The Governance of Schooling

Comparative Studies of Devolved Management

Margaret A. Arnott, Charles D. Raab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134646272
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Recent reforms in the governance of schooling have affected roles, relationships and decision-making within schools and between them and the wider community. Using empirical and theoretical approaches this book describes, analyses and compares the effects of devolved management on secondary schools in a number of countries. It casts a critical light upon policy assumptions and aims, challenging assumptions about the way policy works in practice. Through a comparative international perspective, which looks at countries including the UK and the US, the conflicting options for school governance are addressed. These include: *parental participation and school management policy *professional, managerial and market principles in education *school-based decision-making and the implications of overarching government policies *devolution and centralisation. This is a timely study for practitioners in education, policy-makers in local and central government, academics and students of education policy and management.

Part I
The governance of schooling
Themes in Scottish-based research

1
The devolved management of schools and its implications for governance

Charles D.Raab

Introduction: Theoretical perspectives on the new governance of education

Devolved School Management (DSM) in Scotland, and Local Management of Schools (LMS) in England and Wales are related manifestations of the changing governance of education. They involve changes in the exercise of power and leadership within schools and in the relationship of schools to the wider system of management and control. They resemble trends in other countries, holding out the promise of useful comparisons beyond the English/Scottish ones. As mentioned in the Introduction, there are several variations in labels across and within countries; these often reflect differences of emphasis amongst various elements in devolved or decentralised management. Levacic (1998:331) concisely defines the generic ‘school-based management’ in terms of two elements:

1. decentralization to school level of responsibility for decision making…
2. the sharing of decision-making power amongst the key stakeholders at school level— head teacher, teachers, parents, students, other community members.

She argues that, in LMS, it is predominantly the first element that is emphasised, although there are also greater powers for school governors and parents. She also notes that there is a milder form of school-based management in Scotland as compared with that in England (Levačić 1995:15).

The research reported in this chapter, and in the rest of Part I of this book, deals with both aspects. It does not relegate the second element because the widening of participation beyond the traditional confines of the ‘vertical’ axis of central government, local government and teachers in schools is seen as an important potential development that casts considerable light on the full meaning of the new governance of education.¹ The research is based on the view that the new governance of education in Scotland and England, as exemplified by devolved management, represents a restructuring of:

• roles and relationships within schools, and between schools and a range of external environments that include levels of government as well as other actors or stakeholders; in particular, lay, and especially parental, participation in school decision-making is promoted;
• the pattern of accountability of teachers and other education professionals to each other; accountability to parent and other community ‘stakeholders’ is emphasised;
• the pattern of governance between or among levels of the decisionmaking system, including strategies and mechanisms of control; there is greater delegation of decisions to schools, and education authorities, whilst losing many traditional powers, adopt a strategic and enabling role whilst providing fewer services to schools;
• the flow of resources, principally money, and the mechanisms that arbitrate its flow (e.g. quasi-markets); schools compete with each other to attract pupils, as school budgets directly reflect the number of pupils;
• the educational and other values that underpin schooling; there is a heightened emphasis on measured performance, on targets for learning, and on the management of resources, and less emphasis on teachers’ traditional collegial values.

This research enables the devolved management of schools and associated education policies, such as parental choice of school, to be considered as major components of the new governance. Educational governance can be seen in the context of the general analytical framework of ‘governance’ in policy and governmental studies, where there is now an array of theoretical and conceptual constructs (e.g. steering, dependence, networks) that point up the significance of crucial aspects of change, but do not necessarily explain them. While these terms help to reclassify data about roles, patterns and actions in policy systems, the explanation of change lies elsewhere, in the macro, meso, or micro processes of the society, economy and polity. Moreover, similarities as well as differences of new forms of governance across countries or sites may invite explanations based upon alternative theories. These include political and institutional causation, economic influences, international and cross-sectoral borrowing or ‘lesson-drawing’, ideological fashion or cultural change. Although the research discussed here does not go that far, it casts light on the implementation of education policies that exemplify the new governance in different national, local and school settings; only further comparative research could help to address larger issues of policy explanation.

The policy studies literature contains a number of varying and impre-cise ‘governance’ definitions of broad applicability. Without getting drawn too far into semantics, it is worthwhile looking at some that bear upon the way in which educational governance can be understood. For Rhodes (1997:53), governance in Britain ‘refers to self-organizing, interorganizational networks’, signifying that government centralisation now coexists with fragmentation and interdependence. In this differentiated polity, policy networks characterise the policy process; a segmented executive features bargaining games between and within networks. Government interventions and direct management create unintended consequences and implementation gaps. There is a persistent tension between the wish for authoritative action and dependence on the compliance and actions of others’ (Rhodes 1997:15).

Rhodes’ stipulative definition thus equates ‘governance’ to these network phenomena and structures whilst acknowledging other meanings of that term. At the heart of the new public management, for instance, is the idea of ‘steering’, which Rhodes sees as synonymous with governance (Rhodes 1997:49). Unfortunately, he introduces needless confusion in the applicability of ‘governance’ by defining it in terms of network structures whilst also equating it with governance as a norm-setting process or activity. Compounding this incoherence is an apparent endorsement of the view that governance is also ‘the result of interactive social-political forms of governing’ (Rhodes 1997:51; emphasis added). Matters are not helped by the variety of perspectives on the concept of ‘networks’ itself (e.g. Marsh and Rhodes 1992; Jordan and Schubert 1992; Raab 1992). Nevertheless, if ‘governance’ is a more radical development of the policy-network approach purporting to denote a new way of governing that is now characteristic of Britain, it refocuses attention upon interdependent relationships among an array of structures at various levels. Although definitional issues are unresolved, ‘governance’ usefully signifies a departure from the presumption that a hierarchical, formally authoritative ‘government’ must always be the most important actor. An empirical issue for comparative analysis would concern the relative (un) importance of governmental institutions in different fields of policy. This would require analysts to demonstrate, rather than assume, a priori, the superior or inferior potency of government within the networks.

Yet an important question is whether ‘governance’ denotes a real and recent change in policy-making and government, or whether previous policy histories—including, for example, what occurred at different stages, especially perhaps implementation—could indeed be credibly rewritten in terms of the new concept. The idea that governance through networks is a new phenomenon in Britain, and that governments are no longer so capable of exercising authority, should be viewed sceptically (Peters 1997). There are two issues here: one concerns the concentration or dispersion of decision-making; the other concerns the part played by government in these processes. For Smith (1999:15; emphasis in original), the contemporary ‘shift from a directive state to a more fragmented one’ has influenced ‘notions of governance as a flexible form of control rather than government as direct control’. This conflation of structural properties with modes of action is awkward, especially in that the identifiable differentiation and network activities are said to occur not only between Whitehall and outside groups, but within the ‘core executive’ itself—the co-ordinative heart of the government machine. This is an important observation. However, the core executive has arguably for a long time been composed of multiple, interdependent institutions, whose work is done through complex network relationships; and, indeed-considering the Treasury as one of the core’s mainstays—whose ability to exert direct control has never gone unchallenged. Recent reforms in British government may have exposed the fragmentation of policy processes and posed severe challenges to co-ordination (Rhodes 1995) but they are more likely to have exacerbated these tendencies than to have created them anew.

Although relationships have varied in their degree of tightness and in other dimensions of structure and action, interdependence amongst public and private groups, decision centres, governmental levels and appointed bodies has for long been recognised as a common feature of governance-not least in the nineteenth century—in what is formally a ‘centralised’ state. Scottish education, for example, has for generations been characterised by policy-making and administrative interactions within clusters of institutions that included levels of government (and various institutions at each level), appointed bodies (‘quangos’), and representative associations (Raab 1980). At least from the 1940s to the 1980s, these were laced together by networks of connections amongst participants in a policy community in which the dynamics of trust and distrust were played out in terms of recruitment to the network and its policy activities (McPherson and Raab 1988). It is not a contradiction to say, also, that central authorities tried to use their powers and legitimate authority, albeit with varying degrees of success. There is ample evidence of how interdependence and the distribution of exchangeable resources throughout the network prevented government from always getting what it wanted, and of how the government’s attempts to steer the policy action and to shape the networks in which it participated were by no means certain to prevail. The authority and will of government were, and are, indispensable, although insufficient.

Rhodes certainly recognises that government may still exert some control (Rhodes and Marsh 1992:202–3), but the main message of the new approach is that the networks of governance, of which government is part, now prevail. Perhaps ‘steering’ is the key concept, denoting new and subtle ways in which governments remain potent actors. This is also a central theme in Kooiman’s (1993) perspective on governance, in which social complexity, dynamics and diversity are handled by new government-society interactions. ‘Interactive social-political governance’, for Kooiman (1993:3), ‘means setting the tone; creating the social-political conditions for the development of new models of interactive governing in terms of co-management, co-steering and co-guidance’. Interaction, rather than government action, sums up this approach to governance. ‘Steering at a distance’ is the way that Kickert (1995) describes the situation of new governance in Dutch higher education, but he emphasises that this ‘is not a form of government withdrawal, a partial abolition of government steering capacity’ (Kickert 1995:153) either in intention or effect. Government in the Netherlands gave greater autonomy to the higher education sector in order to increase the effectiveness of steering towards the goals of better quality, more efficiency and achieving innovations by concentrating on steering the outputs more than the inputs.

Thus, for any policy field, a governance perspective based on an analysis of networks runs the risk of neglecting the important directive and leadership roles that governments and the machinery of the state may, and often do, still perform. The extent and manner of this is obviously an empirical question, field by field, and should not be defined out of existence. Smith (1999), who adopts the ‘governing without government’ definition of governance, nevertheless acknowledges that governments may still seek to exercise authoritative control, as in education under the Conservatives: ‘[i]f the notion of governance is to be used at the domestic level in Britain then it cannot be governing without government’ (Smith 1999:28). However, control is not assured because departments compete for authority and must form alliances, exchange resources and engage in games through a range of networks that are horizontal as well as vertical in extent.

This perspective comes nearer the mark, but it is not new. It has generally been overlooked that, long before the recent conceptualisations of governance, Kogan and his colleagues (1984) criticised and supplanted the traditional description of educational government in Britain along some of the same lines. That received description was of a liberal, top-down model, based on legislation, in which local education authorities provided education and made key decisions circumscribing the work of the schools. Note that, especially in the English education context, it was not inappropriate to focus upon a rather shortened hierarchy that left the central government departments to some extent in the background in the day-to-day running of the system. In any case, traditionally and paradoxically, head teachers had great discretion over the curriculum, resource allocations, and external relations with the community and other organisations. Considering the role of local government, Kogan’s team looked sceptically at the hierarchical assumptions of the model on the basis of administrative theory, sociology and political science:

Theory challenges traditional managerial models by asking…whether policy-making originates solely from within the local authority’s authorised channels, or whether values are generated more diffusely. It asks whether the processes of arriving at policies take place more widely within the policy-making system and also among those groups who press upon that system…The structure is in fact diffuse and complex… Policy is made or modified by the interaction within a network of organisations and groups which each fulfil functions in local education governance. Conflict is possible and negotiation becomes necessary.

(Kogan et al. 1984:12–13; emphasis added)

This reformulation has a further contemporary ring in its identification of exchange and dependency theory, as well as of resources and intergovernmental relations, at the heart of the education policy system in which school governing bodies are situated:

Essentially, it views social and political actions as a process of exchange within a political model in which relationships between levels of government form a complex network of institutions, interest groups, and the like. The groups live in an environment of uncertainty produced by the scarcity of resources. They pursue interests and acquire strategic resources by creating dependencies among other actors. Authority and power provide critical bargaining levers to manipulate exchange relationships in the network…Working through a system of exchange, the operation of the intergovernmental network is shaped by the pattern of resource ownership and the structure of dependencies. This model of exchange and power is known as resource dependency theory.

(Kogan et al. 1984:16–17)

The attention devoted to policy networks thus engages debates about the role of the state, or at least of formal governmental institutions, in the policy process (Raab 1994). Atkinson and Coleman (1992:168) are emphatic that ‘proceeding to analyze the policy process as if broad state institutions are irrelevant...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: School Governance In Comparative Perspective
• Part I: The Governance of Schooling: Themes In Scottish-Based Research
• Part II: The Governance of Schooling: Studies In Other Countries