Abstract
A newly intensified wave of educational reform which began in England following the General Election of 2010 has led to unprecedented increases in the numbers of publicly funded schools becoming independent of local authorities. This, together with other effects of national educational policy, is reshaping the landscape of schooling. As a consequence, all who populate this landscape – the people who lead, learn and act within it – are having to make sense of what is uncharted territory. One of the pressing questions in a complex and evolving process is about what is actually happening at the local level. How is it being reshaped?
BELMAS (the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society) responded to this question by initiating a programme of grants for small-scale research projects. Offered competitively, these grants enabled researchers to undertake studies that illuminate a range of issues, highlighted in the call for funding, concerning the landscape of the local in the context of differing local conditions. These issues include the range of types of schools that are emerging and the relationships between them, local governance arrangements and accountability patterns and the changing role of local authorities, the structures and pressures that promote competition or lead to collaboration, and the impact on leadership and leaders.
In the event, 19 projects were funded in two annual tranches (2011 and 2012). The full list of awards can be found on the BELMAS website (http://www.belmas.org.uk). Six of these projects have been reported in our sister journal Educational Management Administration & Leadership (Vol. 42, No. 3, May 2014). This special issue of Management in Education enables a further six to be reported.
All of the articles in this issue, in their different ways, explore the complex politics of school restructuring and the ways in which local circumstances provide a framework within which competing values and policy and other pressures generate complex and varied outcomes at the local level. The first article in the issue, by Tim Simkins, provides a framework for exploring such issues, presenting data on how emerging patterns of schooling differ in three local authority areas and considering the factors that might explain this.
Four articles focus on how schools are responding to the new landscape that they face. Two of these explore the ways in which schools are addressing issues of vision and purpose in the new environment: Mark Gibson’s addresses this issue directly, looking in particular at the role of sponsors in influencing the ethos and vision of a range of different kinds of academies; in contrast, Max Coates’ considers schools that have taken a particular route to protect or assert a particular vision through establishing themselves as co-operative schools. Both of these articles raise fundamental questions about how schools’ visions evolve as they address the potential tensions between maintaining integrity to their own purposes and responding to external pressures from government policy and the market.
One response to these forces is for schools to choose to come together in various, more or less formal, groupings as a way of positioning themselves in the emerging landscape. The next two articles consider the processes through which this happens: Ellie Howarth’s considers the motives that move schools to seek to come together as federations and the ways in which this occurs; and Gill Howland’s describes a particular case where attempts by schools in a local area to come together in a particular way were constrained by external forces over which they had limited control. These two articles are complemented by one by Chris Husbands (not representing a funded project, but arising from a presentation at a BELMAS national conference) which considers some of the issues raised by a key government initiative for enabling school-to-school support, namely Teaching Schools.
The final article, by Ruth Boyask, takes a wider perspective, based on a study of four local authorities. Ruth sets out four privatized models of service to schools adopted by the local authorities and shows their underpinning values and the subtle differences between them.