Abstract
Much research into structural reform in education has reported on the success or failure of individual projects. Less attention has been paid to how the discourses associated with reform are normalized in teachers’ and head teachers’ thinking, and realized in their actions. In this article, we engage with resistance at the interface of legal policy positioning and position-taking by educational professionals. Drawing on empirical data from an ethnographic study of structural change in a school in England, we deploy the metaphor of ‘the Borg’ to develop new insights into the different stances that educational professionals can take to avoid assimilation into a hive mind.
Highlights
Understanding that educational professionals are policy actors in the scope, design and enactment of policy is crucial in debates in the field of education policy
By examining the options and policy processes afforded by the Academization Policy Complex (APC) in a real-time context, we propose that resistance is not necessarily futile
By analysing the realities of the APC within the working lives of education professionals in one school context, we have developed novel understandings of professional discourses and practices at the interface of legal position-making and professional position-taking
Summary
Understanding that educational professionals are policy actors in the scope, design and enactment of policy is crucial in debates in the field of education policy. Student outcomes were below national averages and inspection results were unfavourable, so the Department for Education (DfE) proposed a forced conversion of St Clement’s to academy status as part of a trust selected by the DfE The governors delayed this external intervention until a new head teacher was appointed and examination results improved, and in doing so exercised some agency at local level. First grant-maintained schools, City Colleges, specialist, free and academy schools provided the means of moving schools from public to private ownership and governance, and there are between 70 and 90 different types of schools (Courtney, 2015) Working within such ‘tectonic shifts’ has both limited and enabled the opportunities for local agency: our data show that, while educational professionals articulated an accommodation and acceptance of the APC discourses, their actual practices were more about strategies to get away with not changing to academy status. The phrase getting away with it is apt, since it gives recognition to the turn of events, and as such it implies something significant but always in play, rather than permanent and substantive
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