New Public Management and the Reform of Education

European lessons for policy and practice

Helen M. Gunter, Emiliano Grimaldi, David Hall, Roberto Serpieri, Helen M. Gunter, Emiliano Grimaldi, David Hall, Roberto Serpieri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317563389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

New Public Management and the Reform of Education addresses complex and dynamic changes to public services by focusing on new public management as a major shaper and influencer of educational reforms within, between and across European nation states and policy actors. The contributions to the book are diverse and illustrate the impact of NPM locally but also the interplay between local and European policy spheres.

The book offers:

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• A critical overview of NPM through an analysis of debates, projects and policy actors

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• A detailed examination of NPM within 10 nation states in Europe

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• A robust engagement with the national and European features of NPM as a policy strategy

The book actively contributes to debates and analysis within critical policy studies about the impact and resilience of NPM, and how through a study of educational reforms in a range of political systems with different traditions and purposes a more nuanced and complex picture of NPM can be built.

As such the book not only speaks to educational researchers and professionals within Europe but also to policymakers, and can inform wider education and policy communities internationally.

PART I

The liberal state

2

ENGLAND

Permanent instability in the European educational NPM ‘laboratory’

David Hall and Helen M. Gunter

Introduction

This chapter seeks to make a contribution to debates about New Public Management (NPM) and educational reform and modernisation in England. It does so in two main ways as part of a wider theorisation of how and why these changes came about and through characterisation of the principal features and dimensions of NPM within education in this context. First, building upon previous work on continuities and discontinuities in education policy between New Labour and Conservative administrations (Bache 2003; Ball 1999; Hatcher 2008; Power and Whitty 1999; Whitty 2009) and analyses of the Coalition government’s educational reform programme (Husbands 2015; Wright 2012) this chapter offers a distinct contribution to extant debates about educational reform in England. This is achieved through the identification and analysis of a cross-party political convergences on education policy stretching from the 1970s to the present day. This notion of political convergences in education is analysed via a conceptualisation of their evolution within NPM located in three separate stages of development through successive changes of government from the Conservative, Thatcher-led (1979–1990) and Major (1990–1997) administrations, the New Labour Blair- (1997–2007) and Brown- (2007–2010) led governments through to the Cameron-led Conservative/Liberal Democratic Coalition of 2010–2015. Each of these stages is viewed as representing a significant point in the evolution of NPM in education in this context and even though the nature of these convergences are identified as having shifted over time alongside changes in the emphasis of policies through changes of government, it is argued here that NPM related policy convergences have dominated for in excess of thirty years. Our foregrounding of cross political party convergences in education is not intended to distract from the appearance of divergences between these groups over the period of time in question, but to reveal the political basis for the rapid and deep penetration of NPM and post-NPM policies in education in England. It is asserted that these convergences, rather than offering a secure basis for educational institutions and those who work and study within them, has instead resulted in a permanent instability. The second contribution of this chapter is the conceptualisation of England as a global laboratory for educational change. This conceptualisation locates the development of NPM in an English educational context within theoretical work examining the colonial and post-colonial dimensions of international and global educational change (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). As part of this, the English educational laboratory is identified as having started with a neocolonial and outward looking perspective upon educational reform and as having ended with a largely inward focused set of concerns as the contradictions of neoliberal change have become increasingly apparent in this context.

It is asserted in this chapter that NPM continues to retain potency in enabling a critical examination of education policy in England even though the term post-NPM (Christensen and Lægreid 2011c; Dunleavy et al. 2006; Hall et al. 2015) probably now better characterises this contemporary context.

The research underpinning this chapter has been undertaken by the authors and colleagues in the Critical Education Policy and Leadership research grouping in the Manchester Institute of Education (Courtney 2016; Gunter and Forrester 2008; Hall et al. 2011; McGinity 2015; Woods 2014) and has focused upon contemporary developments in English education policy and leadership.

NPM in education in England

The current provision of education in England, following over thirty years of NPM reforms, can be characterised as one of complexity, even chaos. Layering and over-layering of reforms have created a situation in which there are at least seventy types of schools (Courtney 2016), with the ‘independent’ and ‘autonomous’ school as the model for the effective and efficient delivery of educational services. Hence there has been a shift from the ‘common’ school within a community towards a restoration project of distinction, branding and competition between schools. This has two main thrusts: first, the introduction of business models to schools through their local management from 1988, where schools could control the budget, funding was based on a formula linked to parental preferences for a place for their child and in which the right of schools to hire and fire teachers was trialled; and second, the provision of schools as businesses outside of local democratic control and accountability; as explained later in this chapter this has been through the establishment of a variety of school types. Alongside and in tension to such decentralisation have been forms of centralisation through the national curriculum and the regulation of standards through high-stakes testing and inspection audits through Ofsted, whereby data design, collection, control and analysis has become integral to judgements of quality and educational purposes (Hall et al. 2016). The interplay between autonomy in a market place and regulation regarding standards has been enabled through the three main stages of NPM identified in this chapter, and is explained as follows through key features identified in the Introduction:

• Managers: educational professionals are trained and accredited to deliver reform changes based on national standards that structure identities, practices and careers. Relocation of educational professionals from local systems of democracy to independent schools and/or chains of schools has shifted attention away from notions of educational professionals to business managers and entrepreneurs. An increased emphasis is on such roles as school leaders, who lead and do leadership, whereby the focus is on the exercise of power in order to deliver performance outcomes. Differentiation is through titles (e.g. school principal, executive head teacher, head teacher, senior leader, middle leader, teacher leader), role and job descriptions linked to performance packages and remuneration.

• Managing: the focus is on delivering and auditing national standards through prescriptive curriculum and lesson packages, testing, and performance reviews. This provides the data to demonstrate continued/discontinued public investment, to support marketing to parents regarding the exercising of preferences, and to enable bidding for income streams. The main management tools are: planning, target setting, data collection and analysis. This has focused increasingly on self-evaluation of the student and staff member with judgements about performance through lesson observation and grading, examination results and general conduct.

• Management: the approach is on securing change through people, and so a strong emphasis is on control through processes of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. Organisational values of consultation, participation and team work may feature, where the increasing dominance of performative leadership enables vision and mission to be used to inspire and motivate the workforce and students to secure improvement and acclaim. Values related to ‘school owners’ feature from private interests such as faith, philanthropy, business, and local consortia, where local democratic participation remains but is increasingly under threat from UK government reform.

• Managerialism: new hierarchies of power are being intensified through ‘within school’ distinctions between senior, middle and teacher leaders, and ‘outside school’ controls through owners (faith, business, philanthropy, consortia) and the wider market. Line management relationships have been installed that clearly identify who manages what and how, and through which performance is measured, instrumental accountability operates, and contracts are awarded, extended, terminated.

Having set out the main features of NPM in education in England, we now move on to detailing the development of this phenomenon. From our examination of Tables 1.1 and 1.2 in Chapter 1 of this book and our programme of research, the evidence suggests that there are three main waves or stages of reform that illustrate how the main features of NPM have been built over time.

The foundation stage of educational reform 1979–1997

The key features of this stage are outlined in Table 2.1.

Taken together, various features of the UK policy context in England, most particularly the political ascendancy of the New Right from 1979 when the Thatcher-led Conservative administration took office, older traditions of a liberal state and a disenchantment with state-led interventions following the economic crises of the 1970s (Gamble 1988), combined to offer an extremely promising set of circumstances for the propagation of an intense form of neoliberalism well suited to an aggressive version of NPM.

The foundation stage of installing these changes within schools came about through major reform initiatives by Conservative administrations in the 1980s and 1990s, building upon a new cross party convergence that emerged during a series of educational ‘crises’ in the 1970s regarding the need for improved educational standards (Whitty 1989). These reforms are viewed here as representing an attempt to interrupt publicly funded schools as public institutions and to break with the practice of insulating such institutions from private interests (Du Gay 2008).

In 1988 a new Education Reform Act offered a remarkably wide-ranging set of reforms that would inscribe themselves upon generations of school children and teachers and unleash a subsequent ‘permanent revolution’ (Pollitt 2007a) of subsequent educational reforms.

Some of the key provisions arising out of the 1988 Act included the following:

• Centralisation of curriculum and assessment in schools through the creation of a National Curriculum linked mainly to established academic subjects assessed at four intervals (Key Stages) via national tests;

• The marketization of schooling through the creation of educational quasi-markets (LeGrand and Bartlett, 1993);

• The local financial management of schools establishing them as individual business units;

• The legislative underpinning of privately sponsored City Technology Colleges and the creation of Grant Maintained Schools.

The 1988 Act is viewed as a repurposing of education in England whereby the role of teachers as curriculum developers and pedagogues gradually came to be replaced by one in which they became the deliverers and managers of educational standards in schools newly imagined as business units. In this way the purposes of education, including a marginalization of educational processes, were re-worked so that a cadre of teachers reimagined as managers came into being with a brief to manage educational institutions around specified standards, national testing and a subsequent system of national inspection run by a newly created Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted)¹.

TABLE 2.1 Key features of New Public Management in education in England: the foundation stage

Factors	Tools and practices
Managers	Teachers become managers of data in relation to pupil performance A cadre of teachers are reconstituted as educational managers trained to monitor class, departmental and institutional level performance in schools Competition between schools emerges as a new logic of educational activity Teachers are reconstituted as deliverers of a national curriculum
Managing	Standards of attainment in relation to national testing become the benchmarks against which pupil, teacher and institutional performance are judged School league tables based upon attainment data are developed at national and local levels as a means of enabling educational markets School governing bodies reconstituted to comprise a widened membership including members of the local business community
Management	Line management established in schools whereby teacher performance is evaluated in relation to national performance data Head teachers made responsible for school performance and accountable to Ofsted during periodic inspections Ofsted inspects schools and grades schools according to their performance
Managerialism	National test results established as the key indicators of pupil, teacher and school performance. School managers, as head teachers, afforded responsibility for managing schools in line with performance indicators; teacher appraisal introduced

Within the 1988 Act, the emphasis upon choice, markets and competition and attempts to create independent schools within the state system are seen as reflecting the neoliberal preferences and ambitions of reformers whilst the central control of curriculum and assessment designed to counter educational progressivism and promote educational standards are viewed as reflecting the more neoconservative demands of reformers. These tensions between neo-conservative and neo-liberal approaches to educational reform in England are viewed as being directly analogous to wider tensions within the discourse of NPM itself. These are tensions between a ‘hard’ version of NPM where the discursive emphasis is upon the controlling of public service institutions and their employees in an environment low on trust and with lower levels of autonomy for employees. And a ‘softer’ version of NPM the emphasis is more upon enabling change to emerge within the public sector through creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship with concomitantly higher levels of trust (Ferlie and Geraghty 2005). These discursive tensions were especially heightened within the context of education, given its elevated position amongst elite policy makers as a strategic imperative vital to the nation’s capacity to compete in international markets. This concern initially manifested in the Foundation Stage as a more generalized policy obsession linking educational to economic success but as described later in the chapter they would in the reinforcing stage come to revolve around OECD/PISA scores and the imagined relative international success of England’s education system.

Under the 1988 Act all pupils would come to know and be assiduously reminded of their levels of attainment in relation to targets set against national norms (Wiliam et al. 2004). Teachers would come to be managed via class-level data and, despite well established relationships between the institutional performance of schools and the relative socio-economic advantage of their pupils (Ozga 2009; Perryman et al. 2011), schools would be judged according to raw performance data published in school league tables. This created near ideal conditions for the emergence of a managerialism in which the managerial purposes of this new performance re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I The liberal state
• PART II The social democratic state
• PART III The administrative state
• PART IV The post-communist state
• Conclusion
• References
• Index