Di Gomery
UCL Institute of Education, London Centre for Leadership in Learning
Di Gomery is an EdD student at UCL Institute of Education’s London Centre for Leadership in Learning studying under the supervision of Dr Rob Higham and Professor Peter Earley. Her specialist interests include leadership, technical education and school governance, and she is a member of BERA and BELMAS and Research Interest Groups (RIGs) including Critical Education Policy & Leadership, Governing & Governance, and Leadership and Structural Reform. Di's volunteer roles include school governance (since 2006) and she is presently Vice Chair of Joseph Rowntree School Governing Body (York) and Chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee.
Di has extensive experience of working in both the public and private education sectors. She worked for many years in Higher and Further Education as a Lecturer, Curriculum Manager and Quality Manager (leading staff in their preparations for OFSTED inspection and QAA exercises). And most recently she worked in the private sector (Strategic Partnership Manager and Academies Partnership Manager). She lives and works in York and is currently a freelance education consultant working with senior leadership and organisations on strategic planning, curriculum change and governance.
This study troubles the complexities of competition and competitive practices as perceived by University Technical College (UTC) leadership. It builds on Jabbar’s (2015) conceptual framework of school competition to generate new knowledge and add to quasi-market debates. The foci of enquiry is on leadership’s perceptions of the mediating factors they believe contribute to competition and competitive practices, the range of strategies they developed in response to those perceptions, and examines the resulting outcomes.
Currently 48 UTCs operate in England, each has capacity for 500 to 800 students, and 2 more will open 2018. UTCs are mixed gender all-ability state funded secondary schools that operate independent of local government control and specialise in technical education pathways that require access to industry-standard equipment. They are sponsored by one or more universities and local or national employers who provide strategic direction and support including projects and work experience opportunities to develop students transferable skills such as learner autonomy (Ravitz, 2008), collaborative team work and high level competencies (Warmington and Leadbetter, 2010) increasingly in demand by international employers and governments. Students apply to transfer into a UTC aged 14 (year 10) after 3 years of secondary education (11-18 years) at a school sited across the UTC’s sub-regional admissions area, or transfer at age 16 (into year 12). However, significant “structural barriers to recruitment” exist for transitions at age 14 given that government policy leans toward fixing transitions at age 11 and 16 (Thorley, 2017). Despite growth in UTC numbers and low student recruitment relatively little is known about how this form of 14-18 technical education interacts with its local “lived market” (Taylor, 2001) leading “to many claims and counter-claims being made about UTCs” (Cook, 2016:4).
Data was generated from qualitative research undertaken (summer 2017) with UTC leadership (existing and former) through in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted face to face in the empirical setting (6) or at a designated location (2), and by Skype (2).
Initial data analysis suggests leaders are encountering numerous and varied challenges in their respective lived markets, which impact on their perceptions of professional autonomy, capacity and reputation. Findings also indicate leadership’s perceptions and responses to competition and competitive practices may be broadly relative to the range and type of relationships developed, and level of support received from sponsors and/or partner organisations. These findings and analysis will be of interest to researchers of leadership, technical education and new forms of education provision.
