Innovation at a time of rapid reform: An English Case Study

Title‘Innovative’ Leadership at a time of rapid reform: An English case study.AbstractThis paper sets out to report upon the findings of an ethnographically informed case study of an ‘innovative’ school in England. Specifically the research focuses upon the way in which the leadership team have engaged with the neo liberal policy context in which increased autonomy and diversification of provision is promoted by the government as a driver of standards. Using Bourdieu’s conceptualisations of field and capital the findings suggest that ‘innovative’ localised policy-making can arguably ‘misrecognise’ the role such ‘innovation’ plays in helping to maintain structures, which may serve to disadvantage members of the school community as well as contribute to ensuring the field, and its competitive nature, is protected rather than challenged.Objectives or purposesThe purpose of this paper is to report upon the findings of an ethnographically informed case study of ‘innovative’ leadership policy-making at a time of rapid educational reform in England. The research has charted the development of the school’s localised policy trajectory over a period of three years, (2010-2013) during which time the Conservative-led coalition government introduced legislation (Academies Act 2010) which saw the expansion of a policy context that further promoted diversification of provision and increased school autonomy from the state. Such a policy context is part of a modernising agenda in which the marketised principles of neo-liberalism pervade public policy reform in order to support the privatisation of public services as a means to drive up standards through increased competition, autonomy and accountability, a context familiar to educational researchers working on both sides of the Atlantic (Apple: 2004). Within this context the leadership team at the case study school has engaged with opportunities arising from the modernising reform agenda within the field of educational policy-making in order to strengthen the schools market position, and has done so in such a way that has been acknowledged and endorsed as ‘innovative’ by central government. This localised policy response has involved opting out of state control to become an autonomous institution in order to introduce the provision of curricula that embeds employability skills by delineating students along vocational, professional, digital and technical pathways. This model, which echoes the 1944 Education Act in England, when students from the age of 11 were allocated school provision which offered either an ‘academic’, ‘vocational’ or ‘technical’ curriculum, illustrates the pressure that school leadership teams are under within this neo-liberal policy context to offer differential, competing and ‘innovative’ provision in order to attract necessary student numbers to both survive and thrive. As such the research discussed in this paper offers the opportunity to firstly analyse how and for what purposes localised leadership policy-making may be deemed to be innovative; and secondly the benefits that longitudinal research has in offering critical interpretive perspectives of such ‘innovative’ leadership decision-making during a time of rapid reform. 2. Perspective(s) or theoretical frameworkDrawing on Bourdieu (1977; 1990a; 1990b) I conceptualise the field of educational policy as a game in which different institutions participate in various forms of capital exchange, in which the neo liberal doxa of accountability and performativity pervade the embodied practices of professionals in leadership positions. As such both individual and collective habitus reveals a professional ‘illusio’, an interest by school leaders who are thus “invested, taken in and by the game” (Bourdieu and Waquant: 1992: 116). Within this analysis leadership ‘innovation’ is theorised through the logics of practice which is structured by the necessity of school leaders to accumulate symbolic capital as offered through legitimate action defined by an increasingly centralised and regulating bureaucracy (Blackmore: 2010; Gerwitz: 2002; Thomson: 2005). Such an analysis allows a mapping of the “objective structures of the relations between the positions occupied by the agents [and the] institutions who compete for the legitimate form of specific authority of which this field is the site” (Bourdieu and Wacquant: 1992: 230). In so doing it is possible to offer a theorising of how ‘innovative’ policy-making at the local level can arguably ‘misrecognise’ the role such ‘innovation’ may play in helping to maintain structures, which serve to disadvantage members of the school community as well as contribute to ensuring the field, and its competitive nature is protected, rather than challenged (Thomson: 2010). 3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiryThe research has been developed as part of an ethnographically informed study that involved qualitative research in the case study school over a period of three years and which occurred in three distinct phases. The first phase of the research took place in the academic year 2010-2011, during which the principal and deputy principal and a further two school leaders participated in semi-structured interviews in order to provide an understating of the strategic leadership approach to the schools policy trajectory in light of the change in government in May 2010. These interviews were transcribed, coded and analysed in order to develop the data collection tools necessary for the second phase of the research. During this process it became clear that the school had been engaging with the policy context in such a way that was deemed innovative, by both the school leaders and importantly, by powerful players within the wider field of educational policy-making. As a result phase two of the research took place during the academic year 2011-2012 and involved two semi-structured interviews each with the principal and deputy principal, as well as four one off interviews with school leaders and 21 interview with teaching staff. During this phase the school opted out of state control and became an ‘Academy’, the school leadership team engaged with the autonomy granted by such a move in order to develop an ‘innovative’ policy trajectory which involved diversifying the school provision to offer differential curricula pathways to students as described above. As a result of the on-going nature of such significant localised reform the third phase involved returning to the case study school in the academic year 2012-13 in order to interview the principal and deputy principal once more in order to further track the development trajectory at the school. These interviews further illuminated the significance of undertaking such longitudinal research processes in order to map how leadership decision-making engaged with opportunities within the field of educational policy making in order to position, strengthen and protect the schools interests. 4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materialsThe analyses make use of findings drawn from aspects of all the data sets outlined in the previous section. The findings thus identify and corroborate these leaders’ perspectives on the decision to opt out of local control and discuss their views in relation to the restructuring of the school curriculum as a means to innovate the provision in order to survive in the field. This analysis is supplemented by the researchers in depth knowledge of the school as a result of the ethnographic nature of the study as well as by analysis of local and national policy documents and media reports in order to provide a rich understanding of the political and economic backdrop to which the school is operating within.5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view The data illustrates that the school leaders at the case study school have engaged with professional practices and localised policy-making that has been externally acknowledged and endorsed as ‘innovative’. Such symbolic capital has been accumulated through a variety of processes, for example by a grant from a government department to commission external research into the schools innovative change programme; the conversion to an autonomous institution by becoming an Academy; and the involvement of high profile policy actors in the development of the new model of school provision through differentiated curriculum pathways for students. The data suggests that the school leaders identify these developments as ‘innovative’ and deem such approaches to school development are a significant and necessary aspect of maintaining and protecting the schools interests within a competitive marketplace. As such ‘innovation’ is interpreted as a strategic process, which helps to contribute to ensuring the schools position within the field of education policy-making remains both visible and legitimated. Such legitimation takes the form of schools ‘playing the game’ and ensuring such localised policy developments are in line with policies resulting from the modernising reform agenda and its stated values of efficiency, standards, accountability and competition. The data reveals that such legitimating actions can serve to contribute to the re-articulation of values, in which policy actors appropriate terms such as ‘innovation’ as a way to illustrate the dominance and the power of the neo liberal doxa in leadership practices and decision-making. 6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or workThe paper speaks directly to the conference theme by examining the ways in which school leaders engage with opportunities arising from the modernising reform agenda in order to respond ‘innovatively’ to the need to diversify provision in order to compete within a neo liberal policy framework. The study is significant in its adoption of an ethnographic approach as it sets out to offer an analytical interpretation of ‘innovation’ through an analysis of leadership practices and decision making, of which much more research is required to build a picture of how individual schools and school leaders are interpreting and responding to the policy context that promotes diversification of provision and increased school autonomy from the state. Whilst the study draws on data produced in an English context the findings are of interest to an international audience when taken as an example of the ways in which the development of neo liberal policy agendas contribute to competition within and across education systems and the ways in which individual schools and school leaders respond to and engage with such challenges through ‘innovative’ practices. ReferencesApple, M.W. (2004) Creating Difference: Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Conservatism and the Politics of Educational Reform. 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