Transforming Education

Meanings, myths and complexity

Agnieszka Bates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317417859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Transforming Education challenges the current global orthodoxy that 'educational transformation' can be achieved through a step-by-step implementation of centralised, performance-based strategies for school improvement.

Complex responsive processes theory is utilised in an original way to critique leadership myths and explore the alternative, deeper meanings of educational transformation. The theory opens up new forms of understanding about how ordinary practitioners negotiate the meanings of 'improvement' in their everyday practice. It is in the gap between the emergence of these local interactions and the predetermined designs of policy-makers that educational transformation can be lost or found.

This book is an essential read for education professionals and students interested in the fields of complexity, education policy, leadership and management.

Part 1
The universe of complexity thinking

Chapter 1
Educational transformation in the global age

Thus when the God, whatever God was he,
Had form’d the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded Earth into a spacious round …
A creature of a more exalted kind
Was wanting yet, and then was Man design’d:
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form’d, and fit to rule the rest.

(Ovid AD8/1998: 4–5)

‘Transforming education’ as a global aim

This book ventures into the world of complex responsive processes to explore the rich possibilities and complexities of ‘transforming education’ and to explain how the meanings of educational transformation have become narrowly circumscribed by successive education policymakers.¹ Here, the abstract prescriptions of policy are juxtaposed with the ideas and activities arising from the conversations of groups of educational professionals, which provide meaning and purpose to their everyday practice. However, in recent times, ‘educational transformation’ has become synonymous with hegemonic regimes of performativity. Complex responsive processes theory explains why blueprints for ‘transformation’ cannot simply be encoded in policy documents and transmitted to schools for their mechanical implementation. The meanings of ‘transformation’ emerge through the myriad day-to-day responses of school leaders and teachers to these policies, the outcomes of which are uncertain. Complex responsive processes theory, therefore, challenges many of the assumptions of policymakers about the relationship between systems, organisations and the people who work in them.

The need to challenge official notions of ‘transformation’ now seems imperative as the hegemony of performativity threatens to become a global orthodoxy. Approaches to creating ‘effective’, ‘modern’ education systems in many countries are increasingly dependent on standardisation, national curricula, student performance data and accountability as ‘policy drivers’. Regular cycles of international comparative surveys are conducted by organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). These instruments of comparative analysis claim to identify policy drivers that may be utilised by diverse national governments to construct education policy (OECD 2009). In addition to PISA, a new programme of comparative of surveys was developed in 2009 by the OECD, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). The main aim of the first round of TALIS has been to provide an evaluation of how effectively the national education systems of participating countries meet the demands of the global, ‘knowledge-based economy’. TALIS 2009 asserts that the main task of many countries has been to transform ‘traditional’ models of education into ‘modern’ systems. Its key findings state that:

in many countries, education is still far from being a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are not yet being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of those practices.

(OECD 2009: 3)

The TALIS blueprint for transforming education is predicated on creating ‘knowledge-rich’, ‘evidence-based’ education systems to be achieved often at the expense of traditional educational practices and values. Far from providing a definitive solution, however, characterising education as a ‘knowledge industry’ raises some unsettling questions. What are the implications of an industrial model of modern education for school leaders, teachers and children? What is meant here by ‘knowledge’ and ‘evidence’? Is breaking with tradition necessary to transform education?

The enduring appeal for policymakers of the idea of ‘transforming’ education may be rooted in the meaning of transformation as a marked change in nature, form or appearance (Oxford English Dictionary 2014). The goal of transformative change can be found in the quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the epigraph to this chapter. Creating order out of chaos and leaving the newly formed whole under the rule of someone endowed with special attributes of consciousness and thought is presented here as the ultimate state of transformation. A similar goal can be discerned in the idea of creating modern ‘knowledge-rich’, ‘evidence-based’ education systems. Ovid’s myth of creation is premised on three assumptions. First, that it is possible to design and engineer an improved social order, analogous to the ‘spacious round’ moulded from ‘unequal portions’. Second, that the task of completing the transformation relies on a ‘spectacular’ individual, granted godlike power over its enactment. Third, that the act of creation and subsequent control over the new order are essentially ‘masculine’. These ideas could be interpreted simply as an articulation of a specific historical worldview and social relations in Ovid’s lifetime. However, as explained later in this chapter, these assumptions continue to inform some of the ‘modern’ approaches to transforming education and social change in general, thus constraining transformation within a particular finite set of possibilities.

Transformation as a ‘new’ orthodoxy

In the context of education reform in England, ‘transformation’ has entered the policymakers’ lexicon in recent years to signal changes aimed at raising the standards of pupil performance in national, ‘high-stakes’ tests and improving England’s position in international comparisons, such as PISA. The intent behind England’s approach to transforming education has been described by a senior figure in the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) as a move to ‘crack, once and for all, the historic problems of the English education system’ (Arnold 2004: i). Implicit here is the assumption that the inadequacy of the system demands a radically ‘new’ model of schooling to replace it.

A closer look at the discourse of transformation implies that it has been used by policymakers to mean a ‘new’ alternative to the ‘school effectiveness and school improvement movement’ (SESI) of the 1990s. SESI framed education reform in terms of pupil attainment measured by incremental, year-on-year improvement in national tests results in literacy, numeracy and science (Ouston 2003). Although test scores continue to be the most significant national, as well as global, measure of schools’ performance, the policies of the New Labour governments (1997–2010) introduced the idea of transformation by expressing their objectives for education as ‘transforming’ standards and skills, as well as ‘transforming’ children’s life chances, aspirations and opportunities. Numerous references to transformation in the Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (DfES 2004) convey a sense of ‘real change and improvement’, accomplished ‘quickly’. For example, as claimed by the DfES, between the New Labour coming to power in 1997 and 2004:

As well as transforming life-chances, our reforms have shattered myths about education and shown that it is possible to make real change and improvement quickly at every phase and stage of learning.

(p. 14)

The specific reforms referred to here were introduced under the name of the National Strategies for primary education: National Literacy Strategy (DfEE 1998) and National Numeracy Strategy (DfEE 1999). The idea of transformation at ‘every phase and stage of learning’ was subsequently transferred to the reform of secondary, as well as further and higher education sectors (DfES 2003; LLUK 2008; Cabinet Office Strategy Unit 2009).² The discourse on ‘transforming education’ developed post 2010 by the Coalition government emphasised competitive levers and structural changes. Measures such as improving teacher quality, modernising curricula and making schools more accountable through a better use of school performance data have been cited as policies for making England ‘one of the world’s top performers’ (DfE 2010a: 7). The structural transformation of education by the Coalition has relied on converting state schools into ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’, modelled on the Swedish free schools and American charter schools.³ While it is claimed that ‘struggling’ and ‘failing’ schools will be ‘transformed through conversion to Academy status’ (p. 14), the meaning of ‘transformation’ appears confined to statements of school status and improved scores in national tests.

The tendency towards assigning new labels to familiar, ongoing policy objectives has been accompanied by a ‘re-labelling’ of the roles of educational leaders (Gunter 2004). As noted by Gunter and Forrester (2009), the role of the headteacher in England has recently been re-labelled as ‘leadership of schools’ and no longer requires the Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). This has opened up opportunities for non-educational professionals to become Chief Executive Officers in schools, which are being increasingly re-conceptualised as business enterprises. In accordance with the vision for transforming education, school leadership has been framed as the ability to ‘manage people and money with the creativity, imagination and inspiration to lead transformation’ (DfES 2004: 109).

The reliance on ‘spectacular’ leaders, combined with a strong orientation towards standardisation, numeracy and literacy, centrally prescribed curricula, testing regimes, attainment targets and competition align English education policy with the policy directions characteristic of the Global Educational Reform Movement, or ‘GERM’. As pointed out by Sahlberg (2011: 99), GERM constitutes a ‘new educational orthodoxy’ that has spread across the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia, some Scandinavian countries and many countries in the developing world. GERM is often promoted by private donors and consultants, international development agencies and venture philanthropists who offer financial support to public education systems, but also insist on transferring management practices and values from the business world into education (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009; Ravitch 2010; Ball 2012). Within the standardisation-oriented approaches characteristic of GERM, school headteachers and principals have been elevated to a key role in improving schools through the micromanagement of teaching and learning in line with reform strategy (Sahlberg 2004).

This context has provided conditions for the emergence of the ‘Transnational Leadership Package’, or the TLP (Thomson, Gunter and Blackmore 2014). The TLP consists of normative policy prescriptions, underpinned by ‘effectiveness studies’ and focused primarily on the need of national governments to raise their competitiveness in the global economy. Often designed by non-educational experts, or simply exported to education from the corporate world, the TLP is sold across international markets in the form of generic leadership techniques that confine the role of teachers and other practitioners⁴ working in schools to ‘tactical localised delivery’ (p. x). The TLP could, therefore, be seen as yet another manifestation of education conceptualised as a global ‘knowledge industry’ (OECD 2009).

The local school in a global network

What, then, do these global tendencies mean for a ‘local’ school⁵ in England? What are the complex processes through which policies for transformation are enacted in the everyday life of primary schools? As suggested by existing international research evidence (Ball et al. 2012; Hursh 2008, 2013; Polesel et al. 2014) and original empirical data presented in this book, despite its rhetorical function, the idea of transforming education into a ‘knowledge industry’ (OECD 2009) may lead to profound changes in the nature of relationships within the ‘local’ school, though the changes may not mean a better educational experience for school children.

Before we explore these issues in more detail, let us first consider the different people who belong to the school community: teachers, leaders and other adults working in the school, the children and their families, Local Authority⁶ employees, as well as members of the local community involved in the school on a voluntary basis. Just as with educational leaders, the roles and identities of these diverse members of the school community are also being re-labelled. For example, the increasingly businesslike discourse of education reform and much of the TLP literature refer to them as ‘stakeholders’ (Hill and Matthews 2010; NCSL 2011; Wallace and Tomlinson 2012). With the rise of a neoliberal vision of English education as a quasi-market, parents are being increasingly reconstructed as consumers and reduced to the functions of ‘choice and voice’ (Bates 2013). The focus on pupil performance data as a key reform driver has led to the development of the Unique Pupil Number (UPN) system, which enables officials in Whitehall to ‘see’ the progress of any child in England on their computer screens, ‘at a push of a button’ (DfE 2010b; Lawn 2011). Teachers and school leaders are often referred to as the ‘school workforce’ and reduced to the role of ‘implementers’, in need of periodic ‘remodelling’ (Gunter 2007). A substantial body of research on policy evaluation is similarly reductive, in depicting school leaders, teachers and support staff as ‘cardboard cut-out sense-makers, just too linear and too rational, too focused and logical, too neat and asocial’ (Ball et al. 2012: 5). As explained below, complex responsive processes theory challenges these reductionist tendencies in favour of understanding people as embodied, complex and inherently social, simultaneously (trans)formed by and (trans)forming others.

The key problem with a system envisioned as a ‘knowledge industry’ is that the main task of school leaders and teachers is reconceptualised as the implementation of improvement policies in order to maximise ‘educational outcomes’ rather than development of child-centred pedagogical relations. For example, as emphasised by TALIS 2009, a ‘rich’ k...