Headship as policy narration: generating metaphors of leading in the English primary school

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how doing headship may be considered as a form of policy narration. A key role of the headteacher as policy narrator is to tell/sell a story about their school to themselves, their staff and the outside world of parents, inspectors and other stakeholders. The accounts they construct will depend to some extent on their perspectives, commitments and personal-professional identities as well as an interplay between national priorities and situated contexts. They will also depend on who they are speaking to and what they take to be a ‘professional’ response in relation to their policy work in school. Drawing on in-depth interviews with two experienced English primary school headteachers, Hazel and George, and Lakoff and Johnson’s claim [1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] that metaphors are not just linguistic devices, but technologies of reasoning and understanding, this paper explores the ways in which headteachers deploy different tropes to explain what it is that they do. Metaphors of leadership explored include headship as branding, persuasion and not dropping the ball as well as fighting and parenting although there is an absence of any direct political critique in these two accounts.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy narration
• primary headship
• metaphors of leadership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meg Maguire

Meg Maguire has a long-standing interest in education policy and practice, social justice issues, the life and work of school teachers, teacher education and with the challenges of inner-city schooling.

Annette Braun

Annette Braun's main areas of interest centre on gender and social class, trajectories from education to work, professional identities and critical policy analysis. She has been part of a series of collaborative sociological and education policy research studies and has conducted research on student and teacher identities, the education and childcare decisions of working-class families, the training of childcare workers and policy enactment in schools.