Post-panopticism and school inspection in England

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on a study of school leaders’ experiences of inspection to argue that repeated changes to school inspection policy in England constitute a post-panoptic regime. Thinking with and against Foucault, I elaborate post-panopticism, here characterised by: subjects’ visibility; ‘fuzzy’ norms; the exposure of subjects’ failure to comply; the disruption of identity-constituting fabrications; its dependence on external ‘experts’; and its neo-conservative devalorisation of the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that post-panopticism depends on subjects having become disciplined through panopticism, whose apparatus it employs, and reveals the state’s explicit exercise of power.

Keywords:

• Foucault
• post-panopticism
• performativity
• fabrications
• school leadership
• school inspection

Introduction

The Foucauldian metaphor of the Panopticon is frequently deployed or invoked in conceptualisations of accountability and performativity in education (for example, O’Leary 2012; Page 2013; Perryman 2006, 2009; Poulson 2006; Selwyn 2000; Shore and Wright 1999). The present paper is located in this tradition, but seeks to develop rather than confirm this conceptual framework through examining school inspection in England. I argue that repeated changes to the framework employed by Ofsted, the non-ministerial body that inspects schools in England, should be understood holistically rather than as an evolutionary series of panoptic regimes which are incrementally becoming increasingly ‘authentic’ (Page 2013, 232). I draw on a small-scale, mixed-methods study into headteachers’ recent experiences of inspection and recent school inspection policy to suggest that this frequent change is purposively constitutive of a post-panoptic regime characterised by, inter alia, fuzzy norms, neo-conservatism and subjects’ ontological uncertainty. Some of these characteristics have been noted before (Ball 2000, 2003; Bauman 1998); this article seeks to develop them as an idealised, coherent set of theoretical propositions to better explain recent policy and the changing relationship between the state and schools. Post-panopticism in school inspection is designed to wrong-foot school leaders, disrupt the fabrications they have constructed to withstand the inspectors’ gaze, and make more visible the artifice of the performances that constitute their identities. As an expression of power, I will argue that post-panopticism is concerned not so much with school leaders’ compliance as with the exposure of their constructed and differential ‘incompetence’.

This paper is presented in five further sections. The next section outlines briefly the policies to be explored. I then describe the origin and development of panopticism. Third, I define its characteristics in relation to education. In the subsequent section, I describe post-panopticism, grounding this theorisation in a textual analysis of the two most recent inspection frameworks and an empirical study of school leaders’ experiences of inspection under the January 2012 framework (supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500094/1]). Finally, the paper discusses the implications of post-panopticism for practitioners and researchers and for theorising education policy.

School inspection policy in England since 2011

Ofsted was established in 1992 to reduce the role of local authorities and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate in inspecting schools in England. Inspection contracts were awarded following successful tendering; Ofsted’s rise may usefully be seen as part of the increasing, purposive incursion of the private sector into state education (Ball 2007). Ofsted’s division of schools into four categories (outstanding, good, satisfactory/requires improvement, inadequate) was designed to operationalise market forces by creating a mechanism for school failure and theoretically securing systemic improvements (Whitty 2008). Consequently, Ofsted’s inspection framework matters deeply to schools and their leaders. The framework has normally changed around every three years; however, from December 2011 to September 2012 three frameworks were used in rapid succession, which I shall argue was a product and producer of a changed relationship between schools and the state, and which must be theorised differently. The greatest structural changes to the framework took place in January 2012, and so I shall describe these first. Next, I shall outline the changes implemented from September 2012.

Some changes to the January 2012 framework (Ofsted 2012a, 2012b) from its 2009 predecessor (Ofsted 2009a, 2009b) represented an intensification of previous measures. For example, there was more emphasis on: pupils’ progress, literacy and numeracy; teaching, with more inspector-led classroom observations; and more use of data, especially concerning pupils’ attainment and progress. Lesson observations were increasingly conducted with senior leaders. Stakeholder consultation was strengthened through a new ‘Parent View’ area of Ofsted’s website, to which parents may submit their experiences of the school at any point, and through consulting more with pupils, carers, governors and staff during inspection. Many of these elements sought to enhance the notion of typicality, understood as the extent to which observations match normal school practice.

Other changes involved a significant departure from previous features; one was no longer routinely to perform full inspections of schools rated ‘outstanding’ and to alter the frequency of inspections for other schools (depending on their rating) in a move towards ‘a highly proportionate approach to inspection’ (DfE 2010, 69). Another change was to reduce the number of judgements from 27 to five: pupils’ achievement (their attainment in national examinations or other standardised tests along with their progress); quality of teaching; behaviour and safety; leadership and management; and overall effectiveness. This reduction re-directed Ofsted towards ‘a proper focus on the core function of schools: teaching and learning’ (DfE 2010, 69). These five areas were judged previously, but most were ‘promoted’ from the 2009 framework where they contributed to a wider judgement. The judgement on leadership and management alone retained rather than increased its status. Whilst many of the formerly judged areas were still inspected in order to contribute to these five judgements, some disappeared from the framework, including the extent to which schools promote community cohesion or healthy eating, and the care, guidance and support offered to pupils or their development of workplace skills. Another change was the abolition of so-called limiting judgements. In the 2009 framework these had been used to pre-determine inspection ratings in another area. So, for example, a school’s overall effectiveness rating could not exceed that for its outcomes in national examinations. A final significant change concerned how pupils’ progress was measured, from a contextual value-added (CVA) measure to value-added (VA). VA was used from 2002 in published performance data for English schools until eclipsed by CVA from 2006, and re-emerged in the January 2012 framework. VA describes the difference a school has made to individual children’s outcomes, comparing that child’s expected outcomes, based on prior attainment plus the national median for that level, with actual outcomes. CVA included in its statistical modelling other factors such as ethnicity, gender and entitlement to free school meals (a common indicator for socio-economic deprivation). In abolishing CVA, the Department for Education described it as ‘morally wrong to have an attainment measure which entrenches low aspirations for children because of their background’ (DfE 2010, 68).

From September 2012 the inspection framework changed further. First, schools not rated ‘outstanding’ for quality of teaching could not receive an overall ‘outstanding’ rating (thus re-introducing limiting judgements). Second, ‘requires improvement’ replaced ‘satisfactory’ (and two such ratings, awarded consecutively, would normally result in a categorisation of ‘special measures’, the first of two sub-ratings within ‘inadequate’). Third, normal inspection notice was reduced from one to two days to one afternoon (Ofsted 2012c).

I suggest that these rapid changes mark a shift to a post-panoptic regime. To explain what that means, I want first to adumbrate briefly panopticism and its application to school inspection and wider education policy.

Panopticism: origins and development

The Panopticon was a never-realised design for an Inspection House published by Jeremy Bentham (1791, preface), conceived to be ‘a new mode of obtaining power, of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’. This was to be effected architecturally by arranging cells peripherally around an inner inspectors’ lodge. Through back-lighting the cells and providing translucent blinds for the lodge’s windows, Bentham hoped to achieve his goal for inspectors of ‘seeing without being seen’ (1791, 21). Given the impossibility of unrelenting surveillance, next best was that ‘at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he [in the cell] should conceive himself to be so’ (1791, 3; emphasis in original) and thereby regulate his behaviour to ‘conform to such standing rules as are prescribed’ (1791, 22).

Foucault (1977) rehabilitated and developed the panoptic metaphor to explain how power since the early nineteenth century has sought to discipline the ‘irregular bodies’ of its subjects through ‘instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare’ (1977, 208). For Foucault, panopticism’s objective was to expand and strengthen the social and economic outputs of the apparatus to which it was applied. This was achieved by locating power within these disciplined bodies and their relations rather than in the sovereign body; increasing power therefore increases, rather than impedes production and progress. The ‘new ‘political anatomy’ (1977, 208) thereby created relied upon the individualisation of the objects of power, reconstituting them as objects of knowledge through their visibility to the or any inspector, and permitting differentiation and hierarchical comparison; in other words, normalisation. Consciously visible, known and judged, an individual ‘assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (1977, 202–203).

Panopticism and panoptic performativity in education

Panopticism is often applied or invoked in education, and has been developed by Perryman (2006) in her elucidation of panoptic performativity, which she coined to explain how teachers perform ‘the normal’ in order to escape the inspectors’ gaze. For her, ‘this means that lessons are taught in a particular way and school policies and documentation reflect the expected discourse’ (2006, 150). My intention here is to discuss briefly these applications thematically to give a sense of their scope, purpose and effects; I am not implying that the sum of these themes constitutes a single construct that may be found in the literature. Six themes are identifiable. First, subjects are consciously and permanently visible to all. Second, panopticism is predicated on normative clarity and permanence. Third, its goal is compliance with these norms. Fourth, through performativity (Perryman 2006), demonstrating compliance may produce performance and fabrications. Fifth, these fabrications are self-reinforcing and self-policed. Sixth, it enables educational markets.

First, panopticism as a technology of power is predicated on total and conscious visibility. Visibility is produced in schools by the frequency of inspections and the feeling that school staff are always under surveillance (Page 2013; Perryman 2006, 2009). Even when the inspectors are not there, they ‘are the absent presence in the school influencing [the] teacher's work, the school development plan and decisions arising from it’ (Troman 1997, 349).

Second, there is normative stability; panopticism functions where ‘a particular form of behaviour must be imposed’ (Foucault 1977, 205). In education, conceptualisations of ‘good’ schools derive mostly from the school-effectiveness tradition, whose focus on measurable, standardised outputs legitimises its knowledge claims (Perryman 2006). These become the school success criteria demanded by Ofsted and normalised through documentation. Poulson calls these ‘material forms of knowledge’, which ‘represent discursive and concrete forms of the exercise of power’ (2006, 590). They include the inspection framework and the accompanying handbook (Wilcox and Gray 1996) and are designed to ‘modify … [teachers’] behaviour in a permanent way’ (Perryman 2006, 155).

This modification is achieved through compliance. A school not achieving the standards that Ofsted’s framework prescribes can be closed or its leader dismissed (Roberts 2005). Leaders consequently internalise its definition of success (Hoyle and Wallace 2007) and subject themselves and staff to surveillance to ensure that practice complies with the Ofsted-sanctioned ideal (Ball 2008) whilst retaining the illusion of freedom (Ball 2003). Definitions of compliance are, however, problematic. Hoyle and Wallace (2007) see a range of possible responses located within it, from supportive to barely accommodating. Where leaders’ compliance is partial, they ‘pass’ as obedient subjects through performance (Perryman 2006). However, merely adopting the language of the discourse may implicate the performer more deeply within it and reproduce unequal power relations (Strain 2009). For Ball (2003, 221; emphasis in original), this is ‘values schizophrenia, where commitment, judgement and authenticity within practice are sacrificed for impression and performance’.

Ball (2000) characterises such identity-troubling conceptualisations of performance as fabrications. For him, when aspects of a performance coalesce into coherence – an identity deployable not because it is authentic, but because it is effective in satisfying the accountability regime – then it is a fabrication, disrupting identities because ‘the work of fabricating the organisation requires submission to the rigours of performativity and the disciplines of competition’ (2000, 9).

The ontological dangers of fabrications are exacerbated by the fifth characteristic of panoptic regimes: they are self-reinforcing and self-policing. Shore and Wright (1999, 570) reported that ‘managers as much as academics are caught in a disciplinary system whose negative characteristics they are actively reproducing’. In school inspection, Perryman (2009, 615) suggests that ‘having learnt the accepted modes of behaviour, schools continue to perform the good school between inspections until that becomes how the school functions all the time’. This is possible, however, only where such behavioural norms are known, fixed and disseminated.

Finally, panopticism operationalises markets in education (Jeffrey 2002). The differentiation and comparison Foucault saw as inherent to the disciplinary function of panopticism require quantitative data; in Ofsted’s case, these data allow schools’ differentiation into one of four categories. Policy-makers, influenced by neo-liberal ideology, have the differentiated schools that panopticism has produced compete for pupils to improve standards (although not necessarily learning) (Whitty 2008).

I want to argue that panopticism has evolved into a model which retains its apparatus and mechanisms, with its powerful, single inspectorate and operationalisation through fear. This phenomenon is particularly evident in education, explaining the persistence of panoptic interpretations. What has changed is the purpose; no longer to discipline, but to construct and expose the ‘incompetence’ of those serving disadvantaged communities.

Post-panopticism

I begin by addressing some conceptual difficulties. First, post-panopticism appears to privilege what it follows, rather than what it is. Nevertheless, since the definitional mechanism of total visibility to a single inspectorate is shared by panopticism and post-panopticism, this precludes selecting a name predicated on mechanistic difference, such as Latour’s (2005) oligopticon. Shared definitional criteria do not negate the model’s validity; post-panopticism is not defined in abjection of its predecessor, indeed I argue that it depends for legitimacy on its retention of panopticism’s apparatus. A second problem is that it promotes a tidily chronological view of regimes of power. This impression is unintended; the rapid series of policy developments prompting this analysis may settle or their goals may change sufficiently for a panoptic interpretation to become once again more appropriate. As an emergent model, one advantage of post-panopticism is its flexibility. I am elucidating it here in relation to English school-inspection policy; others must judge if the theory developed here is applicable to other systems, or can be integrated into a future model. This paper should be seen as contributing to a conversation about post-panopticism; it makes no claims to be definitive.

The features of post-panopticism in school inspection

Post-panopticism in school inspection has six main characteristics. The first is conscious, total visibility to all. Second, the ‘norms’ it imposes masquerade as such, but are purposively in flux, transient and fuzzy. Consequently they are not norms at all, although it is discursively constructed that they are, and that activities relating to them must be performed as though they are. Third, the goal of post-panopticism is to expose subjects’ inevitable failure to comply. Fourth, its consequence is to disrupt subjects’ fabrications that had been predicated on stability. Fifth, it is dependent on external ‘experts’ to produce success criteria. Sixth, its effects are experienced differentially; it adopts the discourse of the market to promote a (neo-)conservative agenda devalorising the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. These characteristics will be explored with reference to three sources: first, the two most recent inspection frameworks; second, literature recognising these characteristics or supporting their recognition; and third, an empirical study of headteachers’ inspection experiences.

The study

This study reinterprets data generated for a study of headteachers’ recent experiences of inspection (Courtney 2013), a re-interpretation prompted by Page’s (2013, 231) conceptualisation of the same phenomenon as ‘the perfection of the panoptic metaphor’. This conclusion did not match my own preliminary analysis, so I constructed an alternative model.

The original study had used an online survey generating Likert-scale data, and semi-structured interviews. All English secondary schools inspected under the January 2012 framework and whose report was published on Ofsted’s website between 1 February and 31 March 2012 were located using that website’s search function, producing 175 eligible schools. Their headteachers were emailed a link to the survey and a reminder after two weeks. Out of the 36 (21%) respondents, three (8%) led schools graded ‘outstanding’, 15 (42%) were graded ‘good’, 14 (39%) were ‘satisfactory’ and four (11%) ‘inadequate’. This compares with 5%, 36%, 42% and 17% respectively in each category amongst the population of 175 schools. A chi-square test showed that this difference was not statistically significant (χ² = 2.3, degrees of freedom = 3, p > 0.5). Neither was there a significant difference between the responding and eligible sample in terms of their sex (χ² = 1.3, degrees of freedom = 1, p > 0.25), increasing confidence in the sample.

Twelve surveyed headteachers offered subsequently to be interviewed; six were selected. These covered a range of geographical locations and inspection outcomes (one ‘outstanding’, one ‘good’, two ‘satisfactory’ and two ‘inadequate’); one school had improved its Ofsted rating, four declined and one was unchanged. Whilst thereby avoiding obvious skewing, the group is not statistically representative. One interviewee revealed during the interview that she was an Ofsted inspector. One headteacher was interviewed in person for 45 minutes, the rest by telephone for around 35 minutes.

For the re-interpretation, I first searched the phrases from the interviewed leaders’ narratives to see if and where they addressed the six themes that had emerged from my reading of panopticism. This determined the extent to which panopticism’s structure was applicable to the data. Next, I explored whether the substantive content of the utterances differed from panopticism. For this stage, I coded the phrases from the six participants in each category according to my interpretation of their meaning, comparing and enriching these codes with the quantitative data. This provided an outline of the new model’s characteristics that I developed through repeatedly thinking through my analysis and engaging with the literature.

For clarity, surveyed headteachers are hereafter referred to as respondents, and interviewed headteachers collectively as interviewees and individually as Headteacher 1–6.

Conceptualising the data through post-panopticism

The following sections discuss each characteristic of post-panopticism with reference to the study, policy and literature. My purpose is simultaneously to explain the data and to elucidate the theoretical model that draws on and derives from them.

Visibility

Visibility operationalises panopticism and post-panopticism. In addition to ‘Parent View’, since January 2012 the inspection framework has strengthened the emergent concept of a remote inspection. Here, schools rated ‘outstanding’ have their data scrutinised by Ofsted; declining standards, inter alia, would prompt re-inspection. Schools rated ‘good’, normally re-inspected after five years, receive this same ‘risk assessment’ after three years and annually thereafter up to the five-year maximum. The reliance on these data and increased inspector-led teacher observations has heightened school leaders’ sense of visibility: ‘You can’t hide because your results and your teaching are so exposed in this framework’ (Headteacher 2). The panoptic principle of continuous surveillance has thereby become better realised. As I argue below, however, this visibility is more usefully viewed as part of a post-panoptic regime.

Fuzzy norms masquerading as stable

The standards required by the inspection regime and its primary focus have changed substantively several times since 2011. This analysis recognises that this regime fits into an overarching policy landscape which constructs relative constants such as the standards agenda. Nevertheless, I argue that what has changed from framework to framework is sufficiently substantial to sustain what I call fuzzy norms, and that to see constancy is to privilege a systemic analysis over a school-level analysis. For instance, a school with average attainment, excellent CVA, very good teaching, outstanding pupil care and a focus on community cohesion could conceivably receive an ‘outstanding’ rating in 2011. From January 2012, this school would have to change its focus to producing better VA results, possibly at the expense of its de-privileged community work, to retain its status. From September 2012, its emphasis must change again to demonstrating outstanding teaching. This theoretical scenario is supported by the quantitative data; two-thirds of participants intend to devote less time to community cohesion, and over one-half less time to pupils’ health. In those schools, to those pupils and leaders, these changes matter. The validity of this interpretation does not lie wholly in finding that schools are constantly changing what they are doing – the argument that all these changes may be addressed through improving teaching is partly true, if simplistic and reductive – the point is that leaders are constantly having to re-conceptualise and re-package what they are doing, and to reconcile that with who they think they are: ‘[What] it [the framework] changes is how you present what you’re doing’ (Headteacher 2). This means that what is being judged cannot be the extent to which a school ‘conform[s] to previously defined criteria’ (Perryman 2006, 150), since there is insufficient time for any school to put in place what is needed to show conformity. Consequently, it is less useful to consider as the unit of analysis the latest criteria and their place in a disciplinary regime; rather, it is the multiplicity of changing criteria, the state of flux itself, which must be considered:

It is not the possible certainty of always being seen that is the issue, as in the panopticon, it is the uncertainty and instability of being judged in different ways, by different means, through different agents; the ‘bringing-off' of performances – the flow of changing demands, expectations and indicators … (Ball 2000, 2)

Ball (2000) describes how practitioners invest ontologically in the regime’s success criteria such that their identities are implicated in their attainment. Central to post-panopticism, therefore, is the mis-recognition of this flux by practitioners and its construction by the regime as stable. Fleeting demands acquire the status of norms. Ofsted requires inspected schools to conform to them and assesses the ‘typicality’ with which they do so. The survey showed that five more respondents believed Ofsted wanted to know what their school is normally like (n = 18) than did not (n = 13). Headteacher 6 supported this: ‘Ofsted’s key purpose is … [to ask], what do children typically get in … a typical week in this school?’ Headteacher 3 similarly disapproved of ‘people [who] performed on the day’. This typicality was assessed partly through inspectors’ talking to more children; 25 respondents experienced this. So far, so panoptic; compliance is woven so tightly into the regime’s fabric that headteachers are unaware that performance ‘on the day’ is thereby replaced by a longer-lasting and more deeply affecting fabrication. This, however, is a post-panoptic regime in which the scrutiniser forces continual re-normalisation by obscuring those norms through multiplication. Schools and their leaders are playing in a game with moving goal posts and ordered to comply with these changing criteria at all times through such mechanisms as ‘Parent View’ and inspectors’ conversations with pupils. The paradox this implies provokes little dissent from headteachers; rather, as I explain below, they attempt to comply. Compliance with an unstable template, however, is problematic; it will reproduce that instability in leaders’ identities or render visible the artifice of the attempt. There can be no typicality in post-panopticism, and the purpose of demanding it is not to achieve it, as in a disciplinary regime, but to expose leaders’ attempts as inadequate.

This unstable template is reflected in the documentation, which multiplies in response to the regime’s changing and increasing requirements. These documents are, however, provisional and contingent. They are symbolically loaded but materially emptier, although not empty, since collectively they perform a discursive function pathologising schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities, as I shall show below. Their purpose is to demonstrate the regime’s power to decouple praxis from practice; their multiplication implies not just a reduction of educational processes to mere documentation, as with panopticism, but also the ephemerisation of these documents, which must nonetheless be treated as substantive.

Compliance: more desired but less possible

School leaders’ identities are invested in the norms with which they attempt to comply. This may explain the survey results, which show compliance and agreement with the framework. Concerning compliance, when asked to say whether they would devote more, less, or about the same time to areas newly privileged or de-privileged, respondents indicated that they largely intend to focus less on un-inspected areas, even where merit might be seen in sustaining efforts there as, for example, in improving pupils’ health or engaging with the community. In these two areas, no-one reported that they would devote more time to them in future. As for agreement, the two key changes in the January framework were the most supported; 20 respondents agreed with the reduction in the number of judgement areas (with eight disagreeing), and 29 agreed with the increased focus on pupils’ progress (with just five disagreeing), even where their school would not benefit from the change to VA. It may be seen as ironic that such a high proportion of respondents (18 compared with nine) believed the 2009 framework, with its 27 judgements, was too centred on checking compliance with the policies of the former government whilst demonstrating such a high level of compliance with the 2012 version. I suggest that this misrecognition of their own compliance, to borrow a term from Bourdieu (2000), is integral to post-panopticism, in which subjects’ sense of self relies on the pretence of normative stability. Headteacher 2 similarly misrecognised the degree of her own compliance:

On one level, it [the change in framework] didn’t change what we do, because obviously my job as a leader is to get outstanding teaching and learning and outstanding achievement.

Headteacher 2 expressed these purposes in Ofsted’s language: ‘superb’ or ‘excellent’ might semantically, but not discursively, have conveyed the same meaning as ‘outstanding’. The linguistic reinforcement of power relations is noted by Mulderrig, who argues ‘that strategies of domination are often hidden beneath (and reified through) everyday language’ (2011, 562). Headteacher 6 provides a further example of compliance misrecognition as agentically conferred accord. He accepts the latest definitions of school failure and applies them unproblematically to himself:

I think, 36 or 37% of my youngsters made the expected progress in Maths last year, and that’s just not acceptable, and we weren’t inclined to argue that, and there’s no hiding place from that.

Compliance characterises panopticism, and consent to appear to comply panoptic performativity. What is different in post-panopticism is that, for many, compliance is both more desired because of subjects’ ontological investment in the achievement of its norms and less possible because of the fuzziness of these norms. Consider the term ‘expected progress’ above; semantically unyielding, it reaches into the past through the word ‘expected’ (expectations are necessarily established prior to their attainment) as well as the future through its status as a norm to be achieved. Headteacher 6 assumes responsibility for his failure to achieve this norm, yet his school was amongst the first to be measured according to these new definitions, notwithstanding the temporal omnivalence of the phrase ‘expected progress’. Three points about failure in post-panopticism follow from this. Failure is decoupled from effort and structurally facilitated in this model (particularly for those schools whose socio-economically disadvantaged pupils generally make less progress), and it is constructed by the object and subject of surveillance as the fault of the former.

So, if discipline through compliance is not the goal of the post-panoptic regime, yet the discourse of compliance must be invoked to legitimise it, what then is its goal? I suggest that the goal is to render visible the incapacity of (certain) subjects to comply; to contribute to a discourse of subject incompetence; and to disrupt their fabrications, their identities. Its goal is certainly not school improvement:

If you’re marking a child’s work, you don’t start with what they’ve done wrong, you start with what they’ve done right … If Ofsted wanted to move schools on, they would do the same. (Headteacher 5)

If panopticism may be likened (imperfectly) to an assailant holding a gun to your head and frog-marching you to the ATM to withdraw money, then post-panopticism is that assailant demanding that you dance a jig; no, a waltz; no, a tarantella! The first assailant wants your money; the second wants you to know you can be made to do anything. Both are expressions of power; only the latter is for its own sake and self-confidently naked.

Disrupting leaders’ fabrications

The ontological danger of fabrications for Ball is not simply that they may conjure up and embody the discourse they were meant only to serve, eroding through omission other possible selves, but that they constitute ‘an investment in plasticity’ (2000, 9) in their disavowal of authenticity. I suggest that this sort of plasticity may take us only as far as panoptic performativity (Perryman 2006), in which the ontological struggle is between the authentic and the fabrication, which itself may be relatively stable. This is because panoptic performativity relies on everyone knowing the ‘rules of the game’ in order to play it. In a post-panoptic regime, the fabrication must be continually destabilised to betray the players’ ignorance of the rules and the artifice of their performed identity. In the current inspection regime, this has been achieved through changing the framework; the more often this is done, the less able headteachers are to construct an effective fabrication. Headteacher 4, for instance, had constructed an identity predicated on her leadership of an excellent school; this was disrupted following her inspection outcome, leading to disbelief and self-blame:

… people are still saying we cannot believe you didn’t get an ‘outstanding’; you’re the county’s banker! So there’s an element of me feeling that I’ve let the county down. (Headteacher 4)

Whilst she attributes this disbelief to others, this is arguably a projected sentiment that she shares (Pellegrini 2010). The abolition of CVA and the privileging of ‘key’ subjects reconstitute formerly adequately or highly attaining schools and their leaders as failing, simultaneously re-categorising and stigmatising them:

And whereas we’re outstandingly good for everything else, we’re poor for Maths. And because of that, under the old framework … they would have looked at the big picture and made a judgment about the school as a whole. And we very much had the impression that with this, they weren’t interested in the big picture. (Headteacher 5)

A consequence of this reconstitution is that leaders of schools in areas of socio-economic disadvantage (whose CVA data would previously have accounted for that) now find it harder to achieve a higher rating unless they can produce a new fabrication that adheres to the latest ideal. For some, this will always be impossible; Headteacher 2, along with Headteachers 1 and 6, believes that ‘it’s an impossible framework to get ‘outstanding’ on if you’re in challenging circumstances. And that seems really profoundly unfair.’

Dependence on external ‘experts’ to produce and interpret criteria

Whilst criteria are initially produced externally, panopticism is subsequently self-reinforcing through the publication of the inspection framework along with accompanying material. This invites school leaders to interpret the judgement criteria for themselves in preparing for the inspection and, by extension, in constructing a modus operandi of school leadership. This transparency is only evoked in post-panopticism, in two ways. First, whilst any given inspection framework may ostensibly be transparent, the effect and, I suggest, the purpose of their accumulation is to obfuscate. Second, this evocation belies the power to judge retained by inspectors alone:

And their issue was that whilst our attainment was ‘outstanding’, … and our progress was high … it wasn’t rapid, because it’s been at that level for the last two or three years. And my argument was it’s actually quite difficult to be rapid when you’re already at a high point, but they weren’t having any of that! (Headteacher 4)

The power struggle is reduced to and concealed behind a battle over the semantics of the framework itself, which heads cannot win. As Gunter and Rayner (2007) argue, in contrast to the way leadership is constructed through policy, headteachers exercise power conditionally: ‘in reality they are positioned as middle managers necessary to ensuring that national reforms are delivered on site’ (2007, p. 54). The ideological framework and values underpinning the field of judgement itself – the performative focus on measurable outputs – are not up for debate, nor are headteachers asking to debate it; for all that these are ‘first-order values’, they ‘remain externally defined through policy’ (Gunter 2012, 107). What is at stake is the right to identify with the latest ideal headteacher/school that the regime structures. This regime, despite the apparent transparency of its membership criteria, remains opaque (Ball 2000); objects of surveillance do not share equal dominion of its terms with its subjects (Shore and Wright 1999).

The effective construction of fabrications depends on normative transparency, and so inspectors’ use of unofficial ‘limiting judgements’, where criteria or weightings are applied that do not appear in the published inspection materials, both disrupts these fabrications and underscores the inspectors’ privileged position as knowers (Ball 2000). Respondents (31 out of 36) and interviewees report experiencing these limiting judgements:

Ofsted … just said no, it [the overall effectiveness judgement] will have to go down as ‘satisfactory’ because achievement must be at least ‘good’. (Headteacher 1)

Whilst it is most often the judgement for overall effectiveness which is limited by that for pupils’ achievement, Headteacher 5 felt that this latter may limit others also: ‘Effectively, there was an issue within Maths, therefore, leadership cannot be “good”’. The hierarchical supremacy of the headteacher within English schools means that the stakes are higher than the mere appropriateness of a category; it is personalised, only a short step from ‘leadership cannot be “good”’ to ‘you are a bad leader’. Headteacher 5’s identity investment in being a good leader is ultimately fragile; easily undone by the capricious and unilateral application of an unpredicted, unpredictable limiting judgement. Such instances demonstrate the difference between the role of the expert in panoptic and post-panoptic regimes, one aspect of which according to Shore and Wright (1999, 560), and which I attribute to panopticism, was ‘redemptive … in so far as they made their expert knowledge available to individuals who wished to engage in the process of self-improvement in order to modify their conduct according to the desired norms’. In post-panopticism, the prolific sharing of expert knowledge gives only the appearance of the possibility of redemption. This prolificacy, both product and producer of fuzzy norms, has the opposite effect. The transience and multiplicity of what is shared mean that it is possible in most circumstances for the regime to substantiate, as far as is necessary or desired, an accusation of deviation from them. The fear of pathology is more real than the hope of redemption for school leaders, even those who convince themselves that they have done what is demanded for the moment.

Adoption of market discourse to promote (neo-)conservative agenda

Post-panopticism invokes the discourse of the market to legitimise it, yet the two are increasingly decoupled. Effective markets depend on normative stability; changing continually the way in which outputs are measured, or the outputs themselves, destabilises them. As with compliance, there is a smoke-and-mirrors invocation of one discourse to disguise another; here, it is neo-conservatism, one of whose characteristics is the devalorisation of the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. Neo-conservatism employs the language of neo-liberalism (Apple 2011), but its actions inhibit its operationalisation.

The interviewees’ data showed that leaders’ fabrications are more susceptible to disruption where they lead schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which are less likely to receive a higher Ofsted rating because of the abolition of CVA. As Headteacher 1 points out: ‘And of course, to get “good”, you’ve got problems in a school like ours when they ignore the CVA’. The reason this is ontologically significant for leaders is that they must think of themselves in marketised terms (Ball 2003), and this rating affects how they are positioned and positionable in the market. Headteacher 6 refers to himself explicitly as a commodity compromised in the education market after being sacked:

Convincing those higher in education that a headteacher who’s led a school from being ‘good’ to being a special-measure school in two years, you know, that’s a bit of a tough sell, and I understand that.

Post-panopticism sits within and is legitimised by neo-liberalism. It also makes use of its mechanisms of categorisation, producing labels that are internalised into leaders’ identities. These labels are not produced according to some morally neutral indicator of quality, but are attached more commonly to leaders of schools serving disadvantaged communities. This may become self-perpetuating, since being stigmatised has been shown to affect leaders’ agency. Ho, Shih, and Walters (2012) found that leadership attributes were suppressed by low expectations of competence produced through labelling. Barreto, Ellemers, and Banal (2006, 337) summarise findings from a range of studies demonstrating that ‘members of devalued or stigmatized groups are frequently exposed to negative stereotypes and low expectations … [which] lead to self-fulfilling prophecies’. Herek (2007, 907) argues that the stigmatised have ‘less influence over others, and less control over their own fate’. Arguably, successive frameworks that, whilst differing individually, collectively seek increasingly to pathologise disadvantaged schools and their leaders may be said purposively to dismiss their interests. Not only are the current fabrications of the leaders of disadvantaged school communities made disproportionately more useless than those serving more élite communities through the changes to the framework, these fabricators’ capacity to produce new ones is lessened. Post-panopticism structurally and purposively accords less agency to (those serving) the disadvantaged, which it conceals through its reliance on seemingly value-free quantitative data:

So the schools in other parts of the country whereby children are coming in with … higher levels, then those children are just going to make more progress than a school like us. (Headteacher 1)

I think in a school … that would have had really good CVA but the overall attainment was lower, and where you’re dealing with more deprived children … I do think that the new framework doesn’t really favour [such] schools. (Headteacher 2)

This argument follows Poulson, who draws on Troyna to observe that the political right in education, as elsewhere, has pursued political aims such that ‘the cultural and linguistic meanings of a political, economic and social order representing the interests of a minority are legitimised through being represented as common-sense, universal and natural’ (Poulson 2006, 582).

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that repeated changes to the way in which schools are inspected in England make the continued application of a panoptic interpretation decreasingly useful. The apparatus and mechanisms of the regime that has replaced it are largely similar, because their invocation is important in its functioning and legitimation, and is sufficient only because panopticism may be argued to have achieved the compliance of its objects. This is an important sense in which this regime must be seen as post-panoptic, rather than not panoptic, and makes the meaning of terms such as purposes, goals and effects problematic in this framework. Who, for example, owns the purposes of post-panopticism? In panopticism, the goals and purposes of the inspectors – discipline through surveillance – are those of the regime and transparent also to the inspected. This is necessary to effect predictable and desired behaviours. In post-panopticism, Ofsted inspectors themselves are positioned within its matrix of uncertainty. The values-based commitment many bring to improving children’s lives through inspection is not translated into the goals of the regime. Instead, these good intentions are cynically exploited to conceal the regime’s goal of demonstrating its authority, especially over the socio-economically disadvantaged (although of course, as with any despotic regime, there will always be colluders). This exploitation again depends on the prior existence of a panoptic regime that is assumed by inspectors to persist. In this way, even as they attempt to enforce the latest criteria, inspectors misrecognise their inadvertent complicity in a game whose rules have changed to satisfy themselves of their moral rectitude.

Post-panopticism is a profligate and inefficient means of exercising power. It requires the continual production of success criteria by the regime; it takes effort to translate these discursively into the norms they cannot be; they never become self-sustaining and so must be repeatedly reinvigorated from the centre; and it necessitates increasingly intensive monitoring by the state of the increased number of ‘failures’. More importantly than all these, however, is that post-panopticism does not create, or even intend to create, the more effective institution that was structured by panoptic norms. Schools cannot possibly improve through such a regime (although they might despite it). Their improvement must therefore be seen as purposively secondary; the regime’s focus and effort are concentrated instead on differentiation and judgement, not normalisation. Visibility and compliance are key to this process; in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) saw that the way to minimise resistance was to make the exercise of power less visible. Now, we see that this is no longer necessary; the operationalisation of power may be made explicit, primary even, provided that habits of compliance have become entrenched such that its objects’ identities rely on their compliant state. What I am describing here is a different conceptualisation of the relationship between schools, their leaders and the state that follows and builds on that structured by panopticism. This relationship is characterised rather by the state’s cynical, differential and explicit exercise of power and its certainty of success; an exercise in which considerations of school improvement are not even theoretically present.

There are implications for three areas arising from this paper. First, for theory; post-panopticism in education has not previously been formulated as such, although the constituent parts of the framework draw on and develop extant work in the field, and post-panopticism as a more general set of principles has been current in other fields for many years (Boyne 2000). I hope that it, or parts of it, may prove useful as a way to think about accountability in education, even if only in rebuttal. Just like panopticism, it is an idealised model and therefore is open to contradiction on empirical grounds. Second, there are implications for practitioners. It is more important than ever before that praxis should be grounded in a values-centred practitioner focus on educational processes and purposes rather than in the transient exigencies of the state. It is less clear to me how this may be achieved in a policy context in which the discourse of values has been appropriated by the National College for Teaching and Leadership and subsumed into a wider, largely incantatory discourse concerning vision (see, for example, Wright 2001). Third, for researchers, I recommend that the cumulative effect on school leaders of adopting and discarding fabrications be investigated as their effectiveness is legislated into and out of existence. How do school leaders manage the policy-constructed mutability of variously ‘core’, ‘peripheral’ and even ‘dispensable’ constituents of who they claim or understand themselves to be? How does this play out in an education landscape dominated by the discourse of autonomy? What is the place of and space for agency in such a conceptualisation? If, as Thomson (2001) notes, school leaders cannot change the rules of the game, then they must at least subvert them to avoid what Ball called ‘personal meaninglessness’ (2000, 8), where school leaders become separated from the ethical dimensions of the business of doing leadership.

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500094/1].

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participating headteachers, Helen Gunter, Ruth McGinity, Su Corcoran, Catherine Needham, Chris Chapman, Sonia Exley and those anonymous reviewers who contributed helpful suggestions.