Drawing a veil over managerialism: leadership and the discursive disguise of the New Public Management

Abstract

Through a focus upon the simultaneous rise of leadership and the New Public Management (NPM) within the context of education in England this article offers an analytical account of these developments and their entry into the field of education. This analysis is located within contradictions and tensions arising out of the agential promises inherent in the construction of leadership and the simultaneous managerialist and directive intent of the NPM. The way in which discourses of leadership and, more latterly, distributed leadership act to draw a veil over these tensions and contradictions is demonstrated within the context of research in two schools. The article concludes by examining how discourses of leadership have enabled schools and teachers to adapt to educational modernisation in ways that have undermined teacher professionalism.

Keywords:

• leadership
• New Public Management
• managerialism
• professionalism
• discourse
• autonomy

Acknowledgements

I would like to highlight the contribution of my co-researchers on the SPSO project, Helen Gunter and Joanna Bragg, without whom this article would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the ESRC for supporting the research reported upon in this paper (RES-000-22-3610). In addition I am very grateful to those working within schools participating in the SPSO research and members of the Project Advisory Group for their critical support: Tanya Fitzgerald, Sharon Gewirtz, Peter Gronn, David Hartley, Richard Hatcher, Barbara Howse, Gill Ireson, Colin Mills, Jorunn Moller, Gemma Moss, Brad Portain, John Shanahan, Jim Spillane and Pat Thomson.

Notes

This dataset uses the Indices of Deprivation 2007 which provide a range of information including detailed breakdowns for small areas (super output areas (SOAs)) and aggregate the summary statistics. In each case the SOA with a rank of 1 is the most deprived area and the area with a rank of 32,482 is the least deprived.