The management of ‘emotional labour’ in the corporate re-imagining of primary education in England

Abstract

The last 20 years has witnessed the spread of corporatism in education on a global scale. In England, this trend is characterised by new structural and cultural approaches to education found in the ‘academies’ programme and the adoption of private sector management styles. The corporate re-imagining of schools has also led to the introduction into the curriculum of particular forms of character education aimed at managing the ‘emotional labour’ of children. This paper argues that character education rests on a fallacy that the development of desirable character traits in children can be engineered by mimicking certain behaviours from the adult world. The weaknesses in the corporate approach to managing ‘emotional labour’ are illustrated with empirical data from two primary schools. An alternative paradigm is presented which locates the ‘emotional labour’ of children within a ‘holding environment’ that places children’s well-being at its core.

Keywords:

• Emotional labour
• corporatisation
• emotional capitalism
• Nussbaum
• well-being

Notes

1. Within a historical time frame, ‘corporatisation’ can be understood as a conflation of UK New Public Management (NPM) policies started in the 1980s (Mahony & Hextall, 2000) and the more recent phenomenon of ‘corporate globalisation’ (Saltman, 2003). Both NPM and ‘corporate globalisation’ have been driven by the neoliberal faith in the power of free markets to solve all economic and social problems. In its extreme form observed in the US, ‘corporatisation’ has become a state-backed social, cultural and economic movement for ‘corporate globalisation’ which seeks to ‘erode public democratic power’ and ‘enforce corporate power locally, nationally, and globally’ (Saltman, 2003, p. 3).

2. Academies are state-funded schools sponsored by private sponsors and taken out of democratically elected local authority control to be directly responsible to the Secretary of State for Education. The ‘academies programme’ was started by New Labour (1997–2010), who continued the NPM policies and sought to establish quasi-markets in education, based on consumer choice as a lever for improving quality in the education system (Gunter, 2012). The Coalition (2010–2015) and Conservative governments (post-2015) accelerated the academies programme and introduced ‘free schools’, borrowing the American charter and Swedish free school models. Despite the assumption that academy sponsors simply contribute extra resources and new ideas, many of these ‘new’ ideas are directly imported from the corporate culture where they are deployed to improve employee performance.

3. ‘National Strategies’ refer to the curriculum introduced by New Labour in 1998, 1999 and 2005, which focused mainly on literacy, numeracy and science.