Writing a genealogical ethnography of a multi-academy trust

ABSTRACT

The multi-academy trust (MAT) is rooted in the restructuring of schools in England through the process of academisation. MATs are independent, non-fee-paying education providers comparable to Swedish free schools and US charter Schools. Using Foucauldian thinking on genealogy I follow the emergence of the MAT. To do this, I trace the intersections and convergence of discourses and legislation which enabled the MAT to emerge. I analyse ethnographic data from a yearlong study of the Lawrence Trust which investigated the leadership praxis of the CEO. I argue disruptions and discontinuities in policy contribute to the advent of the MAT, though its history is non-linear. MATs are formed from a convergence of policy entanglements, an imbrication of discourses requiring new ways of leading. This article highlights the reorganisation of schooling through the existence of a MAT signified by the disintermediation of the local (regional) authority, and the decline of public education embodied in the corporatised leadership practices of the CEO.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-academy trusts
• Foucault
• genealogy
• ethnography
• education policy
• leadership
• CEO

Introduction

The establishment of MATs emerges from the process of academisation in England from 2000 onwards where many publicly funded schools have become academies moving out of Local Authority (LA) control. Academies are state funded, independent, non-fee-paying schools run by charitable trusts, groups (such as faith groups), individuals or business organisations and can be likened to charter schools in the USA and independent free schools in Sweden. From 2010, further structural reforms resulted in the establishment of multi-academy trusts. MATs consist of groups of academies organised under a single charitable trust arrangement. Their growth has increased fourfold since 2011. In 2020, there were 1510 MATs operating (DfE 2020), responsible for educating nearly half of all children in state funded schools in England currently 87% of academies are part of a MAT (HM Government 2022, 5). This article reports on a yearlong study of the Leadership of Lawrence Trust Project (LLTP a pseudonym), where I investigated the structure of a ‘medium sized’ MAT¹ comprising eight schools located across three geographical regions in England and the leadership practices of the CEO.

Much has been written on the contemporary history of educational restructuring reforms (Chitty 2009; Jones 2003; West and Bailey 2013), the LLTP’s contribution adds to burgeoning research on MATs and their leadership (Hughes 2019; 2020; Courtney and McGinity 2022; Innes 2021; Simkins 2015; Simon, James, and Simon 2019; Wilkins 2017). The writing of genealogies in educational leadership is few however (see Lewis 2016 on social justice leadership and inclusion), and genealogies of educational reform in Australia featured in a Special Edition of Journal of Educational Administration and History in 2012 (see McLeod and Wright 2012). The LLTP, however, is the first study of the operations of an MAT using a genealogical and ethnographic approach.

Writing a genealogical ethnography of the Lawrence MAT allows me to make two original contributions to the field. First, the contribution presents a novel conceptualisation of an MAT through examining its practices genealogically, other genealogies tend to look at structural reforms in educational policy for example: Ball (2013) and on governance (Wilkins 2015). The second contribution is methodological. In writing a genealogical ethnography, following Tamboukou and Ball (2003) and Tamboukou (1999), the article charts the epistemic breaks examining the interplay between power and knowledge in the evolution and foundation of an MAT. The interpretation of local sites (the MAT) in the production of knowledge enables the understanding of ‘the inner life of the institution’ (Durkheim 2013, 3).

I deploy Foucauldian thinking on genealogy, which enables a standing back from complexity, creating distance. Alongside this approach I utilize the hallmarks of ethnography to make the sense of localised practice, principally of the MAT CEO a position similar to that of Charter School clusters and their administrators in the USA. In so doing, I problematise the MAT as an object of analysis.

Methodologically combining genealogy and ethnography involves a ‘dangerous encounter’ (Tamboukou and Ball 2003); however, following Tamboukou and Ball (2003) I argue such encounters generate a ‘productive tension’. The nexus of this tension is the location of power. Adopting a ‘context-bound critical perspective’ (Tamboukou and Ball 2003, 3) enables the micro study of power through ethnography and the relations of power through genealogy.

In adopting this approach, I pose the following questions: What is the ontology of Lawrence Trust MAT? And under what conditions did MATs emerge? In answering these questions, I examine the ‘surface of events’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 106) – the convergence of particular policies, and the colonisation of the emergent discourses of neoliberalism, privatisation and corporatisation of the public education system combined with ethnographically diving deeper beneath the surface to understand the praxis of the CEO. I argue the Lawrence Trust as provider of education services, embodies the privatisation of state education, facilitating increased central control with the state as principal regulator alongside the increasing opaqueness of governmentality.

A methodological joint enterprise

In Table 1, I list the features of genealogical and ethnographic endeavour which I refer to as a methodological joint enterprise yet paying careful attention to Tamboukou and Ball (2003) in not attempting to integrate both approaches. Rather, I simply offer counterpoising frames of reference as a mode of genealogical ethnographic enquiry to justify this methodological choice.

Table 1. Frames of reference as a mode of genealogical ethnographic enquiry (Hughes 2020).

Frames of reference	Foucault’s genealogy as method	Ethnography
Ontology	Study of numberless beginnings	Study of the everyday
Approach	Traces continuities and discontinuities	Contextual, partial
Intersections	Disparate	History and biography
Power	Coalesces, contingent on how things have become ‘the problem’	Local and relational, embodied
Knowledge	Converges through bodies, policies, and mobilisation of discourses	Tacit, observed localised praxis
Self	Complex	Singular, personally relative, socially situated
Structure	Descent and emergence	Political, continuous
Application	Historically contingent	Tentative, pragmatic

Table 1 shows the valence of genealogy and ethnography seen through these frames of reference as a productive tension. Such a tension enables the ‘productive’ surveilling of the MAT as an institution and taking an ethnographic perspective allows the study of the everyday practices of the MAT leader.

Interweaving ethnography with Foucault’s genealogy, I analyse ethnographic data from the Lawrence Trust, investigating the localised, everyday practices of KT Edwards, its Chief Executive Officer as the constituent ‘moral agent’ and the embodied manifestation of the corporate entrepreneur. I do this through looking ‘obliquely at all collective arrangements distant or nearby, mak[ing] the familiar strange’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986, 2). As a former headteacher, I had knowledge about leadership and schooling but I was unfamiliar with the structure and operations of an MAT. The Lawrence Trust Project builds on previous ethnographies of one individual within the field of educational leadership, for example Wolcott (1973) and Southworth (1995). In studying the everyday, the project adopted the hallmarks of year-long ethnographic encounter.

My selection of a willing participant was purposive in that I recognised that a ‘knowledgeable’ person currently in the CEO position was ideal who had sufficient understanding of their professional role and was deemed to be ‘an expert’, that is someone who was a National Leader of Education. Given my former position as a school leader I, recognised the role of ‘gatekeepers’ thus I was able to successfully engage with both the clerk to the governing body and Edwards’ PA. Both were supportive in arranging an initial meeting with Edwards. Edwards immediately agreed to me undertaking research in the Lawrence Trust and with him directly. He gave his written consent for me to interview him and accompany him to various meetings across the trust over the year. I explained and confirmed that the research would pseudonymise all names and locations in line with the research ethics of my institution. Edwards too would be invited to ‘member check’ all interview transcripts. In the field, my positionality was that of the ‘professional stranger’ Agar (1980) passively observing and remaining at a discreet distance throughout. I followed Edwards’ lead, never directly interacting with pupils or staff unless invited by Edwards. I maintained a marginal position where I could carefully observe and record field notes unnoticed, successfully achieving this when on more than one occasion Edwards exclaimed after a long session of observation ‘I completely forgot you were there!’ Over time I was able to negotiate certain ‘extra’ events I wished to observe (or shadow) Edwards and these requests were all agreed to. This included a Trust-wide staff recruitment morning and an open evening at one of the Trust’s academies. Each visit was usually between 1–3 h in duration.

The four semi-structured interviews with the Edwards had a particular theme: career history; MAT structure; professional networks; and values and vision and took place over the year. Observations, shadowing, and writing detailed field work notes forming ‘thick descriptions’, included detailed observational data and data on meanings, participants’ interpretations of situations and unobserved factors (Geertz 1973). Over 30 hours of observations and shadowing episodes were recorded as fieldwork notes. These episodes comprised visiting lessons with Edwards, attending parents’ evenings, regional network meetings and trust recruitment mornings, management and senior executive meetings inter alia.

Writing the genealogy of the MAT

Genealogy for Foucault:

 … sets out to study the beginning – numberless beginnings … Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes. (Foucault 2020, 81)

Thus the genealogy of the MAT is written reflecting the continuities and discontinuities, the ‘numberless beginnings’ in its development. Tracing the history of the MAT enables the ‘history of the problematisation that is the history of the way in which things become a problem’ (Foucault 1996, 414). Genealogical ethnographies in education have focussed on the genealogy of leadership (Gronn 2010) or the genealogy of MAT governance (Pennington, Su, and Wood 2023) for example. Deploying thinking from Foucault’s later genealogical writings principally Discipline and Punish, the birth of the prison (1991) and his essay on Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (2020), Foucault argues that history is haphazard, not linear, ‘marked on the surface of bodies’ (Foucault 2020, 83). These ‘marks’ comprise intersections and complexities which allow for an ‘elaboration of newer practices’ (Koopman 2013, 105) producing a ‘new kind of reality’ (Tamboukou 1999, 205). Exploring the historical foundations of a MAT, I highlight ‘the local fixations of power in specific sites’ (Ball 2019, 4) tracing its emergence and descent and in so doing new leadership practices emerge.

For Foucault genealogy is ‘grey and documentary’ operating ‘on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’ (Foucault 2020, 76). These ‘accompanying mechanisms’ (Foucault 1991, 234) comprise legislation, improvement programmes, contracts, operational instructions. In writing the ‘history of the present’, Foucault argues for the necessity of distance ‘whilst posing the question in the present’ (Foucault 2020, 83). The present, for Foucault is conceived as contingencies, and random beginnings which genealogy attempts to trace.

In understanding the ontology of the MAT, I examine the assemblage of primary sources, the historically constituted discourses of neoliberalism, privatisation and corporatisation concomitant with contingent legislation embodied by the LT ‘presenting a series of troublesome associations and lineage’ (Garland 2014, 372). The development of the MAT traces the complex histories of alliance, assemblages, pathways – ‘the said as well as the unsaid’ (Foucault 1980, 194), which intersect or converge stemming from the same source. In Discipline and Punish (1991), Foucault traces the emergence (the moment of rising) and descent of power through tracing the history of the prison. Foucault’s study of the prison is useful in framing the analysis of the MAT in establishing its ‘self-evident character’ (Foucault 2020, 83) and explaining its emergence as ‘produced through a particular stage of forces’ (83).

The emergence of the MAT: policy technologies and entanglements

Ontologically the MAT is explained in terms of its constitution derived from legislation, policy and other contingent conditions located in the emergence of education policy complexes (Gewirtz 2002). The post war ‘settlement’ by way of an example of forces refers to a series of assemblages including political, social and economic which typified a broad consensus amongst political parties, trade unions and big business which underpinned education provision (Gewirtz 2002). However, this consensus was not a permanent solution but was characterised by the instabilities and limitations of power sharing. The post welfare policy complex (PWPC), including education policy, particularly under the Conservative government (1979–1997) embraced neoliberalism with the emphasis on the free market, increased competition and the neo-conservative privileging of individualism. The education policies of New Labour (1997–2010) were an instantiation of the previous Conservative government policy. Consequently, different types of schools evolved in bewildering different forms. These ranged from university training colleges, (UTCs) free schools, studio schools, faith schools and academies often grouped together in partnerships or federations or (latterly) as a multi-academy trust. Some school types have collided with and borrowed from older iterations depicting the ‘emergence or play of forces, which results in the moment of rising’ (Foucault 2020, 83). The creation of City Technology Colleges (CTCs) under the Conservative government in 1988 for example was precursors to city academies (created under New Labour in 2000); they were centrally funded, sought sponsorship from private business sponsors and were situated in urban areas. The descent of welfarism and the impact on public education under a modernising agenda can be seen as normalising events – as evidence of continuity rather than change.

Deploying Foucauldian thinking, in Table 2, I depict the emergence and descent of such ‘normalising events’ from 1944 onwards on education policy. The intersections of these are examined through the lens of power, knowledge and self.

Table 2. The emergence and descent of ‘education policy in England' (Hughes 2020).

Emergence
	Normalising events (Structural) 1944–1988	Intersecting practices: power, knowledge and the self	Normalising events (Regulatory) 1988 to present day
Intersections	Post-war settlement Welfarism, consensus	Power sharing privileging ‘the self’	Decline of welfarism, emergence of the post welfare state, managerialism and neoliberalism. The 1988 ERA
	Tri-partite school system operates. Keynesian economics ascendant		Thatcherism instigated the emergence of the free market economy, privileging the individual Decline in public services
	Bureaucratic models of administration operate	Descent of public to private Increased surveillance Different regimes of visibility. New knowledge	Shift of government to governance: closer alignment between the state and market, descent of LEA control, and emergence of private actors in education e.g. sponsors from business, Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted)
	Comprehensivisation of schooling		Increase of power centrally located government emphasis on performance competition and school league tables
	Growth of corporate capitalism		Competition and choice with multi-school types creating a diverse school system

The table depicts the normalising events and intersection of structural changes from 1944 to 1988 such as the post-war settlement, the introduction of the welfare state and changing school structures. The shift to a post-welfarist education settlement (Gewirtz 2002) is seen as an entry of forces, a place of confrontation (Foucault 2020). Such confrontation is manifested in the supercharged regulatory changes from 1988 onwards beginning with the Educational Reform Act which was emblematic of the disintermediation of the local education authority eventually producing ‘a new kind of reality’ of schooling culminating in the emergence of the MAT. The power of the state over civic society and the symbiotic relationship between the state and the market is a key feature of education reform with the increase of school take-overs and increased competition. Interwoven with neoliberalism is the emergence of private interests in the public education system symbolised by private individuals or groups running schools, corporatised leadership practices, new privately run inspection regimes (Ofsted), the use of consultants, increased competition through government target setting and the publication of league tables.

Intersecting practices such as power relations cannot themselves be established ‘without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse’ (Foucault 1980, 93), I now examine the ‘circulating’ discourses around MATs in understanding their ontology.

For Foucault, discourses transect, revealing the intersection of diverse practices of power and knowledge. They are contingent on each other and form complex assemblages that converge and collide, borrowing from other discourses that can offer the interpretation of the ‘ontology of self’. In writing the genealogical ethnography of the Lawrence Trust, I now consider the key discourses of neoliberalism, privatisation and corporatisation as key to its formation. First, neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism. MATs have their antecedents rooted in the neoliberal project underpinned by a ‘neo-Taylorist’ form of managerialism, which focused on target setting, creating performance objectives to measure achievement and rewarding those who achieved the results required. Neoliberalism focused on attendant economic individualism stressing the centrality of the market and the reduction of taxation as it was perceived to suppress enterprise. The changing relationships between the state and civic society were:

 … mediated through a range of structural institutional realignments: the introduction of markets, the rise of contracting, the changing balance of power between central government and local regional agencies of governance. (Clarke and Newman 1997, ix)

Thus ‘structural realignments’ in public services including education witnessed ‘a permanent revolution’ (Clarke and Newman 1997, ix). The anti-statism of the New Right with notions of the ‘hallowed out state’ (Rhodes 1997, 17) suggested that state power and control was diminishing. Instead, governance arrangements being undertaken by institutions, networks and partnerships in an increasingly complex social landscape (Jessop 2016) have ensued with the neoliberal project creating an intrusive undemocratic state corporate system. The second discourse of privatisation has permeated education signifying an ideology coursing through the entire social body.

Privatisation. Prevalent neo-conservative ideologies which focused on the role of tradition and the family and the seemingly declining influence of the state were encapsulated in and linked to, notions of privatisation where the transfer of resources, empowering the consumer regarding choice, shifted from the public to the private realm (Gunter 2018). Paradoxically, the neoliberal ideology that pervaded the 1980s and 90s, where the distinction between the public and private domains was blurred saw greater surveillance and central state control in terms of regulation and intervention and where privatisation became a key strategy in education. Examples of privatisation include outsourcing of school services, inspections and training, the use of consultants (Gunter and Mills 2017) combined with the appropriation of private land and taxpayers’ monies through the process of academy conversion as well as selling policy by private companies to the government, where companies undertake ‘state-work’ creating educational businesses. Partnerships between private corporate elites and public institutions have developed apace both in the UK and the USA (Gunter, Hall, and Apple 2017) including the contracting out of services, the growth of public/private partnerships, resulting in the third discourse: the corporatisation of education (Courtney 2015).

Corporatisation. A new managerialist language and the adoption of corporate business practices with the emphasis on managerialist principles have insinuated education policy both in England and internationally (Gunter, Hall, and Apple 2017; Saltman 2010), where the corporatisation of education has taken place (Courtney 2015; 2016) transforming schools into corporations taking on corporate identities (Saltman 2010) where corporate ideologies pervade public education through language, branding, marketing, the focus on efficiency, the use of corporate management models associated head office functions, executive leadership models and appraisal processes.

The intersection of these discourses forms Foucault’s concept of ‘interrupted circulations of power’ (Foucault 1991) accumulating new bodies of information. ‘Interrupted’ because they form the part of the endless network of relations concerned with the state, policy, legislation and governance. For Foucault, the state is ‘the super-structural in relation to the whole series of power networks that invest in the body: the family, knowledge … technology’ (Foucault 1980, 122). As an example, three key pieces of educational legislation were analysed as part of the genealogy depicting an ensemble of power networks relating to the state which intersect, collide and entangle with the discourses of neoliberalism, privatisation and corporatisation.

Policy technologies as interrupted circuits of power

As indicated in Table 2, the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA), the 2006 Education Act and the Academies Act of 2010 are examples of policy trajectory. The basic purpose of the 1988 Act sought to ‘erect (or reinforce) a hierarchical system of schooling subject both to market forces and to greater control from the centre’ (Chitty 2009, 51). The three examples of legislation interconnect with the neoliberal discourse threading its way through other extensive and far-reaching legislation that shaped and reformed education particularly in the leadership of schools, revealing the continuities, descent and emergence of the MAT. The three examples form part of a larger picture of the PWPC (Gewirtz 2002) stemming from different ideological positions but nevertheless reveal continuities and convergence as well as the shifting structural and regulatory elements of the period.

The 1988 ERA for example, ‘made a “decisive break with the principles of the 1944 Butler Act” (Chitty 2009, 51), with its emphasis on marketisation, in the sense that it strengthened competition and differentiation within the school system’, resulting in major shifts in the way schools were led. The 1988 Act for example saw the introduction of Locally Managed Schools (LMS) which required head teachers to manage their financial resources devolved from the LA understand employment law and health and safety. The legislation introduced a national curriculum, centralised assessments and the publishing of national league tables. The act allowed for the creation of selective Grant Maintained Schools (GM) which essentially were the ‘hybrid of public/private’ category of school (Harris 2012). They ‘opted out’ of LA control and could run their admissions. The act represented a decline in local democracy and was indicative of the government’s attitude to the perceived inefficiencies of the overly bureaucratic LAs. By giving more autonomy to schools, the expectation was that they would become more efficient, flexible and competitive thus creating a market. The role of the headteacher was reconceptualised as that of a manager with business dispositions and where parents became consumers. These mechanisms of the state effectively codified power relations through increasing head teacher autonomy and reducing the power of the LA, whilst at the same time increasing central government control. For Foucault, state power is manifested through notions of ‘transparency’ in institutions such as the prison where the panopticon view was a means of surveillance, similarly, schools were subjected to public transparency and exposure through national testing regimes and the creation of Ofsted and its inspection framework.

The process of academisation accelerated with the 2010 Academies Act where schools could become academies provided, they were judged by Ofsted as outstanding, LAs were rendered powerless in preventing the establishment of academies as the act removed the requirement for the DfE to formally consult with the LA before entering into an academy agreement with ‘any person’. The descent of power epitomised through the disintermediation of the middle tier government was a key feature of this legislation.

The 2010 Act facilitated less complicated procedures for conversion to an academy resulting in a discontinuity of state education with the emergence of private enterprise, managerialism and performativity imperatives. Progressive centralisation has seen the diminution of elected local government officials making local decisions for the local community. Such technologies show the modalities and shift of power dispersed to non-elected bodies. Other legislation such as the 2006 Act enabled legislative structures which facilitated non-education groups and individuals through the creation of a charitable trust, to run schools. A precursor to this arrangement lies in CTCs from 2000 formed under New Labour, entangling with Grant Maintained schools created in the late 1980s. The endless history of forces is traced through policy entanglements normalising the MAT as a structure rooted in the discourse of neoliberalism and attendant discourses of privatisation and corporatisation. The legislation described is formed from and layers with interventions, amendments and modifications of existing mechanisms and apparatus, seen as the ‘moment of arising’ (Foucault 2020, 83).

The emergence of the Lawrence Trust therefore is shaped by these clusters of power relations, including the layers of other legislation symbolic of heterogenous assemblages. In practice, power is embodied in the increased autonomy of headteachers, which enabled a new kind of reality in headship to emerge with the position of the MAT CEO whilst at the same time reducing local head teacher autonomy. Power, for Foucault (1991, 26) is ‘exercised rather than possessed’ expressed in the increase in direct power of the state as a centralising and regulatory force; the descent of state funded education and the emergence of private enterprises running schools. Through policy entanglements, MATs are underpinned by their corporate structure defined as a charity, limited by guarantee, benefiting from a direct contractual relationship with the Secretary of State through the Master Funding Agreement (MFA) (DfE 2020). The power relations between the Lawrence Trust for example as a body and the state are represented by the increased surveillance through central funding, contractual regulations and accountability measures. The ascent of the MAT therefore is not in its origins, but in Foucauldian terms ‘ … it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity’ (Foucault 2020, 79).

The MAT as disparity

The Lawrence Trust as a disparate ‘problem’ emanates from the increasing direct involvement of the state in education emerging with legislation which expanded the Secretary of State’s powers with the 1988 ERA. This legislation enabled the state to enter into ‘academy arrangements’ (an agreement) with ‘any person’ (Academies Act 2010 s 1(1)). ‘Any person’ can mean an individual, business, representatives of charitable and faith organisations where parents and the existing school have little or no say in these conversion arrangements. Becoming an MAT centres on the MFA and is supported by Supplementary Agreements (SA) for each separate academy within the trust. The individual academy is then brought into the MAT losing its legal status as a separate entity, rather it becomes merely a site from which the MAT provides education services under contract. These mechanisms have emerged to increase state control, decrease the local authority’s direct involvement in schooling and, through conversion (the granting of an Academy Order), the appropriation of public land ensues where the land transfer (where applicable) to the trust takes place under a long lease arrangement of 125 years from the LA (described in the ‘Converting to an Academy a guide for Schools, DfE 2021). These particular institutions therefore demand new forms of leading and leadership.

Empirical data from the LT, investigating the localised, practices of KT Edwards, its Chief Executive Officer as the constituent ‘moral agent’, and the embodied manifestation of the corporate entrepreneur has illuminated such leadership practices.

In so doing, the ‘everydayness’ of the leadership of the Lawrence Trust is revealed in ‘the ways in which the sinews of power are embedded in mundane practices and in social relationships’ (Ball 2013, 6). I now turn more specifically to thinking ethnographically in identifying these ‘mundane practices in social relationships’. First, I trace the emergence of Edwards’ school into an academy and his rise as CEO of a MAT seen as an ethnographic ‘realist tale’ (Van Maanen 2011).

Judged as ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, Edwards’ school became an academy in 2012. It subsequently sponsored two other schools, which resulted in the formation of the Lawrence Trust in 2014. At this time, new MATs received an increase in funding (usually between 8% and 14%) which had previously been allocated to LAs (although conversion today does not attract the same monetary benefits). For Edwards the decision to become an MAT was a natural progression of his growing expertise as he had supported other ‘failing’ schools during the period. Edwards is one of the founder members of the Lawrence Trust seeing the opportunity to convert as a way of expanding his reach as a National Leader of Education. He explained the rationale: ‘Conversion, why would we not convert? It’s a no-brainer!’

One claim made by the state is that MATs enjoy more ‘enhanced freedoms’ than LA maintained schools. This ‘claimocracy’ (Gunter and Hughes 2022) forms part of ‘the problem’ of the MAT where the liberation narrative continued with the White Paper Excellence Everywhere (DfE 2016) reaffirming ‘autonomy and freedom’ for MATs and the subsequent 2022 White paper Opportunity for All, where MATs are seen as the ideal solution for the school system.

The appeal for MATs lies in the ability to impose individual pay structures, enjoy certain freedoms in curriculum design. They can change the timings of the school day and enjoy some freedom over their admission arrangements. Importantly, these freedoms in practice result in the loss of autonomy of individual head teachers through the imposition of the CEO, the MAT brand, operationalised through a tightly controlled back office and homogeneous management. In the Lawrence Trust for example, teachers were required at stand at their classroom doors checking pupils’ equipment each lesson, Edwards reinforced this undeviating approach : ‘Teachers don’t carry spare equipment as it’s checked at the door: the dictionary, the planner, the reading book; you can’t come to school without a bag’. Standardised professional development, the imposition of school improvement targets and teacher appraisal systems are also key features. Thus power is exercised in local, regional and material institutions (Foucault 1980, 97), where the manifold relations of power permeate characterise and constitute the social body. Edwards describes this exercise of power within his schools with the utilisation of an imaginary ‘line’ pupils cross on entry to the school:

We have the red line in all our schools, as the children come up to it they know, they look at themselves and say ‘am I properly dressed for school?’ … every school we go into does this and it’s transforming. They get out their see-through pencil case with all their equipment in because no one ever does not have a pen. (Career Interview)

Edwards’ power as CEO is operationalised for example, when he receives invitations from Regional Directors (formerly known as RSCs)² or LAs to support failing schools. Edwards, ‘charge[s] a lot of money because we do a good job’ (CHI 26/9) for this service. These lucrative arrangements support Edward’s agency and influence throughout the region where his template for school improvement is in demand. Other schools visit the LT regularly to learn of these perceived successes. Edwards confirms this: ‘I think we had 52 schools come to see us last year to see how we get behaviour this good’ (Career Interview). The MAT then is the structural embodiment of ideological intensification.

The emergence of ‘new types’ of leaders

The LT as a ‘material institution’ of power relations (Foucault 1980) is invested through government policy. The catalyst being the 1988 ERA accompanied with the considerable reduction in the power and role of local authorities where democratically elected officials ceased to have influence and involvement in the running of schools, resulting in the decline of public education into one of private oversight and corporate leadership practices, which is extended through expansion projects: the selling of the brand; transformed through appraisal procedures and surveillance mechanisms (Skerritt 2023) and displaces existing practices with new knowledge and knowing. Within this emerging complex system of schooling is the expression of new types of leaders and leadership practices which have become normalised:

• New leaders: The emergence of a new type of school leader: the CEO of a MAT as a policy networker and broker (Hughes 2019 Kulz 2017).

• New practices in leading: Developing links and networks with the market to seek entrepreneurial opportunities (Hughes 2020; Ball and Junemann 2012; Courtney and McGinity 2022).

• New leadership practices: Managing teachers, managing pupil performance, managing the business, engaging in school take overs (Courtney 2016; Gunter 2023).

New Leaders: A new and distinct type of school leader is being constructed (Kulz 2017) eschewing the traditional model of the head teacher as lead profession espoused in the 1970s and 80s (Grace 1995). Head teachers are being re-conceptualised as corporate leaders of educational service providers, undertaking entrepreneurial activities and interfacing with the market beyond the locale of the academy (Hughes 2019; 2020). Edwards’ practices as CEO centre on the market and his entrepreneurial dispositions:

Interviewer: Do you see yourself now as an entrepreneur, a businessman or an educationalist?

Edwards: All three, I came from a business family.

Edwards’ reconstruction of his professional ‘self’ is, for Gunter (2018), ‘being depoliticised through major interventions into identities and practices’, (12) with preferred models of leadership such as ‘transformational,’ ‘instructional’ ‘distributed’ under the umbrella of ‘system leadership’ espoused by central government. This is to ‘build capacity in the system: where leaders demonstrate: system leadership beyond their own boundaries–for example by participating in mentoring programmes, or supporting fledgling trusts’ (Education Committee 2017, 14).

New practices in leading: As a successful CEO, Edwards is frequently invited to take over-schools, become involved with school-to-school support as a way of improving standards and developing the trust brand through entrepreneurial activities. Edwards’ track record as the ‘go to trouble shooter’ gives him credibility and power, he was ‘the head of one of the biggest schools’ which gave him legitimacy and regional recognition. The privileging of certain private individuals as experts, and the process of forced academisation (where schools were judged to be in ‘special measures’ or ‘requiring improvement’; by Ofsted are required to become convertor academies), are all ‘circulating mechanisms of power’ (Foucault 1980, 93). Edwards exercises his power through the productive networks of local government officials, regional ad visors, governors, where he goes into ‘failing’ schools enjoying the challenge:

… they had three heads in one year, so me, [and the LT Executive team] went in. I was the head, and it was exciting … … we sorted out behaviour, we helped to get the new head in.

Such involvement is productive and lucrative: ‘On the back of that we were then approached by another LA … the school was the 10th worst school in the country’.

Entrepreneurial activities include selling online learning products to non-education markets and extending his lucrative consultancy practice. Edwards’ networks created and nurtured over time extend beyond the confines of education and penetrate big business, regional foundations and a national charity through board membership (Hughes 2020). They are in effect ‘circuits and systems bearing power’ (Marginson and Sawir 2005, 281). These arrangements ensure Edwards is situated in important positions of power and influence. Additionally, he is often asked to present his perspectives on successful leadership at government sponsored events for MAT executives; he appears in front of government Select Committees; advises Ofsted and appears in the media as the education expert. Within the LT, Edwards sets the ‘conditions of its functioning’ (Foucault 1991, 235), supervising knowledge production and exercising power where Edwards displays his uncompromising attitude and his self-assurance that he is ‘right’:

I said: ‘you can either go today, give me your keys and your laptop or I’m going for you.’ You can only do that if you are absolutely certain. I’m really good, that’s what I’m good at, I have never taken anybody on unless I am completely right.

New leadership Practices: MATs are seen as ‘strong resilient structures able to drive up standards’ (DfE 2016, 16); achieved, according to the government, through competition, the publication of national league tables and the setting of challenging pupil achievement targets by central government and providing parents with school choice. Foucault (1991, 296) describes this as ‘a new type of supervision – both knowledge and power, over individuals who resisted normalisation’. Underperforming teachers are ‘disposed of’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015), for example Edwards recalls the time when he removed colleagues: ‘I did sack the IT manager, no back up, lost all the GCSE and A level work … I had to walk at least three people off the site; senior people’ thus new leadership practices focus intensely on the performativity of teachers with all its horrors.

Other practices involve the actual process of conversion to an academy. Certain successful MAT CEOs are invited by the government through the Regional Directors to take over failing schools or offer school to school support, these arrangements are approved by a local advisory boards (formerly Head Teacher Boards)³ who oversee the decision-making process. The process is arbitrary in that there is no transparent tendering process, for Edwards the experience is unsatisfactory: ‘ … the decision making is shocking … because of the competitive element within it … to be fair there are so many declarations of interest it gets passed around different boards’. For Foucault power accumulates new bodies of knowledge, for example forced conversions are imposed where the local community has very little choice of sponsor unable to resist conversion (e.g. The Barclay school in Hertfordshire and the John Roan School in Greenwich, SE London – Weale 2018). Forced academisation orders are issued by the DfE in conjunction with the LA whereupon the Secretary of State can impose an executive interim board, which then engages with the process of conversion to an academy. Forced academisation is thus an undemocratic process undertaken by private sponsors at the behest of the government. MATs have removed students from their school rolls before public examinations to preserve their position in school league tables. The practice is widespread amongst MATs with students aged 15/16 are ‘disappearing’ from schools (Education Committee 2018). The Delta Academy Trust for example ‘lost’ nearly 7% of their students in 2017/18 (Mansell 2018, u.p.). Here, these ‘little tactics of the habitat’ (Foucault 1980, 149) are examples of the new technologies of power.

Conclusion

This article makes an important contribution to the field where research on individual MATs is limited. Theorising the Lawrence Trust as a problematisation through writing its genealogy traced its ‘genealogical descent’ and emergence (Tamboukou and Ball 2003, 206), reflecting the haphazard nature and dispersion of education policy. The emergence of the MAT is conceived as a series of contingencies and random beginnings. What is clear is the MAT as ‘the present’ is the imbrication of a complexity of alliances and assemblages which converge, collide, build on older practices and legislation.

The ethnographic approach offered a ‘productive tension’ illuminating the localised power relations in the everyday operations of the MAT through a deeper analysis of the leadership practices of the CEO. What is clear is the contingent ontological nature of the MAT in how it came to be, and in the telling of the leadership story of Edwards, its CEO, it questions the way schools are being led in ways that are both more and more corporate where being a leader and leading is undertaken in the private realm.

Edwards is situated in a particular context, influenced by his individual career history. His story is not dissimilar from Culford the Executive Headteacher in Kulz (2017) book, but Edwards’ position is distinct as a CEO in overseeing several schools, undertaking outreach work arranging school takeovers, and engaging in entrepreneurial activities symbolising the reimagining of education as a service provider in an increasingly marketised space. The ethnographic approach situates Edwards as CEO as the embodiment of policy, symbolising a new type of leader, undertaking new leadership practices, where knowledge is tacit and sold as a commodity and where Edwards’ history reveals his position of head teacher, incubated in the public education system has descended into the private sphere of the MAT CEO. While neoliberalism has pervaded other global education systems the unique nature of the MAT structure and its formation is directly connected to the complexity of an increasing fragmented school system in England.

As a state apparatus, the Lawrence Trust depicts ‘the technology of power’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982) embodied by the CEO. Edwards as an opportunistic CEO as an early adopter of the MAT structure engages in leadership practices gaining autonomy and authority to develop his entrepreneurial dispositions (Hughes 2020).

However, the so-called freedoms of the academies project articulated in policy discourse, promising self-determination, or ‘the freedom to act’, are rather mechanisms of neoliberal governmentality (Foucault 2008, 341). Indeed, significant legislation (such as the 1988 ERA) reveals a descent of the public: the dying embers of the LA and the rising of private, that is capital accumulation and dominance of private interests, through appropriation, a lack of competition to tender in school take-overs and opaque consultation arrangements. Legislation has displaced democratically elected LA’s transforming their role into one of ‘strategic commissioning’ (Harris 2012, 538). Progressive centralism based on libertarian values such as entrepreneurism and business endeavour, with the state as a mode of power is the ‘acting upon’, the body politic (Foucault 1991, 26).

The MAT ‘archipelago’ represents the totalising power structures of the state where the Lawrence Trust renders the normalisation of privatisation and corporatisation within state education combined with the subordination of a publicly elected body – the local authority. The Lawrence Trust as a concept and structure has no coherence in origin, its genealogy is not deterministic but forms part of a broader disparate assemblage of forces. The apparatus of public education has been dismantled, rearranged and redeveloped, forming a complex array of ‘mechanisms of normalisation’ (Foucault 1991, 306) manifested in the corporatised leader, the CEO.

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Belinda C. Hughes

Belinda C. Hughes is a lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include critical education policy, leadership, multi-academy trusts and network ethnography. Previously she was a head teacher in the UK and taught in Hong Kong for 15 years.

Notes

1 The DfE define middle-sized MATs as those consisting of between 6and 10 schools (from Association of School and College Leaders Guidance Paper 126, March 2016).

2 The Regional School Commissioners (RSCs) have been replaced in 2022 by Regional Directors who act on behalf of the Secretary of State for Education. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/advisory-boards

3 Advisory boards formerly Headteacher boards (HTBs) are responsible for advising and challenging RSCs on academy related decisions. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/advisory-boards