Manufactured risk: Strategies in education privatisation, depoliticisation and de-democratisation (original) (raw)

For over 30 years successive governments in England have experimented with market-based approaches to education reform with a view to subsuming moral arguments within economic imperatives, limiting the discretion of head teachers and governors through a tighter focus on managerial accountability, remaking schools into businesses through importing techniques and practices from the private sector, and weakening the relationship between democracy and the legitimacy of those who govern. In this paper, I examine ‘manufactured risk’ as a condition and effect of these reforms. By manufactured risk I mean the risks to which schools are subject as part of their ‘modernisation’. Take academies for example, sometimes called ‘state-funded independent schools’. Many local government-run schools in England have converted to academy status to take ownership of the land and buildings, set the curriculum and admissions policy, manage budget spending, employ staff directly, and source their own suppliers and professional advisers. But there are risks to converting including but not limited to increased competition, increased costs and diseconomies of scale. Moreover, academies are vulnerable to regulatory non-compliance, related party transactions, conflicts of interest, financial mismanagement, and lack of transparency. In this paper I explore the relationship between risk and governance through detailing the ways in which risk is implicated in the construction of new sets of antinomies and antagonisms (democracy versus efficiency, lay knowledge versus expert knowledge, amateurish governance versus professional governance) which structures who gets to enter into governance roles. Moreover, I demonstrate the significance of risk as a policy technology that helps to embed, and provide a moral argument for, education privatisation, depoliticisation and de-democratisation at the level of the school.