Power and Education

This article examines the challenges involved in attempting to build collaboration and implement change in a partnership of schools during a period characterised by neoliberal education policy. The partnership was located in a relatively isolated coastal and rural area in the north of England with significant areas of disadvantage and comprised 18 schools, all but two of which provided education for children aged 4–13. Based on research with schools and the local community, the article explores the difficulties of building consensus for cultural change in schools when neoliberal education policy’s paradoxical dual emphasis on marketisation and neoconservative traditionalism militates against the realities of such coalition-building. It uses new social movement theory to examine the difficulties involved in mobilising schools in a dysfunctional partnership and concludes that, despite its emphasis on school-to-school support, the forms of neoliberalism and neoconservatism imposed on schools in England magnify the contextual disadvantages that impede the development of effective collaboration.

Local authority music services have held a central place in the UK’s music education landscape since the end of the Second World War. Nonetheless, the provision of these services has always been a non-statutory responsibility, and local levels of opportunity have varied in response to prevailing economic and political climates, along with broader developments in educational policy. The first half of this article focuses on the implications of two key policies enacted during the 1990s. Both were linked to perceived changes in the profiles of young people who engaged with music service tuition. The latter half presents an ecological study of practical implications of the second policy – the Music Standards Fund – on primary-aged children’s take-up of and persistence with the tuition in one English local authority. At both area and school levels, the children’s engagement cohered with various socio-economic and contextual factors. This coherence is considered from the perspectives of Connell’s ‘neo-liberal parent’ and related Bourdieusian-influenced theories. The conclusion offers implications from the implementation of the policy in the contemporary era of Music Education Hubs, the successor organisations to local authority music services, and the schools these Hubs serve.

Arizona’s “Wild West,” free-market education approach via school-choice policies reflects the expansion of neo-liberal reforms, which emphasize private provision and governance of public services once markets are established. Indeed, charter schools, tax credit programs for public (state) and private schools, inter-district open enrolment, and neovouchers are changing Arizona’s traditional public school systems and the communities where they are situated. It is known that new, incentivist market-based systems can result in decreased democratic school accountability and the thinning of collective democratic political actions. Further, the rapid entry and growth of not-for-profit and profit-making charter schools and education management organizations in the USA raises questions about equitable student access. It is not fully understood, however, how mature school-choice systems affect local communities “on the ground”—that is, how are school policies understood and acted out? This study employed ethnographic methods to analyze the perceptions and actions of community stakeholders in Arizona, including school leaders, teachers, parents, students, and institution and community organizers, at one district public school and in its surrounding community, including its charter schools. The author examines issues of power, since all community actors are not equally able to engage in school-choice practices.

This article aims to look at the intersection of policy and lived experience at the level of the individual child by dissecting how primary education policy in England demands and expects a particular learner subjectivity. The focus is on children in the first years of primary school, and how statutory assessments provide a model of the ‘ideal learner’ who is self-regulating and able to make choices which are self-improving. 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, to consider how this model of the neo-liberal learner has evolved. Drawing on theoretical insights on the ‘neo-liberal subject’ and post-structural insights into subjectivity and acceptable/impossible learner identities, it is argued that despite some shifts towards valuing high attainment in ‘measurable’ subjects within a data-obsessed school system, there remains a broad conception of the ‘good learner’ in the early years, which includes attitudes to learning and self-regulation. This wider view is encouraged by the discourse of ‘growth mindset’ and the recent focus on character education, and has social justice implications.

The aims of this research were to explore the relationship between parents and the UK government within primary education and to critically analyse neo-liberal modes and technologies of governmentality within the testing regime. This article focuses on the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign, which was an online protest by parents. The protest aimed to force the UK government to stop the new Standard Assessment Tests due to be taken by primary school children in the summer of 2016. The research considers, via a critical discourse analysis approach, the potential tension between the government and the Let Our Kids Be Kids protest. The analysis focuses on how the parents positioned themselves as either complying with or rejecting government educational policy. The research findings concentrate on four themes: the paradox of parent power, the discourse of success, the educational experience and the emotional effects of testing. Whilst the campaign sought to challenge the government’s testing regime, the neo-liberal rhetoric that the purpose of education is for future employment was maintained by both sides, with the protesters adopting the same neo-liberal discourse to justify an opposing position. Ultimately, for parents to challenge the government within education, the neo-liberal discourse that supports the current education policies needs to be recognised and addressed.

This article uniquely employs Beverley Skeggs’ ‘hierarchies of personhood’ as a means to explore the iconographies of teacherhood in neoliberal times. Drawing on the narratives of three male primary school teachers in England, it examines and critiques the neoliberal ‘subject of value’ that is acquisitional, performative and self-propelling. ‘Self-projection’, ‘self-protection’ and ‘self-separation’ are identified as a trio of self-care practices that invite normative identity claims as they articulate with embodiments of value found in gendered, classed and raced discourses in contemporary cultural and political domains. The article is therefore about how, within school communities, conditions of personhood are established through regimes of value, and how these regimes are bound by the logic of commodity and exchange. In addressing the limited attention given to the localised formation of masculinities within neoliberalism, the article contributes to an emerging area of scholarship via its innovative engagement with sociological conceptions of personhood and value. The article thereby seeks to mark a shift in the academic and public discourses framing ‘male primary school teachers’, as it critically examines how such an identity category hinges on regimes of value conditioned by interlocking technologies of neoliberal educational governance, patriarchy and classism.