Meeting the needs of local communities and businesses: From transactional to eco-leadership in the English further education sector

Abstract

Leadership in the post-incorporation English further education system has not been distributed in nature, but transactional, driven by the external demands of funding and inspection regimes. However, in the light of the current rhetoric of localism in further education policy there is a view that distributed leadership would be an appropriate alternative form of leadership within this context. This article reviews the education literature and argues that distributed leadership should be introduced to the sector, but that on its own this will be insufficient for addressing the government’s agenda of meeting the human capital needs of businesses, needs-based equity for disadvantaged adults, or the wider benefits of education. This is because distributed leadership, whilst involving a dispersion of responsibility, may not equate to a dispersion of power. To disperse power to local areas and to facilitate an authentic distributed leadership focused on local stakeholders a policy of localism that encourages self-governance and open systems is needed. More specifically flexible accountability arrangements are required that encourage strategy and leadership at the local level. Such distributed leadership embedded within a local governance that facilitates dispersed power to key local stakeholders is similar to what is described as eco-leadership in the leadership literature.

Keywords

Distributed leadership eco-leadership further education transactional leadership managerialism

Introduction

There has been a significant difference in leadership between the experience of post-incorporation further education (FE) colleges in England and that of schools (Lumby, 2003). From 1993 onwards, leadership in FE has been driven by incorporation and the resultant FE quasi-market, which through centralised funding formulae and inspection frameworks has created a hierarchical and autocratic form of leadership (Jameson, 2008: 12) focused on achieving government targets (Boocock, 2013; Elliott, 1996; Randle and Brady, 1997). Such transactional, or managerial leadership, in which compliance is sought through rewards and punishments, continued under the New Labour, coalition and Conservative governments between 1997 and 2017. This contrasts with the distributed leadership discussed in the school literature. Within this context, schools have operated more organically through ‘systemic leadership’ involving many teachers adopting a leadership role throughout the school hierarchy (Harris, 2014).

Distributed leadership under the current Conservative administration is now on the agenda as part of a wider narrative of more devolved rather than central decision-making within a policy of localism in the FE sector (Keep, 2016). Support for distributed leadership is further promoted by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF), which was established in 2013 to ensure an ‘effective up-to-date workforce (in FE) supported by good leadership, management and governance’ (Hughes, Berryman and Sheen, 2015: 4). Prior to the introduction of the ETF the Learning and Skills Information Service (LSIS) also supported a more distributed form of leadership in FE:

One of the key challenges facing the sector is to move away from the age of the heroic leader to one where leadership within organisations is a genuine team effort; where leadership is distributed throughout the organisation, and senior teams and governance structures are created that contain the right individuals with all the skills, knowledge and qualities needed to lead and manage in a complex changing environment (LSIS, 2013: 6).

Distributed leadership is further suggested by Lord Lingfield in his report entitled Professionalism in Further Education Review (Lingfield, 2012), which encourages increased trust in professionals to direct the future success and priorities in FE colleges.

In this article, the funding and inspection of FE colleges, which has shaped a transactional (or managerial) form of leadership, is outlined. A review of the FE policy literature on post-incorporation FE colleges between 1993 and 2017 (under Conservative, New Labour and coalition governments and the current Conservative administration) leads to the key conclusion that transactional leadership has led to a deprofessionalised and depoliticised work environment and to directing management activity to meet the external needs of funding and inspection regimes at the expense of the needs of local businesses and communities (Boocock, 2014; Boocock, 2017; Dennis, 2016; Elliott, 1996; Fletcher et al., 2015; Kelly, Iszatt-White and Rouncefield, 2005; Rennie, 2003; Smith and Bailey, 2005).

A review of the English secondary school literature on distributed leadership (Harris, 2009; Harris, 2014; Harris and Muijs, 2004) further suggests that a more distributed form of leadership in FE colleges may more effectively meet the needs of students, employers and the local community through the utilisation of local knowledge and professional communities of practice. Whilst there is a dearth of research on distributed leadership in FE (Fox et al., 2005; Jameson, 2008; Lumby, 2003), research on the relationship between FE policy and learning cultures also suggests the need for more respect for FE lecturers as pedagogic leaders and for the productive potential of collaboration within learning cultures (Bathmaker and Avis, 2005; Coffield, 2014; Gleeson and James, 2007; Hodkinson, 1997; Hodkinson, 2005; James and Biesta, 2007; Jameson, 2008; Scaife, 2004). A significant caveat relates to the largely normative and descriptive nature of research on distributed leadership that disregards both power relations and the impact of policy (Bolden, 2011; Lumby, 2013).

This article adds to the existing literature on education (and distributed) leadership in illustrating the importance of power relations in FE, and the significance of this for meeting the needs of businesses and local communities. A review of the literature on power relations within distributed leadership in English secondary schools and leadership in FE colleges leads to the conclusion that for distributed leadership to be effective in meeting the needs of students, local businesses and communities it will need to be embedded within a policy of localism where far more autonomy at the local level is provided in terms of funding and curriculum delivery (Gravatt, 2014); more particularly, policy should shift away from the funding and monitoring systems driven by marketisation, managerialism and ‘targets and terror’ (Keep, 2016: 4) to enable an authentic distributed leadership to emerge in which trust in subordinate actors and local stakeholders is used to meet local needs (Keep, 2016). This would require government policy to focus on encouraging networking between colleges and other local education providers and stakeholders at the local level (Boocock, 2017; Coffield and Williamson, 2011; Coffield et al., 2008; Hodgson and Spours, 2015).

Such embedded leadership (i.e. distributed leadership embedded within a local governance that facilitates dispersed power to key stakeholders) is similar to what is described as the eco-leadership discourse in the leadership literature (Western, 2013). Eco-leadership would require colleges to be part of the fabric of the wider community, and leaders to be able to challenge existing power relations to uncover which ‘discourses are privileged and which are marginalised’ (Western, 2013: 257). Leaders at each level within a college would move away from the current neoliberal philosophy of competition and transactional relationships to the principles of mutuality, reciprocal relationships and fraternal relations. In this way, the introduction of eco-leadership would challenge the modernist hegemony in FE and facilitate a shift from transactional to distributed leadership linked to local community and business needs (Western, 2013).

Transactional leadership in the FE sector

As discussed in the introduction to this article, distributed leadership has not been as emphasised within the FE sector as in the school sector. The incorporation of colleges in 1993 shifted the sector from Local Education Authority (LEA) control and historical funding to a quasi-market (Goddard-Patel and Whitehead, 2000), in which demand was determined by the state purchasing agency (the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC)) and supply by FE colleges within decentralised management environments. The result has been a series of external funding and inspection incentives leading to a transactional (or managerial) leadership style in the sector.

Under the Conservative administration (1993–1997) a transactional leadership style was encouraged through FEFC funding incentives acting on leaders to increase the volume of students at lower unit cost. Such incentives included convergence in the average level of funding (the ALF) and 90% core funding (core funding was calculated at 90% of the previous year’s total each year from 1993 to 2002), which required leaders to expand provision to receive the same level of funds as the previous year (Lucas, 1999). Transactional leadership was further encouraged by the Demand-Led Element (DLE) of the FEFC funding formula, in that it incentivised colleges to increase student enrolment beyond the total number forecast in a college’s strategic plan to realise extra funding (but at a reduced rate – a third of the standard ALF – £6.50) (Lucas, 1999).

The policies introduced to create such ‘managed competition’ are sometimes collectively referred to as the New Public Sector Management Paradigm (NPM), a generic ‘private sector’ management model introduced to the public sector in the 1980s and 1990s and predicated on classical management and scientific management theories (Pollitt, 1995). The ideological basis underpinning such reform is found within the discourse of neoclassical economics (and neoliberalism). Financial incentives expressed within funding signals within the FEFC funding methodology were assumed to induce competitive conduct in self-interested college agents leading to improved academic attainment in students (Zanzig, 1997).

There is evidence that the introduction of the NPM and the resultant transactional/managerial leadership under the Conservative administration had the desired effect in terms of an increased number of students enrolled in the FE sector, at lower unit cost (McClure, 2000). Financial incentives, in line with the assumptions of the NPM, acted on colleges to improve advice and guidance systems, induction, tracking and information systems, and a closer focus on student retention (Ainley and Bailey, 1997; Leney, Lucas and Taubman, 1998; Lucas, 1999).

Research on FE suggests, however, that transactional leadership, driven by funding incentives, also led to a significant deterioration in the quality of education outcomes. Cost-cutting strategies such as the casualisation of lecturers and college restructuring undermined the quality of teaching and learning (Ainley and Bailey, 1997; Guile and Lucas, 1996) and distracted colleges from investing in the training and development of staff (Gleeson and Shain, 1999; Hewitt and Crawford, 1997). A short-term management focus on satisfying the financial requirements of the FEFC was also at the expense of needs-based equity for disadvantaged students (requiring extra support) through a reduction in class contact (Lucas, 1999).

A significant final limitation of transactional leadership under the Conservative administration (1993–1997) related to the introduction of strict rules and procedures in line with an increased demand for accountability (Ollin, 1996), which led to a proliferation of bureaucracy undermining the previous professional focus on teamwork and the pedagogic process (Ollin, 1996), and to increased workloads and stress that caused lecturers to focus on individual survival rather than educational goals (Hewitt and Crawford, 1997).

Under the New Labour administration (1997–2010) transactional leadership was also emphasised, but through a more centralist or traditionalist interventionist approach to education provision (Hodgson and Spours, 1999), including a more egalitarian approach to educational inclusion and an intensification at the meso (institutional) level of the ‘new managerialist’ policies initially introduced by the Conservatives. The resultant new model of governance associated with the discourse of modernisation (Newman, 2001) was constructed as a ‘third way’ in politics, combining neoliberalism and social inclusion.

Transactional leadership was particularly encouraged by Ofsted (the new inspectorate for the learning and skills sector) through a policy of benchmarking. This involved comparing college retention, achievement and success rate data with national benchmarks (averages) for 16–18, 19+ and 19+ basic skills provision to inform inspection grades. Such a policy may be criticised for having little regard for the heterogeneity of education, the prior attainment of students or differing levels of advantage/disadvantage in terms of social and cultural capital. It meant that colleges with higher numbers of disadvantaged students were judged unfairly in the education market as such students were unable to achieve at the level of the average student encapsulated in national benchmarks (Boocock, 2015).

Transactional leadership was also further encouraged by local Learning and Skills Councils (LSCs) through the use of success rate benchmarks in the implementation of New Labour’s policy of rationalisation at the local level. More specifically, successful colleges achieving benchmarks would receive Centre of Vocational Excellence (COVE) status whilst college provision not achieving benchmarks faced the threat of course closure. Whilst local LSCs did not have the power to fully implement New Labour’s rationalisation agenda the resultant transactional leadership manifest in target-setting within colleges did lead to improved success rates in the sector from 53% in 1998–1999 to 77% in 2005–2006 (Coffield et al., 2008) and 79% in 2009–2010 (SFA, 2015).

The validity of such success rates as a proxy measure for improved student performance is, however, questionable given the evidence of gaming behaviours, including: student plagiarism and ghost-writing (Allen and Ainley, 2010); lecturers marking student work repetitively until all assessment criteria are achieved (i.e. criteria chasing) (Boocock, 2014; Spours, Coffield and Gregson, 2006); and colleges enrolling students on to unchallenging courses to improve college success rates (Wolf, 2011). In this way, transactional leadership was used to improve success rates through gaming behaviours and grade inflation (‘education by numbers’) (Ainley, 1999; Allen and Ainley, 2010) as a means of achieving effectiveness for the market and for inspection rather than a genuine improvement in line with New Labour’s skills and egalitarian agenda (Smith, 2007).

Transactional leadership in college leaders was further encouraged by a top-down Ofsted inspection framework, including a prescribed approach to teaching and learning, described by O’Leary (2015), drawing on the work of Foucault (1980), as a ‘regime of truth’ and ‘apparatus of control’. To ensure colleges were auditable, Observation of Teaching and Learning (OTL) policies were introduced, which required teaching staff to follow prescribed pedagogical teaching practices. The grading of observed lessons became the norm in the FE sector and evolved into a normalised, performative tool, with a focus on teacher accountability rather than teacher development (O’Leary, 2015: 16).

Graded observations in FE, in being linked to capability and disciplinary procedures (O’Leary, 2015), exemplify a transactional form of leadership in the sector. Within this ‘new managerialist’ context OTL became the key means of collecting data (within quality systems) to evidence continuous improvement in the quality of teaching and learning (O’Leary, 2013). This is criticised by Gleeson et al., (2015) as creating a struggle between ‘structure’ and ‘teacher agency’, more specifically a tension between the developmental needs of staff and homogenous OTL systems and procedures. Significantly, the emphasis on OTL as a surveillance device has taken precedence over an emphasis on the productive potential of collaboration within professional communities of practice.

More recently, under the coalition government (2010–2015) managerial leadership continued to be encouraged by a significant reduction in funds made available to FE colleges in an era of austerity, requiring senior leaders to focus on their role as CEO rather than leaders of learning (Dennis, 2016). A fundamental change in policy also altered the nature of managerial leadership. Rather than colleges (and leaders) being incentivised to supply human capital for the state purchasing agency a new demand-led approach involved the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) allocating funds to employers to invest in the skills of their employees at an education provider of their choice (Keep and Mayhew, 2013). The aim of incentivising each FE college to supply more vocationally relevant curricula in line with the human capital needs of businesses was intensified further by the increased competition created by the government in allowing new private sector providers (of skills) to enter the market (Nash and Jones, 2015).

The evidence from the FE literature suggests that the use of the above centralised funding and inspection directives has led to a transactional form of leadership that has not met the needs of local communities, needs-based equity for disadvantaged students or the human capital needs of businesses (Lupton, Unwin and Thomson, 2015; Wolf, 2011; Wolf, 2015). The economising of education (Kenway, 1994), predicated on an assumption that educational goals are best achieved through incentives acting on agent self-interest, has created a compliant leadership in the face of a series of external funding and inspection regimes, and a disregard for local knowledge and the productive potential of professional learning communities within colleges (Boocock, 2017; Coffield, 2014; Gleeson and James, 2007; Hodkinson, 1997; James and Biesta, 2007; Jameson, 2008; Scaife, 2004). Instead of a focus on meeting the needs of local businesses and communities the leadership focus has been on impression management and seeking legitimacy from funding and inspection regimes (Boocock, 2011; Elliott, 1996; Fletcher et al., 2015; Kelly, Izsatt-White and Rouncefield, 2005; Rennie, 2003; Smith and Bailey, 2005).

To secure compliance internally, college leaders and managers have also been required to deprofessionalise and depoliticise lecturing staff to inculcate a culture of performativity and student commodification (Dennis, 2016; Elliott, 1996; Randle and Brady, 1997; Stoten, 2015). This is manifest in gaming behaviours, such as: lowering standards to certify a larger volume of students to meet achievement targets set (Ainley, 1999; Allen and Ainley, 2010; Smith, 2007; Steer, Spours and Hodgson, 2007); withdrawing lower-ability students from A level examinations to improve student achievement captured by newspaper league tables (Boocock, 2013); and steering students on to undemanding courses to improve student retention and achievement at the expense of their future employability and needs-based equity (Wolf, 2011). The introduction of Ofsted’s common inspection framework, including the imposition of narrow pedagogies and excessive bureaucracy, has also incentivised leaders to create an ‘audit culture’ (Power, 1999), which, it is argued, has undermined the altruism of lecturers and marginalised the productive potential of learning cultures and professional learning communities (Bathmaker and Avis, 2003; Hodkinson, 1997; James and Biesta, 2007; Nixon et al., 2008).

Overall, distant government diktats focused on quantitative measures of success have encouraged transactional leadership and rituals of verification to meet the external requirements of Ofsted and funding agencies for college survival within the FE quasi-market. This has been at the expense of genuine (and more informed) improvements in teaching and learning, which may be achieved through reflective practice within learning cultures and informed by research on teaching and learning, and knowledge of the needs of local communities and businesses (Elliott, 2015a; Hodkinson, Biesta and James 2004; Lucas, 2004).

More recently Dennis (2016), in a critique of the FE leadership literature under the coalition government (2000–2015), discusses the deterioration of values, purpose and equity within leaders in colleges (or ethical fading) in the face of huge funding cuts in the current era of austerity (Keep, 2016). Dennis (2016) describes such ethical fading as college principals’ shifting position towards the role of CEO to ensure college survival in meeting funding and inspection targets at the expense of the role of ‘leader of learning’. Within this context, senior leadership is less about leading education institutions and more about facilitating target-hitting enterprises (i.e. transactional leadership), with students reduced to funding units, and leadership more about managing funding cuts and organisational change than teaching and learning. A significant feature of such managerial leadership is an ethical silence regarding the needs of disadvantaged learners and the local community that are not valued by outside agencies:

My suggestion is that the now dominant culture of education – managerialism – implies ethical corrosion…The ethical corrosion goes deeper and is more fundamental, leading to ethical silence: the idea of ‘ethics’ itself as a resource for educators in defining who they are, their motivations, and its purposes. The sector no longer has the vocabulary that enables it to think and talk about itself in terms of this ethical desire. For college leaders, what matters is being outstanding; the future viability of the college depends on it. And being outstanding means complying with the detailed specification bestowed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) according to criteria that change on a triennial basis (Dennis, 2016: 125).

Time for a shift from transactional to distributed leadership?

Current policy narratives in FE regarding localism and distributed leadership have emerged in response to the ineffectiveness of transactional/managerial leadership under successive governments, driven by the funding and inspection steers discussed earlier. A particular criticism relates to the fact that, ‘Measures of quality (in FE) ignore what is meaningful when what is meaningful is difficult to measure’ (Orr, 2015: 175).

Distributed leadership moves the focus away from the individual leadership traits and behaviours assumed in traditional ‘heroic’ leadership theories that include transactional leadership (but also transformational, charismatic and situational leadership styles) (Lumby, 2013: 585).

A significant criticism of heroic leadership theories (within critical leadership studies) relates to the social construction of leadership as a top-down leader–follower relationship predicated on the assumed qualities of a few special individuals imposing change, the individualism of Western culture (Collinson, 2011) and the dualist assumption of leader versus follower. In particular, the assumption is that leaders influence acquiescent followers, but followers, as knowledgeable agents, do not influence leaders – a supposition that ignores dialectics and power asymmetries within organisational relations (Collinson, 2011). Criticism also relates to the extent to which heroic leadership is correlated with improved organisational performance. Gemmill and Oakley (1992), for instance, describe such leadership as an ‘alienating social myth’ and as an ideology inculcated in followers to create learned helplessness.

In discussing leadership in FE, Fox et al. (2005) also dismiss the view of leadership as being about a few special individuals imposing change, arguing that it is instead a ‘complex network of situated leadership practices involving staff from across the organization’ (Fox et al., 2005, 2.2). Similarly, Jameson (2008) argues for a shift from transactional leadership to a respect for FE lecturers as pedagogic leaders who collaborate with managers to improve practice. This requires effective leader–member exchanges, a high level of trust cooperation and critical friendships to achieve improved education outcomes (Jameson, 2008: 17).

The alternative post-heroic view of distributed leadership thus shifts attention away from the assumption of a few exceptional individuals and focuses instead on a more social and inclusive process involving fluid and emergent leadership, spontaneous collaboration, intuitive working relationships and institutionalised practices based on conjoint agency (Bolden, 2011; Gronn, 2002). Three themes emerge as significant to distributed leadership: first, it is an emergent property of a group or network; second, leadership is not bounded; and third, ability and knowledge do not just belong to the few but the many (Bolden, 2011).

Harris (2014) provides a persuasive critique of the research on distributed leadership in English schools as a means of transforming education: to alleviate an unequal society ‘which is associated with lower life expectancy, homicides, imprisonment, poor mental health’ (Harris, 2014: 2). This requires a focus on planned social capital and collective professional capacity, involving the development of cohesive teams and collaborative professional learning that is realised through high levels of ‘transferring knowledge, trust and shared purposes’ (Harris, 2014: 14) and ‘reciprocal accountability and shared purpose’ (Harris, 2014: 16). Research suggests that such distributed leadership should be aligned with organisational goals (relating to the needs of students, businesses and the wider community), and intrinsic motivation rewarded to encourage the desired high-performing and cohesive teams. International research also suggests that high-performing education systems (e.g. those in Finland, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai), rather than focusing on quantitative targets (and transactional leadership) as in the UK, emphasise instead teacher research and collaboration, professional learning and teacher inquiry. A key argument here is that in facilitating collaboration between professionals within a stimulating social context the creation of a professional learning community through distributed leadership will lead to deeper learning in teachers who are challenged in relation to practice. This also impacts positively on education outcomes as a mediated relationship associated with staff morale (Harris, 2009).

The evidence in FE mirrors that of compulsory education in suggesting that distributed leadership would be a more effective form of leadership than the dominant transactional approach in tapping into the productive potential of communities of practice that generate social capital (Fox et al., 2005; Jameson, 2008). Research into teaching and learning and transforming cultures, a large-scale longitudinal research project undertaken by James and Biesta (2007), for instance, emphasises the importance of leaders creating and supporting professional learning cultures and teaching groups so that tutors can make decisions relating to teaching and learning informed by creativity, innovation and collaboration. Within these more positive learning cultures tutor professionalism would be maximised through expansive work environments in which mutual learning is encouraged and practice critically challenged with reference to research on teaching and learning in differing contexts, rather than assumed pedagogies (James and Biesta, 2007).

Research on FE, however, also suggests that the new managerialism and transactional leadership introduced in response to marketisation has undermined such learning cultures and expansive work environments because the outcome has been one of individual lecturer performance embedded within a corporate culture rather than a learning one (Dennis, 2016; Mather, Worrall and Mather, 2012).

The importance of senior leaders in the creation of learning cultures in FE (James and Biesta, 2007) resonates with research in the school literature, which also reveals senior leadership as significant to developing a culture of collaboration involving professional connections focused on teaching and learning (e.g. Harris, 2014; Harris and Muijs, 2004; Leithwood and Jantzi, 2000). Research suggests that if undertaken effectively the distribution of tasks by leaders has a positive impact in terms of organisational change and the creation of professional learning communities (Louis and Marks, 1998). Conversely, if task distribution and influence processes are not appropriately considered by formal leaders there may be a negative impact on education outcomes through less effective team work (Bolden, 2011). The senior leader (or leadership team) thus has a crucial role in facilitating the inculcation of collegial norms and values relating to collective inquiry (Harris, 2014) focused on creative solutions to emerging teaching and learning concerns as opposed to standardised approaches or pre-determined ones.

Research into the impact of policy on post-compulsory education (Coffield et al., 2008) suggests that for such distributed leadership to be facilitated requires a devolved social partnership that encourages professional–institutional collaboration and ‘professional innovation and empowerment’ (172).

Teaching and learning is more than an individual task for all tutors; it is also a collective responsibility, which requires an institutional strategy to create a learning culture within the institution. The job of the senior management team is to provide the necessary structures, resources, spaces and opportunities for all members of the community to collaborate in a focus on learning (Reed and Lodge, 2006, cited in Coffield et al., 2008: 177).

A shift from transactional to distributed leadership, as discussed above, would also allow democratic professionalism to replace managerial professionalism, in other words, ‘collaborative, cooperative action between education professionals and other education stakeholders’ (Taubman, 2015: 116), leading to a more democratic society in which local community and business needs are emphasised rather than distant funding and inspection diktats.

A key argument in the next section, however, is that democratic professionalism and a wider regard for community and business needs will not be realised in FE through a shift from transactional to distributed leadership alone. A review of the literature on secondary education suggests that distributed leadership, rather than increasing local democracy and decision-making, has had the effect of further inculcating neoliberal values through the diffusion of responsibility, rather than power, within educational hierarchies.

More specifically, it is argued that for distributed leadership to succeed, it will need to be embedded, not within neoliberal values and marketisation, but a policy of localism that genuinely encourages local collaboration, knowledge and democracy. This will require a dispersion of power, as well as responsibility, to enable governance, leadership, teaching and learning within a more collaborative learning environment, to more effectively meet the needs of local businesses, communities and students.

The limitations of distributed leadership

A key question arises as to the extent to which distributed leadership might compensate for the described unethical leadership in FE whilst education policy remains predicated on neoliberal values and marketisation. In discussing the school sector, Harris (2014) suggests that distributed leadership can be implemented irrespective of the dominant neoliberal ideology underlying education policy. She challenges the argument in the school literature that distributed leadership is normative and uncritical, ‘insidious’ and ‘a profoundly political phenomenon’ (Harris, 2014: xiii). It is instead, she argues, merely an approach to leadership practice that considers how influence may be configurated/reconfigurated within an organisation to affect change. It is not, she emphasises, a means of controlling professionals to implement education orthodoxy, neither is it a social construct imposed on education professionals to manipulate them into the ideology of the government. Harris (2014) argues that change is the responsibility of those within the school system rather than the product of external accountability, and should focus on capacity building, group work, pedagogy and systemic solutions to change the culture.

A significant alternative perspective in both the wider literature on leadership (e.g. Grint, 2010) and on education leadership in schools (Hatcher, 2005; Tseng, 2015) is that challenging marketisation through distributed leadership is unlikely to succeed. Hatcher (2005), for instance, is critical of the lack of regard for power and resources in the use of distributed leadership; more specifically, he argues that in the school sector it has been encouraged by the government to control head teachers, who acting as agents for the government adopt distributed leadership to drive through the neoliberal agenda, ‘Thus officially sanctioned “distributed leadership” is always delegated, licensed, exercised on behalf of and revocable by authority’ (Hatcher, 2005: 268).

In the school sector, Lumby (2013) also argues that ‘Distributed leadership has been used largely to create a mirage, an apolitical workplace’ (Lumby, 2013: 581). She further considers ‘as dubious the claims that distributed leadership opens up new opportunities for staff or empowers them’ but that it instead ‘reconciles staff to growing workloads and accountability’ (Lumby, 2013: 582). Distributed leadership, Lumby (2013) contends, does not consider sufficiently or problematise the redistribution of power. Whilst it appears to be an improved form of leadership, in reality its role is one of reconciling teachers to neoliberal values and obscuring power structures. It seems to indicate a redistribution of power, but in practice it uses two- and three-dimensional power. Two-dimensional power relates to the way in which education policy and senior leaders shape what is acceptable and silence alternative perspectives in the distribution of tasks. Three-dimensional power relates to the way middle managers and teachers are socialised into the dominant neoliberal values, so that these values are viewed as in the interest of managers and teachers, leading to individuals supervising themselves as if under ‘an inspecting gaze’ (Lumby, 2013: 589). In this way, autonomy is granted, but embedded within the official agenda such that middle managers and teachers are made more compliant with top-down diktats relating to funding, teaching and the market (Lumby, 2013).

Similarly, Tseng (2015) argues that school headship in England has shifted away from modern professionalism based on participative administration and pedagogical headship towards ‘performative professionalism’ focused on performance indicators and accountability. Tseng (2015) suggests the key objective is one of reculturing schools to meet the requirements of the market, with senior leaders viewed as entrepreneurial heroes. Within this context, distributed leadership is encouraged as a ‘political project’ designed to usurp the wider benefits of education and democratic values in favour of the needs of the economy through ‘simultaneous empowerment and discipline’; that is, ‘the dispersal of power enables and empowers actors but at the same time subjects them to new strategies of surveillance and control’ (Newman, 2004, cited in Tseng, 2015: 491). More specifically, distributed leadership enables teachers to be ‘empowered to govern themselves in approved ways’ (Newman and Clarke, 2009, cited in Tseng, 2015: 294). In this way, schools are colonised with the values of neoliberalism, and truths about effective schools are constructed within a framework of neoliberal power and knowledge. Tseng discusses how distributed leadership is shaped, not by local democracy, but by performance measures and targets, which are used by ‘government at a distance’ to normalise the values of neoliberalism and marketisation through ‘a twin process of automization plus responsibilization’ (Tseng, 2015: 494).

Similarly, whilst agreeing with the idea of a shift from leadership possessed by special individuals to a relational ontology, Bolden (2011) argues that a critical perspective in leadership research is required in the face of a literature that is largely normative and descriptive and to compensate for the disregard for both power relations and a critique of policy within distributed leadership.

Stoten (2015), in his research on sixth form colleges, also shows how contemporary leadership is more about compliance with central government than a more authentic focus on teaching and learning. His research suggests that the introduction of distributed leadership equates to a dispersion of responsibility rather than democratic power, with this being shaped by the neoliberal ideology of marketisation, competition and managerialism and an emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness as the key means of judging organisational performance (Stoten, 2014). Significantly, distributed leadership is distorted by the education market that directs senior leaders, as CEOs, to a focus on narrow-minded institutional interests (driven by targets and league tables) at the expense of local students, businesses and communities (Stoten, 2014). In this way, leaders only have a minor role in shaping strategy and a diminished capacity for considering issues of ‘educational purpose, value, utopia, democracy, equity, and vision’ (Dennis, 2016: 116) within a marketised and managerialist context that privileges the needs of the education market.

Analysis of the impact of distributed leadership in secondary schools suggests that a shift from transactional to distributed leadership in FE would further inculcate the values of neoliberalism through a reculturing process in which autonomy is provided to meet the needs of marketisation rather than the needs of students, businesses and the local community. In other words, distributed leadership would lead to a dispersion of responsibility given the current controlling policy and leadership context, predicated on neoliberal values rather than a distribution of power. Indeed, the political context of FE, which involves far more centralisation than in schools through funding formulae, target-setting and benchmarking, inspection regimes, accountability measures and managerialism, would likely lead to a form of distributed leadership where increased autonomy is embedded within an even more controlling performative culture.

A caveat to the above view is found in evidence of middle managers in FE subverting policy through principled dissent and impression management as covert activity for prioritising ‘students and teachers over the systemic reporting structures and financial imperatives upon which colleges are built’ (Page, 2015: 127). Such strategic compliance enables middle managers and lecturers to attend to the demands of performativity, whilst also creating the professional space required for staff to maintain educational values related to teaching and learning (Shain and Gleeson, 2010).

Strategic compliance, however, is at the margins of practice, and does not fundamentally challenge the irresistibility of managerialism in the FE sector, with middle managers having a limited capacity to resist senior manager commands within authoritarian organisational structures (Gleeson and Knights, 2008; Randle and Brady, 1997).

In a review of eleven post-2010 leadership papers on FE, Dennis (2016) summarises the controlling nature of the dominant professional–managerial paradigm underlying policy, which if maintained in the sector would significantly limit distributed leadership as a means of dispersing power or facilitating local democracy. The evidence suggests a:

desolate post-apocalyptic educational landscape peopled by educators beset by an ‘emotionality of despair’ (Allen, 2014, cited in Dennis, 2016: 125). The landscape of hope – hope for the impossibility of emancipation, hope in the likelihood of fulfilling the ethical desire for equity, social justice, and democracy – is now laced with repression, commodification, audit, and managerialism (Dennis, 2016: 125).

This is supported by Mather, Worrall and Mather (2012) in research within two FE colleges that identified the use of organisational change management strategies to re-educate lecturers into an uncritical acceptance of managerialist norms and values. More specifically, research revealed senior managers introducing performative regimes as a means of replacing professional norms and values with managerialist behavioural norms. In this way, the juxtaposition of performativity and managerialism was used to create controlled standardisation in line with the dominant managerialist discourse informed by neoliberal values. This re-education of lecturers was designed to separate task conception from task implementation, and to remove the locus of control from teaching staff by socialising them into a can-do managerialist culture (Mather, Worrall and Mather, 2012: 535).

Such reculturing of colleges by leaders through performativity regimes illustrates how distributed leadership could be used as a further means of inculcating managerialist behavioural norms if embedded within the dominant professional–managerial paradigm, rather than local collaboration, knowledge and democracy.

Embedded leadership and eco-leadership

Evidence from research on English secondary schools and FE suggests that the introduction of distributed leadership to FE would not enable improvements in provision for the needs of local communities and businesses whilst the sector remains embedded within the current dominant ideology of neoliberalism, marketisation and managerialism. If distributed leadership is used merely as a means of allocating leadership tasks in line with central funding and inspection diktats, the dysfunctional and unintended consequences already discussed are likely to continue.

A significant barrier to the effectiveness of the introduction of distributed leadership relates to leader conformity and compliance with funding and inspection diktats as a means of achieving external legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 2004). This includes normative legitimacy – the need to comply with the neoliberal values of the Conservative administration, evidenced through the achievement of targets and benchmarks. The second type of legitimacy is cognitive legitimacy – the need to conform to the belief systems of Ofsted in terms of assumed teaching and learning technologies (Washington, Boal and Davis, 2008). To meet the requirements of these outside agencies external supporting mechanisms based on managerialist ideologies have been introduced, which: ‘Serve to identify and construct the external version of an institutional leader – an individual who utilizes institutional supporting mechanisms, existing governance mechanisms and cognitive frameworks to alter power arrangements through explicit institutional strategies’ (Washington et al., 2008: 728).

Discussion of the application of distributed leadership within FE requires more regard for the wider political and governance context of such leadership. In other words, a broader framework than distributed leadership alone is required to understand how leadership decisions are shaped by (and are embedded within) education policy; we might call this embedded leadership (drawing on an economic sociology view of leadership in FE). Unlike orthodox economics, which underlies current assumptions of transactional leadership in FE, economic sociology views economic phenomena (such as leadership of teaching and learning) as embedded within social, cultural and political contexts, an epistemology that enables a focus on the impact of policy and governance on leadership behaviour and, in turn, on norms and values, and trust and networks within the individual FE college (Granovetter, 1985).

Embedded leadership compensates for the apolitical nature of distributed leadership in recognising that the policy context in which leadership is situated shapes the nature of such leadership; in particular, it takes account of the fact that the introduction of distributed leadership in FE would need to be embedded within a governance that encourages local decision-making, rather than conformity to distant government diktats. In turn, this would require a shift in the sector away from the current hierarchical and rational goal forms of governance towards open systems and self-governance (Newman, 2001). This would provide the local democracy required for a genuine dispersion of power (rather than just tasks).

The current Conservative administration’s policy of localism could provide the necessary context for a shift towards open systems and self-governance to facilitate a more effective distributed leadership (i.e. dispersion of power), but only if such localism enables colleges in collaboration with local stakeholders to make decisions based on local need. This is unlikely, given the Conservative administration’s values of neoliberalism and marketisation that emphasise centralised funding and inspection targets at the expense of local business and community needs:

The overall impression that comes across from reading the government’s (2015) guidance…is that the fundamental balance of power between the central and the local is not intended to change to any great extent. The power relationships embedded in the process remain firmly within the traditional top-down mould, whereby ministers and central government make the key decision and set the overall parameters within which action can occur – in this case overall spending levels and the process model for undertaking Area Reviews (Keep, 2015: 3)

Indeed, the research of Elliott (2015b) on FE leadership suggests that the first stage of localism in FE of mergers and rationalisation has limited the ability of leadership to meet the needs of local communities and businesses because the individual FE college is now operating in a real education market rather than a quasi (or near) market, where commercial success is emphasised at the expense of collaborative partnerships and community needs:

There is no sign that merger activity in FE is slowing in the FE sector, quite the reverse…From the evidence of this study, commercial success in a marketised FE landscape can carry a high cost of reduced community engagement, fewer educational opportunities and severing of formerly collaborative partnership arrangements…we fear for the future of the sector as an engine of widening participation and educational opportunity (Elliott, 2015b: 34)

For distributed leadership to be effective in institutionalising practices based on conjoint agency, a much more democratic form of localism will be required that genuinely empowers both colleges and their stakeholders – students, lecturers, businesses and local communities – through decentralisation and local decision-making. Such embedded leadership (i.e. distributed leadership embedded within a local governance that facilitates the dispersion of power to key stakeholders) is similar to what is described as the eco-leadership discourse in the leadership literature (Western, 2013).

Eco-leadership may be described as a network of distributed leadership based on an environmental metaphor that challenges modernity’s heroic leadership and myth of central control, linearity and production lines. It replaces the market with a network society in which social relations are transformed within internal ecosystems linked to external ones, with the focus on human values beyond instrumental performativity. Within this context, colleges would be part of the fabric of the wider community and allowed to challenge existing power relations to uncover which ‘discourses are privileged and which are marginalised’ (Western, 2013: 257). At each level within a college leaders would shift away from the current neoliberal philosophy of competition and transactional relationships to the principles of mutuality, reciprocal relationships and fraternal relations. In this way, the modernist hegemony in FE is replaced with interdependence at the local level and heroic leadership is replaced with distributed. The eco-leader, within this context is:

A generative leader who creates organizational spaces for leadership to flourish. Eco-leaders think spatially and connectedly; these leaders think like organizational architects, connecting people and creating networks using processes and technology…Eco-leaders are passionate about ethics, humanizing the workplace, developing sustainable business models, engaging with local communities and protecting the natural environment (Western, 2013: 275).

Such eco-leadership involves a shift from transactional to distributed leadership within FE colleges, embedded not within a neoliberal agenda, but within a more democratic local governance. Such democratic local governance is supported by a number of researchers in the FE sector (Coffield et al., 2008; Coffield and Williamson, 2011; Hodgson and Spours, 2015). Hodgson and Spours (2015), for instance, envisage ‘a more democratically accountable regional and local landscape that is part of a wider rebalancing of policy and governance relationships between national and local power and policymaking’ (Hodgson and Spours, 2015: 199). The objective of this model would be to shift the sector away from the current marketised mode and enable colleges to more effectively respond to regional lifelong learning ecosystems. Within this context, leadership would be about accountability to learners, local communities, local businesses and other local education providers, and to regional and national professional associations, with this requiring a more collaborative and economically connected local learning system.

In this way, the introduction of eco-leadership (distributed leadership embedded within more democratic local decision-making) shifts the embedded nature of leadership away from the NPM paradigm (i.e. market incentives, policy levers, targets and performance indicators) (Hendrikx and Van Gestel, 2016), which requires constant change in the sector and an over-emphasis on college competition at the expense of local collaboration, leading to unethical and inequitable education outcomes (Hodgson and Spours, 2015).

Instead, eco-leadership would involve a local governance in FE more in line with the New Public Governance (NPG) model (Osborne, 2010), in which the government acts as the facilitator of local planning and collaboration, and intervenes to address power inequalities in the creation of a pluralist state (Hendrikx and Van Gestel, 2016). This is the view of Hodgson and Spours (2015: 9) who argue:

There needs to be a more facilitative national policy framework that sets national standards, priorities and objectives, but encourages a climate of longer-term planning, area-wide funding and jointly owned performance measures related to progression and learner destinations. Alongside its quality assurance role, the inspectorate should be promoting collaborative practices that support effective and exciting area-based provision, closer working arrangements between education providers and employers and professional learning through subject and sectoral communities of practice coming together to discuss curriculum development and to improve teaching, learning and assessment.

Within this NPG/local ecology policy context, distributed leadership would be used to encourage lecturers to act as partners in co-creating effective teaching and learning strategies with practice aligned not with the performativity agenda of new managerialism, but with the needs of local stakeholders. Integral to this would be the freeing of lecturers from the oppressive standardisation of teaching and learning practice (the NPM), with practice instead embedded within network processes at the local level (NPG). More specifically, local stakeholders (combined with research on teaching and learning) would inform the nature of the curriculum and guide reflective practice within professional learning communities so that the needs of local businesses, the wider community and disadvantaged adults may be addressed (Hendrikx and Van Gestel, 2016).

Conclusion

An embedded leadership perspective (based on an economic sociology epistemology) conceives distributed leadership as flawed due to its lack of theory relating to the impact of education policy and governance on the distribution of leadership (and power). Such a perspective leads to the conclusion that an alternative to the normative perspectives of heroic and distributed leadership is required: that college (distributed) leadership should be situated within a change in governance that facilitates local decision-making and a dispersion of power, rather than conformity to neoliberal values. This requires a shift in the sector away from the current hierarchical and rational goal forms of governance (and the NPM) towards open systems and self-governance (Newman, 2001) to enable distributed leadership to contribute to a more democratic society in which local community and business needs are emphasised, rather than distant funding and inspection diktats.

Such a change in leadership is in line with eco-leadership, in which leadership at each level within colleges would shift away from a neoliberal philosophy and transactional leadership towards the principles of mutuality and reciprocity. Colleges, in collaborating rather than competing with other local education institutions, would no longer operate as unethical pseudo businesses competing in a quasi-market, but be part of the fabric of the local community within a network society (Western, 2013) and a governance more in line with NPG than the NPM. This more collaborative and economically connected local learning system would be more accountable to learners, local communities and local businesses, as it would shift the focus of colleges (and leaders) away from central control to local educational, business and community needs (Hodgson and Spours, 2015). It would also facilitate a more authentic and inclusive distributed leadership, involving emergent leadership, spontaneous collaboration and institutionalised practices based on conjoint agency.

The Conservative administration’s policy of localism could provide the necessary context for eco-leadership in the FE sector. A further shift in governance, however, will be required for a more democratic and distributed leadership in the sector. More particularly, a greater regard for local knowledge and the contributions of local stakeholders is needed from the Department for Education (DfE), as are more flexible accountability arrangements, which encourage strategy at the local level (Keep, 2016: 8). This article argues that these new forms of governance and accountability arrangements should also have a broader remit than skills for employability at the local level to include a concern for needs-based equity for adults and the wider benefits of education.

An effective policy of localism (and eco-leadership) will also require a significant shift away from funding and monitoring systems driven by marketisation, managerialism and ‘targets and terror’ (Keep 2016: 4). If a national supply-led approach to skills (Keep, 2016) is simply replicated at the local level through skill targets, Eco-Leadership, in terms of local democracy and the network society, will be limited and distributed leadership reduced to a tool for dispersing responsibility at the local level rather than power for the benefit of local employers, disadvantaged adults and the wider community.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

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