Stephen Rayner
University of Manchester
Stephen M Rayner Stephen has experience as a teacher, senior leader and education adviser, working in and with schools in the West Midlands. He has been a governor of eight schools over a period of more than 30 years. In July 2017, he completed a professional doctorate at the University of Manchester and was appointed to a part-time post as Lecturer in Educational Leadership and Programme Director of the MA Education (Teach First Leadership) programme. The title of Stephen’s doctoral project is Academisation: A dynamic process of systemic change in England. He presented his thesis in Journal Format. Four of the thesis chapters have been published: three in academic journals and the fourth in an edited collection.
This paper examines the debates that accompanied decision-making in a secondary school in England whose governors proposed changing its status from a local-authority school to an academy, as part of a multi-academy trust in partnership with the Church of England Diocese.
The research participants were involved in and affected by the outcome of the proposed change: governors, leaders, teaching staff, support staff, officers of the local authority and the Diocese. Each was interviewed twice during the eighteen-month period of ethnographic study. Additional data were generated by observation of key meetings and documentary analysis. At individual level, the project investigates how actors engage with external change demands and whether they begin to think, act and understand differently. At organisational level, it examines change processes and their effects on practice, revealing how ‘absent presences’ control and influence those processes from a distance.
As an analytical framework, I have adapted a theorisation of change first employed in the context of school workforce reform. My development of that model sets the processes of controlling, mediating, working for and enacting change against the key dimensions of academisation: legal, economic, political, socio-cultural and educational.
The paper’s contribution is not only to knowledge about policy enactment, but also to the field of leadership studies. I draw on findings from the empirical investigation to challenge exaggerated notions of the influence that school leaders can have within a ‘self-improving school system’; to problematise the turn to system leadership; and to show that not all school leaders are preoccupied with their prestige or their positioning. For local policy actors, the imperative for survival in a competitive market outweighs their values-based commitment to educational inclusion.
This is not an elite account. Many studies of academies have been written post hoc by policy actors who are advocates for academies or who are concerned that academisation may be destructive. My principal methodological contribution is that the timescale for the ethnographic work was synchronous with the process of change for the school. Data generation began as the academy proposal was announced to the school community and continued until that proposal was dropped in favour of a Statutory Notice for conversion from Voluntary-Controlled to Voluntary-Aided status. It is distinctive for a project based on an open-ended proposal to result in a complete portrayal of a structural change process from start to finish.
