The centralised drive of policy

Comments in earlier chapters have been concerned with the effects of centrally driven policy on the withering of local initiative and governance infrastructures, especially Education. The accompanying emptiness of policy making and lack of national understanding that long ago lost the immediacy required to lead effectively have had their own effects. I begin to examine these effects in this and subsequent chapters. I shift to examine national policy making, rather than its content: how policy is made and how it is intended to be implemented. This has consequences for those expected to connect with students in Education, but the focus now goes wider. The Davis quote mentioned earlier is relevant to the considerations of both this chapter and Chapter 7.

Tales of limited power, interest, skills and policy paralysis at the top

In an interview in 2018, I asked an ex-senior official from Her Majesty's Treasury, who had been deeply involved in the development and implementation of the Education reforms from 2010 onwards, to give his assessment of ‘where they were now with it all’ as he put it. At that time, the relationship between Her Majesty's Treasury and central government service departments, like the DfE, was based on accountability: how had the service department implemented and spent the detailed funding agreed centrally by the Treasury? This was what ‘driving change’ actually meant at his level – Treasury officials would have progress meetings with their counterparts. But this way of doing business declined gradually and, arguably, there has been no further strategic policy making in Education since Michael Gove left the DfE in 2014: just the playing out of its own organisation logic and tweaks in the bureaucracy until the current unstable assemblage crept up unnoticed.

This official's assessment was similar to some of the descriptions given in earlier chapters – the schooling system was a ‘mixed market’, and a ‘half way house’ measured against the stated ambition (DfE, 2016) of 100 per cent academisation of schools by 2022.

Introduction: The polity around the school

It may be an unwelcome truth to the architects from the 1980s of neoliberal Education policy to its re-articulation in the 2022 White Paper. But just as the possibilities for teaching are framed by the communities schools serve – and what the children bring in with them – schools are also framed by communities beyond those they serve directly. Tensions or prosperity in the countryside, parts of towns and cities, housing estates, whole regions, or even nations in terms of the pandemic, affect the way state schools need to act, react and think their role.

Crucially, however, on a more frequent and regular basis, they are affected by the wider network of organisations within which they sit – the local ecosystem – that affect decision making. Ecosystems are constructed differently: some schools serving the same housing estate, for example, or a market town, may collaborate. They may do so via the organisations they are part of formally, including managerial parastatal conglomerations such as multi-academy trusts (MATs) (but see later), the wider directly elected local government ecosystems (their councils), and that of the policy context and implementation of central government. None of these relationships are linear or simple, but form particular ecosystems of mutual relationships, or polities, when decision making is involved.

Fullan (1993, 1999, 2003) refers repeatedly to the governance aspect of all this – as opposed to just the various community interests involved – as the ‘tri-levels’ involved in ‘reform’: central government, local government or whatever constitutes a middle ‘tier’, and the schools themselves. The reality as he says is that, however attenuated or varied, the day-to-day supervision and regulation of what happens to nearly nine million children in England in classrooms occur at all three levels. Therefore, effecting changes in any of these organisations in this wider network affects the others, and provides a context for impeding or accelerating the realisation of reform or change at each level and therefore more widely. This is the stark conclusion of the British Academy (2021a) and the problem with withering away the lower levels. So, as will be argued in this chapter, the articulation of the ‘tri-levels’ is chaotic in English schooling, complex and overall an unstable assemblage that by its very nature remains unstable. Sadly again, this messiness does not just exist in Education.

Introduction: Structures available now

In conclusion, I have argued that effective leadership of public services requires immediacy, knowledge and direct acquaintance. I have also argued that, to make change through good policy, the policy maker and administrator have to engage with organisational frameworks as they are. Few have the luxury of sweeping away existing arrangements and legislating for new ones: public services deal with people and change requires implementation and continuity plans. Knowing how they work is essential. For several years now, central government has lost the qualities and understanding that enable change to the extent, I have argued, that the need for any change in any circumstances is no longer even recognised.

For a time, with the development of the DfE regional offices I have described, led by a team of ‘commissioners’ from predominantly senior school backgrounds, with moral purpose, and a national commissioner with similar, I did at least glimpse in the distance the possibility of minimising the outcome gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged (Riddell, 2016). As a senior local authority (LA) officer, I had been occupied with similar concerns, often taking the emphasis off other matters because of the national centralising monofocal direction of travel. Any expectations I did have disappeared with the departure of a National Schools Commissioner in 2018 and the process of rebalancing renewed inchoate regional structures and powers. As I have argued, alongside the features that have resulted from the (still) incomplete process of academisation, this has contributed to the anarchic, inconsistent chaos and muddle that we live in and that has been theme of this book. The lack of an articulated and clearly understood structure at all levels for Education I have argued, makes any policy realisation virtually impossible from a national standpoint.

I have been arguing for more open and community-engaged processes in government and specifically Education not just because I think openness is a good thing in a democracy, though I do, but that this is the best way to improve the quality of public services and engage those we serve in a more collective discussion about their and our collective futures.

English schools policy emerging from a pandemic: the argument

This book is based on the author's continuing study of and research into English schools governance, and how it enables schools to affect students, their parents and wider society positively. Following a long career as a teacher, a senior local authority (LA) officer and non-governmental organisation (NGO) official, I have become particularly concerned as an academic in recent years with how schools can make a contribution to reducing inequity and injustice.

In recounting and analysing here the organisational consequences of the so-called ‘academisation’ of schools in England, my sad conclusion is they have resulted in schools gradually withdrawing from the wider concerns of the communities they serve and their aspirations for the future, while focusing, sometimes excessively so, only on what can be seen as the technical concerns that parents legitimately have about their children's outcomes and progress. In turn, as a cause and consequence, governance engagement with the practical concerns of schooling has also been retreating gradually – and increasingly by geographical distance – from the schools for which it is responsible. Governance has lost its immediacy, and this process continues.

These twin processes have been driven by the increasing focus by national education policy since the early 1990s on a narrow range of student outcomes, and the development of specific organisational technologies to achieve them, and little else, which has faded out of sight and surveillance. Schools also do other things, but many in school governance no longer recognise their schools in any other but these narrow limited terms. As a consequence, because of reward systems, there has also been a dramatic reduction of capacity at all levels in our schooling system to think about, develop, implement, and even recognise sometimes, the necessary, deeper responses needed to address increasing inequity and the other challenges facing our society post pandemic. That this might even be necessary, beyond doing what will be shown to be ineffective and broadly irrelevant catch up, is a question that cannot be framed in other words or asked within current practice. The gradual technical framing and reframing of governance, I shall argue, has also led to an ignorance of the wider purposes and possibilities in the maturation processes of young people, and increasing secrecy and secretiveness.

In many ways, the subject matter of this book is a lifelong project and interest, to which I hope I have brought the previous research authority of two of my three previous books and a variety of published articles referred to in the text.

The most recent phase of my research started in 2017, and it included the work on the two councils described in the book. This entailed live semi-structured interviews with senior politicians of all three main political parties, their senior officers – chiefs and heads of school improvement – and visits to schools and MATs based in their areas. These involved further semistructured interviews with CEOs, or their deputies, and headteachers. More latterly these had to be done by video call, with the last one being in 2021. In addition, I continued with my interviews of ex-senior officials, as I have been doing for some time, now all in different roles. They had been involved in central government as the policies and their effects described here were in the process of being developed and ‘rolled out’. I also continued to visit other MAT CEOs not located in either of the two local authorities (LAs).

My access was successful – with no refusals this time – as I drew on my large national network, begun long ago as a senior LA officer myself, to make introductions. As said in my acknowledgements, this also involved not seeking quotations beyond the odd unattributable phrase or two used in the text. Further, in an apparently less open governance environment than might be expected in the 21st century, I was able to obtain documentation that never saw the light of day in public-facing contexts, such as on council or other websites. Their deeper analysis helped provide excellent context for the interviews and the non-public thinking that was taking place.

As Dan Gibton (2016) says, this means that I was and was seen as an ‘insider’, with knowledge of my interviewees’ work and strategic environment and experience of taking the sorts of decisions with which they were faced every day. This can also be problematic, of course, as empathy with such senior public figures can obscure other contexts of their work and their significance. This could include disagreement, for example, and sometimes hostility, wherever triangulation takes one.

Introduction

When marketisation principles were being introduced into English schooling from the 1980s, and new internal markets for services being set up, this was paralleled in other public services. And more broadly, national economic policies were being pursued to deregulate the private sector and reduce perceived bureaucratic restrictions on companies.

These processes too evolved under their own organisational logics: it will be argued here that the structural weaknesses that developed in the way that parts of the private sector were led and managed became reflected in not only Education but the broader structure, conceptions and failures of the British state.

Private sector parallels

Perhaps one of the best known acts of market deregulation was the so-called ‘big bang’ in 1988 of the financial markets, specifically those in the City of London (Tooze, 2018; Blakely, 2019). This process, as Blakely and others have argued, had the logical consequence – or at least was accompanied by – the ‘financialisation’ of the UK economy. The nature of this financialisation is contested, of course. Whether a national economy such as the UK's can only return to growth through consumer spending, financed by corporate and personal debt, is similarly debatable, especially within the current economic outlook (OECD, 2022). These matters are well beyond the scope of this book, but some of the visible structural traits of deregulation, such as limited self-regulation, perpetual self-referencing and the apparent common behaviours of system leaders are not. This is especially so as they have become more and more the norm and are paralleled in the state sector, including Education.

To take one example, the ‘can-kicking’ of major strategic matters, referred to at the top of the last chapter, is a typical common behaviour that Davis (2018: 122) found in the top echelons of major companies in the City of London. According to him, this has arisen for a variety of factors. One is the short-term nature of contracts for senior postholders and CEOs – often only three years or so. Another is the way that a particular financial ambition, so-called ‘shareholder value’ (2018: 37; Blakeley, 2019: 61), became dominant as a principal outcome sought by both shareholders and hence company boards. According to Mazzucato (2013: 198), shareholder value has become an ‘ideology’.

Introduction

In this chapter, I shift tack slightly first to consider some of the possibilities for schools and their communities. This is so that schools can be seen to provide more than what could be considered as just a technical offer or service analogous to that provided by the local branch of a national supermarket. This latter seems an especially suitable comparison in those large multi-academy trusts (MATs) that have no Local Governing Bodies (LGBs) and therefore little or no concept of or immediacy with their schools.

I have argued that this is not good enough in a democracy, but I will further argue that to change it Education needs to be returned to the public service. This does involve looking back first to enable looking forward in the final chapters of the book, but also to look at the possibilities within current structures. Local government, explored in the second half the chapter, provides the most fertile ground I argue, but changes of behaviour will also be required of central government officials in particular. Above all else, in addition to schools being involved with their communities, there needs to be some open public body that has a detailed overview of the communities they serve, with access to the immediacy needed to help them look to the future and develop. Central government has failed and continues to fail miserably on all these counts, without understanding it has done so.

The context for Education: England's structure before and after the pandemic

England has been a country with extremes of social inequality for some time (Dorling, 2015). These have been developing over many years and had not been created due to the pandemic, though they have been worsened. We have known for some time (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009) that relative advantages and disadvantages among populations tend to ‘cluster’ (my word): in communities with relatively low or high levels of income, their corresponding levels of physical and mental health, life expectancy, economic opportunities and educational outcomes will also be low or high. Schools and teaching can be part of the problem and can help reproduce and maintain difference rather than modify unequal structures and opportunities. But they can help. Inequalities are kept in place through a variety of social, economic and other mechanisms, all of which can be a focus for policy and targeted intervention, some by schools. The more unequal, the more difficult it is a for a society to develop and improve overall (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009), and the greater the hurdles to rise up the social ladder.

While overall being a ‘prosperous’ country with high levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (US Census Bureau, 2021), the UK as a whole has a low Gini coefficient of 34.3 (a measure of the steepness of inequality scored from 0 to 100, where 100 is perfect). In illustration of life in the ‘bottom’ of this hierarchy, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF, 2020) has estimated that before the pandemic more than 2.4 million households were living in destitution: the inability to put food on the table and clothe themselves and put a roof over their families’ heads. This involved 550,000 children at that time. All of this had been worsening, especially in the north of England.

Prosperous England rests on a very perilous base. Overall, GDP per person fell from $48,513 in 2019 to $44,916 in 2020 (World Bank, 2021), again before the pandemic. Because of the inequality in income distribution represented by the Gini coefficient, this will have been experienced differently.

Introduction: The paradoxes of expectations

The construction of central government and governance in their current forms has been a long time in the development. One recognisable tendency of where we are now – perhaps reinforced by national media needs for quick turn round on particular stories – has been, as another ex-very senior Treasury official put it, ‘the PM (or other highly visible minister) gets the blame for everything’. Most importantly, people expect him or her to do something about a problem identified.

This official and others have documented to me examples of this across government, including flooding, why trains were not running on time (the 10.00 am from Leeds was mentioned – to London of course), and sewage outage by privatised water companies. In all these cases, problems were occurring not because of lack of official action, but as a result of a particular aspect of the gradual formation or deformation of central government in its current form. These all involved organisations that had been set up as arm’s-length organisations, commented on earlier, or that were under contract to the government department concerned, as delivery becomes more and more outsourced. Very little is directly managed as such within the appropriate department.

As a consequence, it was not actually possible for ministers to do very much in each of these cases, or at least promptly or directly. One reason is of course that often there were deeper and larger matters underlying apparently minor problems, often longer term: growth or changes in demand, a longstanding need for re-investment, or indeed contracts that cannot be modified except by mutual agreement or without making a further payment or not at all. There may even be structural problems with the service in question, which may not have been noticed or even conceived within narrowly defined contractual arrangements based on a narrow range of indicators.

The weakening of national officialdom

So-called ‘contract culture’ is one aspect of New Public Management (NPM) (Exworthy and Halford, 1999) mentioned in the last chapter, supposedly imported from the private sector (Hambleton, 2020). The aspect of NPM relevant here is the nature of some performance contracts that set yearly (or longer) objectives, often involving targets, for which staff and organisations are ‘held to account’.

Introduction

In this chapter, the focus moves to the areas that need to change: a summary of particularly important characteristics (and weaknesses) of the English Education ‘system’. For the sort of changes being suggested, this would involve elements of redefining and redirecting. But it would not be in the spirit of the book to present a new detailed schema because, in any democracy, this needs to develop from wider discussion, consideration and action and start with the way things are, as does all sustainable policy.

If Education is to be more open and be re-politicised, what emerges needs to be open and authoritative, not based on newly imagined structures of tired centralised governance systems, however recently elected the incumbents, or by diktat. There may be a need for changed structures, but I will argue for the locations and characteristics of structural change, not prescribe them. At the same time, I would strongly recommend whatever eventually emerges can still benefit now from changes in behaviour, within existing arrangements and structures. These will be rooted within a desire – perhaps later a requirement – to consider the publicly open and democratic possibilities in all pieces of work. For example. It could be asked: how can this programme or piece of work be conducted to encourage wider public understanding and involvement?

I have worked with and for many politicians that do not need to be taught anything here, and the same applies to many officers and some officials of my acquaintance. But redemocratising needs to be an underpinning of all governance work, not an afterthought, and be a required expectation of public life.

I shall argue in the last chapter of the book how some attempts can be made to encourage this sort of focus and suggest the addition of an additional principle of public life (from GOV.UK), the so-called Nolan principles. Public Education in England, that is, state funded, does need to move away from its current privatised state, in the sense that decisions are made now secretly and behind closed doors as routine, into the light of public service. This needs to be a defining principle and is repoliticisation in the sense it is open to public scrutiny, debate and differing views. What I do not mean is that this matter should become part of a restrictive political party debate.

I have many colleagues, friends and others to thank for the writing of this book.

The area of research on which it draws has interested me for more than two decades, arising as it does out of long professional experience. During that time, there have been many people to whom I have gone back to discuss my thinking as it develops or who have just had tremendous influences on it: readers will recognise Geoff Whitty, Stephen Ball, Andrew Pollard, David James, Ray Shostak, John Simpson, Steve Ward, Diane Reay and many others. My particular thanks are due to Ray Shostak and Alan Stubbersfield for their trustworthy comments on early texts.

For the most recent phase of the research, from 2017, I must also thank the Head of the School of Education at Bath Spa University, Kyriaki Anagnostopolou, for her continuing trust that secured some of the School's REF funding (repeatedly when I continued to obtain more interviews without much warning). This enabled me once again to obtain the excellent services of Suzanne Lawrence in providing near perfect transcripts. I was able to use them straight away without the need for substantial editing or indeed interpreting. In particular at Bath Spa, I must also thank Professor Charlotte Chadderton, who became my line manager in my latter years at the university, and now the ‘sponsor’ for my Visiting Research Fellowship, for her continued encouragement and support.

Now that I have become honorary rather than salaried, I can also thank all my colleagues and ex-colleagues retrospectively at Bath Spa for their friendship, good company, academic stimulation and challenge. But I must also thank all the students I taught over my decade at the university who have more than played their part, even while not being aware of it, in the development of the thinking evidenced in this book. As much of the content of this book naturally relates to topics in the undergraduate and master's policy modules I authored and taught, their lively and direct challenges in seminars (before lockdown of course) have often made me rethink not only how I present my arguments but also question aspects of my conclusions.

Introduction

The fluidity of the current management structures concerned with school standards, still under (re-re-) construction is obvious. But local authorities remain part of the story, whatever the current flavour of national rhetoric, and whatever is happening to multi-academy trusts (MATs). How councils work and what they do are also central to the realisation of what I have described earlier as the wider roles and contributions of schools to their communities. But they are partly hampered in this by the currently fragmented and fluid governance arrangements for standards. And as I shall show in Chapter 5, these wider roles cannot actually be separated from considerations of student outcomes, so I begin with them. At the same time, as I demonstrate in this chapter, they are very much still built into what might be termed ‘providing an Education service’. The question for the future is just how.

Arrangements for reviewing and raising school standards

The central thrust of Education policy for 30 years, whatever the mechanism chosen, has been about improving student outcomes: whether the outcomes achieved by all students at various stages of the educational process are sufficient, both in themselves (for example, distributed evenly across all social groups) and in relation to broader policy aims such as promoting social mobility. So it is important to understand the current mechanisms outside schools and academies that supervise their improvement, and how they work together (or not) as the parts of the broader schools ecosystem.

Ofsted and the inspection outcomes it delivers are one of these mechanisms. It should be noted that the vast majority of English schools (around three quarters) have already achieved the national expectation of either a good or outstanding inspection report outcome: 77 per cent by 2020 compared with 75 per cent in 2019 (Ofsted, 2020). This has been the stable inspection test since 2012, with what is required to achieve this grade revised from time to time with new frameworks (current one is Ofsted, 2019, amended 2021). This has been one of the so-called ‘ratchets’ of central government on standards (Riddell, 2016: 129), although arguably less important now.

For schools that have achieved the target of good or outstanding, the current intention is that they will have a further inspection visit about every four years or so (Ofsted, 2019).