Abstract
This book provides considerable insight into the widespread rhetoric of ‘school autonomy’ through a detailed case study of one of England’s academy schools. These are schools which have been divorced from local government and are now either self-managed or, increasingly, managed by ‘multi-academy trusts’. Internationally, the concept of autonomy has been used in various ways, often to denote schools being given more scope for decision-making while still within a local government framework. This kind of autonomy is fundamentally democratic in intent and can enable greater professionalism and community involvement.
This book however examines the neoliberal version of ‘autonomy’. It describes the situation in US charter schools and Swedish free schools, before providing details of academy governance. In England, where the majority of secondary schools and nearly a quarter of primary schools are now academies, these schools are cut adrift from local democratic control though still subject to high-stakes national surveillance as with other schools. This book shows clearly how the tensions open the way for a petty-minded and destructive managerialism.
The situation has recently hit new levels of crisis, as many academies have been consolidated into ‘trusts’ which have the legal status of businesses (public limited companies). The schools no longer have control over their own assets, and thus have far less autonomy in practice than previously within the local authority. Cases of financial maladministration include trustees centralising the schools’ supposedly autonomous budgets while awarding themselves massive salaries (the highest for a trust CEO is over £400,000). There are hundreds of cases of trustees and CEOs awarding large contracts to companies owned by themselves or family members.
Researched at an earlier stage, ‘Inside the autonomous school’ is based on an extended case study of one urban secondary school, including interviews with management, governors and staff. It shows little evidence that the teachers are taking collegial decisions, but plenty that they are subject to managerial hyper-surveillance. Indeed, the ‘trust’ has effectively marginalised the individual school’s governing body (an elected group of staff, parents and local representatives).
The case study school is anonymised, so it is impossible to know if anything is understated here. We are told of some early success, but not whether it might have arisen largely due to population change (a fairly common occurrence since academies, as well as church schools, were given power over their admission procedures). This is not to take away credit for what the head and staff have done, but to warn against exaggerated beliefs in ‘leadership’ or the benefits of academisation.
The authors make good use of Lubienski’s distinction, from a study of US charter schools, between educational/pedagogical and administrative/managerial innovations, with the latter predominating. Behind the rhetoric of school autonomy, we learn that the trust has imposed a ‘house style’ for lesson planning. Essentially, this is the untheorised lesson structure known as the ‘four part lesson’ resulting from a central government directive. This lesson structure was not always observed in the case study school, but systems of surveillance ensured that it became widespread.
Surveillance included termly formal lesson observations imitating national school inspections and weekly drop-in observations during senior managers’ inspectorial ‘learning walks’. This added to levels of anxiety, as teachers planned their lessons according to the current requirements since they never knew when a manager might walk in to observe their lesson. Management expected to be able to see progress during the course of each single lesson! Without that, the lesson would be graded unsatisfactory and the teacher required to undertake extra train.
This fed down into the petty dictatorship of heads of department doing their own learning walks too: I do learning walks as well. I do them every week. I make sure that I go to every single classroom, and check that the teachers are ok with the behaviour, but also that the students are learning, and there are learning objectives in place and lessons are being planned and stuff like that.
It is scarcely necessary to point out the hollowness of such ‘quality control’; the discourse here is of conformity and performativity, fulfilling surface requirements with no thought about pedagogy or the substance of learning.
There are regular checks of students’ workbooks and how teachers are marking them. ‘Quality assurance’ is based on petty rules such as insisting that students have a date, underlined, on every piece of work. For some bizarre reason, images of any kind are banned so that workbooks consist entirely of writing. Homework has to be set by a leading member of the department, so it might have little relationship to a class’s current work. Any teacher found not conforming to managerial requirements has to attend weekly training sessions!
It would be wrong to claim that all academies are run like this, or indeed that all non-academies are not. However, academy trusts have become the trendsetters with regard to this kind of top-down control, largely because teachers have less opportunity to refuse. As the book explains, executives and managers with no educational experience have been brought in. Although younger staff who have known no difference often respond positively, at least for a while, this authoritarian management style discourages risk-taking and soon leads to burnout and disillusionment. Such deprofessionalisation has resulted in massive staff turnover in England, and plummeting numbers applying for teacher training.
This book gives considerable insight into the incursion of a business culture into a school. We see the hype of promotional activities: the principal even commissioned a musical about how the school was ‘turned around’. Teachers no longer work on an agreed pay structure, but rewards are individualised through performance pay shrouded in secrecy. Some teachers are clearly conscious of what is driving the school: The difference between this Academy and a more traditional school in my experience is that this is run like a business. The more kids we get in the more money we get, and that seems to be all that matters. And how we get more kids in is through success in exams. So the SLT [senior leadership team] have these completely unrealistic expectations about kids’ progress. Like, say if you compare to business, if you make a 10,000 profit one year, it is unreasonable to expect 40 million profit the next year, and this is what the expectations here are like.
If it weren’t so tragic and anti-educational, some of the episodes would be funny. The school management read some positive comments about a form of student self-evaluation known as ‘traffic lights’ in a report written by the Ofsted [government] inspectors about a nearby school. Suddenly this is mandatory, and ‘most classrooms had a poster on the wall, with a picture of a red, amber and a green light’. As one teacher explains, There’s initiatives coming left right and centre in this Academy . . . Believe it or not, I actually failed an observation [carried out by senior staff] because I didn’t use those cards. Seriously! Then after a while the Ofsted came and told us that the cards are rubbish. You know what happened the next day? We were told: don’t use the cards; don’t use the cards.
Although only based on a single case study school, this book is rich in detail and insight. It shows what is happening in England not only in many academies, especially those in multi-academy trusts, but indeed across the system. When Stephen Ball many years ago referred to the ‘terrors of performativity’, the phrase seemed to be somewhat overdramatic, but situations such as described in Ainscow and Salokangas’ book show the reality. There is growing resistance, but sadly too many skilful and experienced teachers have ended up walking away from the teaching profession altogether.