Steven Courtney

Mapping school types in England

The number and range of school types in England is increasing rapidly in response to a neoliberal policy agenda aiming to expand choice of provision as a mechanism for raising educational standards. In this paper, I seek to undertake a mapping of these school types in order to describe and explain what is happening. I capture this busy terrain from different perspectives: legal status; curricular specialism; pupil selection; types of academy; and school groupings. The mapping highlights the intersections between the current reform agenda and the historical diversity within the English school system to show the dialogue between past and present. Borrowing the geological metaphors of faulting and folding, I argue that long-established school types are not buried under sedimentary layers of reform, but are thrust into the present where they are discursively re-imagined through neoliberalism. Finally, I conceptualise the landscape holistically through the lenses of locus of legitimacy and branding, where I argue that current structural diversification policies enable the enactment of interests other than educational through transferring responsibility for education and related assets away from public and towards corporatised or religious actors and institutions.

Get off my bus! School leaders, vision work and the elimination of teachers

In this paper, we argue that school leaders are removing those who embody or vocalize alternative conceptualizations of educator. It seems as if Collins’ call in his 2001 book Good to Great to get the right people on the bus is being taken very seriously by school leaders seeking to raise standards. This is achieved by eradicating ‘inadequate’ teaching, and implementing the leader’s ‘vision’, which we argue consists in silencing and potentially removing professional voice, knowledge and contributions. We present data from nine headteachers who talk about their vision and vision work, and in deploying Arendtian thinking, we think the unthinkable about how teachers can be rendered disposable and are disposed of. Arendt’s political thinking tools help us to consider how, through routine practices, current models of school leadership enable totalitarian practices to become ordinary.

Corporatised Leadership in English Schools.

Corporatised leadership in schools in England is being promoted through new actors and new types of school, these latter with corporate structures, values, regulatory freedoms and contractual arrangements with staff. Corporatised leadership is characterised inter alia by the promotion of the interests of business through the curriculum, school structure, learning materials and pupil experiences, and the adoption of business-derived leadership practices and identities. Corporate leadership produces and is produced through new actors – here, Chairs of Governors, the alignment of whose symbolic capital with the privileged corporate discourse increases their influence. The paper draws on semi-structured interviews with nine school leaders from a range of school types. The data were analysed using Bourdieus concept of fields to explore the cross-field effects of business/economics and educational leadership.

Post-panopticism and school inspection in England

In this paper, I draw on a study of school leaders’ experiences of inspection to argue that repeated changes to school inspection policy in England constitute a post-panoptic regime. Thinking with and against Foucault, I elaborate post-panopticism, here characterised by: subjects’ visibility; ‘fuzzy’ norms; the exposure of subjects’ failure to comply; the disruption of identity-constituting fabrications; its dependence on external ‘experts’; and its neo-conservative devalorisation of the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that post-panopticism depends on subjects having become disciplined through panopticism, whose apparatus it employs, and reveals the state’s explicit exercise of power.

Inadvertently queer school leadership amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) school leaders

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) school leaders may understand these sexual identities as essentialist categories and present lived experiences resistant to the identity category-troubling tenets of queer theory, whose application in queer empirical research can nonetheless provide important insights into leaders’ identity, practices and power. In this article, I focus on reconciling this conceptual tension to produce an empirical account of inadvertently queer school leadership in England. The article uses queer theory to re-interpret findings from a study of five LGB school leaders to show that despite perceiving sexual identity in an essentialist way, these LGB school leaders sexually embody inadvertently queer school leadership. They trouble gender norms and conceptualizations of ‘leader’ through non-normative sexual embodiment; suggest queer identities for others; and challenge heteronormativity’s institutional foundations and other processes of normalization.

Head teachers’ experiences of school inspection under Ofsted’s January 2012 framework:

This article focuses on head teachers’ experiences of inspection under Ofsted’s revised school inspection framework, their views of its principles and its implications for school leaders and leadership. The article draws on findings from a mixed-methods study to show that inspections are more focused on pupils’ attainment and progress. Head teachers intend to prioritize these and other judged areas over those no longer explicitly judged. Whilst broadly agreeing with the framework’s principles, many head teachers report that inspection was less positive owing to variation in inspector quality and rigidity in the (interpretation of the) framework. The article argues that leaders of schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged areas might find it harder to obtain a good Ofsted rating, with implications for head teacher recruitment and retention. It argues for improved Ofsted inspector training, a broad, values-driven leadership agenda by head teachers, and the recognition and promotion of contextual responses to educational challenges.

Research and policy in education

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Corporatising school leadership through hysteresis

Abstract This article builds on the established notion that schools are hierarchised through policy, accruing different amounts and types of symbolic capital, by examining how this is reflected in the habitus of the leaders of new, privileged school types. The article uses Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis, or a dislocation between the habitus which formerly produced success in the field and the habitus currently necessary following changes in field conditions. Using crafted narrative accounts from two headteachers, I argue that rather than simply being an effect of change, hysteresis may be an actively sought outcome whereby the state intervenes in a field – education – to deprivilege welfarist leaders and privilege corporatised leaders through structurally facilitating their habitus and mandating its dispositions for the field. However, insofar as deprivileged actors may draw strength and an identity from rejecting corporatisation, the concept of hysteresis must be extended to include notions of agentic dissidence.

Privatising educational leadership through technology in the Trumpian era

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the changes that the election of Donald Trump enables in education policy domestically and in education discourse internationally. I argue that Trump’s own charismatic leadership style is a distraction from the privatisation that it is facilitating through Betsy DeVos, Trump’s appointment as US Education Secretary. I draw on two contemporary examples of technology-enabled privatisation in education – cyber charters and predictive analytics using big data – to argue that in the Trumpian era, educational leadership may be shifting from corporatised forms, where professionals understood as ‘school leaders’ fulfil corporate objectives through corporatised means. Instead, Trumpian-era privatised educational leadership retreats fully behind the technology boardroom door, where it renders superfluous lead professionals in education institutions, and where its objectives are to generate profit through re-conceptualising learners as data providers. This analysis highlights the need for new tools and methods to describe and explain what is happening, and to help develop understandings of what educational leadership in this new landscape might be, do or achieve.

Theorising systemic change: learning from the academisation project in England

Abstract The research reported in this article contributes new understandings of systemic change by studying the form of system redesign known in England as academisation. The data illuminate tensions within the neoliberal policy complex that are surfaced in a single secondary school. Although several studies have described academy conversions retrospectively, there has been little research that both analyses the complex month-by-month realities of decision-making and investigates the changing views of policy actors. Drawing on data from documents, observations and interviews, we argue for academisation to be understood, not as a policy or a complex of policies, but as system redesign. Academisation is not simply a legal process: a school can be academised without officially becoming an academy. The new knowledge from this research speaks to a global audience, because the political, economic and cultural processes on which it reports are under scrutiny in other systems with experiments in school autonomy as a form of publicly funded but ‘independent’ schooling.