Paola Mattei

Accountability and Sanctions in English Schools

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on accountability in school-based education in England. It explores notions of accountability and proposes a new framework for its analysis. It then identifies a number of types of accountability which are present in school-based education, and discusses each in terms of who is accountable to whom and for what. It goes on to examine the sanctions associated with each type of accountability and some possible effects of each type. School performance cross-cuts virtually all facets of accountability, but is fundamental to hierarchical and market accountability where it is associated with a high likelihood of severe sanctions. This, it is argued, means that schools are likely to focus on these forms of accountability as opposed to participative or network accountabilities that involve collaboration with others. The final section proposes that there is a case for accountability systems to focus more broadly on a variety of processes and outcomes related to the overall goals of education. The existing regime in England is heavily focused on hierarchical and market accountability: a greater focus on participative and network accountability may foster a less individualistic approach to education and greater social cohesion.

Reshaping public accountability: Hospital reforms in Germany, Norway and Denmark

The article contributes to the literature on multi-level welfare governance and public accountability in the context of recent European hospital reforms. Focusing on the changing dynamics between regional and central governance of hospitals in Germany, Norway and Denmark, we raise concerns about the reshaping of traditional public accountability mechanisms. We argue that, triggered by growing financial pressures, corporatization and professionalization have increasingly removed decision-making power from regional political bodies in hospital funding and planning. National governments have tightened their control over the overall trajectory of their hospital systems, but have also shifted significant responsibility downwards to the hospital level. This has reshaped public accountability relationships towards more managerial or professional types embedded within multi-level forms of governance. Points for practitioners Our study may be taken to suggest that if reforms are responses to policy pressures, the accompanying changes in accountability relationships and arrangements in turn contribute to altering the pressures and constraints that form the context for administrative, managerial and professional work. As reforms in Norwegian, Danish and German healthcare contribute to corporatization, centralization and economization, there is reason to expect that what officials are held accountable for, and how, is also likely to change and to accentuate the span between policy aims and actual managerial and professional performance.

Market accountability in schools: policy reforms in England, Germany, France and Italy

This article concentrates on the policy reforms of schools in England, Germany, France and Italy, from 1988 to 2009, with a focus on the introduction of market accountability. Pressing demands for organisational change in schools, shaped by the objectives of ‘efficiency’ and competition, which were introduced in England in the 1980s, have been adopted in other European countries, albeit at a slower pace and within the continuing need for domestic institutional conformity. How does the increasing predominance of market accountability in state schools change traditional bureaucratic and professional accountability relationships between politicians, managers, professionals and users? The article argues that despite some evidence of convergence between different education systems, England remains the outlier and continental European countries have been much more reluctant to adopt choice and competition policies.

Managerial and political accountability: the widening gap in the organization of welfare

This article revisits the assumption that the welfare delivery state does not fit into the vertical or hierarchical model of political accountability in light of its recent organizational arrangements. Although a distinction in any analytical framework between managerial and political accountability bears some fruit, the replacement of the latter with the former is contestable and misleading. In contrast to the claims that managerial accountability is a technical and neutral exercise in the application of politics-free criteria, and, as such, it more readily fits the complexity of the 21st-century welfare state, this article suggests that the new organizational arrangements of state schools and hospitals indicate that traditional forms of accountability to elected officials have not withered. The process of developing new welfare state organizational arrangements cannot be divorced from fundamental institutional questions about each democracy. By empirically investigating the effects of the introduction of managerialism on democratic accountability in Britain and Germany, the article aims to further our understanding of the link between the managerial and political dimensions of accountability in the welfare delivery state.

Introduction: Reforming the welfare state and the implications for accountability in a comparative perspective

This special issue is linked to an international research project on Reforming the Welfare State: Democracy, Accountability and Management headed by Professor Per Laegreid. The project aims to examine the ways in which reforms in three areas of thewelfare state in three countries have affected accountability relations. The articles are revised versions of papers presented at a workshop at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, in December 2011 on ‘Researching accountability, conceptual and methodological challenges’, convened by Dr Paola Mattei. Our main focus is on administrative reforms and to what extent they have affected accountability relations in specific sectors – hospitals, the welfare administration, and immigration – inNorway, Denmark andGermany.However, we also cover education reforms in Europe and administrative reforms in Central and Eastern Europe with respect to their impact on accountability relations. A main justification for comparing reforms in these welfare state sectors is that they cover major areas of welfare provision. The sectors display important variations in bureaucratic capacity, specialization and representation of users and citizens. It is therefore of interest to establish whether differences among sectors are more important than differences among countries. There has been a discussion about the Scandinavian model of welfare state administration, specifically about whether it still exists or whether it is breaking up. We have chosen to address this question by comparing two Scandinavian countries with Germany and by also referring to other European countries. The analysis will provide policy-makers as well as scholars studying welfare reforms and public administration with important insights into how reforms may be designed and introduced in a way that does not undermine the political sustainability of long-established welfare state institutions. This collection of articles represents a coherent special issue on the impact of welfare state reforms in Europe

Raising educational standards: national testing of pupils in the United Kingdom, 1988–2009

Raising the basic standards of competence achieved by school children has become a primary objective of governments across Europe. A high performing educational system is taken to be fundamental in achieving European economic competitiveness. Children leaving primary schools with difficulty in reading, writing and arithmetic or a meagre understanding of science are unlikely to achieve the qualifications at secondary school required to secure jobs that will raise them above a poverty line. On one hand, in England, the government has pioneered a radical school reform programme over the last 20 years, including national testing of school children at regular intervals. On the other, high stakes testing was pursued only partially and briefly in Scotland and Wales and then largely abandoned after devolution. National testing in the UK has been associated with increasingly marked divergent outcomes in the UK. This article focuses on the following central question: how far the divergent reform policies in England, Scotland and Wales reflect differences in social policy objectives and how far a very different understanding in the means of achieving them? Empirical findings point to the widening gap in educational attainments across the UK countries and highlight the critical situation in Scotland where test results have stagnated in the last 10 years.

Conflicting Accountabilities in the 2012 Health Care Reforms in England

Analyzing the legislative process of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act in Britain, we investigate the different uses of “accountability” in the committee debates. Based on the minutes of the Public Bill Committee from 2010 to 2011, we examine the contested accountability relationships in relation to the Secretary of State for Health, the Monitor, and the Health and Wellbeing Boards. On the one hand, we discern a shift away from traditional forms of accountability toward professional, managerial, and legal forms of accountability. On the other hand, we note how the concept of “accountability” is used in various ways to gloss this shift over, whilst traditional political accountability is reasserted.

Assimilation and Educational Achievement of Minority Groups in the U.S.

Contemporary political and policy debates in France centre on the discussion of whether Islam and, more generally, the new wave of Muslim immigrants pose a threat to national unity and French identity. We have stressed in this book the resilience of the French republican ideology and its unifying interpretation of integration of minority groups. Religion is a source of group identity, mobilization, and opposition to the mainstream majority, as the radicalization of disadvantages children in the urban banlieue has shown. In the previous chapter, we compared French combative laicite with the religious pluralism and state approach to religious diversity in the U.S. We emphasized the accommodation policies that have contributed in American public schools to the avoidance of the escalation of religious and cultural conflicts. Religion in the U.S. is not a divisive cleavage as in France, but the privatization of schools has triggered a timely debate about education and religion.

Faire l’Islam Laïc: The Makings of French Islam

The summer of 1989 witnessed a series of polarizing events that brought Islam in France to the centre of mainstream discourse and academic interest. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses caused a sensation when a fatwa authored by the Grand Ayatollah of Iran sentenced him to death. Three girls from a school in Creil, France were expelled for refusing to remove their hijabs, the first of many ‘veil’ affairs that would consume French media and political attention in the following decades. Yet the most significant event of that summer occurred when Pierre Joxe, Minister of the Interior, quietly formed the Conseil sur la reflexion de l’Islam en France (CORIF) to help advise him on the state of affairs of Islam in France. Such a council, in the words of Joxe, was meant not only to assist in the organization of Muslim religious affairs in France but also to ‘make Islam laic’ (faire l’Islaim laic) (Godard, 2013).

The Post-2004 Ban and the Integration of Muslim Students: The Limits of a Narrowly Legalistic Approach

The 2004 law marked a new turning point in the French jurisprudence regarding freedom of religion in schools, endorsing a more restrictive application of laicite (Castel et al., 2011, p. 8). As discussed in the previous chapter, the Conseil d’Etat had adopted a more nuanced position in its 1989 decision to allow the wearing of religious signs in schools unless they would disrupt educational activities and teaching, or posed an immediate threat to public order.1 This body of jurisprudence had caused three main difficulties cited in a range of government reports. First, heads of schools had the responsibility to assess individual incidences case by case. They found themselves isolated in taking decisions. Second, heads of schools found that the borders between legal (discreet) and illegal (ostentatious) religious manifestations were blurred and not sufficiently clarified by the jurisprudence. Third, there was a very high level of flexibility in how schools were managing freedom of religion in the country, an outcome that the 2004 law attempted to address.