Depoliticising Education: fragilities within the Multi-Academy Trust experiment

Depoliticisation analyses the transfer of public matters and governance to the private sphere, a process which manifests itself in different forms across different sectors of government activity dependent upon the specific... [ view full abstract ]

Depoliticisation analyses the transfer of public matters and governance to the private sphere, a process which manifests itself in different forms across different sectors of government activity dependent upon the specific policy objective of the moment. This is an account of how the global neoliberal phenomenon of depoliticisation is currently transforming the primary/secondary education sector in England with regard to the sustainability of an organising policy principle increasingly dominated by multi-academy trusts (MATs). New data drawn from fieldwork interviews with school leaders across MATs in northern England (collected and analysed) investigated leaders' own formulations of the key features and innovations operating within their MAT with regard to their practices of networking &collaboration, the development of school policies, and their response to the requirements of compliance. A fragmentation of school types,of MAT types, and of leadership styles and motivations of MAT leaders and their dispositions, was witnessed. While aspects of autonomy are experienced by school leaders, and repoliticisation by them does occur, it is effectively bounded by other state actions which sustain the neoliberal policy context and agenda, and are not identical to the discursive promotions given by the state as a justification for the MAT policy direction. This is important because the fragmentation of education provision enables the state to initiate new school and education-related structures under reducing levels of scrutiny,challenge and resistance. The evidence further suggests that under depoliticisation different types of MAT exhibit different forms of fragility, and indeed failure, which can mimic issues present in the Local Authorities they replaced and sometimes introduce new issues.Given that the scale of academisation and the promotion of MATs is a once in a 'political lifetime' change in English education, the findings suggest that this transformation will not necessarily lead to the development of a sustainable structure for the organisation of primary/secondary education. While specific types of MAT structure are becoming visible, they do not form a common type of school organisation or school leadership that can be templated within any other MAT, each of which is defined in practice by the local circumstances of its creation and the dispositions of its leaders.The fragmentation process now underway therefore increases both the likelihood of the policy desire, and the piecemeal viability of a policy direction, that favours moving beyond depoliticisation to the full privatisation of public education.