The positioning of senior school leaders within the 'self-improving school-led system' in England

Asquith, Simon John (2024). The positioning of senior school leaders within the 'self-improving school-led system' in England. University of Birmingham. Ed.D.

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Abstract

The state-funded school sector in England has been subject to a range of structural changes since 2010. These changes are often categorised as a move to create a ‘self-improving school system’ (SISS) with leaders in the school sector itself taking increasing responsibility for ‘leading the system’ and improving it from within. Such localisation of leadership might be seen, on the face of it, as an act of political decentralisation of education, replacing established local government mechanisms with aspects of governance, financial control, legal responsibility and leadership, handed to schools themselves. These changes have been accompanied by neoliberal phenomena including encouragement of greater competition, parental choice and market approach. Many leaders working in this context report that there is in fact a significant amount of pressure, expectation and power exerted by central government over schools and their leaders. Accountability mechanisms, and expectations of leaders that they will work with government in bringing additional schools into this new ‘system’, typify these pressures.

This research took two specific structural phenomena as its principal foci: the Multi Academy Trust (MAT) and the Teaching School Alliance (TSA). MATs reflect a key policy intention under the SISS, that schools directly funded by central government, rather than via local government authorities, should group themselves (or be grouped) into school-led ‘local’ groupings. Leaders of these schools are encouraged to collaborate within and across such groups and as a result need to act collaboratively but also competitively. TSAs (now reconfigured by government as Teaching School Hubs) act as collaboratively based training and development groupings and in my research all of the MATs had a typically well-established link to a TSA.

The sociological ‘thinking tools’ of Pierre Bourdieu were applied alongside Yrjö Engeström’s third and fourth generation Activity Theory in a sythesised approach, examining how senior leaders were positioned within MATs and TSAs. Phenomenological approach used conversational interviewing of 21 senior leaders across seven MATs, each with a TSA attendant to it. Interviews took place between the summers of 2017 and 2019, meaning that post-2010 ‘systems’ were embedding but that participants had professional memories of earlier approach. Interviews provided rich data enabling detailed experiences and reflections to be identified from participant narratives. Ten key themes emerged through a dualist structure-agency analytical frame and from these, five core findings were ultimately isolated through selective coding. The research concludes that hysteresis and misrecognition have been features of leader positioning within the developing SISS. It finds that values-led but contingent leadership approach is a pragmatically adopted solution for MAT and TSA leaders and that historicity is essential to leaders’ sense-making and their career-story rationales, as they work to enact expansive transformation.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ed.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ed.D.

Supervisor(s):