Surviving the educational landscape: a case study of leadership, policy tensions and marketisation (original) (raw)

Del Col, Stahl 2023 Working in a survival school, exploring policy tensions, marketisation and performativities

Working in a Survival School documents how global educational policies trickle down and influence school cultures and the lives of educators and educational leaders. The research traces the everyday work and experience of educators within an all-boys Catholic college suffering an unprecedented decline in enrolment numbers. In short, it was a school in 'survival mode'. Drawing on Dorothy Smith's scholarship on Institutional Ethnography, the authors document how the school operated and how its efforts to survive influenced the daily work of educators. Institutional ethnography reveals the school as a bounded space subject to a variety of competing local and translocal forces that are historical, political and economic in nature. Exploring the discursive and material effects of policy on both the work and identities of educators, the authors illustrate how the everyday experience of being an educator is shaped by marketisation and how leaders engage in stratagems to promote the school as a vehicle of educational excellence and quality to lure clientele. Building on existing scholarship in educational policy studies and new public management, Working in a Survival School considers how the global marketisation of education systems is experienced in one school fighting to survive. This book is of interest to educators, school leaders and academics interested in policy enactment. Lee Del Col is an educator and school leader in South Australia with over 15 years of experience in both primary and secondary settings. Throughout his career, he has worked in coeducational and single-sex schools within Catholic Education. He holds Bachelor, Masters and Doctoral awards in education, with research interests in educational policy, learner identities and school-based masculinities.

For 'getting it' : an ethnographic study of co-operative schools

2014

The marketisation of the educational sector continues to shape educational provision, policy and practice on a worldwide scale (Apple, 2001; Ball, 2008; Giroux, 2004), ostensibly providing ‘freedom’ through the conflation of consumer ‘choice’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ via the invisible hand of the market. The assumption that competitive markets will produce better schools and outcomes for their students veils the extent to which a large proportion of the world’s population are positioned as marginal actors, unable to ‘compete’ or ‘choose’ as equals, as they engage on a significantly uneven playing field (Mills & McGregor, 2014; Reay, 2012). Historical and global (cf. Fielding & Moss, 2011; Neill, 1990; Wrigley et al., 2012) examples of democratic alternatives to the traditional institution of ‘the school’ have provided rich evidence of the radical possibilities for social change in the form of case studies and academic critique. However, the absence of a cohesive platform which ...

Diluting education? An ethnographic study of change in an Australian Ministry of Education

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words, allowing the schools to decide how to change. Inside an Australian state education bureaucracy at a time when the organisation was restructured and services decentralised, this study helps show some of the disturbing trends resulting from the further entrenchment of neo-liberal strategies. Although control was re-centralised by legitimising performance mechanisms, in the form of national testing, there are indications that the focus on national tests may have alarming consequences for the content and context of education. I argue that the complexities of learning and fundamental pedagogies are being lost in preference for an over-reliance on data systems that are based on a shallow and narrow set of standardised measures.

Investigating school leadership at a time of system diversity, competition and flux

This dissertation reports on a qualitative study of school leadership with nine secondary-school headteachers (of maintained schools) or principals (of academy-type schools) in England. The project maps schooling provision and offers an empirical account of leaders’ identities and practices in neoliberal and neoconservative times. Informed by a critical policy-scholarship methodology, documentary data from primary and secondary sources supplement narrative and semi-structured interviews conducted over 18 months. The findings are reported in five journal articles and one book chapter. The first output maps school types through different lenses: legal status; curriculum; selection; types of academy; and school groupings. The mapping highlights the intersections between the reform agenda and historical diversity. I conceptualise the landscape holistically through locus of legitimacy and branding, arguing that diversification policies facilitate corporatised and religious interests. Second, I show how UTCs and studio schools construct children’s abilities as fixed and differentiable in terms of predicted economic value. They select, but the responsibility for this, following Bourdieu, is transferred discursively from the school through branding and habitus to the “consumers” where it is to be misrecognised as exercising ‘school choice’. Third, I typologise three effects on heads’ and principals’ agency and identities of a few elite multi-academy trust principals, or courtiers, who have won regional empires through expanding their academy chains to occupy the spaces opened up by the dismantling of LAs. Public-sector and school-leader identities and histories permit the promotion of their activities as “school led” and downplays their close relationship with central-state policy- makers and private-sector networks. Fourth, I argue that corporatised leadership in schools in England is being promoted through new actors and new types of school. Corporatised leadership is characterised inter alia by the promotion of business interests and the adoption of business-derived leadership practices and identities. I use Bourdieu’s concept of field to explain the impact of business on educational leadership and the dissonance between leaders and led. Fifth, I argue with Gunter that school leaders are removing those who embody or vocalise alternative conceptualisations of educator by eradicating ‘inadequate’ teaching, and implementing the leader’s ‘vision’. We deploy Arendtian thinking to show how current models of school leadership enable totalitarian practices to become ordinary. Sixth, I develop Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis through narratives from two heads to argue that rather than simply being an effect of change, hysteresis may be an actively sought outcome whereby the state intervenes to deprivilege welfarist headteachers and privilege corporatised principals through structurally facilitating their habitus and mandating its dispositions for the field. Collectively, these findings demonstrate how the diversification of provision in England and the demands of a performative, marketised regime have ontological and professional stakes for school leaders and for the led. Symbolic and economic capital is accruing to the capitalised, facilitated by corporate practices and corporate structural solutions through acquisitions and alliances. Resistance is possible, but a dissident habitus limits standing in the field. This hierarchisation is reflected in the relationship between school types and in how children are meant to self-select into that provision. This is a landscape constituted of positions, where pupils are expected to know their place and the purpose of education is to facilitate social segregation for economic efficiency.

Leveraging Local Knowledge to Envision Educational Policy and Management Outside the Plunder of Neoliberal Technorationality

Research in Educational Policy and Management

Using the supply chain bottleneck of the post-COVID-19 pandemic as a lens, the editors of this special issue demonstrate problematic aspects of neoliberal technorationality when applied to educational policy and management. They offer humanism as a counterweight to the problematics of neoliberalism in education and illustrate how local knowledge in spaces of learning are always present, provide visions of different futures and offer potential for transformation outside seemingly totalizing neoliberal discourses.

School autonomy, marketisation and social justice: the plight of principals and schools

Journal of Educational Administration and History, 2020

There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about the plight of principals and particular schools when policies of school autonomy converge with market imperatives of economic efficiency, competition and public accountability. Such concerns reflect the significance of education systems providing greater and more nuanced support for principals and schools to manage the extra responsibilities of greater school autonomy and accountability. While these aspects of support are central, we argue that systemic reform that is driven by educative, rather than market, imperatives is necessary for creating a context where school autonomy can be mobilised for social justice.

Education policy, neoliberalism, and leadership practice a critical analysis

Hungarian Educational Research Journal

Professor Starr focuses on leadership roles in all sectors of education, including higher education (senior academic and research staff and technical staff roles), schools (K-12), vocational education and training and early childhood education departments (governmental, independent and catholic). This foundational book describes all aspects of neoliberalism and its massive impact on education. Drawing on research and exploring political developments across a range of contexts, this book critically analyses neoliberal education policies, practices, results they produce and the purposes they serve. The book asks how do education leaders view and explain the neoliberal effects, dilemmas and opportunities they create. They also try to answer why neoliberalism is the basis of educational policy, how new liberalism affects education, and what does this mean for the future. The book consists of two parts. The first part composed of eleven chapters, including the introduction, which the author assigned to explain the misleading importance of education policy while the other sections were devoted to addressing the topics of globalization, free market, new liberalism, individualism, independence and political rationality in the exchange market in addition to privatization, selection, competition, improvement, innovation, entrepreneurship and efficiency, productivity, performance and accountability. A rising tide lifts all boats'a neoliberal aphorismsums up Part I of this book, which discusses neoliberalism in education. The chapters in this section explain the origins of neoliberalism, its essential principles or axioms, and describe and critiques how these ideas play out in education policy and leadership practice. The introductory chapter of the book explains the fundamental concepts discussed in the later chapters of this book. It is examining major international events and circumstances affecting national governments, local education systems and policymakers, with accompanying implications for individual educational institutions. The book explores how education leaders view, understand, and rationalize policy decisions, factors that influence their reactions and