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This article examines how external flexibility is developing in primary and secondary schools in England. The emergence of private supply teaching agencies in the 1990s called an entire system for managing teaching staff into question. Using the example of supply teaching agencies, the article analyses the labour market for teachers in England and the different ways of using such flexibility in this particular sector. It will also show how these flexible working mechanisms have been introduced as a part of the extensive transformation of public services in England since the mid-1990s. Supply teaching agencies are part of an overall trend towards shared responsibilities and the gradual “withdrawal” of the Weberian state in the provision of public services. This constitutes the empirical reflection of the liberal policies conducted with great enthusiasm by successive Conservative governments and then Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour.