Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice

Stories of English Schooling

Amanda Keddie, Martin Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351591089
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice provides an account of recent developments in English state education, with a particular focus on the 'academisation' of schooling. It examines how head teachers, teachers and others working in diverse education settings navigate the current policy environment. The authors provide readers with insight into the complex decision-making processes that shape school responses to current educational agendas and examine the social justice implications of these responses.

The book draws on Nancy Fraser's social justice framework and her theorising of neoliberalism to explore current tensions associated with moves towards both greater autonomy for and accountability of state schooling. These tensions are presented through four case studies that centre upon 1) a group of local authority primary schools, 2) an academy 'chain', 3) a co-operative secondary school and 4) an alternative education setting. The book identifies the 'emancipatory' possibilities of these approaches amid the complex demands of autonomy and accountability seizing English schools. Informed by a consideration of market parameters and social protectionist ideals, this examination provides rich insights into how English schools have emancipatory capacity.

Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice makes a major theoretical contribution to understandings of how the market is working alongside the regulation of schooling and the implications of this for social justice. By drawing on the experiences of those working in schools, it demonstrates that the tensions associated with autonomy and accountability within the current education policy environment can be both productive and unproductive for social justice.

1

ENGLISH SCHOOLING, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND NEOLIBERALISM

This is a book about social justice, neoliberalism and schooling in England. It has become impossible to talk about English schooling, as it has about schooling in many other locations, without mentioning the ways in which powerful discourses from the business world have shaped school governance, leadership, accountability mechanisms, competition and new networks between schools. Efficiency, entrepreneurship, chief executives, audits, market share, value adding and performance indicators are all terms now readily associated with schooling in England. In writing this book we wanted to explore the stories of people working in diverse school settings to make sense of the ways in which they were navigating this terrain. In particular, we were concerned with how they regarded and realised the autonomy associated with a devolved education system, although the extent to which it is a system has been questioned (Gunter, 2012; Lawn, 2013). We were also concerned with how autonomy sat with the increasing levels of external accountabilities and scrutiny that have been associated with this devolution.

As with many others studying schooling in contemporary times we are concerned about what impact devolution and new accountabilities have had on social justice agendas and schooling. Such moves have clearly contributed to a range of injustices. Curriculum and pedagogical practices have narrowed and diminished in creativity for those who are perceived to be low achievers. Young, often highly marginalised people who represent a danger to a school’s reputation have been pushed out of school. Teachers and head teachers have been exposed to regimes that question their professionalism and reduce their expertise to sets of skills and techniques. High stakes testing has had serious consequences for the careers of teachers and head teachers, especially those in schools serving high poverty communities. And democratically elected local authorities have had their resource budgets savaged and have been isolated from decision-making practices in schools in their jurisdictions.

However, socially unjust schooling did not begin with neoliberalism in the 1980s (see for example, Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Willis, 1977; Deem, 1984; Connell et al., 1982). There has been no golden age of socially just schooling in England. English schools, in general, have long perpetuated inequalities of class and culture. What we hope to show in this book is the complexity of the current moment, and to give a human face to the ways in which those in schools are coping with such complexities. In so doing, we demonstrate that neoliberal discourses are not totalising, that while there are some in schools who fully embrace current expectations of being a ‘neoliberal worker’, there are those who find ways to form collective resistances, of one kind or another, against the more virulent consequences of neoliberalism; that there are those who utilise neoliberal discourses to advocate for a fairer education system; and those who work to address the ‘collateral damage’ (Bauman, 2011) brought about by neoliberalism.

In this introduction to the book we provide a brief overview of the English schooling context. This context is rapidly changing and can make any work describing it very quickly appear out of date. However, in our view, despite such changes, key issues of modern schooling remain: a compliance with neoliberal discourses, an erosion of trust in state education, expectations of entrepreneurialism, competition between schools, struggles to resist injustice, efforts to collaborate with others, fears for one’s job and one’s sense of professional respect and concerns about young people. These are the issues we focus on in this book. The understandings we have of social justice and neoliberalism, and their relationship, help to make sense of these issues. Following an overview of English schooling, we thus introduce some of the important understandings of social justice and neoliberalism that we bring to the analysis of this context. In introducing these understandings, we indicate the significance of Nancy Fraser’s work for such theorising. Following this explanation we give an account of the two different studies that underpin the work presented in this book, and then an outline of each chapter.

English schooling

Making sense of the current government funded schooling system in England is not easy. Trying to differentiate between the variety of maintained schools, free schools, academies, chains and different trust arrangements takes some doing. Making the matter even more complex is that all of these different types of government funded schools can also include faith based schools overseen by religious organisations (including the Church of England and various Islamic groups). Tom Woodin (2012, p. 327) describes the current education landscape that has produced these diverse forms of schooling as the ‘fissiparous ecology of education’. The constant break-neck paced break-up of the state education system in England into different types and forms of independent state funded schools, including academies in their various guises, has been justified through sustained criticism of teachers, former systems of schooling and young people. This has included lamentations about the state of the nation’s PISA results, especially when compared with other similarly wealthy countries; a denigration of teachers as having failed their pupils, and of the universities that have educated them for not having fully prepared newly qualified teachers for working in the classroom (too much sociology in teacher education has often been seen as the problem); attacks on so-called progressive curricula for not focusing enough on basic skills and not providing canonical knowledge; and the all too familiar complaints about ‘youth today’ who are often seen as either too violent or too focused on technology to engage in traditional schooling.

Market principles and an audit culture – hallmarks of neoliberalism – have been one way in which the government could be seen to be addressing the malaise that was suffusing education in England (Ball, 2012; 2013). Enter academies onto the education landscape. City Academies were set up by Labour in 2000 as a response to the underachievement of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Gunter and McGinty, 2014). Schools, with some justification, were seen to have failed young marginalised people living in high poverty areas of England. However, rather than looking to, for example, institutionalised forms of discrimination and broader equity concerns, a business model premised on market capitalism was seen as providing the solution. It appeared as if key figures in government were thinking, ‘Who better would there be to oversee schools’ adoption of market principles than big business and successful entrepreneurs?’ Hence, schools could become independent but still be state funded – as a City Academy – with sponsors from this community. Other organisations that ran successful business models, such as universities, charities and religious bodies, also became sponsors of these schools (see for example, Junemann and Ball, 2013). Schools with a sponsor could apply to become an academy or, if perceived as ‘failing’, could be forced to become one.

Academy sponsors negotiated individual agreements with the then Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in terms of budgets. Schools then had a far greater say over the use of their budget than when they were overseen by a Local Education Authority (LEA). In order to compensate for the services that they would no longer receive from the LEA, schools’ budgets were increased and they were given the freedom to spend as they saw fit. LEAs’ budgets were then also cut, even if none of their schools had become academies (Benn, 2011). In order to provide schools with the flexibility to make them competitive in the market, academies were released from a number of restrictions facing LEA schools. They could appoint non-qualified personnel as teachers, they did not have to abide by nationally agreed pay agreements for teachers, and they could adapt, or even not follow, the national curriculum. (In regards to the latter, most appear to adhere to the national curriculum due to national testing on its content.) However, schools were not allowed to be selective in their intake of students or to make a profit.

When the Coalition Government came to office in 2010 they continued with and expanded the academies programme, despite concerns being raised by the Liberal Democrats within the Coalition. Under the Academies Act 2010, all schools had the option to become an academy without the need for a sponsor. It was also this Act that initiated the introduction of free schools, new schools run by parent or community groups but funded by the state. Underpinning both the current academy programme and free schools is the notion of the parent (rarely the student) as a consumer of education, and as within capitalist market economics, the consumer is perceived as having ‘choice’ and the ability to make informed decisions about the quality of the product on offer. However, as has been demonstrated multiple times, it is the middle class and the wealthy who benefit the most from such choices (Benn, 2011; Exley, 2013; Reay, 2017). The Coalition maintained the Labour position on academies being non-selective and not-for-profit. However, there were claims that schools were being very selective in their intake, and selective in who they excluded, sometimes illegally, and that their autonomy and governance structures may have made it more difficult to determine illegal activity in this regard (Office of the Children’s Commissioner, 2012; 2011). Little has changed under the Conservative Government, despite the re-introduction of grammar schools being mooted. In Chapter 2 we explore recent developments in English schooling in more detail. Of particular concern about these developments has been their impact on social justice.

Social justice

Social justice is a slippery concept and can mean many things to many people (see for example, Sen, 2009; Young, 1990; Rawls, 1971). We have long been drawn to the work of Nancy Fraser on social justice (Keddie, 2012a; 2012b; Mills, 2001; Mills and McGregor, 2014).We are aware that Fraser has been critiqued by other social justice theorists who suggest that her work is overly normative and reductive (for various debates and critiques see Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Olson, 2008; Lynch, 2012). We are not without sympathy for some of these critiques (Keddie, 2012b; Mills et al., 2016). However, in our view, Fraser’s three-dimensional understanding of social justice and her theorising of neoliberal politics very much speak to the tensions, contradictions and nuances of contemporary schooling in the English context.

In chapters 2 and 7 we explore Fraser’s work in more depth. However, we outline the key elements of her theorising here. For Fraser, social justice requires ‘participatory parity’ which is the capacity for all to participate in society on par with others (2007). The prerequisites for this to occur are economic, cultural and political justice. Economic justice is inhibited by a ‘maldistribution’ of resources – that is where the level of financial or material resources are so unevenly distributed that many struggle to maintain the basic necessities of life. Cultural justice is affected by ‘misrecognition’ – that is where some face discrimination and exclusion on the basis of ‘difference’ because of, for example, their gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexuality and/or physical abilities. Political justice is hindered by ‘misrepresentation’ – that is where some find that their voices cannot be heard in the political sphere or in social interactions. Issues of justice do not necessarily fall neatly into these categories. Such issues are complex and inter-related and thus overlap. Presenting them within these categories is not intended to dilute their complexity or ignore their inter-relatedness. We draw on Fraser’s model in this book, not as an ideal of justice that is static and uncomplicated but rather, as a productive heuristic for analysing the ways in which schools both entrench social injustices and promote social justice in their organisational features and in the outcomes they (re)produce.

The data on the ways in which English schooling reproduces economic inequalities through a system that encourages differentiation of schooling types, classroom organisation and resource allocation is damning (Reay, 2017). There are clearly policy efforts to address this maldistribution. For example, there has been a policy focus on addressing the ways in which socioeconomic backgrounds are correlated with school achievement levels, school attendance and school exclusions. Some policy responses have included a redistribution of resources through, for example, the Pupil Premium and Free School Meals. However, poverty is still very much a significant predictor of the educational under-attainment that compromises future life chances.

The research literature detailing the ways in which English schools discriminate against pupils (and teachers) on the basis of, for example, race, religion, gender and sexuality is also less than flattering (see for example, Gillborn, 2008; Mac an Ghaill and Haywood, 2014; Keddie, 2014; Ringrose and Epstein, 2017). England, as with most education systems, has a strong policy framework (The Equalities Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty¹) that condemns forms of discrimination and outlines the ways in which schools are expected to address such forms of injustice. However, these policy frameworks appear to have had little material effect. Institutionalised discrimination continues to see, for example, disproportionately high numbers of young Black and minority ethnic (BME) pupils excluded from school (Gillborn, 2008; Gillborn, 2016) and put into lower sets, despite having similar achievement levels to their white counterparts (Archer et al., 2018).

There is also a growing body of research literature concerned with the ways in which teachers and pupils have been denied a voice in educational matters that affect them, both within the places they work and study and in the broader political arena (Burke and Grosvenor, 2015; Ayers et al., 2016). This literature argues for the need for teachers to be seen and respected as professionals who are competent to make key decisions regarding their students, who can be relied upon to work in the best interests of their students, and who have much to offer by way of developing new education policies. There is also a body of literature that advocates for a greater listening to young people’s voices in schools – not as a way of making schools more consumer friendly (through, for example, teacher evaluations), but as a means of embedding deep democratic change in schools and of creating inclusive institutions (see for example, Fielding and Moss, 2011).

Within the literature demonstrating the ways in which schools perpetuate maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation, neoliberal moves in education are regularly identified as major contributors to such injustices. For example, Reay (2017, p. 53) argues that the academies movement, along with the introduction of free schools, has brought about ‘redistribution’ of funding from the ‘poor to the relatively well off’. She argues that this has further exacerbated differences in the quality of education and outcomes experienced by those from middle class and those from high poverty backgrounds – maldistribution. Gillborn and Youdell (1999) demonstrated the ways in which schools made pragmatic choices in maximising their performance on league tables through the process of ‘triage’. They showed how schools would determine which students were ‘saveable’ in terms of their academic performance and which were not. Resources, time and focus were directed towards those who were perceived as being able to improve their levels of academic achievement and away from those deemed unable to do so. They argued that this negatively impacted upon both poor and BME students because of the ways in which these pupils were perceived in deficit ways – misrecognition. Ball (2013, p. 27) has argued that performative cultures in English schools have had negative impacts upon teachers’ and students’ well-being and creativity, and affected teachers’ enthusiasm for their jobs. (It is perhaps not surprising that in the current moment, England is facing a crisis in teacher numbers.) He argues that in an education system more concerned with being part of a rich and vibrant democracy rather than conforming to the pressures of marketisation schools ‘have a responsibility to develop the capabilities of parents, students, teachers, and other local stakeholders; to participate, to discuss, to challenge and critique’ (Ball, 2013, p. 26). In the current climate, however...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. English schooling, social justice and neoliberalism
• 2. School autonomy, school accountability and social justice in English education
• 3. Academisation and school collaboration: a story of six primary school leaders
• 4. New modalities of state power: neoliberal responsibilisation and the work of academy chains
• 5. Co-operating in a competitive marketplace
• 6. Alternative provision: a destination of last resort or convenient dumping ground?
• 7. The ambivalences of emancipation for social justice
• Index