Abstract
ABSTRACTIn neoliberal times, marketisation, managerialism and performativity suggest a values-free approach to educational leadership. School leaders, tasked with driving educational reforms, have not always resisted the reforms they find unpalatable, such as a standards agenda, prescribed curricula, high stakes testing and the fragmentation of the education system. By virtue of their long service, it might be assumed experienced headteacher/principals are largely compliant having successfully managed a school’s performance and secured its place in the market. Some have embraced reforms; others may not see education as values-free, having entered the profession motivated by a desire for social justice and having developed inclusive educational philosophies. The focus here is on headteachers’ resistance of the neoliberal reforms they opposed. I report findings from empirical research exploring 10 headteachers’ critical negotiation of English education policy reforms. Their resistance took many forms as “everyday” or hidden and overt forms of resistance. Importantly, it could be seen in the semblance of compliance as game playing, selectivity, masquerade and reinvention. Drawing on theories of “everyday resistance” and conceptualisation of the daily resistance of colonialism as mimicry and sly civility taking place in a third space of ambivalence and ambiguity, I argue that recognition of headteachers’ critical negotiation of policy reforms as resistance signal the potential for future collective action. These heterogeneous everyday practices are influenced by time, context and intersecting sources of power. Post-colonial resistance theory provides the tools with which to uncover what is often hidden.
Highlights
In neoliberal times, marketization, managerialism and performativity suggest a values free approach to educational leadership
Neoliberalism is a problematic concept used variously to signify capitalist reform through free market economic and social transformation, as a marker of right wing politics leading to the dismantling of public services, and as a historical and heuristic device (Courtney, McGinity and Gunter 2017)
Prescribed curricula and pedagogies act as a “straightjacket” (Hill 2006, 22), the “vice-like grip” of marketisation and managerialism (Stevenson and Wood 2013, 49) control the profession, and teachers feel the “terrors of performativity” (Ball 2003, 215)
Summary
Since 2001, international comparative data such as the OECD’s PISA findings have been used to influence education policy-making (Sahlberg 2011). Thomson 2008; Niesche 2013; Ward et al 2016), include them in broader policy resistance research in compulsory (Smyth and Dow 1998; Blackmore 2004; Perryman et al 2011; Ball and Olmedo 2013; Anderson and Cohen 2015; Pinto 2015), further (Shain and Gleeson 1999) and higher education (English 2003). All these forms are worthy of further exploration They overlap and are interlinked as: the ‘everyday’ less visible resistance of critical reflections, critical utterances, mediation of emotions and semblance of compliance in the accommodation of reforms; and the public counter discourse in and outside school with colleagues, peers, the wider community and politicians, the counter conduct of professional disobedience (Wraga 1999) and collective action locally, nationally and internationally. In the context of education reforms, the recalibration of what constitutes success leads to the reconstitution of who or what is ‘failing’, what once was ‘satisfactory’ becomes unsatisfactory (Gunter 2014)
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