International Journal of Inclusive Education

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Education reform in England: quality and equity in

the performative school

Chris Wilkins

To cite this article: Chris Wilkins (2015) Education reform in England: quality and equity in
the performative school, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 19:11, 1143-1160, DOI:
10.1080/13603116.2015.1044202

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1044202

Published online: 20 May 2015.

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International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2015
Vol. 19, No. 11, 1143–1160, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1044202

Education reform in England: quality and equity in the

performative school
∗
Chris Wilkins

School of Education, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

(Received 24 July 2014; accepted 4 March 2015)

This article argues that contradictory forces affect teachers’ work in the neo-liberal
school system in England, with a diversity of governance models alongside
increasingly dominant orthodoxies of what constitutes ‘effective practice and
leadership’. School reforms in England have focused on increasing overall
attainment and on closing the achievement gap for pupils from ‘disadvantaged
communities’; whilst there is evidence that reforms have delivered on the
former, evidence is inconclusive on the latter, with some critics arguing that
some reforms have increased social inequality. The future for teachers’
professional identity and practices in this landscape is uncertain. Whilst this
article broadly concurs with many studies of teacher identity which argue that
the ever-extending reach of performative mechanisms has restricted teachers’
opportunities to develop as activist professionals with ‘a moral purpose’, it also
argues that the diversified landscape may provide the opportunity for new
autonomous spaces. It goes on to suggest that further research is needed into the
forms of locally determined values and practices emerging in ‘quasi-privatised’
academies and free schools in England, to explore whether these professional
communities will be entirely managerialist/entrepreneurial in character, or
whether models of practice underpinned by a concern with social equity and
social justice issues may emerge.

Introduction
Recent decades have seen a global preoccupation with the effectiveness of education
systems, reflecting the dominance of neo-liberalism in economic and social policy
arenas, and an orthodoxy focused almost entirely on seeing improving educational out-
comes in terms of competition in the ‘global knowledge economy’ (OECD 2005;
Rasmussen et al. 2009). This global neo-liberal project has been extensively analysed
and conceptualised during this time, with particular attention paid to the impact of the
performative frameworks that characterise it on the values and the practices of schools
and of teachers.
Another important area of study has been the relationship between the demands of
competing on a knowledge economy and issues of equity. Some argue that neo-liberal
reforms can deliver greater efficiency and competitiveness in parallel with a socially
progressive, even egalitarian agenda; Giddens argues that this ‘European Social
Model’ is at the heart of the European Union’s (EU) Lisbon Treaty (Giddens 2007).

∗
Email: [email protected]

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

1144 C. Wilkins

However, this is countered by those who argue that the demands of performative
systems preclude practice that is driven by values and principles of social justice and
equity (Ball 2000, 8).
This debate has run alongside one about the impact of performative systems on the
work of teachers and on teachers’ professional identity. For some, neo-liberal manage-
rialism has for many years been seen as ‘de-professionalising’ teachers, reducing them
to classroom technicians charged with the delivery of an instrumentalist curriculum.
(Barton et al. 1994; Robertson 2000), whilst others argue that it has created opportu-
nities for ‘professional empowerment’ in schools where distributive leadership
models allow for a more collegial environment (Gronn 2003; Coles and Southworth
2005).
This article explores the phenomenon of performative reforms in education with a
particular focus on the impact these may have on social justice and equity issues. It does
so by examining recent and current policy trends in England, which has long been seen
as being in the ‘vanguard’ of the neo-liberal reform agenda (although the article also
draws on international perspectives, particularly school reforms in the USA). Different
models of education reform have emerged in different systems, with specific policy
approaches developing as a consequence of local political contexts, but of the national
reforms taking place over the past two decades, the English context provides the most
striking evidence of the neo-liberal project at work (Furlong 2013). Nowhere else has
the marketisation and diversification of educational delivery been so extensive;
nowhere else has the performative regulatory framework become so intensive
(Wilkins et al. 2012). An exploration of the impact on performative reforms on edu-
cational equity in England, therefore, may provide useful insights into the potential con-
sequences for the many national systems across the world who appear to be, a varying
speeds and degrees of enthusiasm, following ‘the English way’.
The article discusses of the way in which the structures and governance of schooling
in England have been diversified over recent years, in particular, the way the increasing
autonomy of schools to self-govern in a ‘third space’ between the public and private.
This diversification came initially through devolvement of financial and staffing
responsibilities to all state schools, then by the growth of academies and ‘free
schools’, with even greater autonomy, and entirely independent of local government
influence. In particular, it explores the potential consequences for teachers’ professional
values, identity and practices, and considers the possible impact of what are effectively
quasi-privatised state schools on teachers’ engagement with equity issues.

Neo-liberalism and educational reform

During recent decades, much of the focus of education reform across the world has been
on the teacher workforce, with a number of influential studies arguing that teacher
quality is perhaps the most important determinant of improving outcomes (OECD
2005; Barber and Mourshed 2007; UNESCO 2011). This in turn has led to a policy
focus on every aspect of maximising teacher quality; attracting the best, training
them in the most effective way and examining how best to support their continuing pro-
fessional development (OECD 2011).
The neo-liberal reform discourse (Ball 2003; Apple 2005) has been characterised by
the increasing use of datasets such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to compare transnational
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 1145

performance, and so shape policy responses (Grek and Ozga 2010). PISA has become
particularly influential in shaping political and public discourse within the EU, where
macro-level education policy has been driven by the aspiration for the EU to be a
global ‘knowledge-based’ economic superpower (Ertl 2006; Dale and Robertson
2009).
Evidence certainly suggests systems seen as ‘high performers’ (such as Shanghai,
Singapore and Finland) share a crucial common characteristic; their ability to recruit
the highest quality of entrant into teaching and to build on this through highly effective
professional development (Barber and Mourshed 2007, 16). With the ever-increasing
reach of neo-liberal policies across the globe, there have been many attempts to repli-
cate the key features of high-performing systems; certainly the political profile of
teacher education policy has never been as high as it has in the past two decades
(Furlong 2013).
Perhaps the defining characteristic of recent education (and particularly teacher edu-
cation) reforms across the globe has been the attempts to ‘capture the essence’ of what
enables school systems to ‘come out on top’ (Barber and Mourshed 2007). The sol-
utions adopted are overwhelmingly neo-liberal ones; marketisation, assumed to bring
fiscal efficiency, diversification of provision to facilitate ‘consumer choice’, and some-
what contradictory performative deregulation, in which the state’s role is apparently
reduced to that of oversight of the market whilst actually exerting immense power
through data-driven performance management at every level; on individual teachers,
schools, local/metropolitan authorities and national systems (Ball 2000; Robertson
2000). The neo-liberal reform project, across all public services, not just education,
has been effectively ‘normalised’ through its ubiquity in international political dis-
course; the World Bank and the OECD, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty 2009 and national gov-
ernments across the globe have promoted neo-liberal policies as being not only the most
effective way of bringing about economic and social development, but the only way
(Lynch 2006; Rizvi and Lingard 2010).

Neo-liberal education reform in England: New Labour and beyond

Despite the focus on teacher quality, the relationship between school improvement and
the effectiveness with which schools address social equity issues has received compara-
tively little attention. This is particularly noteworthy in the English context, given that
Tony Blair, prior to being elected as Prime Minister in 1997, stated that his policy pri-
orities were ‘Education, education, education’ (Blair 1996), whilst Peter Mandelson,
one of Blair’s key political allies, was noting that a key measure of the success of
‘New Labour’, as Blair had rebranded the Labour Party, would be whether Britain
would be ‘a more equal society’ in 10 years’ time (cited in Hills and Stewart 2005).
In 1999, Blair used the symbolically significant annual Beveridge Lecture on Social
Justice (commemorating the ‘architect of the Welfare State’) to set out his govern-
ment’s historic aim to be ‘ . . . the first generation to end child poverty’ (Blair 1999).
New Labour education policy, therefore, set out to place social justice and equity
issues at the heart of its education policy in its period in office between 1997 and 2010.
This attempt to align social justice with a neo-liberal agenda typified the Blairite
‘Third Way’, in which the neo-liberal economic growth imperative was explicitly
underpinned by a socially progressive agenda in which closing the ‘achievement
gap’ (between rich and poor, black and white, male and female) was seen as being
as important as improving overall educational outcomes (Hills and Stewart 2005).
1146 C. Wilkins

Education policy, therefore, shifted in the New Labour era from being simply a social
policy to being social and economic at the same time (Furlong 2013). According to
Anthony Giddens, Third Way politics aimed to reshape social democratic principles
in response to the revolutionary imperatives of globalisation and the knowledge
economy (Giddens 2000).

System-level education reform in England

Attempts to address the social justice strand within ‘Third Way’ education policy have
been wide ranging, and included both structural reforms and fiscal ones designed to
target funding at ‘disadvantaged’ groups. The introduction of the academy school
model was intended to liberate school leaders and increase funding to facilitate the
transformation of ‘underperforming’ schools (which were overwhelmingly serving
socially and economically disadvantaged communities). The Sure Start programme,
designed to provide integrated early education, childcare, health and family support
in these communities pursues the same ‘global, knowledge-based economy’ goals as
similar programmes in other countries, such as Head Start in the USA and the Early
Child Care and Education (ECCE) Scheme in Ireland. Infrastructure was also priori-
tised and an ambitious schools building programme, part-funded by the archetypal
neo-liberal ‘Private Finance Initiative’, was introduced in 2003. As with the academies
programme, Building Schools for the Future (BSF) was primarily targeted at schools in
disadvantaged communities.
Following the Conservative-Liberal Coalition taking office in 2010, the neo-liberal
macro-level reforms were accelerated. Although BSF was abandoned, the academy
model was widened and further diversification was encouraged via the introduction
of free schools. Free schools are essentially a ‘hybrid’ model of state-funded indepen-
dent schools with even greater autonomy than academies over matters such as the cur-
riculum, teacher pay and conditions, and even teacher qualifications. The introduction
of free schools, together with the expansion of the academies programme, has been pre-
sented as a means of closing the achievement gap for disadvantaged pupils, demonstrat-
ing that the aspiration to create social mobility through educational attainment has been
embedded across the political spectrum. Similarly, whilst Sure Start funding has been
reduced, the Coalition government introduced a Pupil Premium Grant (PPG) for pupils
from low-income families, presenting this as a challenge to the ‘ . . . soft bigotry of low
expectations’ (DfE 2010) propagated by an educational establishment derided by Sec-
retary of State Michael Gove as complacent and patronising towards disadvantaged
communities. Gove himself (improbably for an ideological neoconservative) cited
Gramsci as a key influence on his thinking when arguing in favour of ‘working class
intellectualism’ as opposed to more naturalistic, informal learning, stating that ‘The
accumulation of cultural capital – the acquisition of knowledge – is the key to
social mobility’ (Gove 2013).
Evidence regarding the impact of these structural and funding reforms on edu-
cational equity is inconclusive. Sure Start, despite its positive impact in terms of
early years health issues, has produced less convincing evidence of impact on edu-
cational outcomes (Clarke 2006). Whilst it is too early to measure the impact on attain-
ment of PPG, evidence suggests that it is primarily being used to protect existing
services by compensating for cuts in core funding (Carpenter et al. 2013). Similarly,
evidence about the impact of the expansion of academy schools is fiercely contested;
some studies argue they have improved attainment (Machin and Vernoit 2012),
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 1147

others have claimed that this improvement ‘disappears’ when the pupil and staffing
mobility that occurs when schools convert to academy status is taken into account
(Machin and Wilson 2009; Wrigley 2011; Allen 2013). A recent parliamentary
Select Committee Report came to the conclusion that there was no conclusive evidence
regarding the impact of academisation on overall attainment (House of Commons Edu-
cation Committee 2015), also noting the variability in impact of academy conversion on
‘closing the gap’ for socio-economically disadvantaged students (Francis, Hutchings,
and R. De Vries 2014).
One notable feature of education reforms in England has been the undoubted
success on the London Challenge, a conglomeration of initiatives that led to a signifi-
cant improvement in student outcomes in London from 2000 to 2010; this improvement
cut across boundaries of social class, ethnicity and type of school governance (Baars
et al. 2014). Further research will be needed to unpick the complex factors that have
led to the success of London Challenge (in both overall attainment terms and in
terms of equity; the extent to which it has contributed to closing the attainment gap).
However, the fact that improvements were seen across academies and community
schools, across the wide range of ethnic communities in London and across a range
of local authority districts where very different models of governance were favoured,
suggests there will be no straightforward answers.
Debate around the impact of neo-liberal school reforms on overall academic attain-
ment, and on the consequences for social equity outcomes, are not confined to England.
Separate OECD reports on the marketisation of school systems found that the introduc-
tion of ‘quasi-market’ incentives brought, at best, modest gains (Hatcher 2011, 490),
and the debates around system reforms in the USA have been particularly heated,
where the charter school and contract school initiatives parallel the academies and
free school developments in England. Proponents of US school reforms argue that lib-
eralising school governance has made at least some contribution to delivering the ega-
litarian goals of No Child Left Behind (Dillon 2005), but many other studies have
pointed to the opposite outcome, that the array of neo-liberal reforms (of governance,
curriculum and assessment) have had a disproportionate negative impact on equity
(Fuller et al. 2007; Hursh and Lipman 2007).
Despite the relatively modest evidence of a positive impact of these structural mani-
festations of neo-liberal reforms, set against a significant amount of evidence of their
adverse impact on equity in educational outcomes, it seems unquestionable that
global education policy will continue to be characterised by a multilayered, multile-
veled marketisation, and in some respects privatisation, measures (Ball 2009).

Constructing the neo-liberal schools workforce

The structural and funding reforms of the New Labour era were accompanied, from the
very beginning, by a succession of reforms aimed at ‘modernising’ schools and the
teaching profession. Central to this was the notion that teachers must commit them-
selves to modernisation by aligning themselves with system-wide objectives
(Furlong 2013, 33). As Blair himself said ‘The teaching profession is critical to our
mission’ (DfEE 1998). The project to open up the ‘secret garden’ and make the pro-
fession accountable had been started by a previous Labour Prime Minister, James
Callaghan, in 1976, and Blair used the 20th anniversary to give this ‘Great Debate’
fresh impetus, calling for a relentless focus on standards in literacy and numeracy,
and for teachers ‘ . . . to be held accountable for their performance and . . . to work in
1148 C. Wilkins

partnerships with parents, business and the community’ (Blair 1996). Blair emphasised
that his mission was ‘practical’ and intended to ‘ . . . put behind us the political and
ideological debates that have dominated the last thirty years’ (Blair 1996). This charac-
terisation of neo-liberal policy solutions as being ‘common-sense’ and ‘above or
beyond politics’ echoes the prevailing conceptualisation of globalisation within politi-
cal discourse; Rizvi and Lingard argue that neo-liberalism has become the ‘social ima-
ginary’ of globalisation, giving it sense and legitimacy (2006, 201). The persuasiveness
of this normalising discourse is apparent in the extent to which the neo-liberal ‘account-
ability and standards’ agenda has come to dominate global education policy, with pro-
fessional dissent offset by wider public acceptance of the ‘common-sense necessity’ of
reform (Torres 2011).
Blair’s ‘Ruskin 20 years on’ speech went beyond the reach of Callaghan’s by tar-
geting not just the restructuring of schools and the curriculum, but by setting out a
mission to reframe teacher professionalism, overturning the traditional notion of indi-
vidual professionalism in favour of a collective endeavour in which professionalism
entailed multiple accountabilities; to parents, colleagues, school leaders and govern-
ment. Under New Labour, teacher professionalism required teachers to take personal
and collective responsibility for their professional development and to be ‘open to
change’ based on evidence of ‘what works’. This vision of new teacher professionalism
was set against a portrayal of ‘traditional’ professionalism in which ‘ . . . isolated, unac-
countable professions made curriculum and pedagogical decisions alone without refer-
ence to the outside world’ (Department for Education and Employment 1998). In
summary, teachers needed to accept an externally managed vision of their own pro-
fessional expertise (Furlong 2013, 34).

The self-improving teacher in the self-improving school

New Labour’s modernisation of the profession in order to improve the school system is
characteristic of neo-liberal reforms of systems across the globe, given credence by
studies arguing for a focus on ‘recruiting the best, providing the best training and retain-
ing the best’ (OECD 2005; Barber and Mourshed 2007; UNESCO 2011). It produced a
decade or more of initiatives in England addressing these three related aims (the 2010
Coalition government, although abandoning many specific New Labour initiatives,
continued on the same course, whilst arguably accelerating the pace of reform). The
emphasis of professional development, therefore, has shifted from the individual
teacher towards developing a culture which places professional learning at its heart
and is intended to turn the profession into a ‘self-improving’ one founded on ‘collabora-
tive capital’ (Hargreaves 2011). For Hargreaves, this ‘modernization’ of professional
development has necessitated a shift from a knowledge model, emphasising academic
knowledge predominately acquired in higher education settings, towards a practice
model in which improvement comes through the ‘progressive development of best pro-
fessional practice . . . learning by doing’ (2011, 10).
Hargreaves’ view of the value of ‘academic knowledge’ for teachers reflects the
wider scepticism of successive UK governments about the role of universities in the
education and training of teachers, with sustained efforts to increase the involvement
of schools in both initial teacher education and continuing professional development.
This has culminated in the Coalition government’s ambition to create a ‘school-led
system’ for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (DfE 2010, 2011; MacBeath 2011;
Taylor 2013). Further confirmation of the determination to shift the centre of gravity
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 1149

away from universities and their presumed focus on ‘academic knowledge’ comes from
proposals to undermine the requirement for teachers to hold formal postgraduate teach-
ing qualifications (Furlong 2013). For some, the promotion of a school-led system rep-
resents a concerted political assault on universities (Browne and Reid 2012), although it
is perhaps more accurately a consequence of the neo-liberal ‘imagining’ of a diversi-
fied, marketised delivery as not so much the most effective approach, but simply
‘common-sense’; the only approach. As Blair might have put it, it is a practical not
ideological imperative; this perhaps reflects the ‘normalising’ of neo-liberalism, to
the extent where the widespread privatisation of state education (Ball 2009) is
largely unremarked upon in public and political discourse.

Initial teacher education and the neo-liberal project

As already noted, ITE is a key strand of neo-liberal education reforms, and recent UK
governments have aspired to match the success of ‘PISA high performance’ systems in
recruiting the best quality entrants into teaching (OECD 2005; Barber and Mourshed
2007; Ball and Forzani 2009). However, there has also been an acknowledgement
that is many systems, matching the entry levels of South Korea and Singapore, for
instance, is not a realistic aspiration for countries such as England and the USA (Freed-
man, Lipson, and Hargreaves 2008, 25).
One high-profile attempt to address this ‘quality gap’ has been the growth of the
Teach for All model, in which ‘elite’ graduates interns are brought into teaching
through an employment-based training programme. Teach for All (Teach First in
England) is now a global franchise, operating in 33 countries, and notable because
of its explicit mission of social equity alongside that of teacher quality, placing teachers
in schools that consistently struggle to recruit high-quality teachers. This linkage
between teacher quality and equity is a significant one, given the evidence that in
systems where teacher status (and so entry quality to the profession) is low, schools
serving the most socio-economically disadvantaged communities have the greatest dif-
ficulty attracting and retaining high-quality teachers (Ammermüller and Lauer 2008;
Darling-Hammond 2009; Little and Bartlett 2010). This means, therefore, that given
the evidence of the adverse impact of socio-economic disadvantage on educational
attainment any policy that aims to close ‘the achievement gap’ must address the
issue of teacher recruitment quality.
However, evidence for the actual impact of such initiatives on social equity (or on
the broader issues of teacher quality and school improvement) is inconclusive.
Although some studies support the notion that getting ‘elite’ individuals into the class-
room through Teach for All and the ‘Fellows Programs’ in a number of US state school
systems can impact positively on school performance (Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger
2008; Muijs et al. 2010; Xu, Hannaway, and Taylor 2011), others have noted the
high costs of such initiatives (McConney, Price, and Woods-McConney 2012).
Others have suggested the Teach for All ‘internship’ model, whatever the economic
cost–benefit ratio, is fundamentally flawed. Whilst Teach for All claims to address
the ‘global problem of educational inequality’ (Teach for All 2014), this aspiration is
underpinned by a rhetoric suggesting that ‘problem’ of teacher quality can be solved
by dispatching ‘elite cadres’ to ‘problem schools in problem communities’. Critics,
however, argue that this simply reproduces ‘middle-class privilege’ through the ‘ . . .
production of discourses obscuring middle-class privilege and power’ (Smart et al.
2009, 51).
1150 C. Wilkins

Notwithstanding the particular sensitivities surrounding schemes that promote

‘elite’ graduates whilst problematising disadvantaged communities, others argue that
entry quality is less significant in determining teacher effectiveness than the quality
of their teacher education/induction programmes (Darling-Hammond et al. 2005;
Darling-Hammond 2009). Ultimately, tracing a causal link from teacher recruitment
all the way through to educational outcomes for pupils is such a complex matter that
it perhaps qualifies as an ‘un-researchable’ question.

Teacher identity in performative systems

The neo-liberal model of ‘modernised’ teacher professionalism, with its emphasis on
personal and professional responsibility for improving one’s own practice and that of
schools, has been the subject of many studies into its impact on teachers’ identity. A
common theme in this research has been the notion that teacher identity emerges
from the interplay between professional and personal identities (Wenger 1998; Day
et al. 2007), and which responds in a dynamic way to internal and external factors
(Sachs 2003; Beauchamp and Thomas 2009). This process creates the potential for con-
flict in ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ a teacher as individuals try to reconcile personal values
with those of the professional community; these in turn need to be balanced against the
institutional priorities of the schools in which they work (Pillen, Beijaard, and den Brok
2013).
This conflict between the idealistic sense of ‘social purpose’ that motivates so many
individuals to become teachers (Lortie 1975; Kyriacou et al. 2003), and the local and
system-level values, practices and priorities, is a recurrent theme in literature concep-
tualising teacher identity construction (Maclure 1993; Flores and Day 2006). Many
studies of teachers’ work in recent years have attempted to explain the ways in
which teachers engage with this complex ‘negotiation of power’ between the personal,
institutional and wider policy contexts (Avis 2005; Lasky 2005; Wilkins et al. 2012).
The prevalence of performative policy and practice in recent decades has been
widely seen as presenting a significant challenge to the normative values of the pro-
fession, enacted through the deployment of ever more visible and ‘intrusive’ external
accountability instruments (Day, Eliott, and Kington 2005; Troman, Jeffrey, and
Raggl 2007; Cherubini 2009;Wilkins et al. 2012). However, whilst these performative
instruments have been widely viewed as constraining and undermining ‘traditional’
professionalism although it could be argued that many critics of neo-liberal policies
present an overly positive, even nostalgic, view of ‘traditional professionalism’. This
needs to be taken into account when discussing the potential impact on social equity
outcomes of neo-liberal reforms.
Whilst the imagined ‘golden age’ of teacher professionalism (usually considered to
be the 1960s and 1970s) did see genuinely progressive reforms in England, particularly
in respect of the curriculum and pedagogy, it would be hard to argue that the profession
was exemplary in championing the rights to equity in education for ethnic minority,
female and working-class pupils, let alone the pupils with special educational needs
ghettoised into schools for the ‘educationally subnormal and/or handicapped’. It is
risky, of course, to apply contemporary judgements in such matters, but a close exam-
ination of the reality of schools in the pre-performative era is a necessary corrective to
the lazy assumption that if the teaching profession could be liberated from performative
constraints, a radical progressive social justice agenda would naturally emerge.
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 1151

For many, this has led to the notion that teachers have been deprofessionalised
(Ozga 1995), through a process by which their work has been reshaped as being a
set of post-professional activities (Hargreaves 2000; Ball 2003; Apple 2005). Performa-
tive mechanisms have been characterised by the ways in which they undermine pro-
fessional values based on critical reflection and practice, and imposing external,
frequently data-driven, priorities that consequently devalue or suppress more creative,
interpretive aspects of teachers’ work (Galton and MacBeath 2008). Ultimately, it is
argued, this leads to an ‘inauthenticity’ of practice that has ‘potentially profound con-
sequences [ . . . ] for the inner-life of the teacher’ (Ball 2003, 226). Evans argues that the
framework of professional standards, first introduced in 1998 in England and currently
in their fourth iteration, have shaped teacher professionalism in complex ways, but pre-
dominately as a ‘demanded or required’ professionalism that is relatively narrowly
defined by teachers’ behaviour rather than their attitudes or intellectuality (Evans
2011, 868).
Others have argued, however, that there is potential for resistance to this post-pro-
fessional teacher identity, despite the dominant entrepreneurial, managerialist dis-
course. For Sachs (2003) this resistance is dependent on the maintenance of a robust
collegiality that values and promotes an ‘inquiry-oriented’ approach. Where this colle-
gial professional culture prevails, in which teachers feel a strong affiliation to their
professional community, Sachs argues that teachers are able to uphold a more
‘values-driven’ notion of the professional as ‘an active agent pursuing a moral
purpose’ (Sachs 2003).
Sachs (2003) argues that dissent is crucial to professional innovation through
‘system adaption’, and that it allows for the growth of a transformative professionalism
driven by internally generated professional values rather than externally imposed
models of ‘good practice’ (Avis 2005). The notion of collegiality and collaboration
as being central to the maintenance of ‘traditional’ professionalism is a common one,
and some studies of school leadership have drawn attention to this, noting that pro-
fessional identities are more likely to remain stable in schools where school leaders
promote a culture of collaborative professionalism rather that individual ‘self-improve-
ment’ (Hord 1997; Katzenmeyer and Moller 2009). This has led in turn to the notion
that the most effective school leaders are those that are committed to fostering a ‘pro-
fessional learning culture’ (Stoll and Louis 2007; Day and Gu 2010).
Sachs’ notion of the activist professional is obviously an appealing one for educa-
tors with a strong commitment to a social equity agenda, and one that at first sight res-
onates with the notion of teachers as ‘productive pedagogues’ (Lingard and Mills 2007)
who locate their practice in a wider context of social justice and the purpose of edu-
cation, rather than the ‘reproductive pedagogues’ who simply enact (and therefore legit-
imise) extant inequalities (Lingard and Mills 2007, 234), However, this optimistic view
of the potential for pursuing egalitarian goals within neo-liberal policy arenas is a ques-
tionable one for a number of reasons. As Sachs makes clear, values-driven practice can
only flourish in a collegial professional culture, and there is a significant body of evi-
dence suggesting that genuine collegiality is difficult to maintain in schools where ten-
dency of performative frameworks to create an environment in which authoritarian
principals are lauded as ‘transformational leaders’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015). In
such unpromising environments, the teaching profession is re-fashioned through a
new generation of teachers more accepting of the discourse of performativity
(Goodson 2014). For many of this new generation of teachers, compliance with perfor-
mative practices is normalised (Wilkins 2011).
1152 C. Wilkins

Neo-liberal school leadership

The ‘knowledge claims and production processes for school leadership’ (Gunter and
Forester 2008) have been central to recent education policy in England (under both
Labour and Coalition UK governments). At the outset of the New Labour era, the
notion that head teachers are ‘the key to a school’s success’ (Department for Education
and Employment 1998) took hold, along with the idea that whilst schools still required
a single, ‘transformational’ leader at the top, sustainable modernisation could only
occur with a more ‘distributive’ model of leadership in which responsibility for
school improvement was devolved to increasingly complex tiers of ‘senior and
middle leaders’ (Gunter and Forrester 2008, 150). Distributive, or ‘dispersed’, leader-
ship rapidly became the standard model for school leadership during the New Labour
era; it was ‘an idea whose time has come’ (Gronn 2000, 333). The multiple rebranding
of the executive agency responsible for overseeing initial and in-service teacher edu-
cation during this period neatly encapsulates the shifting orthodoxies of school
improvement; known in the pre-1997 era as the Teacher Training Agency, it first
became in 2005 as the Training and Development Agency for Schools, and then in
2012, the National College for Teaching and Leadership, reinforcing the view that lea-
dership is central to securing school and system level improvement.
Distributive leadership has always, however, been characterised by contradiction,
and its distributive features do not necessarily equate with democratically distributed
power. Gray and Streshly argue at the outset that learning communities depend for
their effectiveness on leaders’ ability to ‘set the agenda’ and provide a framework
for trying out innovative ideas, and moreover, that leaders should be able to ‘get rid
of’ staff whose dissent that presented a challenge to the ‘right to manage’ (Gray and
Streshly 2008, 131).
This view clearly reveals the paradox of where power lies in the performative school
and has led to criticism that the notion of the school as a learning community is a mis-
leading one, and that the ‘modernisation’ of school leadership has been merely an exer-
cise in ensuring compliance (Thrupp and Willmott 2003). Courtney and Gunter (2015)
argue that the form of ‘transformational leadership’ promoted in neo-liberal school
systems are characterised by authoritarian, and even totalitarian, exercising of power,
to the extent of ‘purging’ the workforce of those teachers whose dissent restricts
their ‘right to manage’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015, 17).
This ‘transformational’ school leadership has been persistently portrayed as being
inspirational yet distributive, and as ideal of the ‘self-improving school’ in which col-
laborative collegiality underpins a vibrant professional learning community
(Hargreaves 2011). However, critics argue that distributive leadership actually
simply enables the spread of a ‘discourse of power’ (Ball 2000) dominated by leader-
ship practices rationalised through a culture of ‘risk minimisation’ (McWilliam and
Perry 2006). Distributive leadership, therefore, rather than foster values-drive profes-
sionalism, legitimises self-surveillance and a colonisation of professional life and
values in what Ball calls ‘a new subjectivity’ (2000, 4). This colonisation allows
central government to present a mirage of increased professional autonomy, with min-
isters regularly claiming the ‘greater freedom for schools’, whilst creating a self-poli-
cing profession within an all-encompassing regulatory framework (Hatcher 2005). In
the performative system, this policing, mindful of the panoptic gaze of government,
creates a culture of ‘coercive instrumentalism’ (Wilkins and Wood 2009, 243; Courtney
2014). In this system, the middle leader is a crucial actor, facilitating a ‘mobilization of
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 1153

bias’ that enhances the legitimacy of particular actions, and so encourages the compli-
ance of all members of the professional community (Busher, Hammersley-Fletcher, and
Turner 2007, 417).

Spaces for equity in the performative profession

Opportunities for maintaining and enhancing teachers’ professional autonomy certainly
exist in the performative school system in England, where professional learning is seen
as crucial to increasing system quality, and the notion of the self-improving teacher in
control of their own destiny has become embedded in the professional psyche.
However, the self-improving teacher is a fundamentally individualistic concept in
which teachers are required to commit to ‘modernisation’ (which in practice means
shifting values and practices to align with current policy orthodoxies, as determined
by the government of the day). Because the government ministers are in a position
to determine, at a micro-level, the criteria by which teacher competence is assessed,
becoming a ‘successful’ teacher is largely determined by the willingness and capacity
to perform at an increasingly high level (as assessed either by internal managers or an
external inspectorate) against nationally prescribed standards of ‘functional compe-
tency’. As already noted, the teacher standards model adopted in England is a
largely instrumental one focusing on narrowly defined teacher behaviours (Evans
2011). Given the well-established links between teacher performance and self-efficacy
(Bandura 1982; Day, Eliott, and Kington 2005; Troman, Jeffrey, and Raggl 2007),
therefore, it is clear that performative regulatory instruments may have a profound,
and constraining, impact on teachers’ sense of values-led professionalism. This is
even more apparent given the phenomenon by which the neo-liberal school governance
enables leaders to use performance pretexts to remodel their workforce by ‘getting the
wrong people off the bus’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015, 3). In this conception of the per-
formative school, compliance is not only embedded into the fabric of the institution, it is
continually ‘re-normalised’ as policy goalposts shift (Courtney 2014, 10).
The individualising effect of neo-liberal policy solutions can also be detected in the
ways in which social equity issues have been conceptualised in the reform agenda in
England, as pursued by both the New Labour and Coalition UK governments since
1997. Whilst the notion of ‘inclusion’ has been central to a wide range of reforms,
this is largely framed through a discourse of individualism, about how best ‘at risk’
individuals can be enabled to succeed against the odds and so close the attainment
gap (Alexiadou 2002). Pupils from ‘disadvantaged’ communities (generally a
synonym for working class, poor and/or black) are conceptualised as being at risk of
failure, a notion that suggests blame can be apportioned for any lack of success in
schooling. In the neo-liberal political sphere, this blame is sometimes directed at the
individual for making poor choices, sometimes to their families and communities for
failing to instil positive attitudes to learning and frequently to teachers and schools
for having low expectations and providing insufficient challenge.
The notion of ‘risk of failure’ is a key one in the neo-liberal education system; both
individuals and schools are judged by the degree to which they are at risk of failure to
meet performative thresholds (Singh and Taylor 2007). The successful ‘performing
school’, therefore, is one which is best able to ‘close the achievement gap’. Whilst
this is apparently a socially progressive agenda, one which aims to allow at-risk
pupils to succeed, its underlying purpose is to create competitors in the knowledge
economy. This interpretation of social inclusion is a fundamentally individualistic
1154 C. Wilkins

one, in which under-achievement is a ‘market failure’ reflecting ‘ . . . a Hayekian ideal

of social justice’ (Alexiadou 2002, 76) in which education is merely the vehicle for
individuals to ‘compete and succeed’. The contradictions of this aspiration are well
documented; the education market is actually highly stratified (Ozga 1995), and differ-
ential access (mediated by inequality of educational outcome) is a necessary condition
of the global neo-liberal labour market rather than an unfortunate by-product (Brown
2000).
The neo-liberal project, as applied to the education system in England, does appear
to be a highly contradictory one. Although Hargreaves, Sachs and many others have
highlighted the potential for embedding socially progressive ideals through collabora-
tive professionalism, it is clear that these opportunities are greatest where there is scope
for innovation and risk-taking. In the English school, however, autonomous pro-
fessional space has to be either ‘earned’ through performative success or granted
through ideological positioning. ‘Earned autonomy’ comes to schools whose level of
performance satisfies the inspectorate, and so are subject to inspections that are not
only to less frequent, but also less intrusive (Waldegrave and Simons 2014). Individual
teachers in the performative school can also earn the right to operate in ‘micro-auton-
omous spaces’ within their classroom; they earn this, of course, by meeting appropriate
benchmarks, both in respect of managers’ assessment of their teaching performance,
and the attainment outcomes of their pupils (Wilkins 2011).
In addition to this earned autonomy, autonomy is bestowed on schools whose gov-
ernance models are ideologically in tune with the government of the day. Independent
fee-paying schools have long been free from many of the constraints imposed on state
schools, whilst over the past 10 years many of these constraints have been lifted from
publically funded schools. Academisation brings freedom from local democratic
control and from some aspects of legislation regarding workforce arrangements and
the curriculum (Woods, Woods, and Gunter 2007) whilst the Coalition government’s
free school initiative represents the most overt signal yet of the desire to privatise
state education (Hatcher 2011). Free schools are at liberty to determine their own cur-
riculum and staffing arrangements (to the extent of being free of the need to employ any
qualified teachers apart from a Special Needs Coordinator), and were explicitly set up to
provide a competitive market for school places. Successive governments have claimed
that the market-driven diversity of academies and free schools, and the ‘freeing up of
professionals’ inherent in this, addresses the fundamental challenge for the school
system in England, that of raising attainment overall whilst reducing inequality
(Hatcher 2011, 500); put simply, this presents a progressive appearance of neo-
liberal reforms as being ones in which quality and equity are equally important and
not incompatible. This would appear to have some resonance with those, such as Har-
greaves and Sachs, who have long argued that autonomous professionals working in
collaborative ‘learning communities’ provide fertile ground for values-led practices
in which social equity issues are as important as academic development. Many
would argue that the ideological underpinning of the ‘semi-privatised’ state school
(be they academies/free schools in England or Charter Schools in the USA) is one of
entrepreneurialism and managerialism, and that this will determine the prevailing
ethos of the school. However, it also the case that they are also sites of democratic
potential. This will, of course, be dependent on the extent to which leaders are
willing and able to foster the high levels of professional trust necessary for teachers
to learn and innovate together, but where these conditions do occur, it is plausible to
argue that the relative freedom from the conservative ‘blame culture’ of the highly
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 1155

performative school (Avis 2005) could create the conditions for teachers to pursue a
genuinely progressive social equity agenda.
Critics of the neo-liberal diversification of school governance models, however,
argue that the liberation of academies from the constraints in force over ‘traditional’
community schools has failed to deliver significant improvements in attainment
(Machin and Wilson 2009; Wrigley 2011; Allen 2013), let alone any closing of the
achievement gap. Meanwhile, the evidence from the USA on Charter Schools suggests
that whilst there is ambiguity about the impact on overall attainment (Dillon 2005), in
some studies have been shown to have a disproportionately adverse impact on out-
comes for minorities (Bifulco and Ladd 2007). Ultimately this is likely to remain a con-
tested issue for some time; the rapid expansion of academies and the demographic
variability between schools makes it difficult to produce clear evidence either way.
Similarly, whilst ministers insist marketising school choice enhances social mobility,
critics argue that it increases social inequality because middle-class parents will
always be better placed to ‘game the system’ and ensure their children ‘win’ places
at the most successful, and desirable schools (Hatcher 2011).

Conclusions
As yet, despite the huge amount of research into teacher identity over recent decades,
much of which has been exercised by the question of how this is re-shaped and re-
formed in performative systems, the particular impact on teacher identity of working
under archetypal neo-liberal governance models in academies and free schools
remains a mystery. By virtue of the liberalised, diversified system constructed in
England over the past two decades, researching this topic and trying to identify the dis-
tinctive features of teachers’ work in such a complex and volatile landscape would
present obvious challenges. However, whilst free schools are still at a small ‘exper-
imental’ scale, academies are now a ‘mainstream’ governance model; introduced in
England in 2002, expansion accelerated from 203 in 2010 to over 3000 (15% of all
schools) in 2014 (DfE 2014). Although it is right to be concerned about the growth
of academies and free schools in respect of the impact on social equity, the question
of how teacher identity in these ‘quasi-privatised’ state schools might be evolving
deserves much greater attention. It may be that the individualised model of ‘colonised’
professional learning (Ball 2000), with its overriding culture of coercive instrumental-
ism (Wilkins and Wood 2009) will continue to encourage compliance with external
models of innovative practice, and exacerbate the sidelining of equity issues.
It may be, however, that these schools provide a greater degree of autonomy for tea-
chers, whether it is solely ‘granted’ through ideological partiality or ‘earned’ through
success in meeting performative targets, and that this could provide space for diversity
and values-driven professional practice. Although cross-national comparisons are
fraught with danger, there are some indications from the USA that the Charter
School movement, whilst frequently subjected to intense criticism for de-professiona-
lising teachers, narrowing the curriculum and increasing the attainment gap (Hursh and
Lipman 2007, 167), there is some evidence that this is not inevitable, and as the move-
ment has matured there are examples of more ‘progressive’ practices emerging
(Carpenter 2008; Blitz 2011). Lipman describes how the first wave of Charter
Schools of Chicago, although predominately ‘corporate’ in organisation and ethos,
included schools where the relative pedagogic freedom Charter status entails opened
1156 C. Wilkins

spaces for progressive agency, and attracted ‘social justice- oriented’ teachers to work
in them (Lipman 2008, 76–77).
What is clear is that further research is needed to see whether this can create the con-
ditions not just for transformational leadership, but for transformational teaching and
learning. At present we have little evidence to call upon, and those studies that have
investigated the cultures developing in the early (2002–2010 era) ‘sponsored’ acade-
mies suggest that they do create an enhanced entrepreneurial domain (Woods,
Woods, and Gunter 2007, 353). However, although the authors of this study argued
that this created the potential for cultural progressivism, in practice the school cultures
they found were predominately constructed as sites of enhanced private entrepreneuri-
alism, and so private influence (Woods, Woods, and Gunter 2007, 254). If the evidence
is inconclusive for these ‘first wave’ academies, then this is even truer of the post-2010
‘converter academies’.
It is clear that the neo-liberal governance model for state schools in England,
whether in traditional ‘community schools’, academies or free schools, is not conducive
to the values-driven professionalism envisaged by Sachs (2003); however, even where
this teacher-initiated culture does exist, it will only lead to a meaningful engagement
with social equity issues where these are central to the teachers’ values. Genuine col-
laborative leadership is essential for productive pedagogies (Lingard and Mills 2007)
that connect schools’ curricula and practices to the pursuit of a social justice agenda,
but it is not enough on its own. We need teachers committed to this agenda, and
whilst teachers entering the profession still overwhelmingly do so for ‘altruistic’
reasons (Wilkins 2011), altruism does not necessarily lead to activism. Evidence of
the past decade suggests that teacher values are mostly suppressed in the face of the
coercive compliance imposed by performative managerialism.
The potential consequences of recent education reforms in England, therefore, are in
almost every respect discouraging for social justice advocates. Paradoxically, however,
as the performative grip tightens across the ‘traditional’ community school sector, it
may be that the most promising arena for teachers to ‘pursue a moral purpose’ and a
social justice agenda could be within the ultimate symbol of the neo-liberal reform
project; the privatised state school.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Chris Wilkins is a Reader in Education and currently Director of Teacher Education at the
University of Leicester.

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