Educational Austerity and Critical Consciousness: English Primary School Leaders wrestling with Educational Policy shifts

Education systems across much of Europe (and indeed the world) are going through a period of challenge around growing and globalised market pressures to improve academic performance. Governments have shifted towards a market-based understanding of education which sees competition and freedom within tightly regulated accountability measures as solutions to problems within the education system (Levin, 1998; Whitty, 2005). Indeed, Europe is described as operating transnational policy-making (Moutsios, 2007). Freire (1985) has argued that education is political and that educators are political actors. This paper considers the perspectives of English primary school head teachers in relation to educational austerity and explores the degree to which they can operate critical consciousness, which Friere viewed as essential for emancipation and transformation. The paper argues that rather than being subject to the deregulation of education with greater autonomy devolved to schools, English primary head teachers are experiencing what Helgøy et al (2007) describe as the re-regulation of education and a reduction of autonomy which these head teachers find increasingly difficult to align with their educational values

Power, agency and middle leadership in English primary schools

English primary schools are considered quasi‐collegial institutions within which staff communicate regularly and openly. The activities of staff, however, are bound by institutional norms and conditions and by societal expectations. Wider agendas of governmental control over the curriculum and external controls to ensure accountability and learning standards have influenced the development and purposes of middle leaders’ roles. This is a conceptual paper that explores issues around the agency of primary school middle leaders within a wider context of the political and educational agenda. Through a reconsideration of research conducted by one of the authors since the inception of the notion of ‘subject leaders’, we exemplify ways in which primary school middle leaders’ attitudes have developed and changed over the past 15 years. In this paper we identify attitudes to leadership, the influence of distributed leadership on primary school role‐holders and possible ways forward for middle leaders

Tropes and Tall Tales: Leadership in the neoliberalised world of English academies

Tropes and tales of heroic leadership are a common feature of media analyses and discussions of education. In the UK, for example, we see this phenomenon in reports of the so-called ‘superheads’, who are parachuted in to ‘turn around’ what are deemed to be ‘failing’ schools and more latterly, in cases of schools that are forced into academisation and taken into an Academy Trust to be ‘managed’ towards improved performance. These instances reflect a cult of leadership and embody a widespread faith in the potential of 'transformational' or 'visionary' leaders to redeem our institutions and our society. In other words, the discourses surrounding leadership speak to our deeply cherished, if potentially conflicting, desires for knowledge, power, purpose, security, freedom and a better world. At the same time, however, a growing body of literature questions the existence of leadership as a phenomenon (Lakomski, Eacott, & Evers, 2016; Samier, 2016), insisting on its imaginary and rhetorical, rather than ‘real’, status. Against this background, the current chapter is based on an analysis of interviews conducted with the senior leadership of a medium-sized multi-academy trust (MAT) comprising a group of schools that have been forced by Government to join an academy as a result of being judged as poorly performing through inspection processes. The academy trust at the centre of this chapter explicitly seeks to offer a rounded form of education to those from backgrounds traditionally excluded from such circles. The MAT thus advocates a strong social justice agenda, seeking to attract schools judged to be problematic in terms of of performance, typically located in areas of socio-economic deprivation, the tensions between this agenda and the competitive logics underpinning government policy notwithstanding. Our analysis is based on interviews with three members of the trust leadership and explores the imaginary constructions of leadership identity generated by participants during the interviews. In particular, we highlight how the hierarchical, competitive symbolic regime of the current neoliberal education policy context inevitably intrudes into these leadership identities. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the implications of these insights for leadership studies and practices, as well as for educational policy at a time of neoliberal intensification

Chasing improved pupil performance: the impact of policy change on school educators’ perceptions of their professional identity, the case of further change in English schools

Changes in education systems across Europe are a response to perceived needs to improve academic performance. The recent workforce remodelling agenda in England (2003–2005) reflected a growing concern that centralisation and the associated deskilling of teachers had gone too far. The resultant restructuring of the work of teachers, giving roles previously performed by teachers to staff without teaching qualifications, needs to be considered from the perspective of those involved. What is clear from comparative studies is that experiences of the implementation of such policies are influenced by local factors. The study reported here focuses on the effect of a significant policy change on teachers in two English local authorities through a mixture of 557 questionnaires and 86 semi‐structured interviews collected from five secondary and nine primary schools. The data focus on the changing roles of teachers and teaching assistants and the lessons to be learned for system changes beyond remodelling

From schools to Higher Education – neoliberal agendas and implications for autonomy

Neoliberal agendas have acted to limit the agency of groups and of individuals through both the imposition of boundaries and through setting up rigorous systems of accountability which together act to codify behaviours. Such systems do not so much remove freedom as influence conceptions about the alternatives available. In this article we outline the English educational policy context and the pressures placed upon first primary schools and then Higher Education establishments, considering the extent to which accountability and an emphasis on the needs of the individual impact on leadership behaviours in schools and upon academic freedoms in Higher Education. Boundaries to individual or group agency are explored drawing together lessons about the limits on professionals in these two situations

Identifying Characteristics of a “Good School” in the British and Saudi Arabian Education Systems

This study aims at establishing whether primary schools in the Saudi education system conform to the characteristics of what are referred to as ‘good schools’ in the British education system. The findings established through this study show that only 43.75% of primary schools in Saudi conform to the characteristics of what are referred to as ‘good schools’ in Britain.  Moreover, it is established that there are more similarities than differences in the roles played by headteachers in these two education systems when it comes to fostering effective schools and developing schools as learning organisations. Nevertheless, it is established that there are more headteachers in British primary schools than in Saudi primary schools who take up roles geared towards fostering effective schools and developing schools as learning organisations. This disparity has been attributed to the fact that in the Saudi education system the role of headteachers is highly regulated and constrained due to the bureaucratic and centralised nature of the country’s education system whereas in the British education system headteachers have more autonomy and control over school management. Generally, this study provides invaluable insights that can be used to improve the professional practice of educators. It illuminates different characteristics and roles that can contribute to the realisation of effective schools and schools as learning organisations. It also provides an explicit outlook towards school leadership in the global context. As the world is increasingly becoming globalised, it is crucial for educators to acquaint themselves with how different systems of education function

Risking Autonomy: Comparing Teachers and Senior Leaders in England and Turkey

Increasing workloads are allowing less time for teachers to recuperate and recover in periods of rapid change (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011) leading to teacher, teacher compliance and loss of motivation, pride and creativity (Lundström, 2015). Engagement in decision-making can be both a solution, where this facilitates a sense of teacher autonomy, or a problem, where engagement in decision-making becomes an additional burden against a heavy workload (Van Droogenbroeck, Spruyt, & Vanroelen, 2014). As Pietarinen et al. (2013) argue, workload distress is exacerbated where teachers feel a lack of control, meaninglessness and a sense of unfairness

The outsider looking in: developing deeper understandings of the complexities in ‘leading’ professional learning in schools as ‘the knowledgeable other’

This article examines leadership and practitioner professional learning (PL) across two multi-school networks. This ethnographic empirical study involved the development of research communities comprised of teacher-led research projects in collaboration with academic researchers (ourselves). We explore what the impact this type of PL and our role as ‘outsiders’ had on developing teacher agency and teacher/leader identity, and how leadership for professional learning (LfPL) emerged through these research activities. Our research sites were a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) and a Teaching School Alliance (TSA) in England. Ethnographic data were collected over a three-year period. Significantly, our approach to understanding the complexity of these learning contexts draws upon socio-cultural theory, particularly Figured Worlds to construct understandings of PL within an identity and agency framework. Further, it utilises the Bakhtinian concept of outsideness to theorise how knowledge is mobilised through these collaborations. This approach offers novel insights for conceptualising LfPL as the intra-actions and practices of our research participants as they mediate our entangled PL spaces as leaders, teachers and researchers, together with developing understandings of the complexity of academic positionality as ‘the more knowledgeable other’ among those who are actually in the know

New perspectives on Middle Leadership in schools in England – persistent tensions and emerging possibilities

To afford school middle leaders meaningful opportunities to initiate change, we must provide them with the space and flexibility to engage with agentic and creative responses to policy and practice. Whilst we argue that the tensions identified in Bennett’s seminal reviews persist, there may, nonetheless, be opportunities for school middle leaders to creatively influence educational agendas. Through engaging in a critical interpretative synthesis of school middle leadership literature, we consider how the subjectivities of such leaders are discursively constructed. We argue that a culture of performativity has diminished opportunities for middle leaders in English schools to develop a strong sense of agency, educational ideology and authentic professional responsibility. However, a current governmental focus on subject knowledge may have opened spaces for a collegial agency, despite the prevailing neo-conservative policy discourse. We thus identify, the potential for movement beyond a discursive position to one where school middle leaders take greater responsibility for developing practice to align more closely with their educational values. Utilising a dialogic theoretical perspective we examine how middle leadership in English schools is currently practiced and mediated in relation to the changing political landscape, and suggest that seemingly contradictory positions provide a fruitful site for new research