This report analyses how schools in England have interpreted and begun to respond to the government's 'self-improving school-led system' (SISS) policy agenda, an overarching narrative for schools policy since 2010 that encompasses an ensemble of reforms including academies, multi-academy trusts (MATs) and Teaching School Alliances (TSAs). Based on a large-scale, four-year, mixed-methods study, the report asks whether or not the models of coordination and school support emerging locally since 2010 represent a genuine basis for an equitable and inclusive 'school-led' system. It explores the factors that support and hinder such developments as well as the implications for schools and school leadership. The analysis draws on governance theory to evaluate the reforms, which are conceived as an attempt to mix and re-balance three overlapping approaches to coordinating the school system: hierarchy, markets and networks. This shows that while one popular interpretation of the SISS agenda is that it requires inter-school partnerships to 'self-organize' their own 'school-led' improvement, this is in fact a partial account that underplays the dominant influences of hierarchical and market mechanisms on the thinking and actions of schools and school leaders and the networks they are developing. The report includes important new empirical findings, for example on the impact of MATs of different sizes and on the relationship between Ofsted inspection outcomes and levels of socioeconomic stratification between schools. It also combines the perspectives of multiple case study schools across four different localities to provide rich insights into leadership decision-making and agency in the context of local status hierarchies and rapid policy-driven change. As a result, while focusing on changes in England, it provides a unique set of insights into how different governance regimes interact across different local contexts to influence patterns of schooling and school-to-school collaboration – insights that will have relevance for research and practice on school system governance more widely.

This paper reports initial outcomes from a short series of semi-structured interviews in 2017 with senior politicians from three parties elected to two contrasting English local authorities (LAs): an urban city authority and a largely rural shire county. These were complemented by continuing interviews with senior officers and head teachers, of both academies and maintained schools, some with positions in multi-academy trusts (MATs), and critical readings of LA strategic documents. Interviews focused on the nature of democratic authority in what is an increasingly privatised schools system in the sense that school governance and decision making have moved steadily away from the authority inherent in democratic representation of a local community towards a more technical (or technicist) conception that depends more on ‘people with the right skills, experience, qualities and capacity’ (DfE, 2017: 10). This process has been described as ‘depoliticisation’ (Ball, 2007), or even ‘destalization’ (Jessop, 2002), whereby there is little public disagreement or debate about schools’ role in achieving national objectives (for example, social mobility). And the new technologies underpinning these changes have in turn engendered new governmentalities and discursive formations focused on little except better ‘outcomes’ (Wilkins, 2016). The principal policy in pursuit of these aims in English schools has been the process of academisation, whereby schools have been steadily removed from the purview of LAs, however etiolated, to be funded directly by central government on the basis of a contract with the minister. More recently, schools have been more progressively organised into Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) – voluntarily or involuntarily – in processes overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners, central government officials also responsible directly to the minister (Riddell, 2016). Politicians interviewed varied in their support for academisation - not always in ways that might be expected to reflect party affiliation – but all felt that schools had an important contribution to make to the realisation of their strategic aims, from economic development to lifelong learning. In addition, they were interested in what happened to the children of their constituents and all felt local authorities needed to engage with schools, reporting varying success in doing so. All acknowledged the difficulties inherent in a system increasingly organised de facto to exclude them, especially with MATs with wider regional or national roles with the attendant more remote offices and boards. According to some politicians (and officers), responses from MATs varied but having an elected mayor in the city authority was seen as one significant mechanism. Nearly all were optimistic for the future. The paper sets these initial findings in the context of what one interviewee described as a ‘stalled process’ (of economic reform), with central government not willing or able to respond to their concerns about the management of the system, especially since the 2017 general election. The reported absence of any space in the national legislative programme for schools because of the preparations for BREXIT means that even the much-discussed National Funding Formula (for school budgets) will be implemented via LAs for maintained schools, retaining some discretion, not the original intention (DfE, 2016: 68). Nor is the process of academisation by any means complete; nor, it is argued, is it ever likely to be. At the time of the first interviews, Regional Schools Commissioners were in the early stages of setting up ‘Sub-Regional Schools Improvement Boards’ involving senior LA representatives, that will most likely remain ‘strategic partners’. In addition, according to several interviewees, a paper setting out the proposed statutory roles of LAs to be amended by subsequent legislation had been drafted before the 2017 election, but not published since. Whereas it could be argued that the newer system based on school collaboration increasingly organised through MATs, overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners, might be more consistent and reliable in attaining greater equity in educational outcomes, a focus so limited leaves major moral (as opposed to technical) questions concerning the nature of ‘state’ schooling in England unanswered in policy: what democratic oversight will local and national communities have of their children’s education; how can and will parents be deeply involved.

This paper is based on research in two English Councils (local governments). It draws on interviews with senior politicians and officials among others and considers the extreme fluidity and its effects of a highly centralised schools system .

This article reviews the literature and explores the institutional and systemic factors that help and/ or hinder change and innovation across school systems, with a focus on evidence from England. A number of authors have argued that schools and school systems need to become more innovative and adaptive if they are to meet the needs of 21st-century societies and economies. Quasi-market models premised on school autonomy, parental choice and vertical accountability have been seen as the best way to secure innovation, but the evidence of success remains thin. The article analyses four examples of change and finds that system-wide change is possible, but requires strong and sustained political support and capacity building within a values-based framework that allows for local agency and adaptation. It concludes by drawing out three implications: the need to prioritise 'professional' as well as 'structural' autonomy; the potential for vertical accountability frameworks to condition the ways in which parents perceive and value innovation; and the need to enhance the legitimacy of innovation in the eyes of education's key stakeholders.

There has been an accelerating policy shift in England towards a system led improvement process for compulsory education, based on the principle of schools having greater autonomy. This government strategy has seen the rapid and further intended growth of academies, free schools, studio schools and university technical colleges (UCT) which are funded directly from central government, with a coterminous ending of the previous statutory relationship between state funded schools and local authorities. This radical policy has fundamentally changed the concepts of school governance and leadership within the country which, after a period of widespread academisation, has led to the preferred structure for supporting individual schools becoming the creation of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). In this model groups of academised schools are to be joined through the establishment of a trust which oversees the management of their prescribed educational provision through a corporate structure.

This dissertation reports on a qualitative study of school leadership with nine secondary-school headteachers (of maintained schools) or principals (of academy-type schools) in England. The project maps schooling provision and offers an empirical account of leaders’ identities and practices in neoliberal and neoconservative times. Informed by a critical policy-scholarship methodology, documentary data from primary and secondary sources supplement narrative and semi-structured interviews conducted over 18 months. The findings are reported in five journal articles and one book chapter. The first output maps school types through different lenses: legal status; curriculum; selection; types of academy; and school groupings. The mapping highlights the intersections between the reform agenda and historical diversity. I conceptualise the landscape holistically through locus of legitimacy and branding, arguing that diversification policies facilitate corporatised and religious interests. Second, I show how UTCs and studio schools construct children’s abilities as fixed and differentiable in terms of predicted economic value. They select, but the responsibility for this, following Bourdieu, is transferred discursively from the school through branding and habitus to the “consumers” where it is to be misrecognised as exercising ‘school choice’. Third, I typologise three effects on heads’ and principals’ agency and identities of a few elite multi-academy trust principals, or courtiers, who have won regional empires through expanding their academy chains to occupy the spaces opened up by the dismantling of LAs. Public-sector and school-leader identities and histories permit the promotion of their activities as “school led” and downplays their close relationship with central-state policy- makers and private-sector networks. Fourth, I argue that corporatised leadership in schools in England is being promoted through new actors and new types of school. Corporatised leadership is characterised inter alia by the promotion of business interests and the adoption of business-derived leadership practices and identities. I use Bourdieu’s concept of field to explain the impact of business on educational leadership and the dissonance between leaders and led. Fifth, I argue with Gunter that school leaders are removing those who embody or vocalise alternative conceptualisations of educator by eradicating ‘inadequate’ teaching, and implementing the leader’s ‘vision’. We deploy Arendtian thinking to show how current models of school leadership enable totalitarian practices to become ordinary. Sixth, I develop Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis through narratives from two heads to argue that rather than simply being an effect of change, hysteresis may be an actively sought outcome whereby the state intervenes to deprivilege welfarist headteachers and privilege corporatised principals through structurally facilitating their habitus and mandating its dispositions for the field. Collectively, these findings demonstrate how the diversification of provision in England and the demands of a performative, marketised regime have ontological and professional stakes for school leaders and for the led. Symbolic and economic capital is accruing to the capitalised, facilitated by corporate practices and corporate structural solutions through acquisitions and alliances. Resistance is possible, but a dissident habitus limits standing in the field. This hierarchisation is reflected in the relationship between school types and in how children are meant to self-select into that provision. This is a landscape constituted of positions, where pupils are expected to know their place and the purpose of education is to facilitate social segregation for economic efficiency.

The emergence of Chief Executive Officers as leaders of educational service providers is positioned in multi academy trusts, the preferred structure of schooling in England. Within this structure, the Chief Executive Officer position is distinct and different from previous constructs of headteachers, since the Chief Executive operates at both street level, that is within the MAT, and beyond 'the street'. In this article, I argue that a new conceptualisation of the headteacher is needed to explain the emerging position and practices of the Chief Executive Officer. These include the interface with the market, adopting entrepreneurial dispositions and constructing professional and business networks. I typologise these practices and positioning through the analysis of empirical data gathered from the Leadership of the Lawrence Trust Project and its Chief Executive Officer, KT Edwards.

This chapter extends understandings of how market discourses are powerful shapers of education governance by drawing on the 'critical logics approach' (Glynos and Howarth 2007). The empirical focus is England's schooling landscape, which has steadily become a quasi-market by promoting the pursuit of individual choice and self-interest. The chapter highlights the 'academy schools policy' as epitomising how discourses of the market have become firmly established in the governing of England's school system. Analysis focuses on an empirical study exploring experiences of local authority officers, academy principals, and academy governors tasked with implementing the academies policy. Market discourses are identified as a central feature of what actors understand to be the guiding principles of the policy landscape. The conclusion outlines the implications for understanding the impact of market discourses on education governance, and highlights how the critical logics approach reveals possibilities for resisting or destabilising the hegemonic grip of the market.

Given this paper is set to be discussed in the context of a roundtable discussion I have rendered it more conversational in tone. I’m also aware that some participants in the discussion may be unfamiliar with the history of English education policy. I have therefore constructed a kind of ‘nuts and bolts’ paper for want a better description. It outlines the aims, context and data for my study as well as some of the recent developments to affect school organization and school accountability in England. Following this I draw on evidence to flesh out what it is school governors actually do and how these forms of ritual participation and their rationalization are impacted by the changing legal and power arrangements of different school setups and the encroachment of particular forms of accountability, notably finance, legal, performance and consumer. I have deliberately foregrounded the discussion around observable concrete practices, and therefore resisted engaging too much in conceptual or theoretical deliberation/engagement for the time being. However, I am keen to apply theory where it might serve to increase both awareness and intervention to affect change. Foucauldian approaches to governmentality spring to mind.