Improving schools in poor areas: It’s not about the organisation,structures and privatisation,stupid!

Who or what is the problem?

One of the themes I have been pursuing persistently in my research is that the business paradigm that is given fullest expression in the notion of the ‘managerial school’ (Gewirtz, 2002) is an alien interloper, and it has no legitimate or proper place in schools – and why would it? Schools are quintessentially ‘relational places’. They are the sites where young people engage in identity formation as they seek to work out who they are, where they fit, where they are going and how they can make sense of things.

The way in which I came to this realisation was through a pioneering piece of research myself and colleagues did in the mid 1990s in a context where very large numbers of young people were switching off, tuning out of and giving up on school. The official policy explanation was that they were not prepared to put an appropriate effort into schooling, and they were therefore seen as ‘dropping out’. Our suspicions were that it was much more complicated than that, especially for young people who came from contexts of poverty or so-called ‘disadvantage’. Unlike the conventional approach to doing research on this topic that merely involved collecting statistical evidence and leaving it at that, what we did was have detailed ‘conversations’ with 209 young people about ‘what was going on in their lives’ at the time they left school. The abbreviated story on what we found confirmed our suspicions, well captured in the title of our report Listen to Me, I’m Leaving (Smyth et al., 2000). Young people told us they became disenchanted with school because of its inability to recognise or respect them – as individuals, their classed backgrounds, their cultural histories and dispositions, and the aspirations they had for their futures. In other words, when things did not work out educationally for these young people, the official explanation was that it was them who were the ‘problem’ – not the system, an irrelevant curriculum that was geared to improving international economic competitiveness, or an indifferent and hostile pedagogy. What clearly needs to be separated out here is the crucial distinction C.W. Mills (1971) made between what he termed ‘personal troubles’, meaning things that ‘occur within the character of the individual and within the range of . . . immediate relations to others’ (pp. 14–15), and ‘public issues’, which he said are ‘matters that transcend . . . local environments of the individual’ and that ‘involve . . . a crisis in institutional arrangements’ (p. 15).

The landmark book we produced out of this unique piece of research was titled ‘Dropping out’, Drifting Off, Being Excluded: Becoming Somebody without School (Smyth & Hattam, 2004). Note the scare quotes around the category of ‘dropping out’ indicating our scepticism about this nomenclature, and instead, the emphasis we place on the systematic exclusion of young people contained in the words ‘drifting off, being excluded’, and the agentic tones implicit in their acting against the institution of schooling in ‘becoming somebody without school’. We had re-positioned them from being victims and the ‘problem’ to putting the focus squarely back on the system and its policies that were failing them and damaging them.

Who is prepared to step out?

Listening to the stories of young people who had been wilfully damaged by an uncaring education system was personally distressing to us as researchers and human beings, and was clearly not something we could sustain indefinitely in the interests of our own mental health. Our next research project involved a search for schools that were somehow defying systems’ imperatives to become more like businesses, and that had instead found ways of working ‘under the radar’ in terms of locating spaces where they could work in the interests of these young people in what was otherwise a hostile environment. We identified and researched what was happening in six secondary schools and we presented their stories in a book titled Teachers in the Middle: Reclaiming the Wasteland of the Adolescent Years of Schooling (Smyth & McInerney, 2007). Teachers in this study were in the ‘middle’ in all kinds of ways, but most importantly, they were in the middle politically between a set of systems imperatives that were saying one thing, and students whose lives and backgrounds were demanding something quite different and much more nuanced. Our reference to ‘reclamation’ is code for what these schools were doing in wrestling back what had been taken from them in terms of professional judgements about how to work with these students, by a policy framework that was seemingly prepared to ‘waste’ them in the interests of sustaining the purity of an inappropriate ideological model – hence our reference to what was being left in its wake – a ‘wasteland of the adolescent years of schooling’. Some of the chapter headings of the book give a clue as to what the alternative looked like, including:

Without going into the detail, which I don’t have the space to deal with here, suffice to say, it is clear that what we had found were schools (all of them in areas of disadvantage and poverty) that were reinventing themselves so as to engage young people. The shift in emphasis is important to note – it was the schools that were engaging the students, rather than the contemporary nomenclature that puts the emphasis on ‘student engagement’ – which makes it sound like it is the students’ responsibility. In other words, these schools had worked out how to position themselves so that they became advocates for young people, and argued that it was the responsibility of the school to fit itself around the young people, rather than the other way round. When that did not happen, it was the school that had ‘failed’ not the young person! Clearly, these were defiant schools in the sense that they were not prepared to ‘write off’ these young people because they were different – which is what the system was prepared to do, while blaming them for their alleged shortcomings.

But, it is much more complicated than just schools!

By this point, we had come to the realisation that disadvantage could not be understood or acted upon, if it was seen as being confined to schools. We needed to understand what was happening to and going on in the communities in which these schools were located – and we looked at one that was engaging in a Neighbourhood Renewal Programme, an outside attempt to change communities for the better, sometimes referred to in the literature as ‘area-based initiatives’. The official agenda of the community renewal programme was one of attempting to bring about change by ‘linking up’ outside agencies (housing, welfare, mental health, local government) to schools, with a view to bringing a concerted approach to bear on the ‘problem’ of poverty and associated educational disadvantage. While this approach sounded to us like it had the right kind of inflection, in the end we were not totally convinced (and have become even more so since, see Harrison, 2015), that this approach despite its fine sounding ideals really had its heart in the right place. What we found was an approach to community reform that alleged to be about the interests of the community, but in which things got very murky in the implementation. Our research was in the early days of the renewal attempt, and we were clear about acknowledging that the evidence was not yet in, but that some of the early indicators looked promising. Hindsight is a great teacher, and we have subsequently found out that agencies can have impure motives, and in this instance, our reading of the early indicators proved to be misleading. Notwithstanding, myself and colleagues produced two books that attempted to look at the messy (and controversial) nexus between school and community reform – one titled Critically Engaged Learning: Connecting to Young Lives (Smyth, Angus, Down, & McInerney, 2008) and the other that reported less on what occurred but that rehearsed our disappointment and reservations, and the imperative to always keep ‘deficit’ discourses clearly in mind even when they might be subtly and skilfully buried. Our Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal: Social Justice in Exploitative Times (Smyth, Angus, Down, & McInerney, 2009) had a much more activist stance than we had seen in the renewal initiative, especially around our keystone notion of ‘relational solidarity’ which we took to mean ‘authentic’ rather than ‘synthetic’ partnerships.

What then needs to be done differently?

The standout hallmark from my research of schools in contexts of disadvantage that are making a difference to the life chances of young people is that they are political places that profoundly understand their contexts, the impediments and obstacles they confront, that are not distant and remote from the communities in which they are located, and they have what we described in the title of one of our books as the quality of Hanging in with Kids in Tough Times (Smyth, Down, & McInerney, 2010). ‘Hanging in’, as we use the term here, is really code for a passionate belief (even a liking) of these young people, and conveying to them a strong view that they are indeed capable of achieving, if those around them are prepared to go the extra yards with them. None of this is to suggest of course that schools can compensate for the social disfigurement wrought as a consequence of a grossly tilted playing field, made even more so by contemporary reform processes that seem bent on demeaning, belittling and blaming them for who and what they are. But, recognition of this is a crucial first step.

Another way of looking at it is that these are ‘connected’ schools in the sense that they have the courage to connect with and contest some ‘big ideas’ (indicated in the chapters of the book) like the following:

What also marks these schools out as distinctive is that they have an active rather than a passive hue about them. What animates them is that they are ‘doing’ places, for example, that they are passionate about:

The approach they adopt is one of displaying a preparedness to problematise the status quo in effect saying, ‘things don’t have to be this way’, and recasting them in ways in which their clientele has a genuine sense of ownership, in contexts where they might otherwise be treated as passive recipients.

Where this book ends up is arguing that secondary schools as we currently know them are deeply mired in the flawed neoliberal project of meritocracy, and as such, they need to be totally recast and reinvented around a new set of ‘scripts, fragments and possibilities’ (Chapter 8). How this might occur is around the archetype of what we call the ‘relational school’ – which has four dominant motifs to what it does:

These dispositions are not presented as prescriptions, but rather as an ensemble of the unfinished business of the ‘critically engaged school’ (more about this shortly).

What about those who are shoved out, pushed out or discarded (the most vulnerable)?

While we wait patiently for the recasting of the high school, the casualties will continue to mount as the neoliberal ideology bites deepest into those least well equipped to push back. It is among the working class and marginalised groups who are ‘othered’ by this marketised version of schooling that the ugliest deformities will be produced. In one of my most recent research projects, I have explored what happens when young people who have been propelled out of school (let us be honest, that is what it is) are presented with a more hospitable context in which to re-engage with learning, compared to the one that extirpated them.

We were interested in finding out from young people themselves, those who had ‘dropped out’ of school and who had resumed learning in an alternative programme: (1) the conditions that had led to them leaving school, (2) how they found their way back into learning and what was different about the programmes in which they had resumed learning, and (3) how re-engaging with learning had changed their lives.

One of the unexpected perversities we encountered early on in the research was the quite contradictory situation in which the education system that had damaged these young people in the first place was the same system that was seemingly trying to rescue or recuperate them through providing a more humane alternative – albeit by placing them in off-site programmes out of sight and away from mainstream schooling. This continued to perplex us, and raised questions about the real sincerity of alternative programmes.

As to the substance of our research, what did we find? In respect of the reasons for leaving school, we were given the usual suspects, among them: bullying that was not properly addressed by schools, despite the existence of bullying polices; infractions with teachers over often minor issues of behaviour and dress codes; escalated power struggles with teachers who seemed to know nothing about young lives; inflexible and indifferent approaches by schools that were remote from the complex lives of young people outside of school and irrelevant and boring curriculum, along with uninspiring teaching.

On the other hand, we heard about some radically different and more humane approaches in re-engagement programmes, where young people did not present with the usual middle-class attributes that are so important for success in mainstream schooling, including curriculum constructed around students’ interests; behaviour management that was dealt with in relational and respectful low key ways that were not allowed to escalate; no requirement for school uniforms, and students who formed less institutionalised relationships with teachers; smaller class sizes where they could receive individualised attention; being allowed to work at their own pace and not pressured to deliver on timelines that were unrealistic for them; greater understanding about the need for flexibility around the complexity and messiness of young lives; being treated like adults rather than small children; not having their past histories and family backgrounds held as an impediment against them and overall, being told that they are capable of achieving, in contrast to past experiences of reinforced failure.

In terms of the impact on their lives, we heard that being in the programme had literally saved their lives – otherwise, some of them would have been dead; this was the first time many of them had experienced success in anything; their health had improved and many of them were off drugs and other forms of substance abuse and they were getting their lives back together and could see productive futures for themselves.

The way we described the re-positioning that occurred here around these young people is graphically reflected in the title of the book we wrote about them From Silent Witnesses to Active Agents: Student Voice in Re-engaging with Learning (Smyth & McInerney, 2012). The title comes from the BBC TV forensic pathology series ‘Silent Witness’ where a forensic pathology team dismembers dead people on dissecting tables in solving major crimes. As we put it:

. . . like its TV namesake, young people in schools are treated with pathological and forensic detachment in diagnosing what is allegedly wrong with them and how they got to be that way. In the process, they are officially denied what amounts to a voice in a context in which their lives, families, neighbourhoods and communities are being scrutinised and examined in policy terms for all manner of deficiencies, and then reconstructed in ways that will supposedly make them wholesome again, while also improving national economic competitiveness. This is the stuff of pure fantasy! (p. 1)

In contrast, we saw what was possible when young people were constructed as ‘active agents’. In the book, we go to some lengths to show the growing mismatch between what politicians argue schools ought to be doing, and the reality of what young people themselves want from schooling.

Whose knowledge is it anyway?

In the seventh book is this continuing research programme entitled Becoming Educated: Young People’s Narratives of Disadvantage, Class, Place and Identity (Smyth & McInerney, 2014), we ask the most obvious question of all: what does it mean to be involved in the process of becoming educated? – and we ask this from the perspective of young people, in particular, those experiencing it from backgrounds of disadvantage. Here, we cast our net considerably beyond notions of improving classroom pedagogy (important as that might be), to consider some more expansive issues. The titles of some of our chapters give a flavour:

We present these issues as a ‘critical constellation’ (p. 9) of almost verboten or taboo topics that are pushed off the agenda or unceremoniously buried in official discussions and explanations about young people’s learning. They are difficult and contentious issues – some would even label them ‘wicked problems’ in the sense of being intractable – in which case they need to be avoided because confronting them requires admitting that inequalities are not natural but are constructed in the way we endorse particular social structures. Officially, it is much safer to keep discussion to instrumental and technical matters like: standardisation, a focus on core curriculum subjects, the importance of a uniform prescribed curriculum, improving results on high stakes testing, organising schooling around models from the corporate world, and naming and shaming under-performing schools (p. 5).

To our mind, and those of the young informants in the study, these matters are a gross deflection from the real issues that impact their lives, like the following:

When these kinds of questions are foregrounded, as they were by the young people in our study, then it becomes possible to re-frame what it means to become educated. As we discuss in the final chapter of the Becoming book, learning is able to move transcend what kids call ‘boring meaningless shit’ (Novinger & O’Brien, 2003); it becomes possible to puncture the ‘hands on’ myth; aspirations as the new battleground of educational reform (p. 137) are able to be seen as not residing exclusively in individual attributes and shortcomings and we are able to problematise whether the young people in the study do indeed come from, ‘broken communities’, or whether this is just another convenient way of categorising them in order to avoid confronting the more complex issue of inequality.

These and related matters are interrogated intensely in the theory-busting book I wrote with Terry Wrigley entitled Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling (Smyth & Wrigley, 2013), and which Terry has alluded to in some detail in another article in this issue.

How does this all come together?

The ninth and final book (is there ever such a thing?), in what is really my lifetime research project, looks across all that I have discussed so far in this article, and presents an archetype that myself and my colleagues call the socially just school, in which the sub-title – making space for youth to speak back – stunningly reveals the underpinning agenda (Smyth, Down, & McInerney, 2014). There are eight distinct domains we explore in the construction of our alternative to the neoliberal school, and the topics are well reflected in the chapters (which the reader is strongly urged to read further):

The culminating chapter on critically educated hope epitomises in many respects what we envisage as the socially just school, while building upon Maxine Greene’s (2000) notion of Releasing the Imagination. The reason Greene (2000) is helpful to us here is because she points to the diminished focus that comes with current dominant thinking ‘small’ policy perspectives – the technical, the testable, the measurable, the manageable, the verifiable – all of which ‘screen . . . out the faces and the gestures of individuals, of actual living persons’ (p. 11). As we put it in our book:

Along with Greene, we are arguing the need to reinsert the large or ‘big’ perspective that reasserts the primacy of context, not as background ‘noise’, but as the essence – the messy, the contingent, the emotional, the tragic and the traumatic – along with discussion about how these get to be constructed and the forces that sustain and maintain them. (p. 173)

Confronting the deformities produced by ‘small’ policy neoliberal thinking, we argue, requires adopting a courageous simultaneous position on three fronts:

How do we do it?

I did say, somewhat facetiously, a moment ago, that there was no such thing as a last book! Well, there is a 10th, and it is titled Doing Critical Educational Research: A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth (Smyth, Down, McInerney, & Hattam, 2014). What this volume does is chronicle how I have done my critical ‘intellectual craftsmanship’, to borrow a term from C. W. Mills (1971), while also pointing to the challenges still remaining for the next generation of scholars. The book is not at all in the genre of a methodological text, because like Mills, I disavow the whole methodological fetish in research. The book is much more of a mapping of the intersection between my biography, the cultures I have variously inhabited, and the history of the times I have moved through. For me, this book is much more than an ‘intellectual rebellion’ (Thomas, 1993) – rather, it represents a sober identification of the four key anchor points that have sustained my scholarly passion over so many years in seeking to create a more socially just world.

I can think of no more apt way to sign off on that book and this essay, than by re-iterating what I depicted in the book as the ‘critical anchor’ points that have animated me as a scholar. These anchors are given expression in a number of what I call ‘doings’: