Introduction

The Trojan Horse affair did not occur in isolation, but in common with many such ‘defining episodes’ manifested in the guise of a culmination of a number of factors: contextual, cultural and political. As Chapter Two reported, one of the defining factors surrounding the event was the way in which it was crafted by the media and manipulated by both the media and the government to such an extent that it became impossible to understand whether this was an education scandal or a terrorist threat. In order to examine the event in more detail and to examine why it was so influential in terms of later policymaking (see Chapter Seven), this chapter places the affair within the context of what is known as the ‘mediatisation of education policy’ – a field of research that explores and examines the complex ways in which the media influences and shapes policy.

In this chapter, I explore some aspects that have emerged from research into the complex relationship between education policy and the media, whilst Chapter Four draws on national news reports and research from a media analysis to explore the changing portrayal of school governors in the media within the period 2009–15. In order to understand how media articulations are influenced by journalists and editors, the chapter also draws on interviews with media professionals in order to explore journalists’ perceptions of what makes for a good story in education and how the media becomes ‘sensitised’ to stories in a particular area. In the final section, I turn to the period directly leading up to the Trojan Horse affair in 2014, examining how the ‘scene was set’ for one of the high-profile educational scandals of the decade.

As described in Chapter One, when the Coalition government came to office in 2010, its aim was to expand the voluntary sector as part of its Big Society project (Rochester et al, 2012). In its drive to do so, it placed considerable emphasis on voluntarism and democratic participation in the running of the public sector. Unfortunately, this went hand in hand with both a global and a national recession, financially impacting on public services, local government and third sector organisations – traditionally, the three largest employers of volunteer staff.