Ken Jones

This review focuses on debates that have occurred in and around English education since 1944. It tracks a sequence of intense and continuing arguments about the proper meanings of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’, about their salience to education, and, through education, to wider issues of equality, democracy, economics and emancipation.

Who are the participants in these arguments? In the 30 years after 1944, the review identifies three main currents of thought and practice:

• a cultural conservatism for which tradition and authority are important reference points;

• a progressivism concerned with child-centred learning;

• and a tendency whose belief that ‘culture is ordinary’ led to an insistence that working-class and popular culture should be represented in the classroom.

After the ‘great transformation’ of the 1970s and 1980s, new protagonists emerged. These included currents of thought that have seen ‘creativity’ as central to the knowledge economy, as well as new theoretical frameworks that insist on the socio-cultural nature of learning. Their prominence did not mean the total eclipse of older perspectives, whose continuing histories are dealt with in the later sections of the review. In many cases, the review suggests, ‘new’ positions intertwined with older understandings.

Read the rest of the paper on the Creative Partnerships website at

http://www.creativitycultureeducation.org/data/files/cce-lit-review-83.pdf

Michael Fullan is a leading international education consultant who is a key adviser to to the Labour government in Britain and to the Ontario Ministry of Education. In this extract from his article The Global Privatization of Education Policy George Thompson argues that Fullan has significant business connections which stand to gain directly from his reforms. The article was published on November 6 in the Daily Censored, an independent blog and news source based at Sonoma State University, USA. Read it in full at http://dailycensored.com/2009/11/06/the-global-privatization-of-education-policy-lorna-earl-conflict-of-interest-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

For more on education in Ontario visit Education Action: Toronto at http://educationactiontoronto.com/home/

Michael Fullan: Ontario’s reform architect

Michael Fullan has significant business connections which stand to gain directly from his reforms. All of the reforms place greater emphasis on raising literacy and numeracy “outcomes” through targeted funding, perpetual teacher and principal retraining, escalating interventions and greater accountability for standardized test performance.

He runs Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. and Leadership4Change, and he occupies a place on the board of international advisors of Microsoft’s “Partners in Learning.” He sells twenty different reform handbooks, including the International Handbook of Educational Change as well as professional development kits for principals and he is a keynote speaker at conferences for organizations such as the Solution Tree.

Fullan has been “Special Advisor” to the Premier and the Minister of Education from April 2004 to the present. He is the chief architect of reforms in Ontario, which he was hired to bring in after helping reform Britain’s education system under Tony Blair. A May 2004 article written just after Fullan was appointed by Ontario’s Premier McGuinty, entitled “School Britannia,” gave “a preview” of the reform that was about to happen, and indeed, it turned out to be very accurate. (http://www.michaelfullan.ca/Articles_04/05_04/05_04.htm)

SPECIAL ADVISOR OR CONSULTING AGENCY?

Despite his prestigious and most influential role in public office where he has for five years been seemingly employed as a private individual in the public interest, one of his businesses, Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. has received three payments: In 2006, the company received $58,915 (http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/english/budget/paccts/2006/06vol3eng.pdf), in 2007-8 the company received $75,900 (http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/english/budget/paccts/2008/2007-08volume3.pdf), and in 2009, Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. received $88,750. (http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/english/budget/paccts/2009/09vol3eng.pdf).

Despite Fullan’s promotion of his numerous other business interests at Michaelfullan.com, “Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc.” is never mentioned on his website. According to USA Today, Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. received $250,000 for a five month contract in 2009 to provide professional development and long range planning to improve literacy and numeracy in Louisiana. (http://content.usatoday.net/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?cId=thenewsstar&sParam=30335373.story)

How much has Fullan been paid for his government position, where he has been special advisor from 2004 to the present? Surely he’s made more than 223,565, when his company commands $250,000 for five months’ work in Louisiana. Has Fullan been using his position of influence in the government to direct business to his own company? Or has the Premier deliberately misrepresented Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. as a “Special Advisor” rather than a hired consultancy?

Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. would appear to sell strategy for accountability reforms and solutions to teachers, principals and superintendents who must adapt to such reforms. As Fullan explains, a “big feature of our work is to play down accountability in favor of capacity building, and then re-enter accountability later. If you lead with accountability, which most states do, then people are immediately on the defensive and it doesn’t work so well. (http://www.houstonaplus.org/testimony/focus-michael-fullan)

Ontario has now reached the “re-enter accountability” phase:

OFIP (Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership) has already targeted over 1000 schools in Ontario for “intervention,” some of which can even be performing above the average, but considered “stagnating” if they are not manufacturing year over year improvement.  (http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/ofip.html).  The upcoming Bill 177 will make school boards accountable for student EQAO results and pass rates, with a “no excuses” policy for lower performance in poorer areas and provisions for ministry take-over of boards who fail.

The new accountability obviously places increased pressure on principals to produce results for their boards. With the Ministry’s new “information finder website” being used to promote parental shopping, there is also considerable pressure to keep enrolment up at their school.

THE FULLAN LINE OF PRODUCTS

Fullan’s primary means of “capacity building” is leadership training. Four million dollars were invested in the “Ontario’s Institute for Education Leadership,” a branch of the ministry put in place specifically to move principals into the driver’s seat of reform. (http://www.education-leadership-ontario.ca)

Complementary to this aim is the full line of Fullan products:

First, the leader who wants to be truly aligned with the ministry’s objectives would do well to read all twenty of Fullan’s books on change, reform and leadership.  In particular the fifty percent of principals who find themselves “below average” on any given EQAO test should invest in Fullan’s Turnaround Leadership, wherein the man behind the reform that now threatens their careers “identifies the positive things turnaround schools do to get off the critical list.” http://www.principals.on.ca/cms/lucre.aspx

But Fullan’s Six Secrets of Change is the ultimate self-help resource for principals, offering “what the best leaders do to help their organizations survive and thrive.”

Next, principals who want to truly understand the new rules of the game would be well advised to buy access to Fullan’s leadership tools made available at Leadership4Change (L4C). This is a special web portal which allows you to “email Michael Fullan directly”. Also, “the L4C Learning Zone gives you access to Michael Fullan’s latest books, articles and a set of videos developed specifically for L4C membership. A vast collection of additional resources is also available here.” http://www.michaelfullan.ca/resource_assets/IntroBrochure.pdf

In addition, the leaders of tomorrow will want to buy the professional development packages. A number of Fullan’s products are available on the Ontario Principals Council website, where a principal who wants to stay off that “critical list” should be sure to get the following for just $339:

“Leadership and Sustainability Multimedia Kit for Professional Development

This all-in-one training package provides staff developers with the necessary tools for training leaders at all levels of the educational system to create large scale, sustainable reform without jeopardizing short-term results.” http://www.principals.on.ca/cms/lucre.aspx

There is also going to be a dramatic new need for achievement, which in today’s Ontario, translates into EQAO numbers. Three hundred dollars is a small price to pay for Fullan’s “Breakthrough: A Multimedia Kit for Professional Development.” This resource promises to “Give educators the keys to a transformative instructional approach that raises and sustains schoolwide achievement!” Furthermore “Facilitators will be able to demonstrate the authors’ powerful Triple P Breakthrough Model.” http://www.corwinpress.com/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book232361

Finally, for $375 the new generals of Fullan’s army could have seen Fullan and Hargreaves “Building a Community of Leaders: Change Wars – A Hopeful Struggle” http://www.opsoa.org/pages/members/09%20Annual%20Conference/2009_PreConf.html

ON MICROSOFT’S BOARD OF INTERNATIONAL ADVISORS

Fullan is a member of the board of international advisors on Microsoft’s Partners in Learning, whom he has been with since 2003 and which had by 2007 established partnerships with governments in over 100 countries. Partners in Learning is Microsoft’s international branch aimed at partnering Microsoft as a private corporation with governments. Microsoft is the world’s most aggressive proponent of both public-private partnerships in education and charter schools, as one may easily deduce from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Report: “We have invested $2 billion, directly reaching at least 781,000 students and opening or improving 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia.” http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Documents/reflections-foundations-education-investments.pdf

Thus, Partners in Learning (PiL) isn’t just about promoting the use of Microsoft products and services such as hardware and software: it’s about reforming every aspect of education from teaching to administration, along the lines of PiL’s “School of the Future”, Microsoft’s flagship charter school in Philadelphia. More importantly, it is focused on influencing government policies themselves, and actively promoting “decentralization.” According to Microsoft’s own definition, this means “putting control of budgets, personnel, and academic affairs back into the hands of local communities,” but giving full control of budgets to individual schools is also a way to allow for private providers like Microsoft to gain access to markets that were previously controlled by central governments. This explains Fullan’s role as a reformer in Thailand and other countries:  “Through Learning to Lead Change, a workshop developed for Partners in Learning by international education reform expert Professor Michael Fullan, more than 13,000 educators throughout Thailand are learning strategies and tactics to prepare for decentralization and to help create a sustainable culture of leadership, collaboration, and innovation in their schools.” (http://www.microsoft.com/education/partnersinlearning/Leadership.mspx#Thailand)

The fact that Fullan’s reforms, with their emphasis on local leadership, do not differ much from those in Ontario should be a cause of great concern.

It is worth pointing out that on the Ministry’s website, one of it’s four overall initiatives has been to “enhance the way education is delivered to students by expanding e-learning opportunities, creating more online resources, increasing opportunities for experiential learning and supporting specialized schools.” http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/about/whatwedo.html

Could such “specialized schools” be charters? Could the e-learning be moving us in the direction of the virtual charter schools which have emerged as a force in the US due to the low cost and high margin of profit compared to having buildings and live teachers? With the impending closure of over 140 schools in Ontario due to under-enrolment, it is interesting to note that the declining enrolment working group made reference to “e-learning” 25 times in their 78 page report entitled “Planning and Possibilities”. (http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/DEWG.pdf)

One of the key groups consulted by the Declining Enrolment Working Group was the OASBO (Ontario Association of School Business Officers), who, in their newsletter, did not fail to see “possibilities”. Bill Blackie, the Executive Director of OASBO, explains in an article called “A Perfect Storm” in OASBO newsletter the enrolment crisis plus the economic recession equals opportunity:  “Boards and their senior staff may need to consider making overtures to potential business partners and service providers that could share sites, or processes that would produce a benefit t to both partners. The declining enrolment working group also made reference to the need to examine the expanded role of technology in delivering programs. This too might be an area to consider for partnerships….If we can capture some of these opportunities, the business functions in education will emerge as a vital and integral part of a new education environment.” http://www.oasbo.org/admin/eZeditor/files/f_9_June2009.pdf

COMPUTER GIANTS IN CHARGE OF ASSESSMENT

In his article, “Large-Scale Reform Comes of Age,” Fullan’s own research betrays a strong bias, for he sees Microsoft, along with Intel and Cisco, as the new leaders to take command of the high-stakes standardized testing which currently regulates the entire U.S. education system: “Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft have just launched a much needed global project with leading academics to develop assessments and corresponding instructional practices for twenty-first Century skills thereby addressing the narrowness, and low level of current testing in the U.S. and elsewhere.” http://www.michaelfullan.ca/Articles_09/LargeScaleReform.pdf

Clearly Fullan sees no conflict of interest in handing the computer giants both assessment and “corresponding instructional practices” —in essence giving them control of the tail of assessment that now wags the dog (instruction) and controls the whole system.

REFORM=PRIVATIZATION

Fullan lauds Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reform, which has accelerated privatization of schools in many ways, for “put[ting] the spotlight on those falling behind, and [because it] has sparked greater attention to data and its use.” But he criticizes NCLB for  “too narrow tests, short time lines, little capacity building, and a punitive strategy. No state or the federal level has an explicit system reform strategy that comes even close to what we know is needed. The only good news is that there is a rapidly growing realization that existing strategies are not working as the U.S. continues to lose ground internationally; and the best news: key leaders are beginning to show interest in particular strategies that get results….” http://www.michaelfullan.ca/Articles_09/LargeScaleReform.pdf

The four references to “strategy” in the above quote make it abundantly clear that Fullan is critical of the strategies, not the goal.

Network 23 (Policy Studies and Politics of Education)

Patterns of conflict in education: France, Italy, England[1]

Ken Jones,  Keele University, England

k.w.jones@keele.ac.uk

(Draft paper – Comments welcome)

The course of educational reform in England has been broader, deeper and faster-moving than that of any other country of Western Europe, cutting deeply into what remained, after Thatcherism, of the post-war policy settlement. [i] No sector or strand of education has been unaffected by a programme which ranges from large-scale privatisation to micro-level classroom reform. Yet despite a certain, persistent level of grievance, this is a programme that has not encountered forceful opposition. Teachers’ unhappiness with an assessment regime based on high stakes testing has been well publicised, without being translated into a collective response. Discontent with the government’s programme for ‘academy’ schools – state-funded privately-run institutions – has resulted in a number of local strikes, and in a lively national campaign, but not one conducted on a mass scale. [ii]School and university teachers have taken occasional, limited action over pay – the NUT’s one-day strike in 2008 was the first national strike since 1987. University teachers have fought local campaigns against redundancies (for instance London Metropolitan University 2004 and 2009, Keele 2008) but have not effectively challenged a policy that aims to align higher education with business needs. Among university students, opposition to the imposition of tuition fees was initially strong, but has waned since, with the passing of the 2004 Higher Education Act, fees became law.

 This pattern of continuing, but low-level and only sporadically organised discontent is increasingly at odds with the shape taken by response to educational reform in other countries. Looking in 2008 at the map of Europe, west of the cold war frontier that ran between Trieste and Stettin, one could imagine a giant ‘X’ of protest, with its diagonals running from Ireland to Greece, and Germany to Portugal. In this year alone, there occurred:

• strikes and public protests against education cuts in Ireland;
• school students’ strikes, supported by  the GEW educational union, in Germany;
• teachers’ strikes in Catalonia against a package of New Labour style reforms that included against the further advantaging of the church-run but state-subsidised private sector;
• in Portugal, the largest demonstration ever organised by teachers’ trade unions, which protested against a new system for the assessment of performance;
• in France, teacher strikes against job cuts, and school-students mobilisation against changes to the curriculum of the lycées;
• most spectacularly, an autumn of protest in Italy and a Greek hot December, actions in which a range of forces – school and university students, unemployed or precariously employed categories, teachers, university researchers – were strongly engaged. 

 This paper, in discussing such events, has both substantive and theoretical intentions. Substantively, it aims to trace contrasting patterns of educational conflict in Western Europe. It seeks to explore and explain the discrepancy between England and other countries of this region – here, France and Italy -  alike faced with a neo-liberal policy orthodoxy, but responding to it in markedly discrepant ways. Thus in one sense it places itself in a long line of research and speculation about the ‘peculiarities of the English’, or, occasionally, the British (Anderson 1963, Thompson 1965/1979, Johnson 1989, Gamble 1981) – about those historically embedded aspects of the English social formation that have offered neo-liberal reform a place to make its home. The paper’s main focus, however, lies outside England. It aims to chart and explain the ways in which education has become increasingly central to social conflicts in Europe, as a site on which significant forces contest the place they are assigned in the reform programme championed by national governments and by transnational entities, including the European Union.  This formulation suggests also something of the paper’s theoretical ambitions: it aims to integrate into the understanding of education policy an appreciation of the role of collective social actors, and to understand the impact of such actors not just on government strategies but on the forms taken by the educational state.

The centrality of education (1)

As several writers have suggested (Hingel 2001, Laval and Weber 2002, Dion 2006), EU policy in the 1990s increasingly recognised the importance of education to economic policy. In 2000, the European Council (Heads of State) meeting in Lisbon took this recognition to a new level of emphasis. The Council declared that the EU, facing the challenges of a globalised knowledge economy, must transform itself by 2010 into ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world’ (European Parliament 2000). Education systems were placed at the centre of this transformation. They were now too significant to be left to the haphazard and variegated process of nationally-determined change. ‘European policy in the field of education and training,’ the European Council declared, ‘must look beyond the incremental reform of existing systems. It must also take as its objectives the construction of a European educational space of lifelong education and training, and the emergence of a knowledge society’. In this context, it would be advisable to adopt ‘a European framework that defines fundamental new educational competences’ (European Council 2000) Through the Lisbon discussions, and those of the Council meetings that followed, the governments of the member countries thus transferred to the European level the power to formulate and pursue large-scale questions relating to the orientation of education systems, regarded now as economically central. In Dale’s formulation, the locus of policy-making was in some senses ‘upscaled’ from a national to a European level. (Dale 2005)

The resulting policy framework has been concretised and monitored through the EU’s programme for education and training, which allows for the co-ordination of member states’ initiatives, and their checking against agreed bench-marks. The EU is complemented in this process of upscaling by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which carries out thematic reviews of national policies in such areas as ‘equity’ and ‘teacher effectiveness’, publishes the influential annual volume of comparative data, ‘Education at a Glance’, and runs the PISA programme for the comparative assessment of students’ performance (Alexiadou 2005, OECD 2008). Such ‘global’ policy influences have been further elaborated at national level: governments have both adopted specific objectives, and more generally, cited the global ‘consensus’ in an attempt to legitimate a national programme of reform (Laval 2004). [iii]

There has developed a rich repertoire from which projects of reform can draw. It centres on, first, an increased role for the private sector in the provision of public education, together with a rise in private influence on education policy more generally; this partial shift from public to private sometimes goes under the heading of ‘opening education to the wider world’ (Ball and Youdell 2008). Secondly, it envisages higher levels of participation and attainment both in formal education, and in lifelong learning. At the same time, however, formal education is reshaped, with more emphasis on skills and competences, and less on what is regarded as outmoded disciplinary knowledge; differentiation among learners, though discouraged at primary and lower secondary levels, is being embedded at 14+ or 16+, so that academic and vocational divisions are securely maintained. Lifelong learning, like higher education, involves cost-sharing, with the ‘user’s’ contribution rising sharply. Thirdly, the educational workforce requires transformation, so that it is capable of addressing the need for skills and competences, and of working in a focused and cost-effective way. Fourthly educational governance must be reformed: local managements should be incentivised to promote change and local school systems responsive to parental choice; at the same time, the centralised evaluation of the work of schools and universities is developed to a new level of specification.

The centrality of education (2)

The changes promoted by governments and international agencies collide with the experiences and demands of other sections of the population.

The reform of schools and universities has become a focus of intense controversy and conflict across Europe, involving at least two major social actors – youth, and those who work in public sector education. In this section, I explore the basis of their discontents.

If education reform lacks popular legitimacy among students, school students and the youth population more generally, it is above all because it does not deliver on the promise of economic prosperity that is central to its rhetoric of change. This is a problem that predates the recession of 2008. For more than 20 years, levels of youth unemployment in much of Europe have been exceptionally high – according to Eurostat figures, the 2006 figure reached more than 20% in France, Greece and Italy, and nearly 20% in Spain. (European Commission 2008: 75) René Bendit, in a survey of youth in Europe, concluded that the problem was structural rather than cyclical; a new social situation had come into being, that of precarity. Precarity cannot be captured solely by unemployment statistics – it embraces issues of pay, job security and career and lifecourse progression; it prevents individuals, from managing their successive entrances into and exits from the labour market in a way that ‘conforms to their expectations’(Bendit 2006:59).

The mechanisms of precarity have two kinds of effect. For some – working-class and migrant youth, with low levels of qualification -  they entail near-complete exclusion from secure employment. For others, those ‘of high educational background’, precarity relates to a gap between levels of qualification and the types of employment  that are available. Levels of educational attainment have risen, and expectations have been heightened, yet access to secure jobs, to housing and to an ‘autonomous’ adult life is harder to come by. The French researcher Frédéric Lebaron (2006) writes in this context about a ‘devalorisation’ of educational qualifications, in which students become both intensely sceptical about the value of their studies, yet also watchful of policies that seem likely to create further status divisions in education, and to dislodge the hold of some groups on qualifications they regard as essential to the chance of individual career-building. It was from this suspicious perspective that EU policy was read, and the dramatic onset of the 2008 recession, in the midst of protest against educational reform, only served to strengthen the severity of such a reading.

Alongside youth, neo-liberal reform has also sparked public sector workers into opposition. Jobs are being lost, by the tens of thousand; conditions, under tighter managerial control, worsened, and the meaning of professional work transformed in a way that lessens autonomy (Jones et al 2007: Chapter 9) But behind these important sectoral concerns lies another set of motivating factors. Peter Gowan has observed that:

‘West European governments and business groups have used the EU since the 1950s to change the pattern of business exchanges both between the EU and the rest of the world and between the member states within the EU itself. But since the mid-1980s, the EU project has acquired an entirely new character … affecting relations between labour and capital not just in economics but in politics and social life more generally’ (Gowan 2005).

In this context, educational change is seen as a strategy for changing the relationship between social classes to the advantage of dominant groups, threatening what are seen both as the historic achievements of working-class and progressive movements, and more broadly as constituent elements of national identity. Kees van der Pijl has argued that many European societies developed against the ‘classical liberalism’ of Britain and the USA: in order to avoid defeat in military or economic competition, they attempted to establish developmental states, in which governments had a strong role in economic planning and social provision, and in which populations were mobilised in support of the national-social project. (van der Pijl 2006) After the defeat of fascism, popular movements were able to push such development further, embedding commitments to equality in national constitutions, and inflecting the social order, at many levels, in democratic and socially inclusive directions (see also Canfora 2006, Chapter 13). It is this process – obviously uneven and incomplete, but capable nonetheless both of affecting the character of the state apparatus and of commanding a certain loyalty – which market-orientated policies put into reverse.

Educational struggles are in this way over-determined by the terms of a wider conflict. They are seen as reactions to a process both of disenfranchisement (van der Pijl 2006) through which key prerogatives of national parliaments have been displaced on to European structures, and of social dispossession and regression – in which historic commitments to equality are diluted, and goods once held in common are privatized, in a move typical of the accumulation strategy of neo-liberalism (Harvey 2005). Thus when educational workers mobilise against current policies, their protests often resonate with popular opinion, and their cause can become a symbol of the defence of a particular social model against the reform project advanced by transnational élites and by a national political class which has accepted the global policy orthodoxy but is not inclined to debate it. [iv]. What might appear to be sectoral issues can in this context ignite wider conflagrations. 

Such conflicts are triggered not only by issues of cutback or privatisation, but also by attempts to remake education at classroom level. As we have seen, for the EU, the world of learning is located at too great a distance from the ‘values of entrepreneurship and the world of the economy’ (de Meeulemeester and Rochat 2001: 8). To establish a new curriculum, based on ‘problem-solving abilities, general cultivation and innovation abilities’ (ibid) entails uprooting the disciplinary traditions around which school and university knowledge has been organised, and with which parties of the left had strongly identified (Anderson 2009b). The imperatives of the EU here clash with the value systems of students and teachers, and the politics of knowledge becomes a new arena of conflict. The modularisation of higher education curricula, for instance, uncontroversial in Britain, is seen in other parts of Europe as something strongly to be resisted – opposition to the ‘Bologna Process’ that promoted a credit-based modular system, and a three year undergraduate degree, has been integral to militant campaigns against university reform in Spain, France and Greece.  For its critics, modularisation strips knowledge of its complexity, reducing it to a series of bite-sized entities to be consumed by a student body taught to pursue certification rather than learning, acculturated to accept the measurement, in reductive form, of knowledge. Thus, while for the EU, the linking of education to economic imperatives is central to its modernisation, for its opponents students, such a connexion involves a epochal process of degradation.

As in the case of popular mobilisation in support of educational institutions which remain in many respects inegalitarian, there is something of the imaginary in this defence of traditions that have historically been linked to elitism and educational stratification, and are now presented as bastions of critical humanism. It is only in the context of precarity that the protests can be fully understood, in their more material dimensions as well as in their historicist allegiances. Students argue that it is the mass university that will be most affected by modularisation and the demands of ‘work’: the grandes écoles, and the ‘Serie A’ universities which students think the Italian state wishes to create, will be relatively immune: knowledge, therefore, will be stratified, in a way that lacks intellectual legitimacy: ‘the value of the degree is related not necessarily to quality of knowledge but to the position of the university in the hierarchy of the educational market’. (Do and Roggero 2009).For similar reasons, school-students have been wary of reforms that seem to weaken disciplinary tradition – the opposition of French lycéen(e)s to changes in the baccalauréat, expressed in the student strikes of 2005 and 2008, illustrate such fears.

France

Van der Pijl’s analysis provides two insights into current patterns of   mobilisation. The first is that they are driven by political as well as by economic factors: the deteriorating position of youth – and of workers more generally – in the labour market has an obvious impact on levels of protest; but so, too, does a population’s notion of the meaning of its education system in relation to what are seen as key elements of national identity. The second is that the forms taken by such movements need to be understood in terms of the location – historical, as well as contemporary – of a particular national state within a world system. As van der Pijl puts it, ‘the ability of different societies to submit to capitalist discipline varies, and the very pressure to do so tends paradoxically to reactivate the specific heritage of each separate society in new combinations’ (2006:31)

It is from the vantage-point provided by such insights that the following sections trace recent episodes of policy contestation in France and Italy and go on to compare them with developments in England. In France, since 2003 there has been a succession of mobilisations against government-driven change, involving, at their centre, both teachers and young people – school-students, university students and the unemployed.

The largest of these was the Spring 2006 campaign against the Contrat Première Embauche.[v] The trigger for the movement was the legislative response of the de Villepin government to youth uprisings in the suburbs of major cities in late 2005, whose fires – almost literally – illuminated a racialised condition of near-permanent social exclusion. The government interpreted the unrest as evidence that France required, in both its labour market and its education system, a dose of modernisation. Its response  included an educational dimension, labelled ‘equal opportunity’, that  strengthened academic/vocational tracking at 14, and an element of employment law that aimed to increase the chances of employment by flexibilising the youth labour market – that is, by making it easier for companies to take on, and lay off, young workers.

Proposed in January, the CPE had within two months given rise to an immense opposition. Tuesday 7^th March 2006 saw demonstrations in 160 towns and cities, involving a million people, most of them higher education students and school-students. From the 7^th onwards, most French universities were occupied. By the 18^th March, a movement of students and workers had been created, with a million and a half people on the streets; and in the demonstrations of Tuesday 4^th April this number doubled again. 750,000 took to the streets in Paris, 250, 000 in Marseilles; there was a mass strike by workers in the public sector. As protest took more dramatic forms, with roads blocked and railway stations occupied, the government gave in and on 10^th April announced the withdrawal of the law.

The movement against the CPE showed that the extension of neo-liberalism to the public sector, and to particular sectors of the labour market, remained a controversial and uncertain project, and that opposition to such change retained an impressive social resonance, built around a sense of solidarity that was an end as well as a means. The sociologist Bertrand Geay had noted the significance of the organisations created by an earlier wave of protest, in 2003: the strike-generated assemblées genérales of schoolworkers and citizens were lived by their participants as a kind of ‘retour à l’essentiel’ – in which the founding principles of public education were reactivated, and knowledge and the conditions of its diffusion became matters for public appropriation (Geay 2003). Something similar happened in 2006. The frequent mass mobilisations became ‘weekly rendez-vous’ where ‘the employed, the unemployed, parents and grand-parents’ joined with students from schools and universities.  One basis for such mobilisation, contra accounts which suggested their definitive weakening (Rayou and van Zanten 2005), was the continuing resonance of ‘old’ commitments – to equality, to democracy and to professional self-definition, which provided a perspective from which to understand and react to present miseries.

These traditions of social republicanism have been accompanied by, if not completely linked to, newer interests: the precarity of youth is at the heart of the French social crisis, and the movement against the CPE demonstrated this in the strongest of ways. But the movement’s course and outcome also suggested something of the uncertainties of opposition, at several levels. The first problem, here, was constituted by internal divisions which related not just to differences in political opinion but to  gulfs in social experience. Sociologists have written about the parallel lives of ‘deux jeunesses’ – the youth of the cités (estates, social housing), and the ‘scholarised youth’ of the lycées and the universities. Mauger (2006) emphasises that these categories, while both internally heterogenous, and partially overlapping, reflect a real divergence of experience and prospects. The social segregation of life on the estates is a world away from that of many lycéen(e)s, with the risk of long periods of unemployment much higher; these differences were reflected in the protest movement. But by underlining the insecurity of those who might have thought that their qualifications would keep them from the life of precarity that lay ahead of those with fewer educational resources, the anti-CPE movement brought together sections of the population which had previously lived segregated lives, in both social and spatial terms. It created, at least temporarily, an ‘improbable’ alliance of social categories (Mauger 2006) – an alliance whose tensions were considerable.

Movements for change in the post-war period saw themselves as modernising forces, and gave modernisation what was in broad terms an egalitarian content. The past was seen in terms of obscurantism, classroom authoritarianism, privilege.  For those in the twenty-first century who continue to work in this tradition, the terms of the counterposition have changed: the ‘past’ signifies a period of partial democratisation and social reform, a resource to be defended. Yet for many of those marginalized youth, who have hurled their energies into protest, the attachment of social movements to an imagined ‘good time’, when structural reforms brought about improvements in the condition of the masses, is itself part of the problem. In the words of one participant:

‘We (the students) are struggling against the system because to us it seems unequal; they (the youth of the banlieues) are fighting because the system excludes them a priori … And they also consider us to be part of the system (which is true), and therefore they direct their hatred towards everybody, including us. For them, even the rebellious part of the system still belongs within it. … For me the violence (of some of the banlieue youth) is not part of our action, but it poses the problem of how to renew the dialogue with these people, so that their struggle lends weight to ours.’ [vi]

The second problem relates to the movement’s political scope and continuity. The concessions that ended the mobilisation were the least the government could have offered, and amounted to much less than what many protestors wanted. A national assembly of students in Dijon called for the cancellation of the government’s entire recent legislation on ‘equal opportunities’, for an amnesty for those arrested during the riots in the banlieues, and changes in new laws on immigration. (Visco 2006). Teachers, students and parents traced a direct line between government intentions for the labour market and its school policy, which aimed to strengthen tracking; in the words of one lycéen, ‘we’re mobilising not only against the new employment law, but against the new legislation on “equal opportunities”; and in those of a Sorbonne student, ‘the withdrawal of the CPE is an important demand, but it is not the principal grievance of those who have launched this movement’. [vii]A major difficulty in securing these demands, that addressed the whole range of educational, labour market and civil liberties issues facing youth, was one of representation. The movement was a vast and turbulent social force, but relied for its negotiating capacity on organisations – the main trade union federations which had more limited aims. Linked to this was a problem of political expression and continuity: for all its momentary impact, the movement was not easily translated on to the political plane – the 2007 Presidential elections were contested, in the main, by candidates who favoured a neo-liberal transformation of the social model and were won by the most right-wing of these figures, Nicolas Sarkozy. As one protestor commented, governments refuse ever to consider closed the question of the social model’s future; after enormous efforts of mobilisation have achieved concessions, the French government would, after a brief pause, want to play ‘extra time’ to achieve a result in its favour. This, essentially, is Sarkozy’s project. 

It is not, however, a project that has become consensual, and if the political problems of opposition have not been resolved, then nor have those of government. In van der Pijl’s terms, the ability of French society to respond to calls for neo-liberal discipline remains limited.  Two years after the CPE protests, in the context of widening social protest against rising unemployment, the same combination of forces continued to mobilise against reform, with the memory of 2005/6 shaping the actions of both protestors and politicians. In November 2008 teachers struck against a cluster of policies. Their protests – the third round of action that year – centred on job losses, but were linked also to a cluster of policies seen as devaluing the ‘professionalism’ of teachers and discriminating against working-class students: the abolition of schooling for the under threes and the network of specialised help for ESN pupils; a cut in the number of hours in baccalauréat classes in the lycées , phasing out university departments for teacher training, surveillance of what teachers wrote in the blogosphere, constant administrative pressure. (Mouloud 2008) According to the FSU, some 200,000 people joined in the 20^th November demonstrations. The Minister of Education, Xavier Darcos, dismissed the protests, claiming they belonged to an old and disappearing tradition. More alarming for the government was the mobilisation of lycéen(e)s and the re-emergence of protest in the banlieues – anxious headteachers reported that hooded youth from the estates were appearing outside their gates.  Having earlier declared that ‘hesitation’ formed no part of his vocabulary, Darcos, announced that he was postponing for a year the lycée reform. His reasons, Le Monde inferred, had everything to do with the balance of forces between reform and its opponents, in which economic crisis and youth revolt threatened to re-ignite the fires of 2005/6 and expose France to the Greek experience of youth revolt. (Frezzoz 2008)

Italy

The leftist writer Rossana Rossanda has pointed out that the precarity which provided the focus for French protest had become institutionalised in Italy without significant opposition: it was the norm in all but the biggest organisations in the services sector, was a fact of life in education and involved 2.5 million workers across the country. Unions and centre-left parties tended to confine themselves to denunciations of the phenomenon, while in effect they encouraged a process of arrangiarsi – of personal accommodation to circumstances perceived as unalterable. (Rossanda 2006)

But at least in relation to education, Rossanda is overstating the case.  Precarity may be a fact of educational life, but it also a source of persistent grievance, that feeds into a wider opposition to reform. The campaigns against the ‘Moratti laws’ drawn up by the 2001-2006 Berlusconi government mobilised hundreds of thousands of students and teachers. . Launched by smaller ‘autonomous’ unions such as Cobas-Scuola, the campaign was joined in 2004 by the larger education confederations. The movement saw Moratti’s reforms as harbingers of privatisation and austerity, and of an institutional and a cultural transformation of the Italian school, by means of which national knowledge traditions would be replaced by competences, and lateral lines of communication between teachers involved in a common educational project would be redrawn to emphasise the vertical transmission of government initiatives. The demands of the action were couched in defensive terms. Citing the  constitution of 1948, into which they read a guarantee of teacher autonomy and collegiality and a commitment to equal opportunity, the unions opposed measures  of regionalised decentralisation – seen as a vehicle for uneven development across regions and increased managerialism – and the shortening of the primary school day. Sections of the movement sought to go further and to organise around the defence of education a wider-reaching campaign. The occupations in which university students were involved in Autumn 2005 attempted to express such an alternative, criticising the exclusionary policies of Moratti, and demanding the introduction of a national law demanding the right to study and free access to knowledge. (Yeaw 2005)

With the return to office of Berlusconi in 2008, these contests were renewed with increased vigour. According to Anderson (2009a: 6), the scale of his victory tempted Berlusconi to pursue  a ‘tougher socio-economic agenda’, especially at those points where achieving the desiderata of global policy orthodoxy could be linked to an attack on ‘opposition constituencies’, in particular the ceti medi riflessivi – civic-minded professionals and public employees – whom some writers have identified as a core progressive force (Ginsborg 2002) . Thus, while tackling tax evasion was not on the agenda, the reform of education certainly was.  In Summer 2008, the government announced legislation that affected both schools and universities; it combined cultural conservatism with economic neo-liberalism, and linked educational restructuring to financial cutback. At school level, the reforms (the ‘Gelmini Laws’), included:

• in primary schools, a single class teacher (‘maestro unico’)  to replace the current system of three teachers rotating between two classes.
• In lower and upper-secondary schools, the reintroduction of the ‘good conduct grade’, with a low mark meaning that students have failed their end-of-year examinations.
• A grading system in primary and secondary schools, with students who do not achieve a pass grade made to repeat the year.
• In primary and lower-secondary schools, separate ‘inclusion classes’ for those (foreign) students judged to have poor Italian.

In addition to these measures, the draft law presented to parliament by the Berlusconian deputy Valentina Aprea in July 2008 – and approvingly noted by the OECD – sought to bring about a more systematic and longer-term reform, involving school autonomy, the competitive recruitment of teachers, and the closer management of their work (OECD 2009: 106).

In higher education, the government planned large-scale cuts, and a reduction in the recruitment of staff: one new lecturer for every five retirees. The law also ‘envisaged the possibility that universities (might) convert themselves into private foundations’ (Muratore 2008).

The response that these measures called into being was diverse and passionate. By early October, students occupying the Università L’Orientale in Naples acclaimed a wave of student strikes and faculty occupations that extended from ‘Turin to Palermo’, mobilising undergraduates, doctoral students and researchers – a category whose precariousness could only be increased by the reductions in recruitment (Rete 2008). On 17^th October, a strike called by the autonomous unions mobilised hundreds of thousands of protestors. By the end of October, there had been another national strike, across education sectors, this time called by the larger, recognised, unions – Flc-Cgil, UiL and Cisl-Scuola -  and La Repubblica was reporting that the movement had the backing of 50% of the Italian population (Diamanti 2008). 14^th November saw demonstrations across Italy, with perhaps a million people mobilising in Rome; and there was a further national strike, called by the autonomous unions, on 12^th December. As in France, educational protest was the precursor of wider action: in February 2009, the metalworking and public sector unions called a one-day strike, against the whole range of Berlusconi’s social and labour policies.

As van der Pijl suggests, we need to distinguish between the different components of this uprising, to establish some sense of a diversity of motivation and objectives, and some sense, too, of points of convergence and unity. The most spectacular element of the protests was the movement calling itself L’Onda, the wave. Based in the universities, but involving also students from the licei and the scuole medie, as well as many from the precarious sectors, the wave surged through the centre of many Italian cities, blocking the streets, and reclaiming public space – for instance, some of the bridges in Venice, from which protest had been banned. In its political articulation, the wave tended to reprise some of the classic themes of Italian autonomous politics: it was a sector of the movement that was ‘not political in the strict sense of the term, but rather a defence of [protestors’] own concrete needs and conditions’ (Anon 2008a) It refused to be ‘represented and instrumentalised by anyone’ (Anon 2008: 3) and presented itself as a:

‘radical refusal of the imposition of an economic model (starting within the national education sector), of cultural forms (racism) and of repressive actions (police). The movement calls itself the “anomalous Wave”, referring to the fact that it does not rely on traditional forms of representation, that it is transversal and not predictable. The Wave is more emotional than organizational, more improvised than structured. In relation to its anomalous nature, the recognition of “being precarious” as a common identity is central, as the different subjects that participate in the movement recognize themselves in this condition’. (Anon 2008: 4)

The political logic of this section of the movement pointed towards ‘autoriform’ and ‘autoformazione’ – the self-organisation of all the precarious, and all knowledge-workers, outside the established structures – an exodus articulated in the slogans ‘free knowledge’ and ‘free university’, which imagined a university outside the state. These were objectives at odds with the emphases of the mainstream (centre-left) trade union movement, which wanted to rally support around what one of its leaders called the ‘defence of the public school system’ against a government whose ‘only logic’ was one of ‘cutting funds and jobs’ (Muratore 2008)[2]. While many in the movement did not accept that the issues were as limited as this, the notion of ‘defending the public school’ had considerable resonance. As in France, the principle of free access to all levels of an integrated education system was seen as an historic social conquest, embedded in the post-war constitution. It was recognized, of course, that the system was riddled with clientilism, inferior in size and attainment to that of other European countries, and weakened by years of neo-liberal management; but for reasons both symbolic and material, it was still worth defending, and to defend it was for some to vindicate the social movements of an earlier period. [viii]That the university was organized on a class basis was beyond doubt, wrote Benedetto Vecchi, in Il Manifesto, but the movement of 1968 had introduced a factor which was a ‘living contradiction’ of this principle: the concept of access to knowledge as a universal social right. (Vecchi 2008).   Likewise, the political scientist Nadia Urbinati could speak simultaneously both of the corruption of the Italian state, including the university, and of that same university as a collective good ‘built with the collective funding of the Italian people’. [ix]From this latter point of view, Berlusconi’s project was plain – the ‘transformation of the social identity of the country’, so that private values triumphed over public ones. (Pullano 2008)[x]

It was this wider, historical view of the stakes of the conflict that animated many protestors – but the movement was not only built on backward glances. For many, the protests ‘had placed at the centre of the debate the great question of the future’ (Anon 2008a). Here, two issues were linked. The first was that of the ‘governing class’, seen as incompetent and amoral, and bent upon the pillaging of the public sector by means of privatization (Mattei 2008). The second was generational: the people whose interests the political class had particularly damaged were the young, for whom the years ahead would be an ordeal of precarity: ‘they have wasted the past and now they are asking us to give up our future. They think that because they have passed a law, we will come to a stop. They don’t understand that we are going forward, that we have nothing to lose.’ [xi](Maltese 2008) From this self-perception of youth, as a generation at risk, came the slogan which served to unify the early states of the movement: ‘non  pagheremo noi la vostra crisi’ – we won’t pay for your crisis.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the only responses to the Gelmini débacle were those of the wave and the unions. Van der Pijl’s point that global pressures activate national responses in new combinations has an application that runs wider than an analysis of the components of resistance. It applies also to the dominant policy, and the terms in which it is debated. For some, the reforms were an Italian instance of a global trend (Vecchi 2008); the form it took was nationally specific, but not exceptional; if the situation in the universities was ‘feudal’ then this was ‘the peculiarly Italian interpretation’ of the tendency for the university to turn itself into a commercial entity so as to compete in the ‘education and knowledge market’. (Do and Roggero 2009) A different position, well represented among journalists and academic commentators, was that the crisis offered an opportunity for the kinds of reform that might make Italy a ‘normal’ country, like all the others of the west. In this sense, the protests were interpreted as a kind of lens turned less upon the crisis of neo-liberalism than upon the structural defects, especially at higher level, of Italy’s education system; and the protest movement was potentially the vehicle for modernising change, a movement of ‘reformism from below’, a project for another kind of university (Maltese 2008). Singled out, here, was the need to break down the power of the professoriat, the ‘barons’. The Italian university, according to Rossi, has been deformed by the workings of a ‘historically hierarchical’ mode of functioning ‘which empowers primarily full professors in recruitment procedures and in all university administrative matters while keeping the other parts of the teaching and research staff in a rigidly subaltern condition in terms of career autonomy and decision-making power’ (Rossi 2006: 278-9). Out of this baronial power grows a web of clientilism.

It is difficult to overestimate the disgust and despair with which the protest movement regarded this aspect of the university system, which presented not just a sectoral problem but a window on to the totality of Italian life. For Vecchi, the baroni were ‘a caste like many others in Italy’, for Urbinati, a reminder that ‘we’re among the most corrupt states in the world’ (Vecchi 2008, Pullano 2008), while other critiques denounced Italy even more comprehensively, as a ‘land where nothing changes; where all attempts at change are blocked … with no space for imagination, creativity, innovation.’ (Veltri 2008).  The art historian Salvatore Settis drew from his experiences of global academia to compare the Italian university – ‘we are outside Europe, we have been third-worldised’ – and those of the anglo-saxon world, where competition for jobs was regulated by transparent procedures, and  research funding was merit-based (Miliani 2008). Maltese, likewise, praised the course taken by university reform in France, which had concluded with a decision that ‘funds should be allocated on a rigorously meritocratic basis’ (Maltese 2008). Urbinati, too, made comparisons overseas: England had ‘developed a means of evaluating research that distributes resources on the basis of merit’ (Pullano 2008).

The passion of this critique is striking, but so are its ambivalences: its terms supply popular understanding, but they are also the chosen ideological instruments of elites.  ‘Baronialism’ is a target both of the movement’s anger, and of the polemic of neo-liberalism, which has long been eager to counterpose the evils of ‘producer control’ to the disciplines of the market (Economist 2008). That the university is ‘rigged’ is the bitter contention of unemployed researchers, but also of those who want to remodel it on business lines (Vecchi 2008, Perotti 2008). The particular figure in which reform is linked to a market-inflected notion of fairness is ‘merit’. As Rosalind Innes has pointed out, ‘merit’ provides the framework in which a great number of reforms, whose effects are likely to contribute to processes of marketisation, can be legitimized: fair and open competition for university places, effective evaluation of the work of schools, a more equitable system of research funding, again based on  competition and audit (Innes 2008). For reformers of this disposition, the Gelmini laws were not a serious project.  The cuts they proposed were not linked to any discernible educational purpose. They failed to address the biggest problem, which was the incapacity of the state to control key processes of governance: it could  plan neither the distribution of teachers across the national territory nor the creation of academic posts; it had no means of preventing the ‘cancellation’ of its policies by local and regional authorities that refused  put them into practice on the ground. From this point of view,  modernization had failed, again (Bordignon and Checchi 2008) – but the problems thus highlighted stemmed less from a neo-liberal world order, than from an historic, national predicament. In the attempt to realize in local circumstances what it took to be a global orthodoxy, the Italian state had only revealed its familiar weaknesses.

By December 2008, the movement had arrived at a pause – perhaps a halt – with many ambiguities intact. Berlusconi, explained La Repubblica, had no intention of ‘setting the piazza alight’, especially when it seemed that educational protests were linking up with wider concerns about the economic crisis. Change to the teaching hours in the liceo and the technical college would be delayed; others changes would  be diluted – only if parents wanted it, would the maestro unico idea be introduced in a school. More money would be found for the university. (La Repubblica 2008, Martini 2008). These concessions, of course, left the stakes of the conflict unclaimed. The movement had demonstrated its capacity temporarily to block reform, to mobilize in great numbers, and to create a counter-culture of opposition that seethed with critique, discontent and the desire for alternatives. For autonomists, this was the main point: whether or not the Gelmini reforms succeeded, the vital thing remained the struggle to develop and embody a counter-power, able to construct a different kind of knowledge, a different kind of university. Strengthened by L’Onda, that struggle would go on. For others, it was problems of the movement that were most pressing. As in France, it had scorched the snake, not killed it; the blows it could inflict were not decisive. It lacked a credible political alternative to the government, and more widely to a governing class which was in agreement with the need for reform, albeit divided on the means of attaining it: ‘no cuts and let’s talk’ was the offer that Berlusconi received from Walter Veltroni,  leader of the centre-left PD. (La Repubblica 2008a). The offer suggested that the Gelmini reforms, suitably repackaged, might in some ways live on.

England, and some general reflections

In ‘The Education Debate’ (2008), Stephen Ball summarises ‘the outcome of the debate [among researchers] about globalization’ and education policy. Following Lingard and Rizvi (2000), he concludes that globalization ‘does not impinge on all nation states and at all times in exactly the same way’. Some states are ‘more able and more likely to deflect or mediate global policy trends, while others … are required to accept and respond to external reform imperatives’. (2008: 29) National policies need therefore to be understood as ‘the product of a nexus of influences and interdependencies’, the intermingling of global and local logics.

It is certainly possible to understand in these terms the recent, halting course of policy-making in France and Italy. But the experiences reviewed in this paper suggest that we can usefully reformulate Ball’s argument, so as to arrive at a different object of analysis. To focus on ‘policy’ as the object of study seems overly to privilege the actions and projects of government and of organizations that contribute supportively to its programmes – and thus a priori to decentre other social actors. (In most current work, even where ‘resistance and countermovements’ are acknowledged [Taylor et al 1997], there is in practice a tendency to note their influence rather than fully to explore its terms, strategies and effects.) Yet the impact of globalization, of which Lingard and Rizvi write, reaches the educational space of France and Italy as much through the responses of social movements, as through the policies of government. And for this reason, if we wish fully to understand this space, we need to work with a broader concept than that of ‘policy’ or ‘policy-making’. A better alternative might be ‘educational contestation’, a concept that would enable analysts to focus on a range of social actors, and to explore fully the intellectual and political resources with which they work.  The concept might also lead to a stronger understanding of the politics of policy-making, that is of the ways in which key decisions, strategies, projects and achievements bear the marks of contestation, and express an orientation – perhaps accommodating, perhaps uncompromising – towards other actors and projects.

As well as illuminating the course of policy-making, a perspective which emphasizes contestation can also help us understand state formation and reformation, that is to say, changes in the nature and function of apparatuses of the state and their relationship to political and social conflict. In this context, much work in the Marxist tradition of writing about the state remains useful, especially, it seems to me, that of theorists such as Gramsci and Poulantzas who have attempted to understand the ways in which states, always in unstable conditions of class contestation, and of changes in the relations of production, have adapted their forms.

Gramsci’s contributions here are well-known (Gramsci 1971: 59, 105). Analysing the dynamics of Italian state formation under Fascism, he wrote of passive revolution, or ‘revolution-restoration’, as a process in which the ruling social groups, through state intervention rather than popular mobilisation, sought to promote sweeping institutional change and national renewal; and in which reform was linked not to the extension of democracy, but to the preservation of existing power structures in the face of a radical challenge which had been defeated but not eradicated (Jones 2004). As Johnson and Steinberg put it, with a particularly insightful stress on what state power does in such periods, ‘passive revolution is the demobilization or disorganization of forms of popular agency’ (2004: 12).

Poulantzas’ work, notably State, Power, Socialism (1978) addresses a different conjuncture, one in which the state was attempting both to contain the social energies unleashed in the 1960s and 1970s, and to manage the transition from the long boom of the period 1945-1975 to the restructured capitalism that followed the slump of the mid-seventies. This complex experience sensitised Poulantzas to the relationship between state forms and social conflicts. If state power was always provisional, fragile and limited, this was because both class and non-class struggles to some extent escaped state control, with the state’s effectiveness ‘always being shaped by capacities and forces that lie beyond it’ (Jessop 2008: 126). The extent of this shaping varied between different sectors of the state, some being more heavily ‘screened’ from the influence of the ‘popular masses’ than others.

The stress on the ‘masses’ is a distinctive feature of Poulantzas’ state theory, but it is counterbalanced by other emphases. Currents of influence do not move only in one direction, from the masses to the state; they also flow the other way. Poulantzas shares Gramsci’s fascination with the innovative capacities of the state, its ability to devise new forms in which hegemony can be secured, populations controlled and antagonists disorganised. He was one of the first to theorise, prophetically, the emergence of an ‘authoritarian statism’ that involved intensified control over ‘every sphere of socio-economic life, combined with the radical decline of the institutions of political democracy’ (1978: 204).This insight, into the reciprocal relationship between a resurgent state power and a crisis of popular politics, provided a basis for concrete analyses. Thus, for instance, Poulantzas was able to identify the significance in terms of class contestation of developments that were later described as the ‘network state’ – policy communities that ‘cement dominant interests outside the state apparatus with forces inside, at the expense of popular forces’ (Jessop 2008: 132).

The state theory of Gramsci and Poulantzas illuminates the recent course of education policy in England, enabling us to understand the ‘modernisation’ programme of Blair’s government as an instance of passive revolution, in which the relationship between social forces has been reconfigured in new institutional arrangements. This was not solely a Blairite achievement. Much of the under-labouring for New Labour’s programme of the New Labour government had already been completed by Conservative administrations. The level of contestation that Blair faced in 1997 was therefore unusually low -  labour movement traditions of equal opportunity had been weakened, the influence of elected local authorities had been reduced, and teachers defeated, both in trade union terms, and in relation to their capacity to shape classroom processes. New Labour was able to populate this ‘emptied’ space of education with new institutions and social actors – a shift that I have elsewhere called ‘re-agenting’. In re-agenting, the development of policy through an explicitly political process of encounter between different social interests becomes less important than its elaboration through networks of agencies, local and national (for instance Ofsted, the Teacher Development agency, the Specialist Schools Trust), whose origins and points of reference lie in the priorities of national government (Jones 2004: 43-4). The complex of networks, organizations, and auditing regimes established under Blair has constituted a new state apparatus of education, concerned not only with the administration of an established system, but with an ongoing and unending effort to create, motivate, resource, support and guide the forces that can make policy happen. It has enabled the organisation of the world of education around the project of raising levels of performance, measured in terms of examination success. The other side of this process is, as Johnson and Steinberg noted, the demobilisation of oppositional agency. New Labour has worked consistently to ensure that the conditions in which contestation might be revived cannot be recreated: its much-noted micro-management of targets and procedures leaves no space for any agency that might seek to modify or contradict its programme.

The limits of these achievements need delineating. They have not resolved historic weaknesses of English education. Levels of educational inequality remain high, and levels of educational performance uneven (Brook 2008). Recession will bring further problems. In the period of financial boom, New Labour did not face the discontents of a volatile, precarious sector of unemployed youth. That may change, especially as the relatively high levels of state spending that the boom enabled will not be maintained. Nevertheless, politically and institutionally, Blair’s (and Thatcher’s) legacy marks out England as distinct from France and Italy.

In these latter countries, a new educational state, based on a qualitatively different relationship of social forces, has not yet been created. One might say, that in contrast to England, where reform essentially began with a Conservative victory in a decisive war of manoeuvre, successive Italian and French governments have fought a long war of position against their opponents – an attritional process stretching from the 1990s to the present day. This process has not yet reached a decisive outcome. New norms reflecting global policy orthodoxy, have not credibly be established. Nor have these governments been able to weaken opposition to the point at which the state can yet enforce new policies, institutions and social relations. Valentina Aprea, introducing her proposed law, praised the shift accomplished by Blair from a producer to a commissioner state, and sought to emulate that change in Italy (De Anna 2009). Likewise, “on veut faire tout comme vous,” Sarkozy told Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, on his presidential visit to London in 2008.[xii].

Such ambitions may not be realized; the conditions that gave rise to the English version of education reform – a decisive political victory of the right, a brief window of economic opportunity – are unlikely to be repeated. Indeed, the attempt to achieve an ‘English’ system, in conditions where opposition remains mobilized, may give rise to new forms of educational contestation. England, therefore, may represent not so much the terminus of a route along which all European societies must travel, as a specific and limited phenomenon. ‘We want to do everything like you’ – but that isn’t possible – not now, and, perhaps, not ever.

References

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Notes

[ii] See the website of the Anti-Academies Alliance http://www.antiacademies.org.uk/

[iii]  A note on sources. Since policy contestation tends not to be well-documented either in academic literature or in the mainstream media, and since, also, the events of which I am trying to track the course are very recent ones, much of the material referenced here is from trade union and social movement sources. In addition I have made use of the reports and insights of ‘committed’ researchers.

[iv] Viviane Reding, then EU Commissioner for Education and Training, spoke of Lisbon as a ‘silent revolution’, the adjective carrying a greater weight of meaning than she perhaps intended. (Antunes 2006: 41)

[v] The following paragraphs are an expanded and updated version of the account of the anti-CPE campaign given in Jones et al (2008).

[vi] ‘Cécile’ interviewed in Visco (2006)

[vii] André’ lycéen from Pau, interviewed in ‘Paroles des lycéens’ L’Ecole Emancipée 90 (7) April 2006, p. 13; ‘Cécile’,in Visco (2006)

[viii] In Anderson’s summary: ‘Spending on education, falling in the budget since 1990, accounts for a mere 4.6% of GDP (Denmark 8.4%). Only half of the population has any kind of post-compulsory schoolinhg, nearly 20 points below the European average. No more than a fifth of 20-year-olds enter higher education, and three-fifths of those drop out.’ (Anderson 2009:

[ix] Urbinati, interviewed in Pullano (2008)

[x] Domenico Pantaleo, General Secretary of the Flc-Cgil, quoted in Muratore (2008)

[xi]  ‘A student from Bologna’ demonstrating in the Piazza Navona, Rome. Quoted in Maltese (2008)

[xii] Sarkozy’s words, quoted by Michel Monsauret, French cultural attaché in Lukes (2008)

Participation and Democratisation in the Local School System

Richard Hatcher

A socialist politics of education comprises three elements: critical analysis of what exists, the elaboration of alternative policies, and a strategy for action. Its object can be divided into two broad themes. The first concerns what we can broadly call the content of education – the curriculum, pedagogy, forms of organisation etc. The second concerns how decisions are made – in other words where power lies in and over the school system. We have no shortage of critical analysis both of the content of current education policy and of the highly centralised, bureaucratic and managerialist way in which policy is devised and imposed, marginalising the voices of teachers, parents, students and citizens. In terms of alternative policies concerning content, we have some ideas about what we are fighting for. But when it comes to our alternative proposals for the democratisation of decision-making, we have little to say.

Of course, a democratic school system is impossible in a capitalist society. At the level of government, whether under Brown or Cameron, national policy will only be influenced by mass pressure. But at the level of the school and the local school system there is the possibility not just of conjunctural campaigns – whether over pay and conditions or over issues such as proposals for Academies – but also of the institutionalisation of forms of popular and professional participation in their decision-making processes. In this sense schools and local school systems can be more or less democratic – they are sites of struggle.

What I am arguing for here is that institutionalised forms of democratic participation in decision-making at school and local system levels should be part of our conception of an alternative, not just as an inspiring vision but as something which we should concretely pose today, at least as propaganda. At school level, we obviously oppose certain specific actions by headteachers (actions by teachers over TLRs is a recent example) but that doesn’t challenge the principle of hierarchical management of schools. If we have no alternative to offer to the very limited form of participation represented by school governing bodies we in effect endorse their existing role. Similarly, if we have no alternative to offer to the very limited democratic function of Local Authorities, in practice we end up simply defending them against further erosion of their role.

Why is the left’s response so limited?

Why is the left’s response limited in scope and almost entirely defensive: opposition to certain ‘control’ policies – mainly to SATs and performance management; and to private control of schools? Why has the left not put forward a radical democratic alternative? At one level it is a recognition that there is no significant popular movement demanding democracy in education. But at a deeper level I think it is the product of two historical strands of labour movement attitudes to schools: statism and syndicalism.

As educators, the dominant issue has been equality, principally in social class terms, and the dominant view has been that equality is best served by national uniformity of provision – a common educational experience in a common school system. In this perspective the principal agent of reform is government as the best guarantor of equality, exemplified by the 1944 Act and the comprehensive school. Parental and community power at the local level tends to be seen as a threat to equality, promoting local variation which reflects sectoral interests, generally those of middle class privilege.

The syndicalist strand has focused on teachers as workers, as employees, struggling over pay and conditions rather than ‘educational’ issues. Its orientation has been fighting for teachers’ independence from management, and it has therefore tended to be suspicious of notions of participation in how schools are run as inevitably incorporating teachers into management agendas. It has been equally suspicious of parental power, seen as potentially introducing reactionary policies and threatening the progressive professionalism of teachers.

Both statism and syndicalism fail to address the question of agency – of what social agents have the capacity to struggle most effectively for radical change. Statism relies on the state as the principal agent of change, albeit only if subjected to some form of mass pressure. Syndicalism tends to privilege teachers as the agent of change and to view parents and communities as, at least potentially, supporters of teachers’ campaigns rather than as active agents of resistance and change in their own right. An orientation towards local democratisation places – potentially – the whole local community at the centre of the process of opposition, resistance and alternatives. (I say potentially because the ‘local community’ is neither homogenous nor necessarily educationally progressive – a point I come back to later.) Popular social agency is the pivot which connects demands for democratisation with demands around the content of education, conceived broadly as everything from what is taught and how it is taught to how school is organised and run – two sides of the same coin.

Where power currently lies in the school system

 Before I suggest some positive policies I want to briefly say something about power in the school system today. We can summarise it as follows. The first four aspects are familiar, but the fifth is a more recent addition.

 1. Increase in centralised state power over curriculum, assessment, evaluation, even teaching methods (the strategies) – power exercised over local authorities, headteachers, teachers, students, governors, parents. Shaping actions, shaping what is thinkable, shaping identities.

2. Increase in the power of headteacher as agents of government policies – performance management.

3. Decrease in the power of local authorities – they now have almost no representative function in education, just operational functions as instruments of government policy.

4. Increase in power over schools of religious organisations and business organisations and individuals.

5. Emergence of new inter-school forms of power – federations, networks etc.

• ‘Hard’ federations, with an ‘executive head’
• Partnerships of ‘successful’ and ‘failing’ schools
• Chains of Academies
• Networks of schools led and managed by ‘system leaders’

The strengthening of managerial power at school level has been accompanied by a rhetoric of professional empowerment in the form of the promotion, by the National College among others, of ‘distributed leadership’. The contradiction is that the government-imposed coercive powers of the headteacher remain, ensuring that the ‘sharing’ of power is only delegated, revocable and restricted within management agendas (Hatcher 2005). Similarly, conscious of the negative effects of the government’s top-down ‘command and control’ standards agenda, key government advisers are now advocating networks of collaboration between schools, but the networks have to be managed by ‘system leaders’ to make sure they conform to government agendas (Hopkins 2007; Hatcher 2008).

However spurious these claims of ‘empowerment’ of teachers are, they offer us the opportunity to challenge the rhetoric with authentic proposals. Similarly, at the local system level, we can take advantage of the debate about ‘local democratic renewal’ and ‘the empowerment of citizens and communities’ which the government is promoting, concerned about voter alienation indicated by the low turnout in local elections. The measures proposed are very limited, and, interestingly, they almost entirely exclude education, but the emergence of the issue of local democracy on the policy agenda provides us with a more favourable context in which to put forward our own ideas.

 The radical democratic alternative: democracy in schools

It is often forgotten that participatory decision-making in schools was one of the original themes of the comprehensive school movement in the 1960s and 70s. For example, George Semmens, a comprehensive school headteacher, wrote in 1972 of the need for ‘democratic schools’ in which the ‘ultimate decision-making body must be the full staff meeting’, on the grounds that ‘the collective ideas, abilities and experience of a whole staff cannot but be of greater value than the ideas, abilities and experience of one person’, and that ‘teachers are more likely to give of their best if they themselves have taken part in the decisions which are arrived at’ (Semmens 1972, p18).

The best-known and most radical example is Countesthorpe College in Leicestershire in the late 1970s, where ‘the internal decisions were made effectively by teachers’ (Chessum 1989, p128).

There were no hierarchies. There were no Heads of Departments or institutionalised leaders who had final vetoes or casting votes. The general running was organised by a weekly meeting of a committee, called Standing Committee. The teaching staff were split into three groups and each group formed the membership of the committee for one third of the School year. Policy decisions were made by the Moot which was open to all. The Standing Committee elected smaller ad hoc committees to make appointments, allocate scale points, distribute capitation, etc. (p128)

Hierarchical management of schools on the British model is not universal in Europe. In a number of countries we can find models of state school organisation which do not concentrate power in the position of the headteacher. In primary schools in the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland there are no headteachers. Teachers elect a lead teacher, but he or she is a first among equals. In Spain between the end of the Franco era and 1985 the principals of schools were elected by the teachers. And in many European countries the headteacher has much more limited powers than in Britain.

The United States also provides some examples of democratic self-management of schools by teachers. The International High School in New York was founded some 20 years ago as a collaboration between the City University and the Board of Education, dedicated to providing a ‘multicultural educational environment’ for students who were recent immigrants and English language learners (Casey, 2000). ‘International High School has a long history of collaborative decision-making, with its entire faculty making all important decisions concerning its educational program.’ The school has also pioneered, in collaboration with the United Federation of Teachers, ‘a school-based staffing and transfer plan in which a school-based personnel committee, composed mostly of teachers, selects and evaluates the school’s faculty’ (p18).

Of course we are not just concerned with redistributing power within the school, among the teaching staff. There are other actors within the school – other school workers, and the school students. And beyond the school there are parents and the local community. I am not proposing a model which would restrict democratic rights in the name of a collaborative but exclusionary professionalism.

One of the most advanced experiences we can draw on is that of the ‘citizen school’ in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Gandin and Apple 2002; Hatcher 2002). I want to use it to illustrate two principles of democratic schools. The first is that the school should be run by those most involved – teachers, other school workers, students and parents. The ‘citizen schools’ are controlled by School Councils comprising 50% teachers and other staff and 50% parents and students, with one place for the headteacher. Parents and students of 12 and over can vote and be elected. The whole community – teachers, staff, students, parents – elects the principal by direct vote. The Council controls the school budget and has considerable autonomy over the curriculum within the city’s policy framework. School policy decided by teachers, parents, students and other school workers with community representatives, all elected, and with structures for deliberation and recall. In that context the school is self-managed by those who work in it, with professional issues decided collectively by the teachers.

The second principle concerns democratic curriculum and pedagogy. Popular participation only works if people feel that by participating they can achieve things. The ‘citizen school’ aims to provide an education which not only ensures students good qualifications but also meets their social interests for an ‘education for emancipation’. It does this through a thematic curriculum based on action research by teachers with students, parents and local citizens into the issues and perspectives of the local community, and linking them with ‘high culture’ and universal forms of knowledge, in order to serve the interests of oppressed and excluded groups.

As I have said, democratic decision-making and a democratic curriculum and pedagogy are two sides of the same coin, mutually constituting each other.

In the British context steps towards this approach could include:

• The right of the school staff below top management level to organise collectively as a body with rights of negotiation and influence over school policy (as the claustro in schools in Spain used to have in the period between the end of Francoism and the emergence of neo-liberalism).

• The right of schools to adopt democratic forms of management, including collective self-management without headteachers, or with an elected headteacher.
• Election of all members of school governing bodies, with structured accountability to open meetings of the school community.

A framework for local democracy in the school system

I’d like to suggest some ideas for such a framework, beginning with seven premises.

1. A framework for local democracy in the school system has to address both school and local authority levels.

2. By ‘democracy’ we mean a combination of elected representative democracy and direct deliberative participatory democracy. As the Power Inquiry stated: ‘mass deliberation in the public realm […] is an absolutely crucial process in a democratic and open society’. (Power Inquiry 2006, p159)

3. As a result of the spread of Academies, Trust schools and federations school governing bodies becoming even less effective at ensuring schools are accountable to the communities they serve (see the new research by Ranson and Crouch: Education Guardian 10-11-09).

4. Local authorities are highly undemocratic. In particular, there is little opportunity for informed deliberative public or professional participation in education policy-making.

5. In spite of the rhetoric of the Labour government about local democratic renewal and community empowerment, the result in the context of education has been the opposite.

6. There is currently a strong move, promoted by quasi-state agencies such as the National College and the SSAT, for schools to be run by a powerful managerial elite (‘system leaders’) without local accountability.

7. Moves to further undermine national pay and conditions agreements will tend to worsen them overall and increase inequality.

The case for local participatory democracy at school level

 We need to offer an alternative vision of greater local participatory democracy at school level. While being opposed to the policy of Trust schools, we should recognise that the model of governance represented by Cooperative Trusts contains positive elements which promote the participation of the whole school community in decision-making. The first, at Reddish Vale Technology College (RVTC) in Stockport, was opened in March 2008. What is most interesting about the RVTC Trust is its governance by a Forum. According to the Trust Proposal:

‘This forum will be made up from the following constituency groups:

• Learner constituency  – open to pupils
• Parent and Carer constituency – of RVTC and associated schools
• Staff constituency– open to all full time and part time staff
• Local community constituency – open to any person who lives and works in the area and who has an interest in education and training, employability and regeneration.
• Community organisations – open to statutory, voluntary or charitable organisations with a legitimate interest in education and training, employability and regeneration.

The majority of the forum would be elected members representing their constituency groups. No constituency representatives would comprise more than a third of the membership of the council and the staff constituency shall not comprise of more than one quarter of the members of the forum. In addition, the members would be able to nominate organisations which would be able to appoint a member to the forum.

Each member of the forum will have one vote on any matter. The role of the forum is to appoint and remove trustees, collaborating with the schools, service providers / users and other organisations and to make recommendations to the trustees.’ (http://www.reddish.stockport.sch.uk/about/docs/Proposal.doc)

While it is not entirely clear exactly what power the Forum has in relation to either the governing body or the Trustee Board, the power to appoint and remove trustees is significant.

We should be arguing for cooperative governance in all schools, building on and extending what is positive in the Reddish Vale model, while of course rejecting the Trust policy itself.

However, we need to come to terms with the fact that the greater the autonomy at school level the greater will be the differences between schools in the policy decisions they make. This is already the case, even with the current level of centralised government control, and the extension of local democratic participation at school level, especially if it takes place in a context of a decrease in centralised government control, will inevitably mean greater diversity of policy. This has the potential for both good and bad consequences. The danger is that it will exacerbate social inequalities. Parents and teachers of schools in middle class areas, for example, could use their enhanced decision-making powers to reinforce their schools’ privileged position. Conversely parents and teachers of a school in a poor area could orient towards a premature vocationalism.

But in my view the potential benefits of ‘bottom-up diversity’ (as against centrally driven diversity) resulting from local popular participation greatly outweigh the dangers, for two reasons.

First, because changing the present disastrous education policies requires mass popular action combining big national campaigns with local grassroots community activity at school level, and people will only get involved locally if they feel that they can influence policy and make a difference.

Second, different approaches in teaching methods, curriculum and internal regimes are necessary in order to challenge social inequality in education. The school system systematically reproduces social inequalities. Radical reforms of school can make a significant difference. The problem is that we don’t know exactly what radical reforms will make the most difference. Knowing what educational practices perpetuate class inequality isn’t the same as knowing the best way to educate working class children, or what an education in the interest of the working class might look like. There isn’t even a consensus over the best way to teach children to read and write. There will be different and legitimate views about the answers among parents, school students, teachers and other school workers, and the wider community. These debates can’t be resolved in the abstract. We need to try out a range of different approaches, evaluate them, and learn from practice. By ‘approaches’ I don’t mean just ‘techniques’, I mean above all the educational theories and philosophies on which a school’s curriculum, teaching methods and internal organisation are based.

Democracy and the local school system

 If we accept the case for democratic diversity, how can we prevent it reinforcing social inequalities? At the national level, by a framework of social justice entitlement which would guarantee certain rights and exclude certain discriminatory and oppressive practices. But that isn’t enough: it’s too general to engage with specific policies and practices at the local level. The key to this is radical democratic reforms at the level of local school systems.

Democracy at individual school level needs to be articulated with democracy at the level of the local authority area. However, the existing system of local government is a shadow of democracy, where there is virtually no opportunity for popular participation beyond voting every few years in council elections, and certainly little serious attempt at deliberative democracy. (I speak from the experience of being an NUT observer member of the toothless Education Scrutiny Committee in Birmingham, of witnessing the sham of public consultation about Birmingham’s 8 proposed Academies, and of researching how the Council in Tamworth forced through its Academy policy with little debate in Council bodies.) This represents a problem for policies and demands which limit themselves to defending the existing role of local authorities in the face of privatisation and marketisation. We need more than a defensive stance, we need an inspiring vision of a much more democratic alternative which we can credibly argue for now.

A starting point is offered by the Power Inquiry, which calls for ‘creating a structured space within which elected representatives, public officials and members of the public can speak to each other’ and recommends that ‘All public bodies should be required to meet a duty of public involvement in their decision and policy-making processes’ and that ‘Citizens should be given the right to initiate legislative processes, public inquiries and hearings into public bodies and their senior management.’

A Local Education Council

 In terms of local school systems, the key principle is of a space in each local authority area in which deliberative democracy can take place about education policy. Let us call it a Local Education Council (LEC). This would be a forum-type body open to all with an interest in education – parents, teachers, other school staff, school students, governors and citizens – though its decisions might be taken only by elected representatives of its constituents. Its purpose would be to discuss and take positions on all key policy issues. The exact relationship of this process of deliberative democracy to the forms of local representative democracy – in particular the local authority – are a matter for discussion, and the balance of forces. But as a minimum the LEC should have the right to access to information and to present proposals to meetings of the city council and its subcommittees and have its views heard and taken account of. The LEC itself could of course expand with subgroups and working groups on specific issues, and hold wider consultative events.

One vital role for the LEC would be to provide the means of dealing with the problem of greater school autonomy being used to increase inequality between schools. One of the functions of the LEC would be to discuss significant distinctive policies which a school decided it wanted to pursue, in order to decide if they posed problems for social equality and justice in terms of their impact on other schools in the area. The proposed policy would be subject to the approval of the LEC (which might set a time limit after which the policy impact was reviewed).

The LEC would also have the task of developing, perhaps in a two-year cycle, an Education Plan for the local system of schools and colleges, including what mix of pedagogic approaches etc it would want to see made available.

Parents and teachers running schools?

 In this context how should we respond to the latest proposals by Labour and the Conservatives for teachers and parents to run schools? (See the Guardian 12-11-09.) The crucial issue is whether this takes place in a free-for-all market system or in the context of democratically-planned provision across a local area. A Tory government would further reduce the powers of local authorities and increase market competition. In that context enabling parents to initiate new schools without a controlling local authority policy framework would be a recipe for further fragmentation and social inequality in education, as well as wasteful spending.  Labour’s proposals for schools to be run as ‘mutuals’ by staff and community – which reflect something of the Cooperative Trust experience – deserve our full support if they extend local democracy, but on three conditions:

1. They operate in the context of effective local democratic planning and accountability, along the lines of the LEC-local authority partnership I have outlined.

2. They operate in the context of national pay and conditions for school staff.

3. The school premises remain in the ownership of the local authority.

Of course more democratic schools and local school systems would still be subject to the dictates of government education policies, and there is no guarantee that they would respond to them by embracing progressive or radical alternatives. But the risk of self-managed incorporation is greatly outweighed by the possibility of creating more favourable conditions to challenge the dominant agenda of whichever party is in power and reinvigorate the egalitarian and emancipatory role of the school.

References

 Casey, L. (2000) The Charter Conundrum. Rethinking Schools 14 (3) 18-19. 

Chessum, L. (1989) A Countesthorpe tale. In C. Harber and R. Meighan (eds) The Democratic School. Ticknall, Education Now.

Gandin, L. A. and Apple, M. W. (2002) Challenging neo-liberalism, building democracy: creating the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Journal of Education Policy 17 (2) 259-279.

Hatcher, R. (2002) Participatory Democracy and Education: the experience of Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Education and Social Justice 4 (2) 47-64.

Hatcher, R. (2005) The distribution of leadership and power in schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26 (2) 253-267.

Hatcher, R. (2008) System leadership, networks and the question of power. Management in Education 22 (2) 24-30.

Hopkins, D. (2007) Every school a great school. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Power Inquiry (2006) Power to the people: an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy. York: Joseph Rowntree Trust.

Semmens, G. C. (1972) Comeback: School Democracy, Comprehensive Education 20, Spring, pp.18-19.

Local government against local democracy: a case study of a bid for Building Schools for the Future funding for an Academy

Paper given at ‘From Critique to Contestation’, Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues XII seminar, Institute of Education, London, 21 November 2009.

Richard Hatcher

‘…mass deliberation in the public realm […] is an absolutely crucial process in a democratic and open society’. (Power Inquiry 2006, p159)

This talk is based on a case study of the progress of Staffordshire County Council’s bid for £100 million Building Schools for the Future (BSF) government funding for Tamworth, including an Academy, during the period 2007 to 2009. Tamworth is a town of some 75,000 inhabitants in Staffordshire local authority, with five 11-18 secondary schools. It was Labour-led until the Conservatives won the county council elections in June 2009.

I have been researching developments in Tamworth since the ‘Hands Off Tamworth Schools’ (HOTS) campaign began in September 2008. HOTS is a parent-led campaign which has published leaflets and policy documents, held several public meetings of up to 100 people, collected hundreds of petition signatures, and won 1848 votes for its six candidates in all six Tamworth wards in the county council elections on June 4 2009, which represented 10% of the total vote.

My data sources principally comprise Staffordshire County Council (SCC) documentation, HOTS publications and numerous internal emails, interviews with key campaign figures, and field notes from consultation events. I have had some personal involvement in the campaign, including as a speaker at three of its public meetings. The analysis in this paper builds on my two previous studies of contested Academy policy processes (Hatcher and Jones 2006; Hatcher 2008).

The proposal to establish an Academy, contested by a local campaign of opposition and entailing, unlike any other education policy initiative, an element of local public consultation, provides an exceptionally revealing insight into the process by which education policy is translated from the national to the local level, and the role of local government in the process.
My starting point is the conception of the policy process in education as a field of contestation in which opposition and resistance to policy, actual or potential, are constituent elements.

In that context I conceptualise the local policy process to set up an Academy as the product of a particular governance regime.

The term governance encompasses a complex range of meanings in contemporary public sector discourse. In brief, it refers to governing which utilises a repertoire of hierarchical, market and network coordinating mechanisms involving state and non-state actors and agencies.

A specific governance regime ‘is assembled from a range of specific technologies, discourses, practices, and ‘empowered’ actors. Each is also likely to privilege particular logics of decision-making and particular forms of practice’ (Newman and Clarke 2009, p127).

The governance regime in question is the alliance of Staffordshire County Council, the DCSF, and Landau Forte, the would-be Academy sponsors, and the strategy they adopted to utilise the procedures of local government to translate the BSF proposal from formation to implementation. It is an example of what I have called elsewhere state governance networks, comprising a coalition of actors from the local state (both elected councillors and officers), national government, and the private sector.

In the case of the BSF policy process I conceptualise the governance regime as comprising two elements: a policy discourse and a process of regulative framing.

The policy discourse refers to the cognitive framing of the Academy proposal: how it is conceptualised, presented and justified. However, the focus of this talk is on the process of regulative framing.

I am using the term regulative framing – adapted from Bernstein’s concept of framing – to refer to the principle of political control of the policy process. It can range from closed framing, unilaterally imposing policy, to open framing, inviting meaningful and inclusive participation in negotiated decision-making. Regulative framing comprises both discursive and non-discursive or coercive elements.

An analysis of the Tamworth BSF process raises two interrelated issues which are central to the field of urban governance theory: democracy and conflict. Local democratic renewal through popular participation has been a theme of New Labour rhetoric for over a decade (Davies 2008, DCLG 2008). It finds an echo among those urban governance theorists who see it as the basis of a progressive consensus in local politics. However, the imposition of an Academy in the face of widespread local opposition puts into question not only the integrity of the consultation process but the democratic credentials of local government, and poses the question of whether the policy of Academies and popular opposition to them can best be explained in terms of incompatible class interests.

Exploring these issues involves a double movement: analysis of the Academy process is illuminated by situating it in the wider context of urban politics, and it in turn can make a contribution to debates within urban governance theory.

The regulative framing of the BSF proposal 

 The origins of the Tamworth BSF proposal lie in 2007. Woodhouse school, one of the five Tamworth secondary schools, was in ‘special measures’. In May 2007 the Schools Commissioner, Sir Bruce Liddington, whose remit included developing early Academy proposals, recommended that Landau Forte should assist the Woodhouse school in coming out of ‘special measures’. Landau Forte is a charitable trust which is the sponsor of an 11-18 Academy in Derby, a nearby local authority.

Liddington has subsequently moved from the civil service to become director of the Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust, one of the largest Academies sponsors.

In July 2007 a meeting took place between Liddington, representatives of Landau Forte, Peter Traves, who was Staffordshire’s Corporate Director for Children and Lifelong Learning, and Lord Adonis, at the time the government’s minister responsible for Academies. Thereafter followed a series of at least six private meetings between the various proponents which culminated in March 2008 when SCC submitted its BSF Strategy for Change document, entitled Readiness to Deliver (SCC 2008a), to the DCSF.

By then the proposal comprised the closure of one of the five secondary schools, the removal of the sixth forms from the remaining four schools and their replacement by a sixth form centre, and the establishing of an Academy, sponsored by Landau Forte, to run both Woodhouse school and the sixth form centre. In short, a fundamental transformation of the school system in Tamworth. The DCSF approved the proposal in June 2008.

What I am interested in is the role of the constitutional structures and procedures of local government in the formation of the bid. The first reference to it was when it was tabled at the SCC Cabinet meeting, comprising five leading councillors, on 16 April 2008. There are two remarkable things about this meeting.

The first is that it was the first time that any SCC body had discussed the BSF bid, and that it did so a week after the BSF proposal was submitted to the DCSF (and some nine months after unpublicised discussions about an Academy began). In other words, the bid did not go through any Council body for discussion or approval before being submitted to the DCSF: it was submitted personally by the Deputy Leader of the Council, Robert Simpson, who was responsible for the BSF bid, under his delegated authority.

The second remarkable feature is that the proposal document itself, Readiness to Deliver, was not presented to Cabinet. What was tabled instead was a document called Manifesto for Change (SCC 2008b), which comprised a set of educational objectives for Staffordshire but made no mention at all of the proposals for Tamworth including the Academy, even though the minutes of the Cabinet meeting state that this document (not Readiness to Deliver) would be the basis for public consultation. Regarding the BSF bid itself, the minutes state only that the submission of the bid ‘be noted’. No discussion is recorded. A consultation document containing the actual BSF proposals, including the Academy, (Consultation Proposals for Tamworth, SCC 2008c), was not published until November 2008. 

Following the Cabinet meeting in April 2008 the next Council body to receive a report on the BSF bid was the Children and Young People Scrutiny and Performance Panel (hereafter referred to as Children’s Scrutiny) on 17 June 2008, but there was no mention of the specific proposal for an Academy and no mention in the minutes of any discussion.

The first report to Children’s Scrutiny which included the actual proposal was in July 2008, a month after it had been approved by the DCSF and again with no discussion noted. Thereafter there was no further reference to the BSF bid at Children’s Scrutiny meetings until the meetings in January, February and March 2009, where brief reports were given on the stage reached in the policy process: there was no mention of the issues which had arisen during the six-week consultation period which had just concluded in January, and no discussion was noted.

Cabinet itself had no further discussion of the BSF proposal after April 2008 until it took a full report of the consultation process in January 2009 and decided to approve the original proposal, in spite of strong objections from HOTS and by the headteachers of the five schools.

This led to a ‘call-in’ of the Cabinet decision by four Conservative councillors, (perhaps prompted by a request by HOTS documenting their concerns with the consultation process), which enabled the decision to be questioned at the meeting of the Corporate Policies Scrutiny and Performance committee in February 2009. This was the only occasion on which the BSF proposal featured on the agenda of that committee.

The four councillors raised several issues, including opposition to the sixth form centre run as an Academy, preferring two sixth form centres run cooperatively by the schools. As Councillor Simpson pointed out at the meeting, this was the first time that Conservative councillors had raised any objections to a proposal first published nearly a year earlier. In that context the most likely explanation for the four Conservative councillors’ departure from their national leadership’s policy of creating more Academies is that it took place four months before the county elections in June 2009 and they saw some electoral advantage in being seen to be responsive to the widespread public opposition to the BSF proposals. Shortly after the Conservatives won control of the council they accepted Labour’s BSF plan with only some minor additions.

The BSF proposal, unaltered from the January Cabinet meeting, received final approval from Cabinet in April 2009.

During the whole process Landau Forte was not required to make a presentation to Cabinet or Children’s Scrutiny or any other SCC body.

The failure of scrutiny

From the point of view of local government as a site of public deliberative democracy the regulative framing of the policy process was a particularly closed one, in two ways.

First, during the period of at least nine months leading up to the formulation and submission of the Academy proposal to the DCSF, while negotiations took place in secret between leading Council figures, the sponsors and the government, the proposal was not discussed by any formal body of SCC.

The second issue is the absence of discussion at the meetings where the proposal was reported on, even when it had become apparent, from September 2008 onwards, that there was considerable public debate and opposition. In particular it puts into question the function of the scrutiny committees within SCC. The White Paper Local Leadership, Local Choice (DETR 1999) outlined the government’s expectations that:

…the new forms of local governance will ensure that a council’s affairs are conducted openly and subject to effective scrutiny. Councillors, local media, and others interested will be helped by these new forms of governance to question those taking decisions and to hold them to account as never before. Open and accountable decision taking will become a reality. (para. 3.59)

Clearly Children’s Scrutiny failed to fulfil this function with regard to the Tamworth BSF bid. The explanation would seem to be that the Tamworth proposal entailed a fundamental change in the town’s whole secondary school system which would create widespread public opposition, the Council leadership decided to avoid it by keeping the proposal secret for as long as possible, and the members of Children’s Scrutiny acquiesced.

A significant additional contributory factor was the exclusion of teachers’ union representatives, who would certainly have questioned the BSF plans, from a role with speaking rights on the scrutiny committees (unlike in some other authorities).

Overall, the Tamworth experience provides forceful confirmation of Ashworth and Snape’s (2004) review of the research evidence on the effectiveness of scrutiny in local government: that ‘scrutiny has not yet developed into a robust accountability mechanism and therefore the work of local executives remains relatively unchecked’ (p553).

The regulative framing of the consultation process

If the first phase of the BSF process took place, largely in secret, from the spring of 2007 till the summer of 2008, the second phase centred on the period of public consultation meetings, which ran for six weeks from November 2008 to January 2009.

Here I focus on the secondary school parents and community meetings. Attendance ranged from 11 to 450 at QEMS, the school threatened with closure, and two consultation meetings for parents and others specifically about the replacement of Woodhouse school by an Academy attended by approximately 180 people.

The consultation process exposed the BSF proposal and its proponents to extensive criticism by HOTS supporters and other parents, teachers, school students, and community members. Again, my focus is not on the cognitive framing of the process – the ways in which the arguments for and against were posed – but on the regulative framing: that is, the way in which the consultation process was controlled and managed.

A standard format for the consultation process for BSF proposals is recommended by government and was followed by SCC in Tamworth. It was not conceived as a process of deliberative democracy (DCSF 2007). 

• Consultation only took place once the Academy proposal was at an advanced stage (DCFS, n.d.).
• The consultation meeting period was short: six weeks.
• Consultation was structured around the ‘preferred option’ approved by the DCSF, not a range of options.
• There was no provision for a formal and equal presentation of dissenting and alternative views to balance the carefully managed presentation of the proposal (DfES 2003).

The rules of engagement (Barnes, Newman and Sullivan 2007) of the consultation meetings were designed to advantage the Academy proponents.

• A platform of leading councillors and officers spoke to Powerpoint presentations and then responded to questions and points from the floor.
• The first set of meetings were chaired by Councillor Robert Simpson, the leader of the BSF bid, not by a neutral chair.
• The additional Woodhouse meetings, on 18 March 2009, were chaired by Louise Allanach, Project Director for EC Harris Built Asset Consultancy, the project managers for the proposed Academy.
• Comments were taken in groups of three or four, enabling the platform respondents to select which to focus on.
• No supplementary questions were allowed, preventing continuity and dialogue.

The regulative framing of consultation extended from the meetings themselves to how they were reported to Cabinet. Three written submission by HOTS were excluded from the reports tabled at Cabinet. They were not appended, summarised, or referred to.

At stake in how SCC managed the consultation process is a particular construction of the public. For SCC the legitimate public were those whose identities are defined by the institutional context of the school – as the parents of pupils at a specific school – and by the constitutional context of the consultation process as the sole legitimate site for the expression of views.  What was regarded as illegitimate was a collective cross-school community-wide identity with a campaigning orientation beyond the bounds of the formal consultation process.

Underlying this were two competing discourses of local democracy: representative democracy and forms of participatory democracy.

While in theory they can coexist and complement one another, elected representatives become uneasy about the prospect of community involvement in decisions that have hitherto been seen as their prerogative.  Such initiatives require councillors to share their power with others whom they may think ill informed, lacking legitimacy and scarcely representative of the communities they claim to speak for. (Rao et al 2000, pp3-4, quoted in Barnes, Newman and Sullivan 2007, p41)

The claim to representation was a key theme of regulative framing. HOTS claimed to represent the majority of parents’ interests, as evidenced by the overwhelming support for their position in consultation meetings and, later, their 10% vote in Tamworth in the county council elections. SCC rejected their claims: they represented sectoral interests, in contrast to the Council’s claim to represent the electorate as a whole. (The views of the teachers unions were rejected on similar grounds.) One expression of this conflict was SCC’s rejection of the call by HOTS supporters for a public vote on the BSF proposals.

If the purpose of the consultation process was not to engage in a process of deliberative democracy one might ask what was the purpose of consultation? It had three objectives.

• First, to claim democratic legitimacy for the policy process, in accord with government policy (DCLG 2008).
• Second, as far as possible to construct support for the policy, in line with the government booklet entitled the Academies marketing toolkit (DfES 2003).
• Third, to register the strength and key themes of opposition in order to adjust subsequent policy presentation, as SCC did.

The local state against local democracy: Academies and class interests

The experience of the Academy policy process in Tamworth can be situated in the context of current debates about public participation and local democracy. These have been prominent themes of New Labour since it was elected in 1997 (Davies 2008). The most recent policy statement is the White Paper Communities in control: real people, real power, published by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG 2008). It ‘aims to pass power into the hands of local communities, to encourage vibrant local democracy in every part of the country, and to give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of citizens’ (p1).

Labour’s discourse is an expression of what Davies (2005, p312) calls the ‘orthodox’ position within urban governance theory.  ‘Local managers have to mobilise citizens and include local knowledge in public policies.’ (Kjaer 2009, p141)

It is evident that the Tamworth experience does not correspond at all to the visions of popular participation and local empowerment of either Labour policy or urban governance theory.

I asked a leading activist in HOTS, a mother of a student at one of the secondary schools, what she thought they had learnt most from the whole BSF policy process. Carolyn’s blunt answer was ‘That there is no democracy’. She continued:

As a parent I am a stakeholder and we have completely been ignored and this consultation process has been so fast, so short that nobody’s been listened to. (Interview)

Carolyn’s views resonate with many research studies which have criticised the failure of those in power to allow meaningful popular participation in local policy-making. For example, Barnes, Newman and Sullivan (2007), speaking of their case studies, conclude that ‘our findings have often led us to be relatively pessimistic about the potential of new initiatives to overcome entrenched institutional or political forms of power’ (p184).

This poses a problem for ‘orthodox’ urban governance theorists. If local participation is in the interests of a modernising local government, why does it not act in accordance with those interests?

The source of their dilemma lies in the consensus model of local politics which underpins orthodox urban governance theory:

…participative governance is strongly oriented towards the production of consensus. The ‘partnership’ model of participation is one which assumes that different interests can and should be subsumed by a common goal. (Newman 2005, pp131-2)

If consensus is possible then failure to achieve it tends to be explained in terms of institutional inertia and bureaucratic path dependency. In contrast, critics adopting a ‘sceptical’ (Davies 2005, p312) approach within urban governance theory argue that many of the contested issues in local politics arise from opposed and irreconcilable interests (Davies and Imbroscio 2008). However, they often display a reluctance to identify these as predominantly conflicting class interests.

Newman and Clarke (2009), for example, foreground the complexity and ambiguity of local politics at the expense of obscuring its dominant capitalist logic. One consequence is that the coercive, as against discursive, power of the local state is underplayed.

In contrast, marxist approaches see urban contexts as sites of the contested and crisis-prone processes of capitalist production, consumption and accumulation, including the reproduction of labour power, giving rise to struggles around not only production but also reproduction (Geddes 2008; Jessop 2002).

Governance theory has no concept of the local state as capitalist, but in a marxist perspective the local state is subordinate to the class power of the central state.

The local state has both been the principal agent of the neo-liberal transformation of urban space through deregulation and privatisation and had the principal responsibility for the management of the ensuing contradictions and crises at the local level. In this context there has been a policy convergence between the two main political parties in local government (Eisenschitz and Gough 1993; Whitfield 2006).

This theoretical approach can provide an explanation of the BSF policy process in Tamworth and its centre-piece, the proposed Academy. Capitalist class interests provide both the principal object of education policy – the efficient reproduction of labour power to produce the future workforce – and one of the means to achieve it: the handover of schools which are public assets, accountable, at least to some extent, to local communities both through elected local government and through representation on governing bodies, to private owners and managers without local accountability. In the case of Landau Forte, it is a trust controlled directly by two multimillionaire capitalists (a property developer and an international hotelier).

This act of privatisation cannot be justified on the grounds that Academies represent a convergence of class educational interests: there is no evidence that Academies are more effective at raising the educational attainment of students from poorer backgrounds than comparable schools (Machin and Wilson 2009), and in fact the proportion of such students in Academies has greatly declined (PWC 2008). Class interests are also in play in Landau Forte’s refusal to recognise trade unions and to allow staff governors.

The role of the local state has been to implement this element of the neo-liberal agenda by managing the privatisation of part of the Tamworth school system. The Labour leadership of SCC has proved itself reliable agents of government policy, at the cost of abusing the structures and procedures of local government and abandoning any final remnants of an independent local social democratic tradition in education.

The implementation of the Academy policy did not require concessions to the governance agenda. While, for example, managing a housing estate may benefit from some low-level ‘empowerment’ of local citizens to help implement government agendas, establishing an Academy entails their disempowerment, at both local authority and governing body levels, and the transfer of power to a private sponsor. While consent was sought through the consultation process, the Academy proposal did not depend on it; its implementation was assured regardless by the uncompromising coercive power of the local state. That is why Academies do not feature in the government agenda for ‘communities in control’ (there is no mention of Academies in the White Paper (DCLG 2008)), and why, as we have seen in Tamworth as elsewhere (Hatcher and Jones 2006; Hatcher 2008), the process of policy formation and implementation at the local level has been tightly regulated, closed and exclusive.

Acknowledgements

 I would like to thank all those who cooperated with this research, and especially Julie for the comprehensive supply of information. Named HOTS supporters are quoted with their permission. Thanks also to Ken Jones for his comments.

 All the Staffordshire County Council documents and minutes of meetings referred to can be found on the Council’s website http://www.staffordshire.gov.uk/. ‘Hands Off Tamworth Schools’ publications can be found on the campaign website http://www.freewebs.com/handsofftamworthschools/.

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