The processual life of neoliberalisation: Permutations of value systems and normative commitments in a co-operative trust setting (original) (raw)
Related papers
Democracy and schooling: The paradox of co-operative schools in a neoliberal age?
Journal of Philosophy of Education
From the first co-operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade would witness a remarkable growth of ‘co-operative schools’ in England, which at one point numbered over 850. This paper outlines the key development of democratic education by the co-operative schools network. It explains the approach to democracy and explores the way values were put into practice. At the heart of co-operativism lay a tension between engaging with technical everyday reforms and utopian transformative visions of an educational future. A new arena of debate and practice was established with considerable importance for our understanding of democratic education within the mainstream.
School governance and neoliberal political rationality: what has democracy got to do with it?
In this paper I discuss the role of school governance in England with a particular focus on the changing responsibilities of school governors in relation to recent education policy. These issues are located through a much broader discussion of neoliberalism and its effects on public sector organisation. Here neoliberalism is defined as the incursion of market forces on public sector organisation, including the introduction of new regulatory tools (inspection, standardisation and accountabilities for example) to replace direct bureaucracy and state intervention and indirectly strengthen government control – what Bob Jessop calls ‘regulated self-regulation’. Drawing on these insights, I demonstrate how a neoliberal political rationality shapes school governance and the kinds of behaviour and orientations idealised and adopted by school governors seeking to make themselves and the schools they govern accountable. Finally, I show how school governance is wedded to mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion (a preference for ‘professionals’ over ‘amateurs’ or unskilled volunteers for example) as well as claims to expertise and specialist knowledge. This raises questions over who gets to influence school governance and what governance is for, as well as bringing into focus larger questions about the role of democratic principles of civic empowerment, participation and representation.
Everyday erosions: neoliberal political rationality, democratic decline and the Multi-Academy Trust
British Journal Sociology of Education , 2020
Since the late 1970s, Britain has moved from a Keynesian welfare state model toward a mode of governance where economic reasoning replaces politics. Education in England has not escaped this shift from government to governance described as neoliberalism. This shift toward a new governing rationality has taken shape within the English educa- tion system since the 1980s through new public management regimes and networked governance; it has accelerated with academies, or schools run outside of local authority oversight. This paper explores how Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs), or chains of academies directed by a centralized Trust Board, takes neoliberalism’s governing rationality further as opaque networks of power are consolidated. Through tracing the narratives of MAT CEOs, government officials and union organizers, this paper shows how network governance enables neoliberal rational- ities to predominate within MAT structures where authoritarian prac- tices become normalized. Democratic ideals become bumps in the road to market-orientated progress requiring removal from education.
Co-operative academies: a transindividual possibility in individualistic times?
2018
This thesis examines the development of the Co-operative schools project in England, a school transformation initiative of the Co-operative Group and the Co-operative College, UK. Since 2008, the Co-operative schools project has developed a number of Co-operative school models, which are positioned as a ‘values-based alternative’ to the controversial Academies programme. The growth of the Co-operative schools project suggests that there is indeed an appetite for ‘alternative’ and ‘values-based’ education. However, it is not clear what the Co-operative alternative is or how the values and principles of the Co-operative movement translate to achieve educational transformation in schools. Integral to the design of this project was my role as ‘embedded researcher’ at the Co-operative College, enabling a unique perspective on the expanding initiative. Through an immersive and exploratory practice of research and reflection, across multiple sites, this study tracks the way in which the in...
DEMOCRATIC OPTIMISM AND AUTHORITY IN AN INCREASINGLY DEPOLITICISED SCHOOLS ‘SYSTEM’ IN ENGLAND
2018
This paper reports initial outcomes from a short series of semi-structured interviews in 2017 with senior politicians from three parties elected to two contrasting English local authorities (LAs): an urban city authority and a largely rural shire county. These were complemented by continuing interviews with senior officers and head teachers, of both academies and maintained schools, some with positions in multi-academy trusts (MATs), and critical readings of LA strategic documents. Interviews focused on the nature of democratic authority in what is an increasingly privatised schools system in the sense that school governance and decision making have moved steadily away from the authority inherent in democratic representation of a local community towards a more technical (or technicist) conception that depends more on ‘people with the right skills, experience, qualities and capacity’ (DfE, 2017: 10). This process has been described as ‘depoliticisation’ (Ball, 2007), or even ‘destalization’ (Jessop, 2002), whereby there is little public disagreement or debate about schools’ role in achieving national objectives (for example, social mobility). And the new technologies underpinning these changes have in turn engendered new governmentalities and discursive formations focused on little except better ‘outcomes’ (Wilkins, 2016). The principal policy in pursuit of these aims in English schools has been the process of academisation, whereby schools have been steadily removed from the purview of LAs, however etiolated, to be funded directly by central government on the basis of a contract with the minister. More recently, schools have been more progressively organised into Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) – voluntarily or involuntarily – in processes overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners, central government officials also responsible directly to the minister (Riddell, 2016). Politicians interviewed varied in their support for academisation - not always in ways that might be expected to reflect party affiliation – but all felt that schools had an important contribution to make to the realisation of their strategic aims, from economic development to lifelong learning. In addition, they were interested in what happened to the children of their constituents and all felt local authorities needed to engage with schools, reporting varying success in doing so. All acknowledged the difficulties inherent in a system increasingly organised de facto to exclude them, especially with MATs with wider regional or national roles with the attendant more remote offices and boards. According to some politicians (and officers), responses from MATs varied but having an elected mayor in the city authority was seen as one significant mechanism. Nearly all were optimistic for the future. The paper sets these initial findings in the context of what one interviewee described as a ‘stalled process’ (of economic reform), with central government not willing or able to respond to their concerns about the management of the system, especially since the 2017 general election. The reported absence of any space in the national legislative programme for schools because of the preparations for BREXIT means that even the much-discussed National Funding Formula (for school budgets) will be implemented via LAs for maintained schools, retaining some discretion, not the original intention (DfE, 2016: 68). Nor is the process of academisation by any means complete; nor, it is argued, is it ever likely to be. At the time of the first interviews, Regional Schools Commissioners were in the early stages of setting up ‘Sub-Regional Schools Improvement Boards’ involving senior LA representatives, that will most likely remain ‘strategic partners’. In addition, according to several interviewees, a paper setting out the proposed statutory roles of LAs to be amended by subsequent legislation had been drafted before the 2017 election, but not published since. Whereas it could be argued that the newer system based on school collaboration increasingly organised through MATs, overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners, might be more consistent and reliable in attaining greater equity in educational outcomes, a focus so limited leaves major moral (as opposed to technical) questions concerning the nature of ‘state’ schooling in England unanswered in policy: what democratic oversight will local and national communities have of their children’s education; how can and will parents be deeply involved.
This report analyses how schools in England have interpreted and begun to respond to the government's 'self-improving school-led system' (SISS) policy agenda, an overarching narrative for schools policy since 2010 that encompasses an ensemble of reforms including academies, multi-academy trusts (MATs) and Teaching School Alliances (TSAs). Based on a large-scale, four-year, mixed-methods study, the report asks whether or not the models of coordination and school support emerging locally since 2010 represent a genuine basis for an equitable and inclusive 'school-led' system. It explores the factors that support and hinder such developments as well as the implications for schools and school leadership. The analysis draws on governance theory to evaluate the reforms, which are conceived as an attempt to mix and re-balance three overlapping approaches to coordinating the school system: hierarchy, markets and networks. This shows that while one popular interpretation of the SISS agenda is that it requires inter-school partnerships to 'self-organize' their own 'school-led' improvement, this is in fact a partial account that underplays the dominant influences of hierarchical and market mechanisms on the thinking and actions of schools and school leaders and the networks they are developing. The report includes important new empirical findings, for example on the impact of MATs of different sizes and on the relationship between Ofsted inspection outcomes and levels of socioeconomic stratification between schools. It also combines the perspectives of multiple case study schools across four different localities to provide rich insights into leadership decision-making and agency in the context of local status hierarchies and rapid policy-driven change. As a result, while focusing on changes in England, it provides a unique set of insights into how different governance regimes interact across different local contexts to influence patterns of schooling and school-to-school collaboration – insights that will have relevance for research and practice on school system governance more widely.
Co-operative Education and Schools: an old idea for new times
There is a growing Cooperative Education sector in England within the region of 300 schools now describing themselves as Cooperative Schools. The growth of this sector is subject to significant debate – is it a countervailing movement for local democracy or is it simply another chain of schools that will hasten the marketisation of education? This article draws on the relatively limited extant literature on the history of cooperative education since the 1850s to understand the key traditions of 'Co-operative Education'. Then, drawing upon an analysis of Cooperative Schools' websites and meetings, upon interviews with Cooperative College officers, and upon visits and interviews with teachers in two Cooperative Schools, it explores how these traditions are being taken up or resisted in Cooperative Schools in England. The article argues that there is a risk that the autonomy that is at the heart of the Cooperative movement may lay the growing Cooperative Schools sector open to co-option within existing neo-liberal education agendas. The article argues that an important bulwark against this would be for the Cooperative movement to focus its energies in particular on the development of a movement of Cooperative educators, the teachers, parents, students and governors who, through what Woodin calls a 'learnt associational identity', can resist the reduction of education to a marketised private good. This analysis has implications not only within the context of England, but more widely in the international struggle to develop new models of democratic accountability for education in an increasingly marketised environment, and for the potential role of the international cooperative movement within that global struggle.