Colleagues who continued to be reluctant to undertake The Daily Mile were framed as resisting not just the intervention, but resisting health itself. A typical positioning of the reluctant teacher focused on failures of disposition, embodied in a ‘lazy’ body. Within the new field, these bodies were unruly, lacking the privileged dispositions to care enough or to enjoy the right kinds of activity:
I think it’s a mindset, because one of the few teachers I had […] who had that reluctance and whatever […] it was just a mindset, I think she was just lazy to be honest, you know, if I’m honest about it, she was just lazy and couldn’t be bothered […] maybe she just didn’t like physical exercise. (Gail, School leader, School01)
I think some teachers are just a bit lazy and can’t be bothered to do it! (Kylie, School leader, School02)
The shape and size of these lazy and ‘unbothered’ bodies also came under scrutiny, as lacking the physical capital required within the new public health field:
if they [teachers] are overweight and they’re sensitive about that, they don’t like addressing the issue of weight in the school […One] member of staff wasn’t taking it up because she doesn’t see the point, and she personally doesn’t value physical activity and this initiative as being crucial to sowing the seeds to good health for kids, and that kind of reflects in her personal behaviours as well. (Vera, Public Health Practitioner)
Just as preparations for the Daily Mile had brought children’s bodies into sharp focus, implementation now brought those of all teachers centre stage. A resistant or ‘unruly body’ emerges, which does not seek to actively move students because they themselves do not value physical capital, because of their body shape, their dispositions (being ‘lazy’), and/or their habits (not liking ‘physical exercise’). These unruly bodies become sites for violating the ‘natural regularities’ of a field that has come to value the embodiment of certain form/s of physical capital. It is in these moments of resistance, where an intervention about the surveillance of children’s bodies surfaces tensions, that the broader surveillance of all bodies within the field of education becomes visible.
Resistances also make visible social relations within the field, particularly those of intersections between gender, age and class. Male teachers’ bodies are often discussed in relation to competition and ‘success’, in examples such as the male teacher who enjoys physical activity and was “really militant about doing it” (Kylie, School leader, School02) such that the class performed well, or the two male teachers who “had both become very competitive with the kids in their class, so there was this whole sort of male competition thing going on” (Joni, School leader, School04). In contrast, the unruly educator’s body, when it emerges, is always female—‘her body’ and ‘she doesn’t see the point’. This (female) gendered habitus intersects with that of ageing, with the dispositions of the ageing female body most notably out of sync with the new field:
so one of the teachers that was particularly adamant she wasn’t going to do it, she’s retired, it was her last, she was coming up to retirement, she wasn’t very fit, you know, and she was just concerned I think that people were going to start making her wear Lycra and run round and round the playground, you know. (Joni, School leader, School04)
we’ve got quite a mature set of ladies as TAs[Teaching Assistants], which are fantastic, they’re brilliant, we love them, but […] there are quite a few that are, you know, over 55, you know? (Damien, Teacher, School04)
Damien’s ‘You know?’ attends to tacit assumptions about the incapacity of bodies, and the (im)possibilities of the ageing female body to align well with the new focus on physical health. The imperatives to move away from this (now outdated) female ageing habitus are highlighted in narratives of achieving the correct dispositions:
I mean my [colleague] who’s well into her 40s […] if you see her she whizzes around every day, she’s like a bullet. So it’s about mindset […] if you’re older and there are physical, but as I said about myself, you know, I’ve got a knee problem at the moment but I’ll do it at my pace because you still should be walking. (Gail, School leader, School01)
Thus narratives of resistance to the intervention can be redemptive: stories of changing hexis, as bodies and dispositions adjust to the new field. One interviewee, for instance, cites her own (lack of) physical capital to emphasise the possibility that all bodies can and should conform:
for the benefit of the tape I’m on the large side so I say ‘well if I can do it, you can do it, come on, let’s do one more lap together’, and at the end of it I’m also [Interviewee breathes heavily] so that kind of works quite well! (Joni, School leader, School04)
Celebratory narratives position those who move beyond resisting as bodies who gradually align habitus with the field:
Yeah, I think, I know, one teacher in particular […] she’s not particularly sporty herself but she’s out there and doing it and that’s, and yeah, it’s growing on her as well. I think there was a little bit of reluctance, not reluctance, just thinking how it could work in [but] now it’s just part and parcel of her thing as well. (Kirsty, School leader, School01)
The celebration of resistance overcome and the visible aligning of habitus with field also makes visible the ‘negative symbolic capital’ that gets marked on the body by the initial resistance, remembered and retained by colleagues. The time lag between habitus and field may have been resolved, but it is not forgotten, in this marking of her ‘reluctance’ as attributed to a lack of disposition towards sport and exercise.
Cutting across the gendered and age based social positions in the field were those of class and ethnicity. Typically, unlike their pupils, qualified teachers in inner London are White British (around 85% of class teachers, and 93% of heads (Haque 2017)), and live outside the school’s catchment area, whereas Teaching Assistants (‘support staff’) (almost all female) are more likely to be older, reside locally and come from BAME communities (Bach et al. 2006). If teachers are modelling bourgeois practices (regular and purposeful physical activity) to their pupils, who are positioned as having dispositions framed in the very different class habitus of their homes, Teaching Assistants are in an anomalous position. Unlike class teachers, they are likely to share social positions in the field of ‘home’ with the pupils, but in school they are also educators, charged with modelling new dispositions. One narrative resolution to this discrepancy was to reference another field – that of dieting and ‘keep fit’—more aligned to the lower-class habitus of the Teaching Assistants, but nonetheless one that could mesh with the field of the healthy school with fewer risks of hysteresis:
But I have to say even with my support staff, at first because they were carrying around a bit of weight, but then they’ve done Weight Watchers a lot of them and now some of them do the Daily Mile twice a day, they’re fitting it in with their healthy bit, you know, and they’ve all got their little Fitbits on, and they’ll say to me, ‘Oh yeah, I went out with that class, I’m going out again this afternoon’, so it fits into them, and they’re wanting to lose weight. (Gail, School leader, School01)
Again, this is a celebratory narrative about taking active steps to foster physical capital and meet the requirements of the field. Although it is a positive appraisal of the Teaching Assistants’ commitment, it also reproduces the social distinctions that position them in the field by evoking a correspondence between the oppositions of Teaching Assistant/teacher with dieting/ ‘health’. If some Teaching Assistants were (overtly at least) celebrated for their involvement, more typically they resisted by simply not participating:
We come back in the classroom and the Teaching Assistant is there (a black female), main teacher is a white male. She says ‘oh, you did the run with them?’ – I say ‘yes’. It is clear the teaching assistant does not run with them. (Fieldnotes, School04, Class08)
When teachers took the children out to run, some Teaching Assistants would stay to work in the classroom, sorting out displays or materials, and others would withdraw to the staff room whist the teacher went out with the class:
I speak to the two teaching assistants who discuss their Christmas and New Year plans […], then I say ‘I have to go downstairs and see if they are ready for the mile’, the teaching assistants say ‘enjoy’. They have no intention of joining. (Fieldnotes, School03, Class03)
[in the staffroom] several teaching assistants are sat around a table talking, drinking tea/coffee and eating biscuits […] The Daily Mile is about to take place outside. They smile. I leave them sitting around the table and join The Daily Mile with the class. They do not join. (Fieldnotes, Class01, School01)
The public health intervention routinely brings into sharp focus the bodies of teachers (whether standing, running, fat, lazy or concerned about wearing Lycra), expected to embody the new obligations of public health. The Teaching Assistants’ bodies remain, however, largely invisible: unless ‘exceptional’ in their resistance to their assumed habitus (gendered, age-appropriate and implicitly class-appropriate). Thus, as the field of public health enters that of education, new expectations settle on teachers: that as professionals they will embody new dispositions encapsulated in The Daily Mile, and model purposeful, regulated and countable physical activity orientated to achieving a ‘healthy’ (slim, fit) body for their students. These expectations lie differently on the Teaching Assistants. Positioned as less advantaged within the field of education, their bodies are simultaneously associated with the habitus of pupils’ home fields as well as that of the new public health-oriented school system. As such, their resistance can be ignored rather than sanctioned: their withdrawal simply reinforces the subordinate position of those dispositions that no longer align with the new field.