Reforming Education and Changing Schools

Case studies in policy sociology

Richard Bowe, Stephen J. Ball, Anne Gold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315412115
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Education Reform Act introduced in England and Wales in 1988 brought about enormous changes in schools, both as management units and as educational institutions. This book, first published in 1992, was the first to look at the effects of the Act in all its aspects on the basis of empirical evidence gathered from schools over the first three years of the Act's implementation. It looks at how change is being achieved in the Local Management of Schools, the influence of the market on schools, the introduction of the National Curriculum and the place of Special Needs provision in the new education scene. This book will be of interest to all who want to know about educational reform in Britain. It will also be of interest to those in the fields of education policy, educational management and sociology of education.

Chapter 1

The policy process and the processes of policy

INTRODUCTION

In the field of educational policy studies the ‘placing’ of schools, teachers and students in the policy process, has been largely achieved by theoretical fiat. On the one hand there has been extensive work on the generation of policy. This has remained, for the most part, within the province of macro-based theoretical analyses of policy documents and the activities and organization of groups of policy makers. Concern here has been with the representation or exclusion of interests in the political process and the struggles of activists, pressure groups and social classes within that arena (Kogan 1975, Ball 1990a). In these conceptualizations schools remain either marginal to the policy process or they are ‘represented’ via the teaching unions. The voices of the heads, senior managers, classroom teachers or the students remain, for the most part, strangely silent. On the other hand, there has been a growing body of literature investigating the ‘implementation’ of policy. This has often taken the form of detailed analyses (micro-based ethnographies for example) of how the ‘intentions’ behind policy texts become embedded in schooling or, more frequently, of how aspects of the schooling situation ‘reflect’ wider developments in the political and economic arena. There has also been a somewhat smaller body of literature that has celebrated the potential power of teachers and/or students to subvert the heavy hands of the economy or the State. Here the silent voices are heard, but they speak either as theoretically overdetermined mouthpieces of a world beyond their control or as potentially free and autonomous resisters or subverters of the status quo.

This separation between investigations of the generation and the implementation of policy, has tended to reinforce the ‘managerial perspective’ on the policy process, in the sense that the two are seen as distinctive and separate ‘moments’; generation followed by implementation (Alford and Friedland 1988). This distortion produces accounts of the policy process as linear in form; whether top-down, bottom-up or allowing for a ‘relative autonomy’ of the bottom from the top. Thus, state control theories (Dale 1989) portray policy generation as remote and detached from implementation. Policy then ‘gets done’ to people by a chain of implementors whose roles are clearly defined by legislation. In policy studies generally this sort of ‘linear’ conception of policy has been further encouraged, post-1979, by what has been increasingly referred to as the Thatcher ‘style’ of government and its avowed intention to break down the corporatism of the ‘social democratic’ consensus (CCCS 1981). The lack of wide consultation prior to legislation on the trade unions, the health service and in education was seen as evidence of a new, non-corporatist style in action. Thus, for example, Lawton has talked of the pulling apart of the old ‘partnership’ between the DES (Department of Education and Science), the LEAs (local education authorities) and the teachers and its substitution by a fragmented policy process in which the new policy makers appear remote from the educational scene; a scene which, nonetheless, the policy makers are trying to control more tightly (Lawton 1984). Thus, he considers the politicos (ministers, political advisers, etc.), the bureaucrats (DES officials) and the professionals, HMI (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate) to have become increasingly ‘disconnected’ from the policy receivers (LEAs, schools and teachers) (Lawton 1984). If we take this ‘tightening grip’ (Lawton 1984) thesis further then the shift appears to have been taking place for some time. The growth of centrally administered policies, TVEI (the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative) run by the MSC (Manpower Services Commission, later to become the Training Agency), ESGs (Educational Support Grants) run by the DES, both on a ‘bid and deliver’ basis, would be examples of the State’s growing control of education. The culmination being the Educational Reform Act 1988 with its centrally ‘determined’ policy prescription that gives the DES and the Secretary of State extensive new powers to direct the work of LEAs and schools. In this analysis the changing language of the policy process would be illustrative of deeper structural changes in the relationship of the State to educational institutions. Thus from the TVEI and ESGs, which introduced the ‘delivery’ of educational change, external ‘monitoring’, ‘management’ and ‘evaluation’ (Dale et al. 1990), we go through to NCC (National Curriculum Council) documents which pick up that language and also talk about the ‘implementation by headteachers … of the National Curriculum’, ‘absorption by individual teachers of the National Curriculum’, ‘delivery of his or her (student’s) entitlement’ etc., etc. (See for example, National Curriculum: From Policy to Practice, DES, 1989a.)

There seems little doubt that there has been a State control element in the Government’s approach to policy construction and a strong desire to exclude practitioners (or their ‘representatives’, the trade unions) (see Ball 1990a). Furthermore, we would accept that in the legislation the Government’s promotion of parents and the market over the claims of the ‘educational lobby’, and its language of ‘implementation’ are all attempts to continue to exclude certain voices from the policy process. Nonetheless we want to suggest that it would be politically naive and analytically suspect to begin from the assumption that it has been possible to make that exclusion total; either in terms of policy generation or in terms of implementation. The example of TVEI is itself particularly telling in this respect.

POLICY ANALYSIS AND THE STATE-CONTROL MODEL

As a policy externally imposed upon schools TVEI was initially seen as a classic example of a ‘top-down’ model of curriculum reform, however, the actual experiences of researchers and teachers told a somewhat different tale. TVEI reached the statute books as an initiative of Margaret Thatcher, Lord Young and Sir Keith Joseph. It was well financed and required schools and LEAs to submit projects for scrutiny prior to finance being made available. Yet many have pointed out that the MSC’s need to secure the co-operation of the ‘educational lobby’ actually produced curriculum development in schools that was far closer to the educationalist (mostly school-based) than the occupationalist (mostly MSC-based) model of the curriculum (Dale et al. 1990). The point is that the transformations that may come about as legislative texts are recontextualized may, in some cases, be dramatic. McCulloch (1986) argues, for example, that the utilitarian rhetoric and objectives that accompanied the launching of the initiative have been subverted via their incorporation into mainstream education. Although TVEI was successfully established in the context of Thatcherite politics at the national level, at the local level it gave way to a revival of more liberal notions of educational practice (Gleeson 1989 pp.88–9). Saunders (1985), referring to TVEI, has suggested three broad categories to indicate how schools generally responded to this externally initiated change:

1. Adaptive extension: A strong interpretation of TVEI – it has been used to change the whole curriculum.

2. Accommodation: TVEI adapted to fit the general shape of the existing curriculum structure.

3. Containment: TVEI absorbed by the existing school pattern.

While there are many problems with a static and uniform categorization of this kind (schools may shift position over time and different departments may respond differently and financial and staffing constraints may inhibit response) it nonetheless serves to underline the ways in which detailed curricular planning and implementation may be driven by different interpretations of change. In reading the literature on TVEI one is struck by the extent to which an externally ‘imposed’ policy was appropriated by the teaching profession for very different purposes to those intended by the policy. The implication is that the ‘capacity’ of the State to reach into the schools has to be judged via the use practitioners make of policy initiatives and, consequently, the extent of state control resulting from the 1988 Act actually remains an empirical question. Indeed we would go further and agree with West’s observation about Learning to Labour (Willis 1977) and extend it to the sociology of education more generally:

There is a relative lack of serious examination of institutional or organization mediations between capital and the classrooms experienced by the lads. Although other CCCS work does begin to address such issues of educational policy, professional alliances, etc., we still have little idea of how such national policy issues and processes connect to schools and classrooms, and how the latter connect to such groups as the lads.

(West, 1983)

Thus, despite the very real sense in which teachers have been excluded from the ‘production’ of the Reform Act 1988, we still want to argue that a State control model distorts the policy process. Indeed it seems to us that the image implicit in the conception of distinct and disconnected sets of policy makers and policy implementors actually serves the powerful ideological purpose of reinforcing a linear conception of policy in which theory and practice are separate and the former is privileged. The language of ‘implementation’ strongly implies that there is, within policy, an unequivocal governmental position that will filter down through the quasi-state bodies (presently the NCC and the subject working parties) and into the schools. (The LEAs are placed in a marginal position, but are essentially seen to be supporting schools in their endeavours.) It is clearly in the Government’s interest to promote such a view. Consequently, this top-down, linear model is hardly the best starting point for research into the practical effects of the ERA. Who becomes involved in the policy process and how they become involved is a product of a combination of administratively based procedures, historical precedence and political manoeuvring, implicating the State, the State bureaucracy and continual political struggles over access to the policy process; it is not simply a matter of implementors following a fixed policy text and ‘putting the Act into practice’. One key task for policy analysis is to grasp the significance of the policy as a text, or series of texts, for the different contexts in which they are used.

POLICY RESEARCH AND THE ANALYSIS OF POLICY TEXTS

The translation of educational policy into legislation produces a key text (the Act). This, in turn, becomes a ‘working document’ for politicians, teachers, the unions and the bodies charged with responsibility for ‘implementing’ the legislation. Although questions about the status and the nature of particular policy texts remain empirical ones, we have found the work of Roland Barthes a useful, conceptual starting point here. He has argued that:

literature may be divided into that which gives the reader a role, a function, a contribution to make, and that which renders the reader idle or redundant, ‘left with no more than the poor freedom to accept or reject the text’ and which thereby reduces him to that apt but impotent symbol of the bourgeois world, an inert consumer to the author’s role as producer.

(Hawkes 1977, p.113)

This latter sort of text he refers to as ‘readerly’, and the signifier/signified relationship is clear and inescapable; there is the minimum of opportunity for creative interpretation by the reader. An initial reading of National Curriculum texts, for example, and their technical language of levels, attainment targets, standardized attainment testing and programmes of study, might suggest just such a readerliness. However, the NCC has also published secondary texts, the Non-Statutory Guidelines, which suggest the National Curriculum texts are to be interpreted more like Barthes alternative ‘writerly’ texts, which self-consciously invite the reader to ‘join-in’, to co-operate and co-author. In the language of TVEI, to feel a sense of ‘ownership’. But this free play is a matter of degree in the interpretation and reading of these texts rather than any kind of open freedom of action. Barthes has also argued that: ‘writerly texts require us to look at the nature of language itself, not through it at a preordained “real world”’ (Hawkes 1977, p.118).

We have been acutely aware that the very invention of a new proposed ‘reality’ for schooling in terms of attainment targets, etc. draws attention to the language itself, and to its adequacy as a way of thinking about and organizing the way pupils learn. ‘Making sense’ of new texts leads people into a process of trying to ‘translate’ and make familiar the language and the attendant embedded logics. In this process they place what they know against the new. Readerly texts, however, presuppose and depend upon presumptions of innocence, upon the belief that the reader will have little to offer by way of an alternative. Teachers may feel battered and coerced, they may have been softened up for change, but they are also suspicious and cynical and professionally committed in ways that hardly form the basis for ‘innocence’. Finally, Barthes suggests that the reading of writerly texts involves two kinds of ‘pleasure’, the straightforward pleasure of reading and the jouissance, the ecstasy or bliss which arise from the sense of breakdown or interruption. The latter coming from the critical and creative response to the text, the seeing through to something beyond. While this might produce for some a sense of discomfort and loss, it also opens up possibilities for ‘gaps’ and ‘moments’ of progressive and radical insertion, for example the breakdown of transmission teaching, subject boundaries and formal examining and their replacement with cross-curricular work, investigations and group and process-based assessments. What it is also vital to recognize then is that these readerly and writerly texts are the products of a policy process, a process that we have already indicated emerges from and continually interacts with a variety of interrelated contexts. Consequently texts have clear relationships with the particular contexts in which they are used. This applies as much to national debates as to exchanges in schools between teachers and the individual approaches developed by teachers to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum.

In looking at the 1988 Act a number of authors have already pointed out, it is not a text that is capable of only one interpretation and the various elements that make up the Act (the National Curriculum, LMS, Open Enrolment, Opting Out, etc.) empower different bodies, groups and individuals in different ways (Bash and Coulby 1989, Jones 1989 and Whitty 1989), empowerment depending not only upon the ‘tightness’ or otherwise of the legislation but also upon the possibilities and the limits of particular contexts and settings. In effect the ERA is being constantly rewritten as different kinds of ‘official’ texts and utterances are produced by key actors or agencies of government – Programmes of Study, Attainment Targets, Subject Working Party Reports, NCC Reports, etc., etc. Thus a whole variety and criss-cross of meanings and interpretations are put into circulation. Clearly these textual meanings influence and constrain ‘implementors’ but their own concerns and contextual constraints generate other meanings and interpretations. Thus while textual analysis:

Makes it possible to understand knowledge production as a chain or series of transformative activities which range from the social organization of text industries, to the activities of text producers, through the symbolic transformations of the text itself, and to the transformative interaction between text and reader, or school knowledge and student.

(Wexler 1982, p.286)

As Wexler goes on to point out, it is crucial that such analysis is critically informed by a political and social analysis that seeks to uncover some of the processes whereby such texts are generated. Texts, structures and agencies of control need to be attended to. The state control model actually tends to freeze policy texts and exclude the contextual slippages that occur throughout the policy cycle. Instead we would want to approach legislation as but one aspect of a continual process in which the locii of power are constantly shifting as the various resources implicit and explicit in texts are recontextualized and employed in the struggle to maintain or change views of schooling.

This leads us to approach policy as a discourse, constituted of possibilities and impossibilities, tied to knowledge on the one hand (the analysis of problems and identification of remedies and goals) and practice on the other (specification of methods for achieving goals and implementation). We see it as a set of claims about how the world should and might be, a matter of the ‘authoritative allocation of values’. Policies are thus the operational statements of values, statements of ‘prescriptive intent’ (Kogan 1975, p.55). They are also, as we conceive it, essentially contested in and between the arenas of formation and ‘implementation’. While the construction of the policy text may well involve different parties and processes to the ‘implementing’ process, the opportunity for re-forming and re-interpreting the text mean policy formation does not end with the legislative ‘moment’; ‘for any text a plurality of readers must necessarily produce a plurality of readings’ (Codd 1988, p.239).

In our ethnographically-based study of policy our concern has been to explore policy-making, in terms of the processes of value dispute and material influence which underlie and invest the formation of policy discourses, as well as to portray and analyse the processes of active interpretation and meaning-making which relate policy texts to practice. In part this involves the identification of resistance, accommodation, subterfuge and conformity within and between arenas of practice and the plotting of clashes and mismatches between contending discourses at work in these arenas, e.g. professionalism vs. conformity, autonomy vs. constraint, specification vs. latitude, the managerial vs. the educational. Furthermore it is important to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The policy process and the processes of policy
• 2 Education in the marketplace
• 3 LMS (the Local Management of Schools) and the entrepreneurial school
• 4 The National Curriculum: subject to change?
• 5 Special Educational Meeds in a new context
• 6 Changing Management and the management of change!
• References
• Index