The Managerial School

Post-welfarism and Social Justice in Education

Sharon Gewirtz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134590629
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

The relationship between welfare and the state has undergone a sustained process of reconfiguration over the past two decades and managerialism has played a key role in this process. In education, parents are now seen as consumers and schools as small businesses, their income dependent on their success in attracting customers within competitive local 'markets'.
At the same time, management practices borrowed from business, such as target setting and performance monitoring, now play a key role in regulating schools.
What kinds of schools are the reforms producing? What impact are they having on school culture and values? What are the social justice implications of applying a business model to the provision of schooling?
In The Managerial School Sharon Gerwirtz draws on in-depth interviews with teachers in a range of secondary schools and close observation of school practices to try to answer these questions.Through a comparison of Conservative and New Labour policies, she argues that New Labour's 'third way' for education is a contradictory mix of neo-liberal, authoritarian and humanistic strands that is not in any real sense a new educational settlement.
This empirically based account of over a decade of education reform offers a unique insight into the effects of managerialism on schools and a hard-hitting analysis of the inherent tensions in a system that undoubtedly perpetrates social injustice.

1 Introduction

The changing politics of education: from welfarism to post-welfarism

This introductory chapter sets out the policy context and rationale for the book as a whole. It begins by describing the key components of the shift from welfarism to post-welfarism, the assumptions underpinning the post-welfarist settlement and the conditions out of which the shift arose. The chapter then goes on to outline the book's analytical approach.

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, the English schools system was broadly shaped by an ideology and set of languages, policies and practices which together made up what can loosely be categorised as a welfarist settlement. The term settlement is used here to refer to the specific constellation of assumptions and arrangements - political, economic, social and institutional - which framed school provision during this period. The welfarist settlement was underpinned by a broad consensus amongst powerful groups - the major political parties, the trade unions and big business - and by a significant degree of popular support. However, contestation, conflict and fragility are defining features of all settlements - they can only ever represent a temporary ‘equilibrium’ (Gramsci 1971) - and the welfarist settlement in education was no exception. The instabilities of the welfarist settlement, which gave rise to the emergence of post-welfarist policies, practices and values, will be examined later in the chapter but first I want to identify the key policy components of the shift from welfarism to post-welfarism.

Welfarism entailed a formal commitment to distributive justice; that is, to the redistribution of social goods on a more equitable basis. It was grounded in the economics of Keynesianism and the politics of corporatism and was underpinned by the ‘social democratic consensus’ (CCCS 1981). I say formal commitment because, of course, in practice, welfarism failed to eradicate enormous social inequalities - although it might have had an ameliorative effect for some - and the label corporatism thinly veils the unequal power relations between the ‘partners’. The major policy manifestations of welfarism within the field of secondary schooling were the expansion of ‘secondary education for all’ and bipartism in the immediate post-war period (sometimes referred to as the meritocratic phase), followed by the introduction of comprehensive schooling and the raising of the school leaving age (the comprehensive phase). Corporatism in education was characterised by a ‘partnership’ between the central state, the local education authorities and the teacher unions.

In the welfarist era, welfare work was governed by what John Clarke and Janet Newman have called two ‘modes of coordination’ -bureaucratic administration and professionalism - or ‘bureau-professionalism’. By mode of coordination they mean:

the complex of rules, roles and regulatory principles around which the social practices of organisations are structured - which generate typical patterns of internal and external social relationships and which, among other things, privilege certain types of knowledge.

(Clarke and Newman 1997: 5)

Within the schools system, bureaucratic administration and professionalism both had key roles to play in coordinating provision. The institutional locus of bureaucratic administration was the local education authority (LEA). Here, rules and procedures to govern such things as the allocation of resources, the building and maintenance of schools, and the organisation of school meals, transport and admissions were generated within a hierarchical framework. But professionalism also had an important part to play in the LEAs where teams of experts - for example, educational psychologists, welfare officers, advisors and inspectors - were based. Moreover, education officers were not ‘just’ administrators. Having been a teacher was a prerequisite for employment as an education officer and officers played a signiicant role in providing support and expertise to teachers, for example, through staff development services. In schools, teachers operated as relatively autonomous professionals, with the head as leading professional and ‘senior architect’ of the school's curriculum (Fergusson 1994: 102).

In the post-welfarist era the formal commitments to Keynesian economics and distributive justice were dropped and replaced by formal commitments to market ‘democracy’ and competitive individualism. Key welfarist orthodoxies were challenged, in particular the view that welfare was best provided within bureaucratic organisational formations. Now welfare bureaucrats and professionals were held to be the source of major problems rather than the source of solutions. They were branded as inefficient, self-interested and guilty of fostering welfare dependency and undermining the self-reliance of their clients.

The legislative manifestation of post-welfarism in education is a set of policies which, as shorthand, are referred to throughout this book as the post-welfarist education policy complex (PWEPC). The PWEPC is comprised of a number of disparate elements that initially emerged out of different ideological traditions and pragmatic concerns within the Conservative Party. However, as we shall see, the New Labour government first elected in 1997 not only retained but also added to the complex. I call these disparate (and at times apparently contradictory) elements a complex because of the way they combine to produce specific effects, in particular, the exertion of a greater degree of state control over schools, colleges, universities, teachers and lecturers, within a context of devolved management. The key elements of the complex that relate to the schools sector in the Conservative era (1979-97) are set out in Table 1.

In addition to discourses of choice and diversity, the complex is permeated by a utilitarian discourse of efficiency, effectiveness, performance and productivity. Its elements combine to constrain schools and teachers whilst increasing central control over the school system. First, the abolition of secondary picketing and teachers’ negotiating rights constitute mechanisms for depressing wages. Second, the PWEPC has given agents within the state an enhanced capacity to define the content and desired outcomes of education through the national curriculum, testing and the standardisation of initial teacher training. And third, through Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education), the market and performance tables, the PWEPC has enabled the state to attempt to ensure that those outcomes are attained in the most efficient ways. In this context, the market mechanism is meant to function as a system of resource allocation in which resources low away from ‘low-performance’ (unpopular) schools and towards ‘high-performance’ (popular) ones. The system was designed in part to ensure that only minimal funds are spent on schools that are under-performing, and where schools are seriously under-performing (i.e., ‘failing’) Ofsted can set in motion moves to close or amalgamate them. Within schools, the efficient use of resources is encouraged by devolving to headteachers control over their own budgets and by giving them a financial incentive, through per capita funding, to spend resources in ways which will lead to improved performance.

Table I Key school-related elements of the post-welfarist education policy complex, 1979-97

Key school-related elements	Legislation
Abolition of secondary industrial action	1980 Employment Act
Removal of teachers’ negotiating rights, imposition of new teaching contracts and new pay and promotional structures	1987 and 1991 Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Acts
National curriculum, national testing at four ‘key stages’ and performance tables	1988 Education Reform Act
Local management of schools and per capita funding	1988 Education Reform Act
Parental ‘choice’ (open enrolment) and ‘diversity’ (i.e., new types of school, e.g., grant-maintained schools, city technology colleges and other specialist schools). Increased representation of parents on governing bodies. The Parent's Charter (DES 1991; DFE 1994a)	1980, 1986, 1988 and 1993 Education Acts
Ofsted and the new inspection regime	1992 Education (Schools) Act
Establishment of Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and subsequently Teacher Training Agency to oversee teacher training, and publication of centrally determined criteria upon which approval of courses is based	Circulars 3/84, 9/92 and 14/93 and 1994 Education Act
Each governing body required to set performance targets for its pupils in all public examinations and key-stage assessments and make them public	1997 Education Act

These reforms were accompanied by a ‘discourse of derision’ (Ball 1990a) that was mobilised against teachers and local authority bureaucrats, in an effort to manufacture a new common sense in support of post-welfarist policies. As Ross Fergusson explains:

Teachers were denigrated as self-interested and unaccountable. And while self-interest is normalized as part of the discourse of market relations, and elsewhere is celebrated as the engine of progress, it is seen in this instance as invalidating teachers’ claims to professionalism. Other routes to breaking bureau professional power entailed the public questioning of the competency of teachers, allegations of the failure of the comprehensive system, the down-skilling of teachers’ professional knowledge through the exclusion of theory in favour of more instrumental forms of initial training and in-service staff development... Local education authorities came under attack as part of the wider attack on local democracy... They were said to be part of the bureau-professional power bloc, controlling the character of local schools, causing high public spending, and imposing ‘politicized’ values which challenged some of the key assumptions of social relations and normalities.

(Fergusson 1998: 230)

Bureaucratic modes of coordination were held to be both ineffective and inflexible, as the US academics, Chubb and Moe, passionate advocates of choice in education, explain:

Bureaucracy vitiates the most basic requirements of effective organization. It imposes goals, structures, and requirements that tell principals and teachers what to do and how to do it - denying them not only the discretion they need to exercise their expertise and professional judgement but also the flexibility they need to develop and operate as teams. The key to effective education rests with unleashing the productive potential already present in the schools and their personnel. It rests with granting them the autonomy to do what they do best . . . [T]he freer schools are from external control the more likely they are to have effective organizations.

(Chubb and Moe 1990: 187)

Somewhat paradoxically, given the constraints imposed by the national curriculum, testing and a stringent inspection regime, the PWEPC was designed, at least in part, to ‘unleash the productive potential’ of school managers whilst constraining what were seen as the stultifying bureaucratic procedures and attitudes of LEAs. The idea was that by giving headteachers and governors control over their budgets and by making school income dependent on attracting custom, senior managers in schools would have both the tools and the incentive to behave in more cost-effective, flexible, competitive, consumer-satisfying and innovative ways. One of the key rationales underpinning the reforms, then, was that market forces and more efficient management techniques would help raise standards in schools. The underlying assumption was that if schools were given autonomy to respond to market forces (within the broad constraints set by the national curriculum, national testing and Ofsted's inspection criteria) then any failure to improve and boost recruitment could be blamed on poor management and teaching.

It was in accordance with such thinking that corporate and bureau-professional modes of coordination were undermined and in their place attempts made to erect new managerial regimes. The essential diferences between the archetypal professional/bureaucrat and the archetypal new manager are succinctly captured by Clarke and Newman as follows:

By contrast with the professional, the manager is customer focused and is driven by the search for efficiency rather than abstract ‘professional standards’. Compared to the bureaucrat, the manager is flexible and outward looking. Unlike the politician, the manager inhabits the ‘real world’ of ‘good business practices’ not the realms of doctrinaire ideology .. . The significance of management as a regime lies in the claim that managers ‘do the right things’. It is this which underpins management as a mode of power and is associated with an insistent demand that managers must be given the ‘freedom’ or the ‘right to manage’.

(Clarke and Newman 1992a: 6)

The PWEPC demands the realignment of school practices to performance criteria set by the state and managerialism is the device which has evolved to effect this realignment, in particular through the strategies of target-setting, performance monitoring and a closer surveillance of teachers. Crucially, the PWEPC exists within a wider economic and policy environment which itself constrains teachers and makes a powerful contribution to the restructuring of their work. First, in periods of high unemployment, ‘the dull compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1976) is likely to constitute, for many teachers, an enormous incentive to acquiesce to the pressures of post-welfarism. In addition, the increase in poverty generated by labour market restructuring, unemployment and the wider post-welfarist policy complex (Hills 1995; Piachaud 1999) places enormous pressures and constraints on the work of schools and teachers within them.

However, the shift from welfarism to post-welfarism has, of course, not been as neat and tidy as my account so far might suggest and the boundaries between the two eras are blurred. For example, as Clarke and colleagues (1994: 5) have pointed out, ‘managerialism in the public sector has a confused and contradictory political history’. Indeed Clarke et al. suggest that some of the public sector management theories which came to dominate in the late 1980s and 1990s may have had their roots in the practices and thinking of the new urban left councils of the early 1980s. Furthermore, market forces and managerial modes of coordination were not simply and unproblematically imposed on a passive and undifferentiated work force. The processes and practices of markets and managerialism have been variously welcomed, agonised over, contested and reworked by public sector managers and workers, and the impact of managerialism has been - and indeed continues to be - uneven (Clarke et al. 1994, 2000). Nevertheless, as we shall see, it is no doubt the case that post-welfarist policies have altered significantly the conditions within which public-sector workers in general and teachers in particular operate, forcing them to respond in some way, whether by enthusiastic compliance, reluctant implication, subversion or outright resistance.

But how do we begin to explain the emergence of the PWEPC? First of all, it is important to recognise that the English educational policies of the 1980s and 1990s were not unique. Similar policies have been advocated and introduced in other countries - for example, Sweden, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - across a whole range of public-sector services (Whitty et al. 1998). The ideological roots of managerialism in education can be seen in part to lie in critiques of business management by US economists in the late 1970s and 1980s. The central plank of these criticisms was that business managers, operating within inflexible and over-regulated corporations and within an over-interventionist state, were inefficient, uninnovative and uncompetitive. The answer lay in a free-market economy, the reassertion of the ‘managerial prerogative’ or ‘the manager's right to manage’, the marginalisation of trade unions and new management techniques (like Total Quality Management and Human Resource Management). Those arguments were in turn adopted within some sections of British industry as well as by New Right politicians:

At the level of political debate, the New Right presented a new view of British management as well as its traditional pejorative focus on the trade unions. Though the latter were clearly identified with considerable inefficiencies in the operation of the labour market, British managers were also seen as contributing to the poor performance of the British economy. Initiatives were devised which would enhance the professionalism of British managers and improve their training and educational credentials . . . To achieve a level of international parity management needed to be understood as a strategic activity demonstrating a proactive capacity, a reversal of the 1970s image where a corporatist environment had denuded much of its entrepreneurial space. Behind many of these developments lay a commitment to re-establish an unfettered market economy where management could take the initiative; planning, controlling and co-ordinating the factors of production. Less constrained decisions could be made which more closely reflected codes of business efficiency and were particularly related to the specific needs of individual companies . . .

(Ozga 1995: 9-10)

Subsequently, these same ideas were applied to management in the public sector. Alongside education, health, housing, social work and the criminal justice and benefits systems have all been restructured with a view to al...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Managerial School
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The changing politics of education: from welfarism to post-welfarism
• PART I Post-welfarism and the reconstruction of English schooling
• PART II Assessing post-welfarism in education
• Bibliography
• Appendix: Notes on the research methods deployed in the two empirical studies informing Part I
• Index