Making little neo-liberals: The production of ideal child/learner subjectivities in primary school through choice,self-improvement and ‘growth mindsets’

Introduction

This article aims to explore how policy shapes the lived experiences of children in the early years of primary education in England through a discussion of how assessment content and current individualising discourses require children to become self-regulating and self-improving learners, or little neo-liberals. Although neo-liberal ideology has influenced early childhood education internationally, England is an international outlier in terms of regulation in early childhood, in that children are required to start compulsory schooling earlier than elsewhere and are subject to a statutory curriculum and assessment regime from the age of four (Department for Education, 2014a). The ‘early years’ part of primary education, made up of voluntary Nursery classes for three- and four-year-olds and compulsory Reception classes of four- and five-year-olds, represents a hinterland between the more formal practices of primary education and the play-based ethics of preschool settings such as nurseries (Moss, 2013). As such, the early years are the location of constant debate and contestation between policy agendas which emphasise school readiness, and the benefits of early intervention, and professional discourses which focus on care, the value of play and recognition of the ‘whole child’ (Carr, 2013; Gillies et al., 2017; Moss, 2013). This article demonstrates how the early years in England provide an example of the dominance of neo-liberal ideas, and the potential exclusionary impact.

The policy context in England is distinctive in that it is productive of a particular, restrictive learner subjectivity. Early years classrooms in England are subject to statutory assessment: at present, the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFS Profile) must be completed in June of the Reception year for each child. This involves a teacher judgement on whether each child has reached ‘expected’ levels in 17 early learning goals, or has ‘exceeded’ these, or is deemed ‘emerging’. Additionally, there have been policy forays into a statutory assessment on entry, known as Baseline Assessment (which I discuss in more detail below). The current and long-established EYFS Profile, as a detailed assessment on each child based on observation through the year, provides a frame for understanding what constitutes a ‘good’ four- or five-year-old school student, and who falls outside of this designation.

The article uses data collected through qualitative research projects conducted in the late 2000s and in 2017, involving interviews with teachers and school leaders, and observation in classrooms. Drawing together data over this period allows from some observation of how changes in assessment regimes have altered models of good learner subjectivities, though my overall argument is that policy discourses are marked by continuity – notably, in the importance placed on making good choices. The focus is on the distinctively neo-liberal elements of the idealised student subjectivity in the early years, drawing on theoretical insights on the ‘neo-liberal subject’ (Walkerdine, 2003) and post-structural insights into subjectivity and acceptable/impossible learner identities (Youdell, 2006). The aim is to answer two main questions. First, how does neo-liberal policy shape learner subjectivities in the early years? Second, how have these changed with policy reforms? In doing so, I consider how neo-liberal policy demands neo-liberal subjects – in this case, little neo-liberals – and then, in the discussion section, I reflect on what this means for the reproduction of inequalities in education.

The neo-liberal regime in the early years

Early childhood education and care for children aged from birth to five has been a policy focus internationally since the late 1990s. The increased investment in early childhood seen in the 2000s in countries such as the USA, Australia and the UK has been accompanied by market-based reforms driven by neo-liberal ideology (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005), such as voucher schemes and competition between providers. In this context, investment in the early years is justified using human capital theory, which suggests that spending money on children in their first few years will yield gains, as they require fewer services as adults. This is ‘the story of quality and high returns’, as Moss (2014) terms it, where the result of investment and high-quality provision is increased human capital and decreased dysfunction. The desire for accountability has led to a need for measurement, so that early childhood becomes dominated by a calculative rationality. Dahlberg and Moss (2005: 4) argue that policy is ‘stirred by the prospect of preschools being sites for producing predefined outcomes, mainly through the application of technical practices to the efficient governing of children’. The drive to raise standards overall also has implications for practice, with increasing pressure on preschool settings to prepare children for compulsory schooling (Moss, 2013; Rose and Rogers, 2012), and a resulting critique of the social and emotional impact of ‘schoolification’ (Organisation for Economic Co-operation, 2006; see also Gunnarsdottir, 2014).

In England, early childhood has been subject to increasing regulation, and similar concerns have been raised about greater formalisation. Education for children under five in England is governed by the Early Years Foundation Stage framework (Department for Education, 2014a), a curriculum which differs from the National Curriculum, which is statutory in state schools from Year 1 (age five to six). The awkwardly named EYFS covers a broad range of areas, including personal and social development, creative development and physical development, as well as literacy and mathematical skills. Since 2003, children in Reception (age four to five) have been assessed through a statutory assessment known as the EYFS Profile. Teachers assess children on whether they meet 17 specific early learning goals across the broad curriculum, and report this in June each year. The EYFS Profile has been reformed and renamed since 2003 (it was previously the Foundation Stage Profile), with the main change coming in 2012 when the new Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government reduced the number of points teachers had to make decisions on from 117 to 17. At the time of writing, teachers are required to designate each child as ‘exceeding’, ‘expected’ or ‘emerging’ in relation to these 17 goals covering all areas of the curriculum (Department for Education, 2017b); these translate into one, two or three points per goal, providing an overall score ranging from 17 to 54 for each child.

In addition to this assessment, there was an attempt to introduce an assessment on entry, known as Baseline Assessment, in 2015. This assessment, conducted within the first six weeks of school, was intended to be used as a starting point for measuring a child’s progress through primary school over seven years, so that the school’s ‘effectiveness’ overall could be assessed (Department for Education, 2016). However, following a widespread campaign against the new tests (Better without Baseline, 2015), research which found that teachers saw the assessment as unnecessary and unhelpful (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2017a), and doubts over the comparability of different providers (Standards and Testing Agency, 2016), the policy was abandoned in 2016. Nonetheless, in 2017, plans were announced to reintroduce a revised form of Baseline Assessment in 2020 (Department for Education, 2017a).

Thus, the school-based early years in England are a site of neo-liberal policy experimentation, fully integrated into the heavily marketised and accountability-driven policy regime (Moss et al., 2016). While there are distinctive features of the early years, such as the different regulations in terms of staff qualifications, a different curriculum and a specific assessment which goes beyond the core subjects of literacy and mathematics (both assessed at ages 7 and 11), the early years remain under the jurisdiction of the primary school head teacher, and there is a significant impact on the early years from the pressures faced by the rest of the school. Notably, the inclusion of EYFS Profile results in schools’ data profiles for the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (the school inspection service, known as Ofsted) has led to an increased focus on early years results as part of the school’s ‘Ofsted story’ – the narrative of success presented to inspectors (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2017a).

This influence from the rest of primary education, part of the wider ‘schoolification’ critique (Moss, 2008; Organisation for Economic Co-operation, 2006), is evident in current political discourse around the early years. In 2017, an Ofsted report on good practice in Reception, titled ‘Bold beginnings: The Reception curriculum in a sample of good and outstanding primary schools’, was heavily criticised by practitioners for recommending more direct teaching of literacy and mathematics. The report, which was based on 41 primary schools, was described in an open letter organised by the campaign group Keep Early Years Unique (2017) as recommending potentially damaging ‘developmentally inappropriate practice’ based on a small and flawed sample. Around the same time, a government consultation on primary assessment in general was conducted, and the Department for Education’s (2017a) response to the submissions included a decision that the early learning goals which form the EYFS Profile should be revised ‘to make them clearer and align them more closely with teaching in key stage 1’. This recommendation came alongside the proposed return of Baseline Assessment in 2020.

Similar contestations continue internationally – notably, in the response of early childhood academics to a ‘mini-PISA’ (Programme for International Student Assessment) for five-year-olds organised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Moss et al., 2016; Urban and Swadener, 2016). The early years remain a site where high-stakes testing and discourses of ‘quality’ (Hunkin, 2016) are resisted through professional discourses which emphasise care for the child and a broad curriculum based on play. However, in England, this resistance is limited in its impact, given the depth of the neo-liberal policy incursion into education. As a result, I argue that the early years are dominated by a particular model of what it means to be a ‘good learner’, defined by policy which is distinctly neo-liberal in nature, and exclusionary.

Theorising student subjectivities

This discussion of learner subjectivities in the early years of education is underpinned by the idea that dominant discourses shape models of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ learner, which children are compared against. Foucault’s notion of discourse is used here to describe particular frameworks of meaning which ‘constitute rather than simply reflect social reality’ (Ball, 2005: 5); discourses are productive of ‘truths’ within a setting, which then appear to be pre-existing. Thus, while it might appear to always have been so, the ideas contained in a policy document, for example, produce particular notions of who is successful in the early years and how we can assess this success. Historically and geographically specific discourses shape how we understand the learner and the teacher, and their relationship to one another in a particular time and place. Furthermore, dominant discourses relating to class, ‘race’, gender and dis/ability create intelligible spaces for some, but not all, children to be seen as ‘good’ learners, close to the ideal (Youdell, 2006).

The concept of an idealised learner subjectivity has a long history in the discussion of the ‘ideal client’ of education (Becker, 1952; Gillborn, 1990; Walkerdine, 1990). More recently, Youdell’s (2006: 2) work has discussed how ‘students’ subjectivities are entangled with schools’ notions of different “sorts” of students and learners’, drawing on Judith Butler’s (1990, 1997) work on identity as performative. The subject is constituted through discourse, which delimits intelligibility. As Butler (2010: 4) argues: ‘Subjects are constituted through norms which, in their reiteration, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognised’. By considering the expectations placed on children as learners, the intention here is to consider how children can be recognisable as good learners in relation to the operating norms of the classroom. Youdell (2006) discusses how some pupils are constituted as ‘impossible learners’, outside the possibility of educational success, while others are rendered intelligible as acceptable learners. This conceptualisation of how learner subjectivities can operate has been used, both by Youdell and others, to consider how some groups of children are excluded from acceptability as they are not intelligible as good learners within discourses that operate as ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1980). For example, the association of the ideal learner with a white, middle-class ideal positions entire cohorts of children in inner-city schools as a ‘difficult intake’, who will inevitably have low levels of attainment (Bradbury, 2013b). These ideas have also been developed further to explore the complex ways in which high-attaining students from marginalised groups can be dismissed as inauthentic learners, accused of learning for the ‘wrong’ reasons (Archer, 2008; Bradbury, 2013b).

Of particular interest here is the shifting form of the ideal learner identity, alongside policy change. It is argued that within a neo-liberal policy framework dominated by the idea of the market, competition, accountability and individualism, the ideal learner is shaped by distinctly neo-liberal values, so that in the early years the child is expected to become a ‘neo-liberal subject’ (Walkerdine, 2003). This subject is responsible and self-regulating, reflective, flexible and self-transforming, among other attributes (Francis and Skelton, 2005: 124), and this model is discursively produced through the expected goals of the statutory assessment (Bradbury, 2013a). We can conceptualise this production of an ideal through policy as a form of ‘ethnopolitics’, which ‘concerns itself with the self-techniques by which human beings should judge themselves and act upon themselves to make themselves better than they are’ (Rose, 2001: 18). Thus, the production of neo-liberal identities in the early years can be seen as part of a broader strategy through which the subject is constituted in relation to neo-liberal values.

It should be noted that this is not an explicit model, but one which is implicit in the content of assessments, policy documentation and teachers’ everyday discourse. It may also operate in tension with other notions of ‘success’ in schools, which may be restricted to raw attainment in tests or indeed, more recently, the notion of ‘good progress’ (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2017a). However, I argue here that the ‘turn to character’ (Allen and Bull, 2018) represented by character education, alongside other discourses about students’ attitudes to learning such as ‘growth mindset’, suggests that this wider understanding of what it means to be a good learner still dominates. Character education has become a solution to educational problems under the coalition (2010–2015) and Conservative governments (2015–), where ‘“character strengths” such as optimism, resilience, and grit [are] located as key factors shaping academic and other life outcomes’ (Bull and Allen, 2018: 392). As I discuss further below, these and other individualising discourses locate the solution to disparities in attainment in the individual child, while downplaying the role of structural inequalities.

The research studies

This discussion is based on two qualitative research projects undertaken in primary schools in England in the late 2000s and in 2017. This is not an attempt at a longitudinal study, but rather a way of considering shifting discourses among teachers under different policy regimes. The first project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, aimed to explore the classroom practices associated with the statutory assessment in Reception – the EYFS Profile. The data collection involved methods influenced by ethnography, including long-term observation in the classroom (at least once per fortnight for one year), repeated interviews with classroom teachers and school leaders, and document collection of policies, assessments and classroom groupings. The interview schedules focused on the use of the assessment and its impact on the classroom. The research sites were two schools located in inner London serving diverse and lower-income populations, which I named St Mary’s (a Church of England school) and Gatehouse (a community school). While I have discussed the findings from this project elsewhere (Bradbury, 2013b), here I reflect on this data as juxtaposed with more recent data from the second project.

The Grouping project explored the use of grouping by ‘ability’ in classrooms for children aged three to seven (known as Early Years and Key Stage 1). This project was funded by the National Education Union, which is the largest teachers’ union in England, and was conducted with my colleague Guy Roberts-Holmes (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2017b). The data collection involved four hour-long focus groups with teachers, with questions on the use of groups for different subjects and age groups, and how policy on grouping was decided. Following this, quantitative data was collected through an England-wide survey of teachers (n = 1373), including questions on the extent and nature of grouping and opinions on the practice. This survey also included some free-text responses, which provided a large volume of additional written responses. Finally, 12 individual interviews with teachers and school leaders were conducted at four case-study schools located in different regions of England, in order to explore in more depth how teachers used grouping and their reasons for doing so. The sampling for the focus groups and interviews was opportunistic, based on access to teachers and schools, but the participants represented a range of different geographical locations, types of school and stages of their teaching career. There was no requirement to be associated with the union for participation in the interviews or survey, but the focus group participants were union members. Here, I use data from this project mainly from the focus groups and interviews, and some written comments from the survey. Both projects were conducted using the ethical guidelines of the British Education Research Association and went through ethical approval at the host institution.

The data from both projects was analysed independently in relation to the guiding research questions of the project, and then returned to for the purposes of this article, with an attempt to draw out further how an ideal learner subjectivity is created and maintained in the neo-liberal classroom. The data from the second project was analysed in relation to the finding from the first project that policy created an ideal of a self-regulating and self-improving learner, alongside the developing literature on learner subjectivities in education.

Policy and neo-liberal child/learner subjectivities

Here, I set out how data from both projects suggests that an ideal learner subjectivity that is neo-liberal in character operates in the early years of primary education. This analysis is premised on the connection between the content and form of assessments and the creation of an idealised student subjectivity (Bradbury, 2013a); it suggests that assessment informs pedagogy, particularly where the assessment is ‘high stakes’ (Stobart, 2008). This leads to the question of how changing assessments alter the form of this ideal, and to what extent. This question of what is changing is important in the early years as there is an international trend of ‘schoolification’, where practices increasingly resemble those used with older primary school children, and this includes shifts in assessments from those which consider attainment across the curriculum to those that focus narrowly on literacy and mathematics. Previously, I have argued that the early years are unique in that children are assessed on their character and dispositions, as well as their ‘academic’ attainment – for example, their ‘willingness to learn’ (Bradbury, 2013a). This more recent narrowing as part of ‘schoolification’ might be assumed to alter an idealised student subjectivity in the early years, so that what is valued is a child who is successful in English and mathematics. As I suggest below, there are certainly indications that these subjects have a growing importance in the early years. Moreover, the trend known as ‘datafication’ (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2017c; Lingard, 2009), where teachers are increasingly focused on the production and analysis of attainment data, would suggest a need to focus on that which is measurable, not the more amorphous notions of attitudes and character. Again, there is some suggestion that what matters is what is measured in what I discuss below. However, the more recent research data suggests that, despite a narrowing of what is assessed (for example, in the first iteration of Baseline Assessment, the planned reintroduction of the assessment, and the plans to revise the current early learning goals), the desire to assess children in the early years more broadly remains. This can be seen in the elements of the Baseline Assessment which assessed ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’ (Early Excellence, 2016), the inclusion of ‘self-regulation’ in the new Baseline Assessment, and also the wider discourses of character education and ‘growth mindset’ present in primary schools. Therefore it remains the case, I argue, that children in the early years are judged against an idealised student subjectivity which demands high academic attainment and a self-improving and self-regulating attitude towards learning. I begin with the most important part of the idealised student subjectivity – the need to ‘self-improve’ – before considering how growth mindset and mastery reshape this subjectivity. The analysis section ends with a discussion of the damaging effects of getting choice ‘wrong’.

Discussion: individual success, individual failure

The linkages between neo-liberal policy and the reproduction of social inequalities by class, ‘race’, gender, dis/ability and many other factors are well established in the research literature (Ball, 2017; Gewirtz et al., 1995; Gillborn and Youdell, 2000). This discussion explores how the specifics of the production of an ideal learner identity in the first years of school work to exclude some children from positions of acceptability or recognisability as ‘good learners’, so that they are rendered ‘impossible’ (Youdell, 2006) and outside of educational acceptability. I focus on the importance of choice, and how the child is made responsible for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ choices in ways which are exclusionary, and how this relates to how families are seen as engaging with education, or not.

As discussed above, choice is a key principle of early years practice, in that children are able to choose activities during free play. But not all choices are equal, and the implications of choosing ‘wrongly’ are that the child does not learn the ‘right’ things and is positioned as a ‘bad chooser’, like Bauman’s (2005) ‘defective consumers’. As Bauman (2005: 76) argues: ‘Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right – there are good and bad choices … the kind of choice made is the evidence of competence or its lack’. In the ethnographic EYFS Profile project, children who chose higher-status activities, such as reading, writing or mathematical puzzles, were constituted as the self-improving, responsible and self-aware good learners, while those who chose lower-status but perhaps more enjoyable activities, such as riding tricycles, were understood as not properly engaging with the project of learning (for discussion in more detail, see Bradbury, 2013b). This judgement of engagement has classed implications, as children’s choices may be based on familiarity with and confidence in particular activities.

Moreover, the extent to which each child was seen in general as an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ was affected by understandings of their racialised, class and gendered identity, based largely on perceptions of their family background. Children from poorer homes who did not attend school were framed as failing to take up the opportunity of education, while working-class children with ‘educationally orientated’ families were seen positively as self-improving. Here we see how the assessment of children’s attitudes to learning can be simplistically linked to their family background in ways which are inevitably reproductive of social disadvantage. As one teacher commented in the Grouping project: ‘we have no idea what their home life is like and that obviously determines how well they’re going to do in school’ (Focus Group 3). Another commented: ‘The majority of the pupil premium are with me who are just one step behind where they should be. But then our pupil premium children don’t do any reading at home, none' (School leader, Whiteread Primary).

This assumption that reading is not done in ‘pupil premium families’ illustrates how easily links are made between parents’ choices about engagement with schoolwork and children’s attitudes to school. The presumed choice not to read at home, seen through a neo-liberal lens, is irrational and positions the ‘pupil premium’ family as failing to take up opportunities to improve themselves; the child is ‘behind’ and outside of educational acceptability. As Rose (1999: 88) describes, within the project of ‘responsible citizenship’, some ‘remain outside this regime of civility’. These children are unrecognisable as ‘good’ learners, unable to occupy positions of success.

Conclusion

In the early years, the need to become a ‘little neo-liberal’ is governed by policy, which seeps into expectations and practice in classrooms, as we see in the research data above. This is not a static and stable demand, but one which evolves as policy shifts. The ‘schoolification’ and concomitant datafication of the early years, where mathematics and literacy have increased prominence in a system which values what is measured, operate at times in tension with a wider model of what constitutes a ‘good learner’. However, the continued measurement of children’s attitudes and dispositions in statutory assessments, and teachers’ enthusiasm for this, means that key commonalities with Walkerdine’s neo-liberal subject remain. This is apparent in the value placed on choosing appropriately and improving oneself – whether this be through selecting the right activities, adopting the right ‘mindset’, or showing ‘grit’ and perseverance.

Importantly, the idea of self-improvement and being an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ is premised on individual responsibility for success or failure. Policy and current educational trends provide ‘norms of enterprising, self-actualizing responsible personhood’ (Rose, 1999: 18): if the child does not pick the appropriate chilli challenge or chooses low-status activities during free play, then they are required to deal with the consequences of their irrational decision. If the children from ‘pupil premium families’ mentioned above are ‘one step behind’, it is seen as their responsibility as they have chosen badly not to read at home. This removes structural factors from the discussion; after all, not choosing irrationally within a system of free choice ‘is easily, without a second thought, interpreted as choosing something else instead’ (Bauman, 2005: 75).

Meanwhile, as Rose (1999: 88) argues, for those who are excluded, ‘problems are represented in a new way, and are hence amenable to new modes of intervention’. The discourses of explanation around why some groups of children persistently ‘underperform’ in schools can be seen in this light, as a continuous project of justifying exclusion. Most recently, what Taylor (2018: 399) calls ‘stigmatising character discourses’ within character education involve judging children’s attitudes to learning; these discourses ‘leave the burden of responsibility for particular social outcomes in life and the labour market with individuals and their ability to cultivate their own human capital’.

This ‘turn to character’ (for further discussion, see Allen and Bull, 2018; Bull and Allen, 2018; Burman, 2018; Morrin, 2018) is the latest justificatory narrative for disparities in attainment. Character education and growth mindset discourses, like other circulating social policy trends such as network theory and the influence of neuroscience, are examples of how new ‘insights’ can be translated into policy (McGimpsey et al., 2017), in ways which adapt the subjectivating force of policy. The different subjects represented through policy – both irrational and rational choosers – are a diversification of the policy subject:

different narratives become possible, different regulatory technologies are developed and deployed, and there are methodological shifts in education and youth policy making as economic theory is adjusted to incorporate a range of new assumptions about human nature and their individual choosing behaviours. (McGimpsey et al., 2017: 920)

To conclude, neo-liberal policy shapes the lived experiences of children in their first years of primary school in England by providing a model of an ideal learner subjectivity who is self-improving and entrepreneurial. But not all children are recognisable as this ideal learner, based on raced and classed discourses, and those who do not engage or choose irrationally are placed further outside the realm of educational acceptability. In an era when early childhood education is affected by neo-liberal ideology internationally (Moss, 2013; Moss et al., 2016), and where policy from England is often ‘borrowed’ by other countries (Adoniou, 2017), this emphasis on the individual child as a self-improving learner has relevance in wider debates about the impact of neo-liberal policy on early educational inequalities.