The Metropolitan panel comprised a diabetologist, diabetes educator, practice nurse, dietician, diabetes counsellor, social worker, pharmacist, community nurse, podiatrist, general practitioner, exercise physiologist and occupational therapist.
The difficulties with recruitment in Manchester, accompanied by problems with Ethics Committee approvals and delays in utilising lay educators newly acquired skills, led to a situation where there was drop out of educators, practices and nurses and full equivalence of intervention was intimated if not quite proven.
Why would they want to interview someone like me who went to school and did a school-based internship to obtain state certification as a school district administrator when they can hire another rich, elitist non-educator who practices "education" education as sending her own children away from home to a boarding school?
These critiques should not be read as arguments against the benefits of higher qualifications for the quality of educators' practice.
In-depth examination of peer educators' practice in this context offers potential insights into the practice of lay workers in other related complex health promotion programs.
One way of turning from a large- to a small-scale approach to workforce sustainability is to focus on educators' practice.
In particular, better mobilising discourses of sustainability, and further exploration of the micro-politics of educators' practice, are two ways we have suggested new possibilities could be generated for approaching seemingly entrenched workforce challenges.
It could also be argued that if calls for improved public recognition of professional status are not matched by improved remuneration, the undervaluation of educators' practice might be perpetuated (Lyons 2011).
We conclude by arguing that greater attention to the everyday politics of educators' practice, along with the forces shaping these milieux, may be a way of generating new possibilities for supporting workforce sustainability.
We also draw upon Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) ideas about flows of micro- and macro-politics to suggest the potential of micro-politics of educators' practice as a means of thinking further about the macro-politics of workforce sustainability.
