School leadership and management after Special Measures: discipline without the gaze?

Abstract

This article is concerned with the medium-term effects on management structures and styles following a period in the disciplinary regime of Special Measures, a regime of intensive inspection applied to a school which is deemed as ‘failing’. In it I discuss the techniques used by the management of one school to continue the school's improvement after the inspection team had departed. In particular I consider the prolongation of a system of ‘panoptic performativity’ in disciplining the staff body in a number of ways. I argue that in order to ensure that the school continued to make progress, the school management behaved as if the inspectors were still there by establishing other disciplinary mechanisms, and there is clear evidence that this was successful in the first nine months following Special Measures. However, there was a definite weakening of the panoptic pressure, and it took the return of inspectors to restore the disciplinary regime. This is not intended as a criticism of the management of the school, but rather a comment on the difficulties the school had in maintaining a framework of externally imposed discipline once the external pressure was lifted.