Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Stephen Ball’s The Education Debate, now in its fourth edition, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
The lack of a proper and robust system of accountability and local oversight was thought to be one of the principal reasons why the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair was allowed to gain such traction, and why it resulted in such a profound crisis for education and for school governance in England. This chapter analyses the cultural, social and political factors that have influenced democratic accountability in education since the post war consensus. Placing it in the context of accountability of public services, it outlines evolutionary changes in terms of what constitutes democratic accountability. The chapter also investigates what impact the English inspection system has had on educational accountability and how this in turn has influenced the policies and practices of school governing.
Education is not a top priority for newspaper editors and stories on education are often squeezed out in order to give priority to areas such as health, social care or immigration. In terms of journalistic reporting, as one ex-education editor put it in May 2014: “[You] are more likely to find education reporters that are or have been school governors than have reported on it”–a fact borne out by this particular analysis. This chapter looks to contextualise reporting on school governors within the period 2008-2015 taking a granular approach to investigating the changes in the ways in which school governing was framed during this period.
Rapid policy-driven changes have presented challenges for allschools, but in areas of high socio-economic deprivation–traditionally difficult areas for governing bodies to operate–these challenges have been magnified. Some of the most recent research into issues faced by governors in these areas is documented in a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (see Dean et al, 2007). Although the report also emphasises that many of the problems encountered by schools resonate with all governing bodies, it makes the point that they are compounded by the difficulties of working in areas of high socio economic deprivation. This chapter draws on a case study of governors in two multi academy trusts in areas of deprivation. Using interview data it explores how governors working in these challenging areas make sense of their work and environment. It concludes that although conditions are undoubtedly very challenging, governors have a profound sense of community and the school’s role within it.
The introduction sets the scene for the book, outlining The ‘Trojan Horse’ Affair and its significance for education and education governance. It also locates school governing in the wider context of governance and places education in the broader field of public services.
This book set out to examine how political and cultural changes have affected the governance of English schools and how one particular episode, the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair, brought to light the many issues created largely due to intense and rapid changes within the structure of English education. In this the final chapter, I examine how the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair became a catalyst for even greater and more sweeping changes to governing policy and practices, and discuss the implications of these for democratic school governance in England.
What impact have the unprecedented and rapid changes to the structure of education in England had on school governors and policy makers? And what effect has the intensifying media and regulatory focus had on the volunteers who take on the job?
Jacqueline Baxter takes the 2014 ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal, in which it was alleged that governors at 25 Birmingham schools were involved in the “Islamisation” of secular state schools, as a focus point to examine the pressures and challenges in the current system. Informed by her twenty years’ experience as a school governor, she considers both media analysis and policy as well as the implications for the future of a democratic system of education in England.
Chapter one begins with a brief outline of the role that school governors play in educational governance in England, describing the challenges they face and outlining these in the lead up to the ‘Trojan Horse’ Affair in 2014. In so doing it illustrates the ways in which unprecedented levels of reform that led up to the affair, and the catalytic effect it has had on policy since then. It also highlights the myriad ways in which the politicisation of education has encroached upon the whole area of compulsory education in England and how this, in turn, has impacted on democratic governance and accountability.
The ‘Trojan Horse’ affair did not occur in isolation, but in common with many such ‘defining episodes’ manifested in the guise of a culmination of a number of factors: contextual, cultural and political. One of the defining factors surrounding the event was the way in which it was crafted by the media and manipulated by both the media and the government to such an extent that it became impossible to understand whether this was an education scandal or terrorist threat. In order to examine the event in more detail and to examine why it was so influential in terms of later policymaking, this chapter places the affair within the context of what is known as the ‘mediatisation of education policy’–a field of research that explores and examines the complex ways in which the media influences and shapes policy
Chapter Two details the unravelling of the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair andthe ways in which it revealed that the government’s peremptory andPanglossian ideal of an ‘excellent education system’, as articulated via the academies project, has, to a great extent, overlooked the vital area of Education governance. It describes how the affair has not only revealed a troubling set of issues related to governance, but by manifesting as a ‘media storm’, ‘an Islamist plot’ and the apotheosis of an ‘ideological drive’ by a senior government minister, has also become a watershed for future policy and practices in this area.
This chapter considers some of the dangers of national, centrally-driven evaluations, arguing that the main reason why evaluations cannot explain what works is their relative neglect of the perspectives and experiences of the central actors. It focuses on the connection between ‘the new and quasi-scientific language of programme evaluation’ and the ‘actuarial-interventionist logic of contemporary youth justice’. It shows the ways in which evaluation becomes more a part of a process by which compliance with programme goals can be assured than a scientific attempt to assess the effectiveness of different strategies. It discusses how the Youth Justice Board and the Home Office were seeking clear evidence of the crime reduction that the youth offending flagship was intended to deliver.
