‘Decentralised’ neoliberalism and/or ‘masked’ re-centralisation? The policy to practice trajectory of Maltese school reform through the lens of neoliberalism and Foucault

Abstract

The politics of the later part of the twentieth century have been marked by the emergence of neoliberalism, which has consequently impregnated the global policy climate with neoliberal technologies of government. It is within this political scenario of hegemonic neoliberal discourse that I explore one aspect of school reform in Malta – contrived school networking as mandated by the policy document ‘For All Children to Succeed’ (FACT), issued in 2005, by which Maltese primary and secondary state schools were geographically clustered into 10 colleges. I explore the influence of neoliberalism and the presence/absence of its characteristics, namely, State central control, the ‘empowerment’ agenda and the tension between autonomy and accountability. This is done both through policy analysis and policy reception – I carry out a documentary analysis of FACT and present this together with the leaders’ views, collated from interviews and observation, after being subjected to narrative analysis and interpreted through Foucault’s concepts of discourse and governmentality. Despite the gradual unfolding of the decentralization process, there is a very strong presence of State central control. Besides methodological significance for policy scholarship, this article has particular philosophical implications for educational policy, practice and theory within the infrastructure of globalized neoliberal governmentality.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• discourse
• Foucault
• governmentality
• neoliberalism
• policy analysis
• school reform

Notes on contributor

Denise Mifsud is a full-time lecturer in education within the School of Education at the University of the West of Scotland. Research areas of interest include educational policy analysis, generation, reception and enactment; leadership theories, with a particular interest in educational leadership, especially distributed forms; school networks and educational reform; power relations; Foucauldian theory; Actor–Network theory, as well as qualitative research methods, with a particular focus on narrative, as well as creative and unconventional modes of data representation. Denise Mifsud’s recent publications include: Circulating power and in/visibility: layers of educational leadership, Journal of Workplace Learning (2015); Distributed leadership in a Maltese college: the voices of those among whom leadership is distributed in the college and who narrate themselves as leadership 'distributors', International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice (2015), Manuscript awarded the 2014 American Education Research Association (AERA) Emerging Scholar Award; The setting-up of multi-site school collaboratives: The benefits of this organizational reform in terms of networking opportunities and their effects, Improving Schools (2015); The policy discourse of networking and its effects on school autonomy: A Foucauldian interpretation, Journal of Educational Administration and History (2015); Actor-Network Theory: An assemblage of perceptions, understandings, and critiques of this 'sensibility' and how its relatively under-utilized conceptual framework in education studies can aid researchers in the exploration of networks and power relations, International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation (2014); Policy-mandated collegiality in the Maltese education scenario: The experience of the leaders, Malta Review of Education Research (in press); Review of the book 'Educational Leadership and Michel Foucault' by Gillies, D. (2013), Improving Schools (2015); Review of the book ‘Ethnography lessons: A primer’ by Wolcott, H.F. (2010), The Qualitative Report (2015); Review of the book ‘Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason’ by Allen, A. (2014), Scottish Education Review (2015); Review of the book ‘Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Foucault Studies’ by Faubion, J. (ed.) (2014), Foucault Studies (in press).

Notes

1. (Dean 1999)

2. (as outlined by Peters 2001b)

3. (Joseph 2007)

4. (1980, 98)

5. (1991b, 63)

6. (Bailey 2013)

7. (xi)

8. (see Sonu 2011, Pinto 2012)

9. (1992)

10. (Gunter 2012)

11. (Honan 2004, Ball et al. 2012)

12. The ‘School Development Plan’ [SDP] is drawn up by the Head of each individual school together with the other SMT (School Management Team) members, according to the needs of their school.

13. [AfL]

14. (Sullivan and Skelcher 2002)

15. (2002g, 132)

16. (1991a, 177)

17. (Ball 1994, 19)

18. (2002a, 208)

19. The audit is a monitoring exercise that is carried out in each state school every five years. The Director for Quality and Assurance, together with his or her Assistant Directors and other related staff spend a week in a particular school checking the infrastructure, teaching, teachers’ resources and plans, the school’s development plan, at the end of which they prepare a report which is sent to the Head of School.

20. (xi)

21. (Wright 2012)

22. (2002g, 132)

23. (2002a, 205-6)

24. (Ranson 2008)

25. (Karlsen 2000)

26. (Pinto 2015)

27. (Forrester and Gunter 2009)

28. (Hartley 2007b)

29. (2002f, 346-7)

30. (2002d, 354-5)