English schools policy emerging from a pandemic: the argument

This book is based on the author's continuing study of and research into English schools governance, and how it enables schools to affect students, their parents and wider society positively. Following a long career as a teacher, a senior local authority (LA) officer and non-governmental organisation (NGO) official, I have become particularly concerned as an academic in recent years with how schools can make a contribution to reducing inequity and injustice.

In recounting and analysing here the organisational consequences of the so-called ‘academisation’ of schools in England, my sad conclusion is they have resulted in schools gradually withdrawing from the wider concerns of the communities they serve and their aspirations for the future, while focusing, sometimes excessively so, only on what can be seen as the technical concerns that parents legitimately have about their children's outcomes and progress. In turn, as a cause and consequence, governance engagement with the practical concerns of schooling has also been retreating gradually – and increasingly by geographical distance – from the schools for which it is responsible. Governance has lost its immediacy, and this process continues.

These twin processes have been driven by the increasing focus by national education policy since the early 1990s on a narrow range of student outcomes, and the development of specific organisational technologies to achieve them, and little else, which has faded out of sight and surveillance. Schools also do other things, but many in school governance no longer recognise their schools in any other but these narrow limited terms. As a consequence, because of reward systems, there has also been a dramatic reduction of capacity at all levels in our schooling system to think about, develop, implement, and even recognise sometimes, the necessary, deeper responses needed to address increasing inequity and the other challenges facing our society post pandemic. That this might even be necessary, beyond doing what will be shown to be ineffective and broadly irrelevant catch up, is a question that cannot be framed in other words or asked within current practice. The gradual technical framing and reframing of governance, I shall argue, has also led to an ignorance of the wider purposes and possibilities in the maturation processes of young people, and increasing secrecy and secretiveness.