The ‘independent state school’ and its aftermath: implications for the processes and structures surrounding school leadership

ABSTRACT

The education system in England, along with the leadership and management of its schools, has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, heavily influenced by key features of the private school sector. However, in this article, it is argued that the strong policy focus on autonomy and diversity was in fact an accentuation of the historical tradition of the English system: secondary heads and their staff having much more autonomy and schools being more diverse than is generally the case elsewhere. In order to contextualise any analysis of the current politicised, centralised school system in England, it is important to first understand how the marketized and semi-privatised arrangements came about. This article questions whether, despite being constantly subjected to policy change and reorganisation, any improvements in either academic outcomes or equity issues could be claimed. It then asks how socially just current educational provision could claim to be, with its distorting accountability measures and emphasis on the individual school rather than the system as a whole. It highlights key implications for system design, encompassing both processes and structures, surrounding the leadership and management of schools across England.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership and management
• schools and systems
• social justice

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr. Deirdre Torrance for her invaluable help in adapting the original conference paper for journal publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Academies also have control over admissions, but this is not unique to them as many schools in the ‘maintained’ sector, notably voluntary aided schools, also control their own admissions.

2 https://www.gov.uk/guidance/guide-for-newly-opened-academies-academy-trusts-and-free-schools/regional-schools-commissioners-rscs.

3 For the specific purpose of this article, I have drawn on international work where there is a direct comparison with England (Bubb et al. 2019), where a small number of contexts is considered including England (Lubienski 2014; Salokangas and Ainscow 2018) or where a very broad international research base is offered (Waslander, Pater, and van der Weide 2010). Other studies, such as Epple, Romano, and Zimmer (2016), Hoxby (2003) and Lavy (2010), whilst offering interesting research findings concerning the effectiveness of competition and autonomy in contexts other than England and demonstrating how complex it is to conduct studies into this issue, are based on single national settings. Their findings are not therefore directly relevant to the analysis and argument I am developing in this article.

4 See https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06972.

5 See http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/WFD-Faith-Schools-Press-Release.pdf.

6 Surveys have shown that parents feel marginalised in relation to government reforms (see Croft 2017, 54).