The special measures school and the ‘c’ word: A case study of the role of conformity,compliance chimera,and the power of community and context in a special measures secondary school in northern England

Introduction

Saint School (a pseudonym to provide anonymity) was placed into special measures following a ‘no notice’ Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) inspection in 2015. Situated in an area of socio-economic deprivation, the school’s intake is predominantly white working class, with a higher than average number of students with special educational needs. I have worked as a teacher in the town where the school is situated for over 17 years and understand that the complicated mesh of factors that creates the social system within a school melds into a locally perceived identity – one that takes generations of students to refine. This article is written through a sense of frustration at the manner in which the local community and the socio-economic positioning of educational establishments are ignored in the neo-liberal restructuring of schools. I realise that being a member of staff in the school discussed in this article may raise methodological arguments surrounding ‘insider’ research with regard to objectivity (Bridges, 2003). However, as an exposition of the lived experience of the special measures process, it provides frameworks of meaning that are not being ‘imposed’ from outside of that actuality. Without doubt, my own feelings will influence the outcome, alongside the multifactorial context that provides structure to all lived experience, but I believe that this has value as a comparison to ‘outsider’ perceptions of schools presented through the media and other external observations.

The outcomes of an Ofsted inspection produce a labelling process, through which the public image and identity of a school become distorted and manipulated, at both the macro and micro levels. The initial ruling of special measures can be antithetical to preconceived beliefs about a school and is based on the decisions made by an inspection team, as follows:

Schools are made subject to special measures under section 44(1:a,b) of the Education Act 2005, where the Chief Inspector is of the opinion that:

‘ … the school is failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education, and the persons responsible for leading, managing or governing the school are not demonstrating the capacity to secure the necessary improvement in the school’. (Education Act 2005:29)

The processes that were observed as the special measures ‘protocol’ unfolded can be theorised through the concepts presented by Gramsci (1972), who, as early as the 1920s, was paying attention to the relationship between the role of the media and political interests in the creation of ideological consensus, producing the concept of hegemony after 1926. The role of Ofsted and the abrupt changes to the inspection process in 2014, added to government calls for academisation, leave few teaching staff in the UK believing that monitoring systems are anything but ideologically driven. Gramsci can provide a theoretical understanding of the manner in which ruling groups/classes exercise domination: either (1) through the domination of the state through courts, prisons, the military and police or (2) through the domination exercised by civil society via the ideological state apparatus of education, religion, the trade union movement, political parties, mass media and the family. Only this second form constitutes what Gramsci called ‘hegemony’ – a situation in which one view of the world becomes the dominant way of seeing and becomes disseminated throughout that society. This view of domination by consent, not force, moving Marxism away from a perceived overestimation of the nature of conflict in society, provides a useful theoretical lens through which to explore the experiences of the school. However, it is through Gandin and his exploration of neo-liberal education systems in Brazil and the ‘Citizen School’ project in Porto Alegre that a more contextualised understanding of ideology and hegemonic control can be exercised (see Gandin, 2006; Gandin and Apple, 2002). He discusses the articulations that drive the connectivity between administrative systems, education and its community context. I wish to explore the case that Gandin makes for ‘common sense’ in this articulative process. In his statement that ‘[t]he ideas that form common sense are not there because they were forced in, but because they make sense to people, based on their own every day experiences’, Gandin (2006 :194) illuminates the positioning of sociocultural, ‘lived’ perceptions and the manner in which these afford us a less deterministic depiction of power, allowing for the possibility of transformative processes. The perhaps more hopeful proposition that Gandin provides when he suggests that ‘[n]evertheless, the important point is that no hegemonic action can block all spaces simultaneously and even its own discourse can be rearticulated to favour counter-hegemonic purposes’ (Gandin and Apple, 2002: 29) is where this exploration will begin.

Community and context

The process of creating a reformed identity for Saint School was rooted in a neo-liberalism which fixated on accountability and the top-down imposition of systems and procedures that left little scope for innovation. The resulting emphasis on the provision of evidence, data and measurable outcomes from the classroom, alongside the institutional policing of the body and its presentation, had diverse effects on staff and student behaviour. Brand-savvy students were quick to notice that the executive head teacher would arrive wearing an Armani suit and shoes with the telltale red soles of Louboutin – a walking advertisement for capitalist values and materialism, decked out as ‘aspirational’ for students better acquainted with a reality where 44% of residents in the electoral ward surrounding the school are living in an area classed in the top 10% most deprived nationally and in a town where 53% of school-age children were eligible for free school meals in 2016.

The effect on many students of such an overt representation of an exteriorised paradigm of neo-liberal materialism and its juxtaposition with success, achievement and value was to label this person as an interloper, despite the fact that most would only wear designer brands themselves. The role of the executive head, as a figure imposed on the pre-existing culture of the school, was perceived as alien by some students, and articulated through comments made to teaching staff, in conversations overheard in corridors, and through direct confrontations between students and the new head teacher. For these students, he was a trespasser on their territory, suddenly suggesting that their own culture, socio-economic standing and belief systems were invalid when judged against the ideological mores of neo-liberal benchmarks. Whilst such perceptions may not have been grounded in overt statements from the new leadership, the manner in which new procedures and rules were communicated was often viewed as ‘non-commonsensical’, the rules themselves conveying a lack of understanding of the space in which the school operated. The perceived lack of consultation over changes to the uniform or the length of the school day – changes which failed to take into account the financial and social circumstances of families – quickly created a climate of rejection, resulting in comments such as:

I am appalled at the changes made to school uniform at short notice. Does this man realise what a deprived area he is working in and that for some children just attending school is an achievement? Changing uniform does not improve teaching quality.

The decontextualisation of the educational process from the socio-economic environment in which it is delivered is a point I will return to, but here it is important to highlight the attempted deconstruction of local and familial identity through both overt and less visible, subliminal expectations of compliance and conformity to often inaccessible value systems. The process of the demonisation of the working classes outlined by Jones in his study of class war from above has relevance here:

The demonization of working-class people is a grimly rational way to justify an irrational system. Demonize them, ignore their concerns – and rationalize a grossly unequal distribution of wealth and power as a fair reflection of people’s worth and abilities. But this demonization has an even more pernicious agenda. A doctrine of personal responsibility is applied to a whole range of social problems affecting certain working-class communities – whether it be poverty, unemployment or crime. (Jones, 2011: 192)

Compliance

Whilst being fully aware that my personal perceptions of the effects of the special measures process cannot be separated from emotional responses, I consider that my privileged position within this research allows for more nuanced insights into the effects of the all-encompassing transfusion of neo-liberal educational practices. My own experience at Saint School would indicate that the initial days of disarray, both personally and operationally, following such an Ofsted outcome create a disruption of normative concepts of institutional identity. It is this momentary asphyxiation of action that opens out the fissures through which the dismantling and then reinvention of identities can be choreographed. Rather like the process of grieving, the staff and students in Saint School initially reacted with responses of denial – after all, the previous inspection had ruled the school as ‘good’. However, the sensitivity accorded to the bereaved was brutally non-evident as all involved were swiftly instructed to accept their label as failures, with statistical evidence to prove it. The central role of this acceptance became apparent as the staff were increasingly expected to forego their work–life balance, amongst other edicts, in order to ‘get out of special measures’ – a holy grail that could be achieved through ‘hard work’, ‘working not just hard but smarter’ and ‘brutal self-assessment’.

It is this process of continual self-review, measuring against some nebulous or impossible ‘gold standard’, that has become the ‘lifestyle choice’ for education; there is no element of the ‘system’ that is not continuously monitored, observed, reviewed and always found wanting, always resulting in revised action plans, always viewed ‘objectively’, and recorded, listed and made accountable. The individual roles within this system are codified into a formulaic recipe for success. Failure to follow such regulatory practices is deemed to be a traitorous lack of concern for the future of the system and the institution, and therefore creates a requirement for further ‘training’ of the transgressor. Such micromanagement of every aspect of the ‘teacher’ as a nullity, devoid of social context and identity, a mode of conveyance from whom all previous perceptions of personhood are to be obliterated, was to become the miasma of an engineered ‘normality’. Dependent on the ritualised reinvention of systems and procedures, the enforcement of standardised, homologous representations of everything from the colour of ink used to mark students’ work to the word teachers were to use to describe their working community, nothing was exempt from the remodelling. The questions raised by the rapidity and scope of such a formulaic regime initially had little space or time to be nurtured. Further, these relentless, barrelling changes denied all attempts at consultation with the very staff who would be implementing them; as teachers in ‘special measures’, our opinions were devalued and eliminated from all discussions.

Conformity

Under the aegis of an executive management team, the assault on personal expressions of identity and the conflation of success with prescribed codes of self-presentation became the mantra by which ‘otherness’ was to be demonised. The staff were commanded to portray their professionalism through ‘business wear’ – the standardised uniform of the office environment with its focus on flattening difference and controlling the maverick body, especially that of the female. Prior to the special measures, there was a section under ‘safeguarding’ in the staff handbook that stated: ‘Adults who work with pupils should ensure they are dressed appropriately. This means that adults should wear clothing which is appropriate to their role and is not likely to be viewed as offensive, revealing, or sexually explicit’. However, following the Ofsted outcome and the appointment of an executive head teacher, the edict had become noticeably more prescriptive, gendered and specific. Whilst the male staff were to be constrained through one overarching rule – ‘The dress code for men is a suit or smart trousers, along with a collar and tie’ – the female staff were obviously considered to be a more rebellious element, requiring greater specificity, as in: ‘ensure that the minimum skirt or dress length is on or below the knee, blouses are permissible, strappy sun tops or camisoles are not considered appropriate business attire’ and ‘[i]t is inappropriate to expose items of underwear, or to reveal bare midriffs’. The dress code went further, stating that: ‘Tattoos should be kept hidden and one pair of earrings is permissible but no other body piercings including nose studs are acceptable’.

The fact that this code had been introduced for staff who were generally not noted for flamboyance or the exposing of undergarments was perhaps underlined when it was followed by a clarification that the female staff could still wear cardigans. Even more insidious was the command that each member of staff should ‘self-evaluate’ their clothing choices as they prepared for each working day, worming the proselytising neo-liberal mantras into life even beyond the confines of the school walls. Giroux (1981: 23) neatly expresses the manner in which hegemonic power structures are as visible in the minutiae of organisational practice as they are in the overarching theoretical discourse with regard to ideology when he states that ‘hegemony is rooted in both the meanings and symbols that legitimate dominant interests as well as in the practices that structure daily experience’. Codified everyday practices thus provide visible legitimation of the invisible and internalised power structures.

Paraphrasing the Education Act 2005 on the criteria for placing a school in special measures, those existing within the institution must guard against any inference that they personally are not demonstrating the capacity to secure the necessary improvement in the self. The concept of ‘capability’ procedures within education for those who are deemed ‘incapable’ of self-improvement provides a model of ‘regular observation, monitoring and evaluation of performance, with guidance, training if necessary, and support for the teacher’ (Department for Education and Employment, 2000: 5), with a desired end point of not only creating higher performance within the individual, but also providing them with the tools to ‘self-manage’. The identity of the successful teacher has commingled with that of the business manager, imprisoned in target-driven spreadsheets of quantification of the self.

So, what happens to the non-measurable elements of the person? Mills (1959) suggested that personal narratives can never be decontextualised from their historical milieu. It is the relationship between the two that creates social relationships, intertwined with the wider political structuring of reality:

That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. (Mills, 1959: 7)

Contradictions

It is this multidimensional nature of ‘reality’ that encompasses the nuances of Gramscian hegemonic power, suggesting that ‘every individual person lives her or his life at a particular historical moment. He or she is incorporated into distinct identity-granting communities of meaning’ (Denis and Kalekin-Fishman 2012: 151). Where incongruities arise between the micro and macro layers of social structures is the point where the machinations of power over the individual can suddenly be made apparent.

The paradoxical suggestion that teaching is a vocation, an expression of service to others to which a person has been called (by God in the case of the faith school), whilst also a role that can be reduced to the processes of the call centre, begins to illuminate the ambivalent tightrope of survival in neo-liberal education – a journey which in itself creates clefts from where the ‘assembly-line’ ideology of education can possibly be resisted. In its publication Christ at the Centre, the Catholic Truth Society outlines the unique ethos of the faith school when it states that ‘teachers and staff too, should be given opportunities to reflect on and formed to understand their role within the school as a vocation within education’ (Stock, 2012: 20). Moreover, working in a faith school is ‘a privileged means of promoting the formation of the whole person, since the school is the centre in which a specific concept of the world, of the human person, and of history is developed and conveyed’ (The Catholic School, 1977: 8). The notion of vocation and service includes a moral imperative to provide pastoral and holistic support, which became increasingly incompatible with the business-focused, target-driven ethos being presented as the path to success at Saint School.

Under the sheer weight of repetitive administrative tasks, the teaching staff began to prioritise, to create shortcuts and to consider which edicts to ignore or accept. The endless spiral of review then self-review reached the level of nonsensical when classwork books were randomly scrutinised by line managers, in a programme of unannounced ‘work scrutinies’. The non-initiated may have been forgiven if they had expected this to be focused on the standards of the students’ class- or homework; in fact, it was the teacher who was given a grading on their marking, using the exact grade descriptors employed to grade students’ work. Further, the individual teacher was then expected to grade their own marking, using the same descriptors to consider if it matched the outcome given by the manager. When such processes began to reach this level of farce, it became clear that they had little relation to the improvement of pupils’ grades. The staff became increasingly frustrated at the lack of support they were able to offer students, partly due to every available moment of the working day being accounted for and assigned a label (all administration-focused) and partly the sheer physical and emotional exhaustion elicited by the workload.

Additionally, mentoring support for vulnerable students, previously viewed as a strength within the school, was withdrawn, with the mentoring staff being diverted into classroom assistant roles for core subjects. The sudden loss of access to such emotional support created obvious insecurities for a number of pupils, with some responding angrily and becoming difficult to manage within classroom environments. One such student stated: ‘This school used to care about me. Now nobody does. They didn’t even tell us that our mentors were going. We just turned up to see them and got sent away. I feel rubbish’. The teaching staff who may have previously had the time and energy to challenge such a decision and its abrupt implementation, or to at least provide an alternative ‘safe space’ for these young people, were too exhausted by their workload to do so effectively. However, the incongruence between the ethos of the school, which had grown and developed over many years in response to the needs of the community it served, and the ideology of the new leadership with regard to providing emotional support for students finally proved to be the point where ‘common sense’, as in previously internalised norms and values about holistic pastoral aspects of education, became the standpoint from which a rejection of ‘grafted-on’ ideologies began to emerge.

Counteraction

Gandin (2006) suggests that the traditional application of Marxist frameworks which focus too heavily on production runs into a cul-de-sac of determinism. The more nuanced view that ‘commonsense is never totally converted into the dominant discourse’ (Gandin, 2006: 195) creates the possibility of transformation. As the staff sought to maintain the positive and effective elements of their pre-Ofsted practice, a regrouping process could be observed within departmental meetings and less formal spaces, such as staffrooms.

Those who were already unhappy about the decoupling of their role from the vocational focus on pastoral support for students were rallied when the school chaplain, in his weekly reflections, reminded the staff of the Christian ethos that had previously shaped the priorities for the school. Couched in biblical teachings, often supported with direct quotes from scripture, a route for resistance that could brook little argument from the leadership was suddenly opened before us. These reflections were certainly produced with ‘honourable purpose’, the catch-all ‘Christian value’ that had become the watchword for justifying the often brutal decisions that were made to ‘improve’ the school. As many staff were feeling the effects of exhaustion and anxiety, engendered by the unsustainable workload and the panopticon environment of continual observations, such comments as the following were delivered:

Remember that after each day of creation God paused, looked at his work and saw that it was good – clearly no stranger to a bit of self-assessment then. Then on the final day, he didn’t call in a committee, he didn’t write an action plan, log data or rag-rate his next move. He rested.

This fissure in the previously impenetrable armour of the ‘support school’ was further cleaved open through a continuing professional development session with an educational psychologist, who gave whole-staff training on how to support emotionally vulnerable students. This training was triggered by the steep increase in the number of students being referred by the school to the local Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services – a jump from 7 in the 2014–2015 academic year to a startling 44 students in the 2015–2016 academic year. Such figures left little doubt that the withdrawal of traditional support systems for vulnerable pupils in the school, added to the intense academic pressure that they were suddenly placed under, was having a hugely detrimental effect on well-being. The teaching staff became increasingly concerned, particularly when the official line was that ‘Ofsted aren’t interested in the backstories. They just want to know how you’ll get this student their target grade’. The presentation from the educational psychologist focused on the central theme ‘I am not a robot’; it drew applause from an exhausted staff audience. One quote stood out:

It can be tempting for schools under pressure to see work to promote wellbeing and address mental health problems as a luxury or optional extra. This however runs contrary to the strong evidence on the links between wellbeing, learning and school improvement. (Weare, 2015: 22)

At the end of the first year in special measures, over 20 staff members had left the school for alternative employment, other staff were absent with long-term stress-related illness and departments were being ‘restructured’ on a seemingly ad hoc basis. Some certainly gained from this turmoil; new job roles opened up some changes in status and financial standing for those who suitably impressed the executive leadership team, but the majority viewed any such promotion as, at best, a poisoned chalice. However, the creation of staff ‘teaching and learning champions’, ‘super pupil progress coordinators’ and a multilayered management structure, which effectively prevented any concern from reaching the higher leadership team before it was suitably diluted and sanitised, ensured that a campaign of ‘divide and rule’ prevented lasting solidarity amongst the staff against a specific issue.

Conquering heroes, colonialism and chimera

A recent newspaper article suggested that ‘[p]oliticians love the idea of dynamic unfettered edu-knights riding to the rescue of failing schools, but sponsors, academies and free schools have not provided a miracle cure’ (Millar, 2016). The issue for the ‘superhead’ arriving in a special measures school is that they may have limited knowledge of the local area and have a remit that centres on specific, short-term success criteria. Hill et al. argue that the only truly successful leader of a school is the ‘Architect’, who

believe[s] it takes time to improve a school … They redesign the school to create the right environment for its teachers and the right school for its community … they take a holistic, 360-degree view of the school, its stakeholders, the community it serves, and its role in society. (Hill et al., 2016)

So, why is a system that is so dependent on the scientific management of all aspects of learning, that claims the supremacy of data analysis and progress measurement above all, so obviously enamoured with the concept of a medieval hero figure – in effect a saviour? The knights of history and of fairy stories enshrined a chivalric code, a code that included sagacity, honesty, justice and loyalty, requiring courage and integrity to remain true to the moral boundaries of the role. However, just as science has sought to separate human consciousness from myth, the constructed ‘hero’ has become an ideological vehicle, seeking to subvert the possibility of collective consciousness through the presentation of symbols of salvation based purely in the material. Ownership of the means to ‘success’ is concentrated in the hands of an elite who justify their ideological positioning through formulaic recoding of the exegesis of educational policy.

The figure of the executive head teacher as a ‘rescuing hero’ in a ‘failing’ school, and the ritualistic manner in which the structures and practices that would lead to academic improvements were imposed at Saint School, seemed to be imbued with an almost talismanic power. The continual drive for similitude in every aspect of the educational operation would progress towards not only a policing of the minutiae, but also a superstitious weaving of potentiality within the very actions themselves.

An interesting tension can be observed between the demands of the mechanistic model of education being imposed and the runic inviolability in which the ‘ways to get out of special measures’ are held. The teacher, as the human conduit for these exalted practices, becomes merely a contrivance, the vocational role replaced with the sacrificial – Agamben’s (1998) bare life. Strange phrases that would not be out of place in the world of Hogwarts (Rowling, 1998) are now woven into the daily routines of secondary schools – ‘the purple pen of progress’ being just one example of the charm-like invocations employed to ward against failure and seemingly at odds with the business model being applied. Yet those who have survived this paradoxical process could explain that there is a simpler, yet perhaps more humbling, answer to the conundrums raised by the issues at Saint School. One-size-fits-all ideologies cannot be grafted on or replicated across the plethora of social, economic, geographical, historical and political communities in which schools and their staff and students are situated.

I would suggest that the construction of ‘superheads’ and the executive leadership teams that accompany them is akin to colonialism. Not only is the concept of community rendered invisible; it is made absent, a non-existent entity that is not ignored – it is not recognised. At Saint School, it was even deemed vital to provide students with a ‘language’ that would allow our particular saviours to converse with them, through a set of Christian values rather than through their own ‘restricted’ code (Bernstein, 1971). The insistence that every action should be undertaken with one such value – ‘honourable purpose’ – was to create a common understanding when ascribing motivation for a given action, supposedly to encourage students to apply moral argument to negative behaviours before engaging in them. In reality, the phrase began to touch wing tips with the concept of ‘ends justifying the means’, particularly when the ‘honourable purpose’ of the executive leadership was challenged. This one phrase encompasses the corruption of personal integrity that can accompany rescue fantasies. The most damaging of decisions could apparently be made without guilt, as it was motivated by the ‘honourable purpose’ of ‘making this school successful’.

Conclusion

The category of failure in which Saint School was placed states that: ‘the school is failing to give pupils an acceptable standard of education, and the people responsible for leading, managing or governing are not demonstrating the capacity to secure the necessary improvement’ (Education Act 2005: 29). This phrasing paves the way for the messiah-like construction of the executive head, framed within neo-liberal notions of ruling elitism, which elevates the individual above the communal and reifies the practices that serve to pronounce their domination over the unenlightened ‘masses’. It is this ‘ownership’ of the means of producing ‘successful’ schools which signifies the neo-liberal ethos that has created such alienation within teaching as a profession. The attempt to delegitimise the historical collective identity of an institution such as Saint School, and to elicit consensus for a constructed identity that is alien to the frameworks of meaning within the group, ultimately depends on fear to engender compliance.

Students and teachers alike are made accountable for their own effectiveness within imposed, narrow criteria. Focus on individual responsibility sidesteps the issue of culpability for the agencies that produce and reproduce the structures of power within British education – structures that are patently failing to provide holistic learning environments for young people facing the complexities of contemporary societal pressures. Saint School is not alone in seeing a rise in levels of stress and anxiety amongst pupils. According to Sharp (2013: 10): ‘There are clear indications … that the pressure to perform in an increasingly micromanaged, accountable education system may be playing a part in developing mental health problems and in suicidal behaviour’.

Schools, health services and families are blamed for and commanded to solve issues caused by economic and social inequalities that have escalated under the drive to marketise education, knowledge and health. If students are now defined as human capital, the repositories of ‘the stock of skills and knowledge embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce economic value’ (Sullivan and Sheffrin, 2003: 5), then the ‘product’ is being damaged by the assembly line. The diffuse manner in which capital now operates is mirrored in the multi-academy trust; the pupil is both output and consumer of the education system, and understanding how resistance can be effective becomes veiled by the laminations of power relationships. This is the challenge for Saint School – to harness the newly emergent discourses that recognise the common-sense belief that education cannot be a disembodied system, severed from lived experience, and to reconnect with the political centrality of the teaching role. Perhaps the experiences of Saint School and the dehumanising aspects of the special measures process would support Schwarzmantel (2004) when he states that ‘liberalism as a critical ideology has in its vulgarised “ideological”’ form lost that critical edge, and abandoned its vision of a society of fully self-determining individuals’. If this is so and, as Gramsci (2001: 1242) suggests, ‘[i]deologies are the true philosophy because they result from the philosophical vulgarisations which bring the masses to concrete action, to the transformation of reality’, then the question now for education is: What form can such action take?