Mapping the virtual school ensemble: the role of loss, grief, love, and care

Bowden, Hannah (2023). Mapping the virtual school ensemble: the role of loss, grief, love, and care. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

For young people in local authority care in England, who now number over 80,000, loss and grief are necessarily evoked upon entry into care. This loss and grief, which is predominantly non-death and oftentimes ambiguous, refers to both the material and the immaterial; parent(s), siblings(s), time, place, identity, and so on. Subsequently experienced within a system skewed toward crisis intervention, this affective dimension of young people’s lived experiences is disenfranchised (unattended). One such aspect of this disenfranchisement refers to the performative channelling and conversion of love and care so that these affective experiences and responses might be rendered measurable and, therefore, ‘valuable’ by the neoliberal education machine. Focussing on such processes within the context of education, an area in which there has been limited research to pinpoint the key factors associated with the perpetual and systemic educational attainment gap between young people in local authority care and their peers, this thesis turns its attention to the Virtual School. Not a physical school setting, the Virtual School brings together local authority employees, led by a Virtual School Head Teacher, as a policy measure intended to close this attainment gap. Using policy as an entryway into the Virtual School ensemble, that is the collection of techno-bureaucratic and affective elements which come together to form a recognisable ‘whole’, this thesis proffers itself as a contribution to the field of critical education policy sociology.

Using a Deleuzo-Spinozian approach to ontology via ethics within a fertile space between assemblage and Actor Network theories, this thesis documents a kind of abstract ‘mapping’ of the Virtual School ensemble. Tracing the material relations between the affective and the performative, ethnographic data, from eight months spent in a Virtual School in England and additional interviews with other Virtual School staff members, are presented and analysed as a way in which to critically explore the articulation of four elements of the ensemble. These elements, which cover the techno-bureaucratic and affective, are ambiguous (non-death) loss, money (Pupil Premium Plus), corporate parenting policy, and Personal Education Plans. Through an analysis of these elements, attention is drawn to the fleeting opportunities for loss, grief, love, and care to escape into the ensemble before it is captured and converted, channelled, or made into something ‘unspeakable’. Focussing on the limits placed on the affective by the performative forces of the neoliberal education machine, this thesis draws attention to the resultant disenfranchising nature of the Virtual School ensemble. In doing so, this thesis reveals the Virtual School’s contingency as it is made intolerable. Rather than presenting a set of discrete actions required for its improvement, this thesis begins to imagine a future Virtual School ensemble which positions itself as an affectively-led political community. Thinking in this way opens a space for a critical conversation, at both the level of policy and practice, which takes seriously the ambiguous loss and grief experiences of young people in local authority care and the role love and care can play in its enfranchisement.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):