Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter presents three descriptive case studies of state secondary schools in affluent circumstances. Findings from the studies suggest that in effective schools, school leadership teams are geared up in the art of stagecraft and successfully present their achievements in a positive light in relation to quality benchmarks. The leadership of the schools have a clear understanding of what constitutes school effectiveness and can articulate this to an Ofsted inspection team, and support their claims with reference to relevant data. External factors for the success of the school, such as the affluence of the population and the number of graduates per head of population in the surrounding area, are not addressed by the inspection teams. Positive Ofsted inspections focus on the acceptance by learners of following the school uniform policy, and their general appearance, as evidence of a strong school culture. The ability of the school to present a convincing account showing that the actions of the school are ‘caring’ and conducive to building character is also regarded as evidence of a strong school culture. Effective schools present an image of themselves underpinned by statutory regulations, compliance, rules, and protocols in which teachers are expected to take responsibility for learners’ learning.
According to the research in the field, there are several key indicators of school effectiveness: school capacity and ability to build capacity; a strong and supportive school culture/climate/ethos; and strong leadership. This chapter presents three descriptive case studies of state secondary schools in challenging circumstances, focusing on the policies of the schools, their mission statements and contents of the school website, the Ofsted inspection reports, and any published responses to the reports. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how school inspectors report on the effectiveness of the school and the evidence they present to support their judgements. School policies may not be an accurate reflection of day-to-day life in the school, but they are organising principles that reflect the school’s goals and the assumptions the school makes about the right approach to achievement, character, and inclusion and how it would like the school community to be seen to function. The argument explored from investigating the case studies is that there is a correspondence between what is expected of schools, the control function exercised on schools, and the underpinning assumptions of much school effectiveness research and neoliberal education policy and practice.
Schools do not operate outside of performance indicators – forms of bureaucratic/administrative audit/surveillance – and school inspections are focused on the degree to which schools perform against benchmarks in relation to learners’ achievement and character. School improvement and effectiveness researchers are tasked with finding ways of assisting schools to improve and be more effective in terms of their performance. Drawing on Foucault and Bourdieu, the role of the school can be seen as focused on policing the lives of learners, and equality of opportunity is used to propagate and maintain inequality, but with a sense of fairness. Performance in the education system comes to shape and define how we should view the economic and moral worth of the person and their place in wider society. The knowledge and expertise of the underqualified are assumed to be not worth having, and people who embrace the knowledge of the unqualified are seen as lacking in character and taste. The category of low aspiration needs to be recognised as a contested concept, by asking what kinds of attitudes and behaviours are constituted as ‘low aspiration’. Coming to terms with difference involves challenging misrecognition and accepting the voice of the excluded as a legitimate voice.
The central argument developed in this chapter is that there is a correspondence between the underpinning assumptions of much school effectiveness research and neoliberal education policy and practice. The assumption that learners in all but the most effective state schools lack the character of learners in fee-paying independent schools is reflected in research into the need to enhance learners’ social capital. It is common for neoliberal assumptions to be accepted as the starting point in the formulation of research questions in school improvement and effectiveness research. The role and purpose of this research is to facilitate the greater and more effective penetration of neoliberalism into the field – notably in terms of how social exclusion is redefined as individual failure. The chapter will explore how the underlying assumptions of much of the research often unquestioningly accept the assumptions of ‘aspiration nation’ and the development of a neoliberal agency/subjectivity in the learner. This research adds to the legitimacy of the neoliberal assumptions, and consequently adds to the legitimacy of forms of control underpinning audit and the role of Ofsted. Finally, much of the research in the field is found lacking in terms of content and construct validity.
To do well at school, to be seen to be successful in achieving paper qualifications, and to progress into further and higher education is a legitimate aspiration to hold. From the 1980s onwards there was a change in basic assumptions underpinning discussions of social justice in relation to education from the earlier discussion of equality in terms of a need for greater economic redistribution of goods and power reflected in a politics of structural difference, to a focus on recognition, and a politics of cultural difference. Coming to terms with difference involved challenging misrecognition and accepting the voice of the marginalised and excluded as a legitimate voice. However, one group of learners is excluded from this understanding of difference – the learners who want to leave school at the earliest opportunity and who aspire to follow a life course without qualifications. Learners who reject what the school has to offer are regarded as individuals who lack both aspiration and character and become the primary focus of the aspiration industry. The aspiration industry is an assemblage of institutions and practices focused on maintaining the conditions for the exclusion of learners who reject what the school has to offer.
Education is considered central to social mobility and, following a drive to raise learners’ aspirations, an ‘aspiration industry’ has emerged.
However, the desire to leave school early should not be regarded as evidence of students lacking ambition. This book traces the emergence of the aspiration industry and argues that to have ambitions that do not require qualifications is different, but not wrong.
Reviewing the performance of six schools in England, their Ofsted reports and responses, it evaluates underpinning assumptions of what makes an effective school. This book critically examines neo-liberal education policy developments, including the 1988 Education Reform Act, and the political discourse around changing explanations of education ‘failure’ with the rise in the marketisation of education.
Advocates of school leadership do not propose a one-size-fits-all form of leadership; whether it is instructional, transformational, or distributed leadership, it must take into account aspects of the contextual factors. The standards movement is focused on understanding outcomes and goals for learning, but often with no clear strategy for implementation or understanding of the capacity that teachers need to develop to achieve the standards. Social capital is described as a quality of groups and is focused on the ability of the group to change itself as a group. Capacity building is understood as a product of purposeful doing by drawing on skills, competencies, and knowledge to accomplish the goals of the school. If the school leadership can encourage learners to become social capitalists, seeing some choices as illegitimate and inferior, then poverty and inequality cease to be key factors in bringing about educational failure. However, key terms in the field are often unclear, rarely defined, and often poorly researched; this includes key concepts such as capacity, social capital, and moral purpose. These are ideas that form the basis of the research agenda: what is an effective school, and how is effectiveness to be measured?
This chapter details the historical context of the current education system to give the reader an understanding of the role of education in the mid-twentieth century and the debates that helped to develop the understanding of education within the neoliberal economy and wider society. The organisation of the education system before the 1944 Education Act was in desperate need of reform. The 1944 Education Act provided the framework for the postwar education service, secondary education for all, and unified education service. However, by the 1950s people lost faith in the success of the eleven-plus to accurately measure the intelligence of a child or predict their future academic achievement. The chapter explores the movement from the tripartite to a comprehensive system of secondary education changes, to early years education following the Plowden Report, the impact of the Black Papers, and the impact of the ‘great debate’. The 1988 Education Reform Act began the marketisation of education, aimed at raising standards by increasing parental choice and competition between schools. Following the Kennedy Report in 1997, technical and vocational education and training were also understood to be a mechanism for providing greater social inclusion to people who are assumed to lack ambition and aspiration.
Neoliberalism is the revival of ideas and arguments initially put forward by economist Adam Smith in the nineteenth century, and developed by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises, on the central importance of having minimal state intervention in the workings of the economy. The underpinning assumption of neoliberalism is the belief that if the free market is left as unrestricted as possible, society – both individuals and the wider society – will benefit. In addition, allowing an unrestricted free market will help to maintain personal freedom and democracy. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, the chapter outlines how specific issues in society come to be identified as problematic, including the dominance of some interpretations of a situation over others. Young people who reject what school has to offer can be viewed as engaged in a political response to neoliberalism on its terms, the production of an alternative form of subjectivity and freedom. However, individuals have human agency and the attempt to change the subjectivity of an individual by the imposition of power can generate resistance. Although attempts to raise aspiration may be unsuccessful, the policy becomes central to regulating our understanding of educational failure and underachievement.
