Critical approaches to education policy and leadership

Hungarian Educational Research Journal

Professor Starr focuses on leadership roles in all sectors of education, including higher education (senior academic and research staff and technical staff roles), schools (K-12), vocational education and training and early childhood education departments (governmental, independent and catholic). This foundational book describes all aspects of neoliberalism and its massive impact on education. Drawing on research and exploring political developments across a range of contexts, this book critically analyses neoliberal education policies, practices, results they produce and the purposes they serve. The book asks how do education leaders view and explain the neoliberal effects, dilemmas and opportunities they create. They also try to answer why neoliberalism is the basis of educational policy, how new liberalism affects education, and what does this mean for the future. The book consists of two parts. The first part composed of eleven chapters, including the introduction, which the author assigned to explain the misleading importance of education policy while the other sections were devoted to addressing the topics of globalization, free market, new liberalism, individualism, independence and political rationality in the exchange market in addition to privatization, selection, competition, improvement, innovation, entrepreneurship and efficiency, productivity, performance and accountability. A rising tide lifts all boats'a neoliberal aphorismsums up Part I of this book, which discusses neoliberalism in education. The chapters in this section explain the origins of neoliberalism, its essential principles or axioms, and describe and critiques how these ideas play out in education policy and leadership practice. The introductory chapter of the book explains the fundamental concepts discussed in the later chapters of this book. It is examining major international events and circumstances affecting national governments, local education systems and policymakers, with accompanying implications for individual educational institutions. The book explores how education leaders view, understand, and rationalize policy decisions, factors that influence their reactions and

2009

translation of policy and through the use of further case studies, outline the inequalities which become apparent when particularly western models of education are applied in international contexts. Section 4 concludes with a succinct overview of the key themes addressed in each section but the book ends on a more individual note. Each of the authors introduces us to their own 'journey' to and reflections upon their interest in Inclusive Education; these stories present a fascinating snapshot of each author's educational history reflecting experience of and feelings about Inclusion and Exclusion. Such personal reflections are unusual in academic text books, yet in the context of this book, they are a fitting conclusion and leave the reader in a reflective mood. This book urges the reader to challenge the potential for 'fashion' to diminish the importance of seriously reflecting upon Inclusion in education and as such, should not languish on your shelves alongside 'impulse buys'a well-written text focusing on such an important issue deserves constant wear.

Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2007

Oxford Review of Education, 2005

2021

In recent decades, the institutions of the welfare state, including education, have been the target of continuous criticism related to their many functions and practices. Despite efforts at education reform, criticism remains vociferous, coming from parents, teachers, politicians, or business leaders – education has failed to reduce inequalities, achieve higher results at national or international evaluations, higher ‘employability’ or children’s happiness, and similar. The constant flow of criticism in education creates a sense of perpetual crisis that begs for more reform, leading to new evaluations and a new round of criticism. Although education reforms are, as a rule, well-intentioned, we are found surprised or even shocked each time they seem to fail to deliver on their promises, which raises a very simple question – why don’t they work? At first glance, the reviewed book aims to offer an insight into this very question and its answers. However, due to its specific approach to...

2006

Abstract There is a position that Government will undertake its work in a responsible way that allows for the provision of education in Australian society with a just and equitable hand. While this may be a utopian idea of the role of education in a democratic society, the literature provokes different thinking. It suggests that policy development is misplaced within political ideologies and lost amidst the grinding gears of government departments at both federal and state level as it makes its way into schools, and therefore to those it impacts upon. This thesis explores the co-relation between the intended purposes of educational policy, its possibility for social equalising and its eventual impact for those who live the consequences of enacted policy at a local level. This includes a glimpse at past educational policy and the ideologies that inform them, the mechanisms of society which enforce change to policy and the eventual outcome. Its significance, in a wider context, is that current policy agendas which seem to readily enhance the benefits for all students, and by that fact should benefit our society, are being excessively argued, negotiated and delayed. The methodology/methods used in this thesis use bricolage to bring together rich experiences, narratives and contextual connectivity. This has value because the case and commentaries component gives a snapshot of the impact of policy, and how it is viewed by educators who use it and are part of its mechanisms. It also highlights the absent, what is of concern with the interpretation and use of policy at the local level, as many assumptions are made by teachers and administrators based upon their own lives and experiences. Three specific policies were considered by the participants – literacy, homework and reporting. This thesis presents the thinking of key stakeholders in a school around three significant topics and related policy on the work of students, teachers and school accountabilities. The insights provided highlight how many students are disadvantaged on the basis of educational policy that fails to acknowledge both the context and circumstances of their lives. As a result, these students are viewed as being deficient rather than being viewed for what they can do. The educational policies considered are written in a way that teachers working with these students are increasingly being constrained in their responses to these student’s needs, generating poorer learning opportunities.

This article is based on research undertaken between 2009 and 2012 into the former Labour government's extremely ambitious 'Building Schools for the Future' (BSF) Programme and its withdrawal by the Coalition government. The project, which utilises analysis of policy documents, case studies in six local authorities (LA) and semi-structured interviews with national and local policy actors, is being funded by Roehampton's Centre for Educational Research in Equalities, Policy and Pedagogy and the British Academy (SG100363). The focus of this article is the implications for social justice of BSF and its subsequent withdrawal. The structure of the article comprises an introduction to BSF and a summary of some of the main issues arising from it. We then move on to explore the social justice dimension of BSF as it is expressed in LA documents and in relation to the social policy aspirations of the former Labour government. In July 2010 the Coalition government discontinued the BSF programme and we track events and policy from that time, particularly focussing on the radical shift away from Labour's transformational and communitarian agenda in favour of criteria based on efficiency and value-for-money. We present data from our interviews with local actors on the equality and social justice impacts of this re-orientation of policy. We conclude by arguing against the view that Labour abandoned social justice suggesting that BSF was one of a number of policies through which equality was pursued, albeit by stealth.

Policy and Politics, 2012

This article draws on data from a study carried out on the evolution of specialist schools under New Labour in England in order to illustrate changes in educational governance. Shifts in policy-making power are highlighted, away from increasingly marginalised traditional corporatist partners, towards 'denocracy' (Seldon, 2004) or greater political centralisation. 'Presidentialisation' under Prime Minister Tony Blair was accompanied by fast-growing policy networks, lending legitimacy to centralised policy ideas while intensifying connections and blurring lines between state and non-state. However, while spaces and sites for policy activity became more extensive, they remained exclusive, with insiders and outsiders clearly defined.

British Journal of Educational Studies, 2008

We draw on empirical data and theorising that focuses on the relationship between the state, public policy and knowledge in the construction and configuration of school leadership under New Labour from 1997. Specifically we show how a school leadership policy network comprises people in different locations who operate as policy entrepreneurs in shaping policy.

Policy Futures in Education

Bruno Latour famously asked, ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’. In this paper we draw on his ideas to present some resources for ‘gathering’ – for doing education policy research with others – which we term ‘critical–dissensual collaboration’. We believe that our education policy research ‘critique from afar’ may indeed have run out of steam and we make some proposals for doing critical research, but with (a diversity of) others. We offer resources for undertaking critical–dissensual, collaborative education policy research – where, as Law suggested, ‘realities are not secure but instead they have to be practised’. This extends the conceptualisation of enactment that Stephen Ball and colleagues have made; from focusing on ‘how schools do policy’ to how researchers and schools (re)do policy together. This article is part of our attempt to underpin this redoing of policy with a politics of dissensus and to develop alternative resources to those that enable a ‘god’s eye view’, as Ha...

2018

This paper reports initial outcomes from a short series of semi-structured interviews in 2017 with senior politicians from three parties elected to two contrasting English local authorities (LAs): an urban city authority and a largely rural shire county. These were complemented by continuing interviews with senior officers and head teachers, of both academies and maintained schools, some with positions in multi-academy trusts (MATs), and critical readings of LA strategic documents. Interviews focused on the nature of democratic authority in what is an increasingly privatised schools system in the sense that school governance and decision making have moved steadily away from the authority inherent in democratic representation of a local community towards a more technical (or technicist) conception that depends more on ‘people with the right skills, experience, qualities and capacity’ (DfE, 2017: 10). This process has been described as ‘depoliticisation’ (Ball, 2007), or even ‘destalization’ (Jessop, 2002), whereby there is little public disagreement or debate about schools’ role in achieving national objectives (for example, social mobility). And the new technologies underpinning these changes have in turn engendered new governmentalities and discursive formations focused on little except better ‘outcomes’ (Wilkins, 2016). The principal policy in pursuit of these aims in English schools has been the process of academisation, whereby schools have been steadily removed from the purview of LAs, however etiolated, to be funded directly by central government on the basis of a contract with the minister. More recently, schools have been more progressively organised into Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) – voluntarily or involuntarily – in processes overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners, central government officials also responsible directly to the minister (Riddell, 2016). Politicians interviewed varied in their support for academisation - not always in ways that might be expected to reflect party affiliation – but all felt that schools had an important contribution to make to the realisation of their strategic aims, from economic development to lifelong learning. In addition, they were interested in what happened to the children of their constituents and all felt local authorities needed to engage with schools, reporting varying success in doing so. All acknowledged the difficulties inherent in a system increasingly organised de facto to exclude them, especially with MATs with wider regional or national roles with the attendant more remote offices and boards. According to some politicians (and officers), responses from MATs varied but having an elected mayor in the city authority was seen as one significant mechanism. Nearly all were optimistic for the future. The paper sets these initial findings in the context of what one interviewee described as a ‘stalled process’ (of economic reform), with central government not willing or able to respond to their concerns about the management of the system, especially since the 2017 general election. The reported absence of any space in the national legislative programme for schools because of the preparations for BREXIT means that even the much-discussed National Funding Formula (for school budgets) will be implemented via LAs for maintained schools, retaining some discretion, not the original intention (DfE, 2016: 68). Nor is the process of academisation by any means complete; nor, it is argued, is it ever likely to be. At the time of the first interviews, Regional Schools Commissioners were in the early stages of setting up ‘Sub-Regional Schools Improvement Boards’ involving senior LA representatives, that will most likely remain ‘strategic partners’. In addition, according to several interviewees, a paper setting out the proposed statutory roles of LAs to be amended by subsequent legislation had been drafted before the 2017 election, but not published since. Whereas it could be argued that the newer system based on school collaboration increasingly organised through MATs, overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners, might be more consistent and reliable in attaining greater equity in educational outcomes, a focus so limited leaves major moral (as opposed to technical) questions concerning the nature of ‘state’ schooling in England unanswered in policy: what democratic oversight will local and national communities have of their children’s education; how can and will parents be deeply involved.

Critical Quarterly, 1997

The idea that no matter what the party in power after the election it would all remain depressingly the same was swept away one glorious and symbolic May Day. Labour won, and how! The sun shone and Britain basked in a holiday weekend that seemed like the new government's first act ± a reward to the electorate for having the good sense to vote tactically and rid themselves of what had always been a minority party in power. With the overwhelming mandate that the British people have given the Labour Party for change and the prominence that has been given, rightly, to the opportunities for constitutional reform, it seems almost anticlimactic to talk of educational policy. Yet it should be remembered that Tony Blair put it top of his list of priorities.`Education, education and education,' he declared three times, just in case we missed the point. The key to the clear blue water on educational policy was there in his acceptance speech,`Opportunity for the many and not for the few', and the policies are in place to make it happen. The Conservative mantra of parental choice crumbled before the increasing realisation of a two-tier system that offered more money to institutions that conformed to their free-market dogma and gave these schools the power to reject most children who applied for places. The separate funding for grant maintained schools can be changed without an act of Parliament; changing admission policies will be more complicated, but Labour are pledged to ensure that these schools agree their policies with the local authority. Selection is off the agenda and the money for assisted places will go to funding smaller primary classes. Although this last measure will take time before the full effect is realised the message it sends is clear. This is not about anti-e Âlitism but a recognition of the waste of talent that a two-tier system brings about. To survive economically, we need to raise the achievement of the average pupil, not concentrate resources on those whose ability to learn is already well suited to the way in which schools teach. This agenda also hovers behind the spending pledge of the windfall tax ± the