Governing through accountability: linking school governance to

performativity and neoliberalization

Dr. Andrew Wilkins

University of Roehampton andrew.wilkins@roehampton.ac.uk

Twitter: @andewilkins

SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY AND STAKEHOLDER EDUCATION (SASE) FUNDED BY ESRC FUTURE RESEARCH LEADERS SCHEME GRANT REF. ES/K001299/1 OCT 2012 – FEB 2015

Structure

• Outline of project (aims, conceptual frameworks, data collection)

• Define governance. • Define performativity. • Explore the relationship between

performativity, neoliberalisation and school governance.

• Questions.

Aims of project • To explore and compare how school governors and

senior leadership frame and steer governance.

• To explain how governance is practised and negotiated on the basis of technical-managerialist demands (audit and external inspection, target setting, monitoring systems, benchmarks, data-driven performance, quality assurance indicators) and social practices (value divergences, conflicts, scrutiny and challenge).

• To map the chain of accountability governing schools – consumer, performative, corporate, contract, etc.

Data collection

• January – August 2013 7 different types of primary and secondary schools in England, including local authority maintained, free school, foundation, state boarding, converter and sponsor academy, with some schools operating within Collaborative, Multi-Academy and Co-operative Trust models.

• October – December 2013 Academy chain school. Church of England, Secondary.

Data collection (case study) • Telephone and face-to-face interviews

In-depth interviews were carried out with 80 school governors.

• Observation material 35 full governing body and committee meetings were observed.

• Documentary evidence Additional information was collected using school policy documents, school prospectuses, websites, minutes from meetings and school archival records.

• Literature review A review of relevant government and non-government texts relating to school governance was carried out.

Conceptual framework/s

• Governance as cultural practice (Bevir)

• Govern-mentality (Foucault) • Neoliberalism: ‘roll back’ and ‘roll out’

(Peck)

• ‘Shadow of hierarchy’ (Jessop)

Policy background

1980s Thatcherism • Local Management of Schools

(LMS) • New Public Management • Stakeholder governance • Neoliberalism (advanced

liberal governing) • ‘Active citizenship’ (citizens as

consumers)

1990s/2000s Blarism

• Neoliberalism plus (network, communitarianism, Third Way)

• Foundation partnerships and federations (school clusters, collaboration)

• New policy actors, policy networks, educational governance (double devolution)

Government to governance The shift from government to governance – governing without government. Governance signifies the co-production of services by a plurality of actors and organizations (government and non-government). ‘informal authority of networks supplements and supplants the formal authority of government’ (Rhodes 2007).

Governance

Source: http://www.educationinvestor.co.uk/summit.aspx

Governance

Source: http://www.academiesshow.co.uk/

Governance

Source: http://www.pixl.org.uk/page/default.asp?title=Home&pid=1

Governance

Source: http://www.ltsa.org.uk/Home/

Governance: ‘public service industry’

Total public sector outsourcing: 2008: £9.6bn

2012: £20.4bn

2014-15: £101bn (estimated)

Source: Plimmer (2013) Outsourcing soars in public services. Financial Times

Public Service Industry ‘This alternative civil service is not just about delivery of specified services, it is part of a ‘shadow state’ which is also displacing the old civil service’s policy-making role. Individually and collectively the companies define policy options and aspire to address outcomes rather than simply delivering services. They offer ‘ends’ as well as ‘means’ (Stephen Wilks 2013)

Source: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/archives/35583

Decentralization?

Shift from government to governance - competition, networks and markets have replaced hierarchy, centralization and bureaucracy? Shift from producer monopoly to competition. …or Shift from state monopoly to private oligopoly.

New Labour policy rhetoric

Old • Citizens • Passive users • Rationing culture • Centralization • Uniform, rigid • Elitist • Hierarchical, bureaucratic • Producer monopoly

New • Consumers • Active users • Consumer culture • Decentralization • Responsive, flexible • Anti-elitist • Network, collaboration • Competition

Performativity • Performativity requires ‘individual practitioners to organize

themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations’ (p. 215)

• Need to observe ‘the subjectivities of change and changing subjectivities which are threatened or required or brought about by performativity’ (p. 217)

• ‘Truthfulness is not the point – the point is their effectiveness, both in the market or for inspection or appraisal’ (p. 224)

• ‘Those in weak ‘market’ or performance position may well submit to becoming whatever it seems necessary to become in order to survive’ (p. 225)

• ‘displaces or subsumes differences, disagreements or value divergences’ (p. 226)

Ball, S.J. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. JEP, 18 (2), 215-228

3 strategic functions of school governors

• ‘Ensuring clarity of vision,

ethos and strategic direction’ • ‘Holding the head teacher to

account for the educational performance of the school and its pupils’

• ‘Overseeing the financial performance of the school and making sure its money is well spent’ (p. 6)

Public accountabilities

Source: Ranson, S. (2003) Public Accountability in the Age of Neoliberalism. Journal of Education Policy, 18 (5), p. 463

Accountability: governing at a distance

School governors ‘Ensuring clarity of vision, ethos and strategic direction’ DfE (2013)

‘Consumer/corporate accountability’: strengthen consumer responsiveness, business plan, strategy, competition, market position, branding, etc.

Accountabilities

Accountability: governing at a distance

School governors ‘Holding the headteacher to account for the educational performance of the school and its pupils’ DfE (2013)

‘Performative accountability’: strengthen product quality, standards, achievement levels, responsiveness to arms-length regulatory bodies, etc.

Accountabilities

Accountability: governing at a distance

School governors ‘Overseeing the financial performance of the school and making sure its money is well spent’ DfE (2013)

‘Contract/corporate accountability’: strengthen service efficiency, value for money, competitive tendering, schools to contractors, etc.

Accountabilities

Company Secretary ‘I think as we move towards a more responsible, professional era of management responsibility then what you’ll be looking for will be more diverse, you’ll be looking not just for people who are rooted in the community, but I think you’ll be looking for people with skills to offer as well... I think to have a properly functioning set of institutions you need more people playing more roles than that, and I think when we get into setting up the subcommittees you are going to need some degree of expertise. So, for example finance committee, you are going to need people who understand accounts and how to take measured financial decisions… I think it’s going to have to become more focused and more professional, because big sums of money are now being handled through each of the academies and collectively through the board’

Free School, London

Headteacher ‘if you are in a lovely middle-class area like Hampstead then it’s easy to recruit solicitors and barristers and accountants as parent governors, because they send their children to the local primary school, and it’s all wonderful. I remember [Chief Executive of Academy Trust], she was a headteacher in, it might have been Islington I think, no, Fulham, and of course all her governing body were these highly professional people. All the children, their parents were solicitors and barristers, spoilt for choice, whereas in a more challenging area like [school locality], people are unemployed actually… I mean we’ve been fortunate [school name] is very, very mixed, in terms of it’s social economic background, we’ve got unemployed people and we’ve got GPs and we’ve got people who work in the local further education college, people who run their own business I think, so we’ve got one extreme to the other actually, so we are lucky, but other schools in this area wouldn’t be as fortunate as that, and they wouldn’t have professional people to draw on as parent governors. And that’s it’s own challenge because they would probably need more training in order to be able to ask the right questions’

Free School, London

Chair of Premises Committee

‘A governing body, when you are dealing with a business like that, I would like to see, curiously enough if you are going to go academy, that you run, I’m talking out of turn here because I’m sure I must be in the minority, is you want, to my mind, something like a Harris Academy behind it, because what they do is they bring in their own governors, who do governing bodies of several schools, is my understanding. Now you see that if you are going to have to manage all the finances, all this, all that and so on, you need people who are professionals, not amateurs. And the trouble is that most governing bodies, as I say, are amateurs. I mean I’m an amateur’

Maintained School, London

Maintained School, London

Community Governor ‘I think they are worthy people, who want to show an interest. [Chair] and I were talking about this yesterday actually, we don’t have much strength on the governing body so there is a need to appoint a lot more people, but trying to find people who’ve got the right sort of experience from industry, commerce, that sort of thing, who want to give the time, is quite difficult. But [Chair] has contacts in the business world so she is actively trying to recruit people’

Current (neoliberal) trends Redefinition of democracy Democratic principles rendered inexpedient or impractical, incompatible with smooth managerial oversight of the school. Stakeholder governance conditional on strength of school, capacity and willingness to accommodate difference, dissent. Inclusion and participation: YES. But mediated by corporate culture, specialist knowledge. Local authority intervention (democratic accountability, locally elected councillors) considered inefficient, romantized by idealists.

Current (neoliberal) trends Business ontology School governors are essential cogs in the business machinery of schools. Create institutions that are intelligible to the market, can justify their existence in market terms (flexible, competitive, cost effective, sufficiently business driven). Witch hunt for ‘weak’ governors. Continuous streaming within governing bodies to weed out ‘deadwood’, drive to homophily (people like ‘us’). Governors must periodically upskill, evidence their worth, be professional, enterprising.

Current (neoliberal) trends Managerialist realism Educational governance driven by technical demands, monitoring systems, indicators of ‘quality’, production of outputs, target setting, professional worth. Frustrates space for conceiving/enabling alternative forms of (stakeholder) governance. Generates cynical detachment/compliance among some school governors, BUT they still do it. Ideology doesn’t simply command, it incites through terror of expulsion.

Current (neoliberal) trends Revival of authority in new guise Deregulation or re-regulation? ‘Effective governance’ (DfE 2013) indicate a set of policy devices, policy technologies, disciplinary practices; encompass techniques of attrition, surveillance, normalization and responsibilization. School survival, adaptability and flexibility – additional control through increased freedom (and discipline). ‘Shadow of hierarchy’ (Jessop and Sum 2005).

Recommendations

• Minimal hierarchy. All governors enjoy equal opportunity to influence higher-order governance decision making – or elected area school boards or strategic area authorities with opportunities for genuine community involvement

• Diversity and representativess. Change culture of participation. People of specialist and civic knowledge be valued equally. ‘differences are voiced, deliberated and mediated’ (Jones & Ranson)

• Moral accountability. Generate mutual solutions to local need, downward accountability to local community. Difference and deliberation essential – small executive body subject to the scrutiny of the multitude.

• Multi-level engagement/governance. Create responsive and quality infrastructures to ensure genuine public discussion and stakeholder engagement; to secure public agreement, public trust and a sense of shared ownership.

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