Critical Educational Policy and Leadership Studies (CEPALS) research interest group (RIG)

Held in Bloomsbury, perceived by many as the pulsing heart of intellectual London life, and hosted in the Arts and Crafts splendour of Mary Ward House, CEPALS RIG members gathered to critically engage in the ‘study and practice of socially just leadership’.

This RIG promotes education as a public and ‘socially just’ service, and as such its remit is to share research on policy scholarship and education leadership (including methodologies and methods) to inform and support our professional practice and research.

Conveners Dr Ruth McGinity and Dr Steve Courtney (UCL and University of Manchester) designed the half-day forum under the broad title ‘Practice and professionalism’. The programme included presentations by a diverse and dynamic network of academics and professionals as specialists in their respective fields. This was followed by a discussion underpinned by a series of questions posed by our expert convenors and appointed discussant, Professor Helen Gunter (University of Manchester).

Collectively, the presentations combined to create a series of connotative chains of academic thought, centred upon the theme of the professional in education and explored from a range of perspectives. More specifically, the event was designed to stimulate thinking about what is happening within education organizations, what is happening to professionals and with professionals (individually and collectively), and importantly to provoke reflection on how we, as a RIG, may respond by identifying potential actions.

Opening the RIG event was Alison Milner, a final-year PhD student at the University of Nottingham whose doctoral research is a ‘critical, interpretive study of teacher professionalism in England and Sweden’ (Milner, 2017 ¹ ). Milner’s presentation ‘ignited’ the event with a number of ideas that set the stage, and which were subsequently built upon throughout later presentations and much discussion. Drawing on the work of Evetts (2008), Milner suggests there is a shift in professionals’ positioning. This new orientation or re-positioning, she asserts, would suggest that leadership is tending to move away from connecting with their professional communities, occupations and associations (Brandsen and Honingh, 2013) towards connecting professionally to their work organizations as the new arbiters of ethical codes and professional standards. Hence, professionals’ work competence becomes primarily defined and increasingly assessed by the work organization and increasingly less by peers and their associations, thus generating a shift ‘towards “own brand” forms of professionalism’ (Muzio and Kirkpatrick, 2011).

It is possible that this shift towards ‘own brand’ forms of professionalism is the intended or accidental outcome of considerable government education policy activity and reforms since 2010 that has resulted in leadership ‘morphing’ into new or revised forms. Gunter proposes that this may eventually constitute a re-professionalizing and/or de-professionalizing of leadership.

Indeed, leadership’s professionalism may already be ‘morphing’ and, as such, leaders perceive their very survival as necessitating professional realignment to the dominant ethos, vision and ‘own brand’ of the various larger organizations in which they increasingly find themselves ‘operating’ as opposed to ‘leading’.

The challenges ahead for leadership and the teaching profession as a whole was considered by Rob Copeland of the UCU (University College Union) and Alison Ryan, Senior Policy Advisor of the NEU (National Education Union), who focused their presentations on the union’s roles of supporting members as professionals, including collective bargaining and identification of the teaching profession’s future needs. As such, UCU are considering how best to mobilize people to become members, particularly those in the early career phase, and how best to focus on the issues professionals face, such as peer review, the REF (Research Excellence Framework), TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework), the fragmentation of roles, and lesson observations, whilst retaining meaningful bargaining powers for pay and conditions.

This notion of professional fragmentation was further developed in Viv Ellis’s (Kings College, London) presentation highlighting the range of new providers within the sphere of higher education, including Institute for Teaching (Art Ventures), Teach First, the National Institute for Education and the Policy Exchange think tank. Ellis suggests that this expansion of what he terms ‘vertical integration of providers’, whereby products and services are both generated and delivered through providers’ own supply chains, can create a monopoly wherein teachers who do not fit with the dominant theory may be excluded. The expectation that leadership professionals will willingly, hesitantly or reluctantly align themselves to, or ‘buy into’, the dominant ethos and vision of larger organizations such as multi-academy trusts (MATs) was elucidated upon by McGinity and Courtney’s presentation of their early research with a MAT. Their early findings would suggest that the education quasi-market is generating a more fluid pool of expanding and diverse provision, particularly in secondary schooling (including MATs), with differing perspectives on what constitutes professionalism, and this has consequences for leadership as a whole. Gunter expertly captured the main themes running throughout the presentations, and presented these back to the group through a series of questions designed to stimulate debate and identify possible actions.

In summary, CEPALS RIG events are opportunities for BELMAS members to be informed by, and importantly contribute to, academically challenging debate. In this instance, it presented an opportunity to examine the paradox between, on the one hand, government policy and reforms and, on the other, leadership’s professionalism, as well as where these two elide. For it is the elision between the two that creates new ground within the education quasi-market for academics to examine the challenges for leadership (Earley and Greany, 2017) and their professionalism, to theorize about ‘change’ (Greenwood et al., 2002), and consider the implications for leadership as a whole.