Introduction

On 21 June 2021, the UK Department for Education that governs education in England published a tweet in which they pronounced 25 June as ‘One Britain One Nation Day’, ‘when children can learn about our shared values of tolerance, kindness, pride and respect’, with the support of the then Secretary of State, Gavin Williamson (Harding 2021: NP). The celebration included an ‘anthem’ for all children in school to sing on the appointed day, with the repeated chorus line: ‘We are Britain and we have one dream, To Unite all people in one great team’. Verse two sings out: ‘A nation survived through many storms and many wars, We’ve opened our doors, and widened our island’s shores, We celebrate our differences with love in our hearts, United forever, never apart’ (OBON 2022: NP). This proposed ‘national event’ raises questions about how and why the core vantage point of the Department for Education is inter-related with privileged vantage points such the former police inspector Kash Singh who is promoting the anthem in his capacity as the Chief executive and Founder of the campaign group ‘One Britain One Nation’ (OBON). The anthem shows how the core vantage point uses normative functionalism to fabricate conformity and approved-of identity through how histories and current experiences of living in the UK are included/excluded in the curriculum. Ironically the lyrics encourage disunity because Britain is not the UK, and so Northern Ireland is excluded, and it was reported that most schools in Scotland would be closed for the summer vacation on the day of celebration (Harding 2021). Geography and the UK constitution put to one side, the words and event conflate (and confuse) nationalism with patriotism, and as such the narrative description and critical viewpoints and standpoints of those who are marginalised and othered on the basis of eugenicist populism and nationalism are unrecognised.

Introduction

On 28 November 2021, The Sunday Telegraph published a front page story under the headline: ‘Woke’ anti-Government speakers barred from Whitehall. Malnick (2021), the journalist who broke the story, reveals that a leaked memo to civil servants states that they must do ‘due diligence’ on proposed speakers regarding their public statements (for example, social media), and that they must not issue invitations to those who have ‘spoken against key government policies’. The aim is to remove ‘woke and politicised’ (NP) views and activities from policymaking processes. Such a public revelation of censorship raises questions about the relationship between the state, public policy, and knowledge production, and while education research in general, and the EPKP projects in particular, may demonstrate a plurality of ideas, evidence, and debates as resources for education policy, it is the case that oligarchic club sovereignty holds dominion. While the current UK government rails against what is labelled ‘cancel culture’, the impression is given that cancelling researchers and research is integral to claimocracy scoping and strategy (Malnick 2021), and so it seems that policy violence based on authority, legitimacy, and intelligence just became more publicly brutal. For CEPS this unfolding contextual setting matters, and it raises issues not only about policy actors who are in core and privileged vantage points, who espouse approved-of viewpoints and fabricate libertarian standpoints, who relate and exchange within and between official regimes, but it also requires that attention is given to the othered and marginal who have their ideas, evidence, and debates negated because independent data and analysis reveal how knowledge production actually works, and might work differently. Indeed, CEPS research and researchers, that includes the EPKP projects, have been labelled woke and cancelled, and this is why such research is vital.

I begin this final chapter with a summary of the gains made through writing this political sociology of and about the education reform claimocracy through the TPSF, and I then go on to examine how and why developing intellectual activism requires a political sociology for and by critical education policy studies.

Introduction

In 2019, the UK media reported the case of a housing development in London where a communal recreational area had been provided but the children living in rented social housing were prevented from accessing it and playing with the children of homeowners (Grant and Michael 2019). This is one of an accumulation of cases of proactive segregation and speaks to ‘poor doors’ architecture, whereby housing developers in London construct different entrances into an apartment building for those who rent and those who own, along with different postal delivery and waste disposal services (Osborne 2014, Wall and Osborne 2018). Permission to build currently requires plans for affordable housing, but it seems that housing developers operate on the basis that purchasers of high value properties in the same complex do not want to mix with such people. This is one example of how property rights are used to inscribe entitlements to certain bodies, and how sectarian divides are constructed and secured based on notions of superiority of one type of human over another inferior type. While communal mixing with the sharing of common services has increased in the UK, a worrying feature is that ‘segregation is increasing in a number of very particular respects in the UK, especially the growing isolation of the White majority from minorities in urban zones’ (Kaufmann and Cantle 2016: NP).

The segregation that is experienced by children who are enabled or prevented from living and playing together is also evident in how they access and benefit from education services. Proactive legal separation is a sustained education policy strategy of successive UK governments in England and across the globe. For example, children are divided on the basis of school place provider and parental choice into fee charging and taxpayer provided schools, and/or boys’ and girls’ schools, and/or faith or secular schools, and/or academic and vocational schools (Gunter 2020b). In addition, segregation is co-produced through how structural advantage and disadvantage operate in everyday decisions, practices, and market exchanges (van Zanten et al 2015), and while it may be unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race, evidence shows it is a resilient feature (Coughlan 2015; Meatto 2019).

Introduction

It is estimated that ‘two in five children living below the poverty line are not entitled to free school meals’ (Butler 2021: NP), where during the COVID-19 pandemic food insecurity intensified leading to the increased use of foodbanks in England. The Trussell Trust has reported:

The precarity of work combined with austerity cuts and inflation means that families are increasingly depending on food parcels at home and free school meals for children in school term time. After being rebuffed by the UK government, the footballer Marcus Rashford secured a policy U-turn by successfully campaigning for immediate support for: ‘the provision of meals and activities to low-income families during school holidays and the expansion of the healthy start voucher scheme’, and he continues to argue for longer term change through ‘a full-scale review of the free schools meals system’ leading to ‘a meal a day’ to all school pupils in England in financially struggling families’ (Butler 2021: NP). This speaks to the reality of the working poor whereby families are not being paid a living wage, and so are toiling hard to put food on the table, where subsistence is additionally threatened by Brexit and COVID-19.

Introduction

In the wake of the abduction and subsequent murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in London in March 2021, the issue of physical and reputational violence against women has become a focus of intense and sustained public debate. People came forward to give testimony, and included within this are accounts about how and why educational organisations can be unsafe. This is not new, where name calling and double standards are regarded as: ‘ordinary, expected and public’ (Bell 2008: 3). However, McBain (2021) reports that the failure to engage seriously means that the Everard and other cases has now produced ‘the reckoning’ illustrated by the public response to ‘Everyone’s Invited’, an Instagram account set up in June 2020 by Soma Sara, a 22-year-old UCL graduate, to gather anonymous accounts of sexism and sexual abuse at UK schools, and she goes on to say:

The segregation of the provision of and access to educational services means that the habitual rank ordering of the self and others is based on individual and corporate fabrications that demean and damage everyone. This physical and mental violence is evident in schools, and policy violence creates, sustains, and routinises it. Successive UK governments have a stake in segregated provision: in the name of modernisation the unmodern that sexualises female bodies is perpetuated as legitimate; governing by knowledge production authorises the acceptance of sexual savagery; and intelligent knowledgeabilities are deployed under the banner of aspiration but are used to keep bodies in their predetermined and correct place.

Introduction

In June 2021 it was announced that Eton College had signed an agreement with the Star Academies MAT to open three selective sixth forms in the Midlands and North of England, with the aim from 2024 to ‘fast-track young people, often from deprived communities, to the UK’s most academic universities’ (Dennett 2021: NP). The plan is that:

There is nothing in this list of activities that Sixth Forms in schools and colleges in the public sector do not do and cannot do, but what is different is that both organisations in this scheme are beneficiaries of privatised independence from democratic accountability, but at the same time are dependent on public funding from the taxpayer. For example, Eton charges annual fees of £44,000 generating an income of £51 million, plus £8.1 million in donations in 2020, and has charitable status which means it receives 80 per cent discount on its rates bill (cutting from £831,600 to £166,320 in 2020, Rushton 2020: NP). In addition, while reports show that private schools give bursaries, they ‘are spending millions more on giving affluent middle-class families fee discounts than on children from disadvantaged backgrounds’ (Henry 2018: NP). A change in the law in 2006 required charitable status for private schools to be linked to sharing facilities with local state schools through to formal partnerships facilitated by the System Partnership Unit (Fairburn 2019), and so the price of hefty tax exemptions and other privileges means that private schools undertake civic philanthropy in the public interest as missionary work with those less fortunate.

Introduction

MATs have been reluctant to take on schools where certain pupils and communities could damage the brand, and so there are schools that have become ‘orphans’ because no Trust will take them on (Mansell 2017). In addition, local authority schools have not all leapt at the lauded opportunities of voluntary conversion (Rayner and Gunter 2020) and there are cases of local resistance (see Chapter 4). The policy response has been to tempt schools by using a ‘Try before you buy’ scheme that enables MATs to take on identified failing schools (Dickens 2016: NP). Economic incentives that are ‘time limited’ are used to encourage schools to experience the membership of a MAT, where for the price of ‘a service charge’, a MAT will open its ‘networks and services’ with a school to demonstrate the benefits (Dickens 2021: NP). The use of targeted funding to lever system change is not new (McGinity and Gunter 2017) and currently it is premised on a form of benign coercion underpinned by the assurance that it is reversible, but in reality, schools and MATs become locked in, and so the actual conversion process with potential parental opposition is eased. The academisation of schools in England is incomplete (22 per cent primary and 68 per cent secondary), and so the remaining unconverted maintained local authority schools are a problem for UK governments that want to dismantle local democracy in favour of markets underpinned by eugenicist populist ideology. A huge contradiction exists whereby school, teacher, student, and democratic system failure are integral to education policy, and yet specific reform interventions cannot be seen to fail, and so those involved must navigate in choppy waters.

Investigating such matters through the EPKP projects requires explanation through the TPSF. This validates the importance of vantage points in education policy, or the organisational location of the person or group involved in public decision-making. Research within the EPKP projects demonstrates that the core is the prime vantage point, and I examine policy violence through Theme 1: System Design.

This chapter argues that our subjective experiences ߝ how we experience the world and understand ourselves within it ߝ are just as closely governed as our objective conduct, discussed in the last chapter. Whether they realise it or not, contemporary teachers are expected to play a significant role in this form of regulation. After all, teachers are now not simply responsible for transmitting a given curriculum and keeping children in line; they are de facto psychologists, responsible for the mental health, regulation and development of their pupils.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept ߝ a linguistic mirage ߝ most would argue there’s something of importance there ߝ but what is it?Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth ߝ as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 15 ߝ at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

The working life of educators ߝ whether in schools or universities ߝ has become dauntingly complex, with the relentless focus on standards and testing, pressure to ensure equitable outcomes, a managerialist working environments, ever-growing professional responsibilities and expectations, increasingly heterogeneous classrooms and fairly relentless media criticism, to name only a fewissues. The job requires continual self-reflection, a commitment to lifelong learning and an ongoing dedication to the profession in order to remain viable at all. Making sense of it all ߝ Making Sense of Mass Education ߝ is not an easy task. Hopefully this book can help a little.