Trust and leadership in post-compulsory education: Some snapshots of displaced dissent

While education cannot function without trust, its loss in institutions sometimes goes unspoken, officially unreported, only shared in ways invisible to measurement or control. This article considers issues of trust, power and displaced dissent, providing some snapshots of participant views about questions of trust and leadership recorded in a series of 28 interviews and 242 electronic survey responses from the post-compulsory education or ‘lifelong learning’ sector in 2004‑09. This formed part of an externally funded research project which collected data in three timed data collection phases. Snapshots of displaced dissent from a minority of participants expressed disquiet regarding the level of trust operating in their educational institutions, in response to questions about ‘trust and leadership’. These snapshots are random examples of dissent emerging from those whose power to speak out in their own institutions was limited, for fear of reprisals. They are collected together to provide evidence of otherwise unspoken things that may lie beneath the silences operating in a minority of post-compulsory educational institutions regarding considerations of trust. A theoretical model of the operation of organisational trust is proposed that recommends open and consensual dialogic practices for the development of more trusting situations in post-compulsory education workplaces