Narrowed horizons and the impoverishment of educational discourse: teaching, learning and performing under the new educational bureaucracies

Abstract

Using the system in the UK as a case study, this paper begins by examining the relationship between the rise of the ‘new managerialism’ in the public services and the ideological framework that was provided for this by the convergence of key ideas emerging from the new right and new left. It looks then at the growth of the new educational bureaucracies to service this management culture and relates these to changes in the role of concepts of strategic management in the shift from the Cold War era to the present very different international configuration that has followed on from the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. It provides a critique of the pervasive, supervisory, performance management culture that has emerged in the public services by using organization theory to question the applicability of these processes to education. Most critiques of the new managerialism in education have engaged with it on sociological or political grounds without attempting to examine how these particular approaches are accounted for within organization theory. It focuses on the work of one influential theorist in the field, arguing that his work offers rich critical insights which are particularly applicable to the organizational forms of educational management. Finally it evaluates the influence of this management environment on the quality of education arguing that its obsessive focus on quantitative outcomes and the ‘measurable’ has been a key factor in the narrowing of horizons and the impoverishment of educational policy discourse under the present Government and its immediate predecessors.

Notes

1. For the much more distinctive but comparable processes in the Scottish system see Jones (2003, p. 132) on tendencies towards a ‘national curriculum’ and (pp. 155–156) for the effects of ‘managerialism’. See also Pickard in Bryce and Humes (2003, pp. 229–238).

2. See for example Mahony and Hextall (2000) on the TTA; on Ofsted see Thrupp (1999, pp.151–155: ‘Its (i.e., OfSTEd’s) Chief Inspector, Chris Woodhead, was described by the Times Educational Supplement as the nearest thing English education has to a “pantomime villain” (9 February 1996, p. 18)’) and Helsby (1999, chapter 8).