Deb Outhwaite
University of Warwick
Deb Outhwaite is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Teacher Education at the University of Warwick, where she runs the MA in Professional Education for teachers from all phases of education. A qualified 11-18 teacher, Deb taught Social Sciences in secondary education for 12 years prior to university teaching and was an A-Level examiner. Her Education Doctorate, awarded in 2017, was entitled: ‘Educational Leadership in the International Baccalaureate: critical reflections on modern elite formation and social differentiation’. Deb co-convenes the Leadership Preparation and Development RIG for BELMAS, and sits on BELMAS Council. Deb also sits on IPDA’s International Committee, and is a Parent Governor in an 11-18 outstanding comprehensive school.
BELMAS Annual Summer Conference 2018
How sustainable is the International Baccalaureate Diploma in the English state sector? Perspectives from 28 Senior Leaders.
This Theatre Style session is based upon a Doctor of Education case study conferred in 2017, that set out to analyse why the International Baccalaureate’s Diploma Programme (IB’s DP) was becoming the ‘platinum standard’ (Oakes and Seldon, 2011) for post-16 qualifications in England when it fell into rapid decline in the state sector.
The 28 senior leadership interviews conducted in the fourth strand of the data collection, and believed to be the most significant, demonstrated that the IB’s DP is now only alive and well only in elite schools largely situated in London and the South-East of England, and has disappeared almost completely from the state sector, when it was previously thriving there.
This thesis explored what it meant to practice educational leadership with the aim of working for a global society, and discussed who benefitted both from that leadership and from studying the IB’s DP in schools in England. The thesis analysed the leadership implications of globalisation and its consequences for social justice, learning, educators’ professional identity and what that meant for international (multi-cultural) communities in England.
The interviews explored in-depth the success of the IB’s DP in elite schools, and the failure of it in post-16 centre’s inside the state sector, analyzing what could be learnt from the adoption (and removal) of non-mandatory policy in international curriculum adoption. The interviews were rigorously analysed to see how senior leaders felt about the IB’s DP, and what they learnt through its adoption, and in the state sector explicitly its adoption and removal. The thesis analysed what could be learnt from the schools and colleges who still run the IB’s DP and the potential consequences of this for social justice and fairness inside a global society.
The viewpoint particularly considered in this Theatre Style session is where does this leave the IBDP in an English context, and how sustainable is it moving forward in the state sector particularly? Numbers of the current IBDP entries are interesting, as although student numbers are still rising, centre numbers have actually decreased but in areas like the grammar school system in Kent the IB looks very sustainable, whereas elsewhere the picture is much less positive.
Oakes, J., Seldon, A., (2011, May 12), The Platinum Standard, Times Higher Education.
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