David Halpin

Grant Maintainted Schools: Education in the Market Place

Grant-maintained schools and the great reform of education the grant-maintained schools policy the uptake of the policy local education authorities and opting out going grant-maintained experiencing grant-maintained schools - pupils and parents opting out and the education marketplace - two case studies self-governance, diversity and developments.

The Developing Role of the Headteacher in English Schools: Management, Leadership and Pragmatism

This article argues that, at a time of extensive educational reform in England and Wales, some headteachers are developing pragmatic response strategies to mandated change, and drawing eclectically on a range of management and leadership traditions to maintain institutional equilibrium and preserve valued educational philosophy and practice. Of particular interest is evidence that heads’ efforts to incorporate imposed educational policies into their schools’ practices do not necessarily involve the abandonment of strongly held ideological positions, even when these appear to be threatened by such policy. The ideological and managerial positionings of headteachers are, it is argued, more complex and less ‘determined’ than is sometimes suggested in the literature.

Managing the State and the Market: 'New' Education Management in Five Countries

Within the field of education management studies, recent reforms promoting devolution and choice are often seen to provide exciting new opportunities. It is claimed that the ‘new’education management, with its emphasis on site-based decision-making and consumer accountability, will enable headteachers and principals to ‘take control’ of their schools and make them more productive environments in which to work and study. However, our review of research findings from five different countries that are putting in place devolution and choice policies suggests that these new opportunities are more illusory than real. Positioned between the competing demands of the state and the market, school managers are becoming increasingly isolated from colleagues and classrooms — leading to a growing divergence between the managers and the managed. The paper considers the implication of recent developments for managers in general and for women managers in particular and concludes by discussing the relationship between the ...

‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’: diversity, institutional identity and grant‐maintained schools

Abstract The 1996 education White Paper on self‐governance confirms the governments long‐standing commitment to diversify educational provision and to employ grant‐maintained schools to take that agenda forward. This paper considers the extent to which self‐governing schools have contributed to diversification of the system and argues that there is little evidence that they have provided programmes which are innovative or mould breaking. Why this is the case is explored through interviews with headteachers of nine grant‐maintained schools. It suggests that school responses are crucially shaped by the headteachers’ interpretations of the conflicting demands of national policy frameworks and local competitive markets in education. In curriculum terms they show a propensity to consolidate their schools’ identities around what the schools have done in the past rather than embrace the opportunities to modernise presented through the governments funding priorities.

Utopian Spaces of “Robust Hope”: The architecture and nature of progressive learning environments

Utopianism, which is a distinctive vocabulary of hope, teaches us that society, including its physical sites of social and political practice, are both imagined and made and that we can accordingly believe they can be reimagined and remade. This paper exemplifies how exercises of the utopian imagination within teacher education curricula are able to do just that for teachers wishing initially to imagine and subsequently to realise progressive learning environments which privilege human agency, collective action, sustainability, community and equity, which together constitute the values said to underpin “robust hope”.

Utopianism and Education: The Legacy of Thomas More

‘At the beginning, with Thomas More, utopia sets out an agenda for the modern world. Today, five hundred years later, what are the uses of utopia?’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 85). This paper provides an answer to this question by examining Mores utopian ‘method’ which, it is suggested, offers a model way of thinking imaginatively and prospectively about the form and content of social reform in general and educational change in particular.

The Nature of Hope and its Significance for Education

This paper offers an analysis of the nature of hope and explicates its significance for and relation to education. This entails distinguishing initially two kinds of hope – absolute and ultimate hope. While absolute hope is an orientation of the spirit which sets no conditions or limits on what is achievable and has no particular ends in view, ultimate hope is an ‘aimed hope’, that is to say a form of hopefulness that entails identifying and struggling to realise in the here and now particular improved states of affairs – for oneself, for others and for society generally. To that extent, ultimate hope, despite efforts to undermine it prompted by despair, relativism, cynicism and fatalism, is a crucial aspect of the educational process. On the other hand, absolute hope, combined with a ‘larger love’ of teaching, provides those educators who have it with a significant personal resource in coping better with the special demands of their work.

Researching grant‐maintained schools 1

The 1988 Education Reform Act allows schools to ‘opt out’ of LEA control and become ‘grant‐maintained’ by central government. This measure has provoked considerable controversy. Its supporters claim that it will increase parental choice and improve standards; its critics say that it will further fragment the education service and reintroduce selection. This paper examines the background to the measure and discusses five research tasks for those, like the authors, who are concerned to assess its significance and monitor and evaluate its effects. 1. This paper was first presented at an Education Reform Act Research Network Seminar held in the Faculty of Education, Bristol Polytechnic, on Thursday 30 November 1989. Parts of the paper draw on the authors’ research proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council, J. Fitz and D. Halpin (1989), and work subsequently supported by one of its grants (Award No. R0000231899). A number of colleagues, including Geoff Whitty, Len Barton, Gill Crozier, Paul Croll, I...

Area-based approaches to educational regeneration

The Education Action Zone (EAZ) experiment is one of a number of area-based regeneration initiatives (ABRIs) that have been introduced by central government in recent years in England in an attempt both to tackle social exclusion and lever up educational achievement in some of its disadvantaged localities. The policy, regarded by some of its advocates as the epitome of New Labours ‘Third Way’, is premised upon the idea that different bodies (public, private, voluntary and community) can work together to deliver localised ‘joined-up solutions’ to ‘joined-up problems’ – in this case those to do with how to address successfully persistent educational failure in poor neighborhoods. Drawing on the findings of a three and a half-year long ESRC-funded research project designed to investigate the origins, operation and impact of the EAZ policy, this article reflects on the degree to which this approach to educational regeneration is delivering on its objectives and highlights the lessons that can be learnt from its operation so far.

Education Action Zones and democratic participation

Education Action Zones and their forums seek to draw together diverse constituencies of interest in order to develop and implement local plans for school improvement. As such, it has been suggested that they may better empower parents and communities (Blunkett 1999) than existing forms of school governance. This article, which is based on a textual examination of the first 25 applications for zone status, interviews with forum members, including seven EAZ Directors, and observation within two EAZs, explores the extent to which the early evidence suggests that EAZ Action Forums are offering a new way to democratise education.