Abstract
System leadership continues to be constructed largely as a desirable, even normative, evolution of educational leadership, with critiques often focusing on implementation rather than principles. This belies its increasingly recognised role in processes of disintermediation, in which the ‘middle tier’ comprising local government is dismantled. In this article, we draw on interview and observation data from our case study research in a new multi-academy trust to argue that system leadership is better understood as a manifestation of, and mechanism for, depoliticisation. We present a reconceptualisation of system leadership in which its primary function is to enable and operationalise three forms of depoliticisation: governmental, societal and discursive. We conclude that system leadership as depoliticisation is a suite of professional practices with linked identities and dispositions that operationalises the state’s project to depoliticise education in England through multi-academisation, or the creation of multi-academy trusts.
Highlights
We argue that the contemporarily dominant suite of normative entrepreneurial practices known as system leadership is a manifestation of depoliticisation, in which political issues and decisions are removed from the public sphere where they may be debated
System leadership is invoked to advance the politico-structural project of multiacademisation, or the legal, discursive, cultural and organisational processes whereby a group of schools is removed from the local authority and privatised through adopting a Multi-academy trusts (MATs) structure in a contractual arrangement with the state
Concerns have been raised regarding the extent to which multi-academisation represents or permits ‘empire-building’ (Courtney, 2017): in a governmentally depoliticised landscape, the MAT takes on responsibility from the state for addressing this, and its administrators and governors, labelled system leaders, grapple with the tensions: But how do you start to give something for people to galvanise around, something different within the system, to recognise it stands for something else and you would have seen a lot of what we were trying to get to grips with yesterday with the board, because the biggest headache Oak Manor had was that they were such a large organisation, being perceived as swallowing up, or empire building. (Ben)
Summary
We argue that the contemporarily dominant suite of normative entrepreneurial practices known as system leadership is a manifestation of depoliticisation, in which political issues and decisions are removed from the public sphere where they may be debated Instead, they are ‘presented by politicians and policymakers as matters of technical efficiency rather than normative choices’ (Clarke, 2012: 298), and so politics as an exercise of power is re-configured as a matter of individual choice, and thereby privatised (Courtney and Gunter, 2017). The conceptualisation and analysis presented here have implications for policy making and policy scholarship in states internationally where system leadership is being considered or enacted, for example in the USA, where charter schools may be brought and managed together under charter management organisations To realise these contributions, we make a novel claim. This is that, unlike prior education reforms involving leadership (Gunter, 2012; Hall et al, 2013), system leadership does not just enable or facilitate the state’s political objectives: instead, it constitutes the political project itself
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