‘Off‐rolling’ and Foucault’s art of visibility/invisibility: An exploratory study of senior leaders’ views of ‘strategic’ school exclusion in southwest England

Abstract

This article reports an unprecedented exploratory small‐scale investigation of the views of senior school leaders in southwest England relating to ‘off‐rolling’ (illegal exclusionary practices). ‘Off‐rolling’ is conceptualised as a policy technology, however, the conceptual framework used in data analysis derives from Foucault’s treatment of power and pleasure, and the constitution in discourse of novel ‘permanent realities’. Relations of force that senior school leaders routinely navigate in neoliberal education cultures characterised by ‘performativity’ are highlighted. The latter describes pressures to evidence efficiency and continual improvement, including high‐stakes performance monitoring and, in England, a national school inspection regime. The response rate to this online and predominantly qualitative survey was poor, which was attributed to the illegality of ‘off‐rolling’ and the risk that academic research in this area could be perceived to reproduce the power–knowledge relations associated with a national school inspection regime and familiar neoliberal political or professional discourses around training of education professionals (where both are framed as addressing deficits to achieve improvements). Nevertheless, findings from a key question inviting comment on scenarios drawn from the authors’ teaching experience are presented here, as they highlight the issues arising in research of sensitive topics. Reliance on brief vignettes to explore levels of understanding was, arguably, a limitation of the study, risking participants interpreting this device as unwelcome external scrutiny. It is argued that Ofsted’s definition of ‘off‐rolling’ as gaming (manipulation of academic performance data) effectively discourages recognition of exclusionary practices that are not irrefutably related to academic performance as such.