In England trust is becoming scarce. Since Robert Putnam published his study of the decline of social capital in the US in 2000, there has been considerable interest in national variations in levels of trust. In Europe, Scandinavia is well ahead of other countries: around two thirds of the population agree that, generally speaking, other people can be trusted. In England and France this figure falls to under a third, even below the finding for the US.

In November 2001 Estelle Morris made a speech, issued as a pamphlet, entitled Professionalism and trust: The future of teachers and teaching (2001), in which she said “signals a new era of trust in our professionals on the part of Government”. She specified as follows:

Eminently sensible, many of her audience might have thought, and their judgement would probably have been confirmed had they already been familiar with a mid-1990s study of secondary school teachers at work, which revealed that teachers spent only about one third of their time actually teaching, most of the remaining time being almost equally divided between administration and preparation. Surely Estelle Morris is right, her audience would judge, that most teachers would like to spend more of their time teaching and will therefore welcome the reforms.

In fact her proposals had a very mixed reception and were followed by a long period of opposition to workforce remodelling from one of the teachers’ unions.