Cancelling Principal Agency in England

In this chapter, we argue that principal agency as a professional welfare inclusive persona is being cancelled in order to install a professional corporate brand persona through a long-established process of restructuring within what remains of England’s schooling system. Through this argument, we reframe scholarly debates concerning the limitations of principal autonomy to highlight the devastation produced by principals’ wrong think—where principals take the “wrong” position—and wrong-do—where principals make the “wrong” decision to prioritize welfare and inclusive values and agendas. A claimocracy, or rule by assertion, makes this evident in policy texts where the correct positioning, doing, and decision-making for and about corporate branding are made attractive through the promotion of new freedoms for principals to innovate, where we argue this is a form of corporatized fabrication that enables the cancellation agenda. School principals are told they have agency, but in reality, this is regulated and ultimately cancelled through the state’s performance apparatus. We have identified nine mechanisms of cancellation in this chapter: these are being silenced and accepting the state-sanctioned professional identity; privatization; conversion into a true believer; recruitment; surveillance, operationalized through multi-academy trusts (MATs) and school inspection; leaving the job; being removed from the job; the eradication of the school as a physical entity; and finally, being erased. We conclude by thinking with each of cancellation’s two meanings of banishment and erasure to suggest that the eradication of welfarism from the corporatized policy landscape in England means that there is no way back for welfarist principal agency, and that this cancellation is final.