A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest

Introduction

In the summer term of 2016, English primary school children in Years 2 and 6 were the first to take the new Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), based on a new national curriculum, which were intended to be more rigorous. SATs have been part of primary education in England since the introduction of the 1988 Education Act. Alexander (2010), Ball (2013), Carr (2016), Hutchings (2015) and Whitty (2008) highlight that, throughout this time, the government has persisted despite the disapproval of head teachers, teachers, parents and academics. SATs are used to hold schools accountable for the percentage of pupils achieving the expected standard and whether pupils make sufficient progress based on new value-added measures (Department for Education, 2016a). The Let Our Kids Be Kids (2016a) grass-roots protest was initially led by a small group of parents of Year 2 children who had, in their words, ‘had enough … enough of endless testing, enough of teachers not being trusted to teach, enough of an Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills]-driven, dull, dry curriculum aimed solely at passing National Curriculum Tests (SATs)’. The protest culminated in parents removing their children from school on 3 May 2016 in what was referred to as a ‘kids’ strike’; this was a protest day before SATs for Year 2 and Year 6 pupils were due to start. Instead, the parents arranged what they described as a fun day of learning, which in some cities became communal activities in local parks.

The hope of the campaigners was that the protest would encourage schools to boycott SATs. Over the seven weeks of the protest, it received strong support. Although the actual number of those who did participate in the ‘kids’ strike’ is not known, the campaign website claimed that 8000 children were absent, over 45,000 people signed the online petition, and that the absence-letter template provided was downloaded over 63,000 times. Additionally, according to the website, some press sources reported that as many as 40,000 children missed school (Let Our Kids Be Kids, 2016a). Whilst the numbers are not large when compared to the 1.19 million children who were registered within state-funded primaries in Year 2 and Year 6 (Department for Education, 2016b), the protest made an impact. It was covered by both local and national media, as well as generating a large following on social media, highlighting the issues of high-stakes testing within primary education. The Let Our Kids Be Kids protest emphasised the role of parents as activists, presenting a counterdiscourse via social media in protesting against the government, and thus it can be considered as a site of resistance.

The focus of this study was to consider how the power relationship between the government and parents is enacted through the education system and, ultimately, the question of who knows best for a child, and to what end. This article investigates the relationship between parents and the government; whilst parent–school and school–government relationships are also an integral part of education, it is beyond the scope of this article to consider these relationships within the research. The study considered the potential tension that resulted between the government and parents in the creation of the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest in the degrees of compliance with, and rejection of, government educational policies. In order to address these aims, the research utilised a critical discourse analysis approach in conjunction with a thick description to analyse the campaign in detail. The findings are explored through the themes of the paradox of parent power, the discourse of success, the educational experience and the emotional effects of testing.

The neo-liberalisation of education

Government education policy currently reflects a neo-liberal ideology, whose discourse has shaped the current education system. Neo-liberal policies that focus on the testing of children have been increased in order to respond to the government’s need for data to create parental choice within education. Rudd and Goodson’s (2017) research highlighted that, since the financial crisis in 2007/2008, rapid policy changes have enhanced previous marketisation and privatisation strategies, altering the educational landscape. Within the realms of educational research, there is a wealth of literature exploring the effects of neo-liberalism within both policy and practice, as considered by Apple (2006), Ball (2013), Rudd and Goodson (2017) and Saltman (2014). Humphreys (2017) affirms that market-orientated economics have reinforced a neo-liberal narrative within education reforms, both globally and nationally.

In order to ensure that the country can compete globally, policies within education have become ever more focused on accountability measures, resulting in a vertical, top-down process of control. Accountability works as a technology of governmentality through managerial organisation, in which schools and those within them implicate themselves in their own governance to achieve the prescribed targets. Accountability therefore becomes both internalised and enacted as part of what Foucault (2010) would describe as the political project of the government. Many reforms throughout education are centred on raising children’s attainment within specific subjects that are considered to enhance future employment. Schools, teachers and children have all become units of measurement within the education system, reflecting technologies of power, in which a policy discourse of accountability has become normalised (Ball, 2013; Carr, 2016; Hayler, 2017). As a result, the focus on further control has been seen within primary education with the introduction of the new, more rigorous forms of primary SATs.

The discourse of testing

Government education reforms have had an increased focus on the rigorous testing of primary school children, with the rhetoric that schools must set high expectations for all pupils and be held accountable via pupil performance (Department for Education, 2016a). Teaching strategies and practices now support the testing of pupils and the use of test data, through which schools endeavour to meet government accountability standards (Atkinson, 2015; Carr, 2016; Hayler, 2017; Hutchings, 2015). Reliance on testing can be considered as dehumanising to teachers and pupils, whereby all are reduced to numerical value based on test scores. This form of dehumanisation could also apply to parents, as poor pupil performance is often attributed to poor parenting (Wood and Brownhill, 2018). Research suggests that pupil identities and their worth to the school system are linked to their test scores via pupil tracking technologies (Hayler, 2017; Rutledge et al., 2013). Numerous research studies, both nationally and globally, report the negative effects of the testing regime on children (Alexander, 2010; Hayler, 2017; Hursh, 2008; Hutchings, 2015; Lingard et al., 2013; Saltman, 2014; West, 2010). Many reports suggest that SATs are causing anxiety, disaffection and mental health problems within children as young as six. The negative effects of testing are reported by teachers as stress, anxiety and panic attacks, which they considered to have increased in 78% of primary schools over the past two years (Weale, 2017). The Department for Education’s (2016c: 34) own research identifies that ‘[a]t any one time, three pupils in an average class of 30 are suffering from a mental illness’.

Furthermore, evidence suggests that high-stakes tests have failed to increase a child’s overall knowledge and learning (Alexander, 2010; Hutchings, 2015; Organisation for Economic Co-operation, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010). Therefore, testing has proven unsuccessful in the improvement of standards by the government’s own measurements, yet its use persists. Government failure to change the testing regime has resulted in reports of children’s mental ill health becoming normalised. This reflects Foucault’s (1995: 224) theory of power and knowledge, which ‘regularly reinforce one another in a circular process’; consequently, the need for testing is continually reinforced as an accepted part of schooling. It is this conflict that was reflected in the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest, in which parents no longer saw the merit in the constant testing of their children.

A discourse of parental responsibility

Neo-liberal education policies promoting parental choice have generated an ethical framework which both encourages and legitimises self-interest in the pursuit of competitive family advantage (Oria et al., 2007). Through the notion of educational choice, parents experience new forms of governmentality as they are now deemed responsible for gaining the best advantage via education for their child’s future life.

Educational success is therefore linked to parental involvement. Vincent (2017: 542) highlights how education policies have continued to incorporate the role of the parent within polices, and how parents, particularly mothers, are strongly positioned as responsible for their child’s ‘emotional, social, educational, and physical development’. Reay et al. affirm the idealised version of the parent:

Historically white middle class identity in the UK has been an idealised one held up for others (namely, the working class masses) to aspire to (Carey, 1992). Currently, in the 2000s the white middle classes, and particularly as they are inscribed in policy discourses, best fit this ideal of the democratic citizen – individualistic, responsible, participatory, the active chooser. (Reay et al., 2008: 238)

Many government policies over the past decade have been aimed at raising aspirations. Some parents are considered to be ‘failing’ parents due to a lack of engagement with their child’s education and having low expectations; as a result, they are connected with societal problems (De Benedictis, 2012; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011; Wood and Brownhill, 2018). Whilst the purpose of the research was not to discuss issues of social class, the discourse of how parents can be considered as either allies or enemies of the government’s education policies is relevant. Choice for parents and increased involvement in their child’s education can provide opportunities to resist the mainstream education discourse. Research by the National Foundation for Educational Research suggests that parents choose schools based on the ‘school that suits my child’ and the ‘location’ of the school. The data suggested that school choice based on examination results was less important to parents (Wespieser, 2015). This implies that there is a site of resistance between parents and government policies on the need for testing.

Parents’ acts of resistance within education are increasing; the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign website highlights and supports the differing parent groups that disagree with various government education policies. These assorted groups include Parent Education Hub, More Than A Score, Take Childhood Back – NaturePlay, Better Without Baseline and Too Much Too Soon, to list but a few. The groups are all concerned with the pressure on children with regard to testing, and the removal of play and creativity from education (Let Our Kids Be Kids, 2016a). They address issues from boycotting SATs and requesting the extension of the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum to the end of Year 2, to the increase of creativity within primary education. The rise of parents acting collectively as activist groups reflects Foucault’s (2007: 201) notion of ‘counter-conduct’, which refers to ‘the struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’. Within this context, the current research was based on consideration of parents as activists within education who create sites of resistance to a neo-liberal form of education and the testing regime within primary schools.

Governmentality and the educational self

The Let Our Kids Be Kids protest, as a site of resistance against the government’s neo-liberal education policies, was explored via Foucault’s (2008) theory of governmentality. Foucault first referred to the term ‘governmentalities’ in his lectures concerned with the genealogy of the modern state (Lemke, 2002). This notion of governmentality was concerned with the problem of government: ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, by whom should we accept to be governed, how to be the best possible governor?’ (Foucault, 2007: 88). According to Foucault, the term ‘government’ does not only refer to the political, but also incorporates philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogical texts. Furthermore, the term ‘government’ also incorporates the governing of the family, as Foucault (2007: 94) identifies: ‘when a state is governed well, fathers will know how to govern their families, their wealth, their goods, and their property well, and individuals will also conduct themselves properly’. Therefore, governmentality is concerned with the conduct of individuals, families and groups, and the regularities of everyday existence. This notion of how families govern themselves is particularly salient within current neo-liberal education policies, in which parents are positioned as responsible for ensuring that their child receives the best education. This creates a ‘defining “strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility,” within which the types of conduct, or “conduct of conduct,” that characterize “government” are established’ (Foucault, 2007: 389). Governmentality thus creates a ‘reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms of knowledge’, in which the government is considered as adumbrating the close link between power relations and processes of subjectification (Lemke, 2001: 191). Within this theory, the government is understood as a discursive field in which the exercise of power is ‘rationalized and structures specific forms of intervention’ (Lemke, 2001: 191). This intervention can be related to government institutions as a technology of government power, which aims to produce citizens as a result of policies. A citizen is produced within a neo-liberal mode of governmentality, and is described by Rose and Miller (2008: 195) as an ‘enterprising individual in search of meaning, responsibility and a sense of personal achievement in life’. Such individuals conduct their lives as a form of ‘enterprise of the self, striving to improve the “quality of life” for themselves and their families through the choices that they took within the marketplace of life’ (195). This notion of the neo-liberal subject is salient within education policies.

From a governmentality perspective, the analysis of education policy creates a critical space centred on ‘that dimension of our history composed by the intervention, contestation, operationalization and transformation of more or less rationalised schemes, programmes, techniques and devices which seek to shape conduct so as to achieve certain ends’ (Rose, 1999: 20). Problems within education policy ‘are resolved not just by enactment or change of policy but also through an alteration in how existing policy reaches subjects’ (Cheney-Lippold, 2011: 173). A government seeks to influence the subject via the use of power, which Foucault (2002b) describes thus: ‘The exercise of power is a “conduct of conducts” and a management of possibilities. Power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or their mutual engagement than a question of “government”’ (341). Power is not manifested through violence but via coercion; power is exercised through the conditions of freedom, involving ‘individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available’ (342). The power of the government, which functions by being the overseer, becomes the regulator and ‘the distributor of all power relations in a given social ensemble’ (344). The context of education is a relevant social space within which governmentality power relations can take place. Thus, parents can be considered to be coerced through education policies to ensure that their child is receiving the best education possible to ensure future economic success; this is reflected in the freedom of choice for parents to send their child to the ‘best’ school being an accepted part of society.

However, within governmentality, the individual subject is governed by the state and, at the same time, governs him/herself. Ball and Olmedo (2013) describe the individual subject as ‘the result of endless processes of construction of identities that are to a greater or lesser extent, but never completely, constrained by the contingencies of the particular historical moment in which they are inscribed’ (87). This creates a paradox whereby the idea of resistance can become a central aspect in the analysis of power relations (87). Foucault (1997: 292) affirms: ‘In power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be no power relations at all’. In relation to the dominant discourse of neo-liberal education policies on which this study focused, the parents supporting the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest by removing their child from school can be viewed as no longer governing the family to the will of the government. Instead, via the protest, parents were able to use the notion of power in the opposite direction, which therefore can be considered as a specific form of resistance. The research considered an analysis of the neo-liberal modes and technologies of governmentality within the testing regime of primary education.

Methodology

The research aimed to explore the relationship between parents and the government within primary education via the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign. In order to achieve these research aims, a critical discourse analysis of government education policies, the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign’s communication and the corresponding newspaper reports was utilised. In conjunction, thick description was used to provide a detailed account of the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign and the government’s response. The discourse within the institution of education is central to this research and how the Let Our Kids Be Kids activists sought to challenge the government’s dominant position.

Data analysis and discussion

Conclusion and recommendations

The study showed that the notion of power was realised both through government discourse and policies and within the parent–government relationship. For the government, the education system operates a technology of governmentality, in which the parent is seen as complicit in pressurising schools to continually raise standards for education in order to compete globally and provide a skilled future workforce. The government discourse of choice is directed at parents as a means of empowerment to enable them to choose the best school based on test scores. Whilst the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign was aimed at boycotting SATs, which are a mechanism of neo-liberal governmentality, the parents failed to wholly challenge the neo-liberal discourse of education being necessary for future employment. Moreover, although this research did not specifically focus on the discourse of social class, it arguably formed part of the debate. The activist discourse was situated within a privileged position of the middle classes: not only did the protesting parents have the cultural capital to mobilise in the first instance, but they also replicated much of the neo-liberal discourse that supports the current education system. Interestingly, this played out as both compliance and resistance to a greater and lesser extent. The research demonstrated that whilst an interrogation of the dominant discourse should open up a space for practical action to challenge neo-liberal educational policies, the dominant discourses have become legitimatised as self-evident and natural. Therefore, the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign failed to present a strong counterdiscourse to challenge the current neo-liberal ideology within education.

The power of the government is evident within the structure of education, with the focus on developing children to become productive adults in society. An analysis of the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest revealed that the parents seemed to share this core value. However, it was the notion of childhood itself that was the site of contestation for these parents. Throughout this research, it was evident that, for the government, the child represents an investment for future means of production; however, for the parent, childhood should be an enjoyable experience. The pressure and subsequent stress placed on the children as a result of testing was the main motivation of the proposed Let Our Kids Be Kids boycott. It is this notion of a happy childhood that presents a counterdiscourse to neo-liberal education policies. The children’s negative experiences of the testing regime further present an opposition to the government’s neo-liberal education policies, as the children failed to be constructed within a neo-liberal subjectivity. However, it is noted that the child’s voice is not represented within this research; instead, children’s experiences are reported by parents who are against the tests. Therefore, another area for future research could be to explore children’s own understanding and experiences of testing in school. The government’s rhetoric states the need to continually raise standards in order to compete within the global market of education. However, with the number of children considered failing, fearing failure and having negative responses to the testing regime, the validity of neo-liberal policies is brought into question: if children are unable to meet the ever increasing standards and are then classed as failures, does this ultimately also make the government’s neo-liberal policies a failure?

In conclusion, the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign’s aim was for the government to withdraw primary school testing. As the tests were not withdrawn, the campaign could initially be considered a failure. However, more recently, the primary school assessments introduced in 2016, which were the focus of the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest, have undergone a parliamentary consultation process (UK Parliament, 2017), with Year 2 SATs due to become optional from 2023, although there is no evidence to prove whether this was as a result of the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign. The current study has identified that future protests against single issues within the education system could be more effective if parent groups were supported to understand how they are framed within government neo-liberal policies, and to challenge the boundaries this paints for them in relation to their child’s education.