers. Whilst the first matter is important, it is the second that is considered here. The state maintains a fundamental interest in controlling and directing teachers’ labour. The Standards policy package will intersect the structure of control currently in place. It may replicate the contemporary arrangements that are mediated through arms-length school-based decision making and conceptions of teaching. It could also be constructed in a manner that permits greater incursion by the state into teachers’ work. The implementation of the policy package has not gone uncontested and it seems likely that this resistance is not yet over.

Teaching is an individual act of one teacher in one classroom. It is also a collegial and collective endeavour. The job of teaching is a creative and complex activity; however, we may not often consider the underlying nature of this work. This article seeks to identify the structures of control and dynamics of consent and resistance at play in teachers’ work that results in the conversion of their labour potential into children’s learning. The focus of this exercise is generically teachers; however, a narrower reading would be a primary teacher with some classroom-based responsibility. Conclusions reveal that there are layers of structural and detailed control directing their labour, teachers consent stems from a range of sources and that resistance is present in a variety of ways, both visible set pieces and more oblique individual actions.