Policy Bureaucrat 2 Interview Report (ESRC Bi-Lateral)

  1. Policy Speed

As with the first policy interviewee, this policy bureaucrat felt that England was ‘an outlier’ especially since 2010, in moving further and faster in ‘pushing’ for an increase in school autonomy and equity in schools.

The overall ethos changed from being largely about universalism (an expectation that every one of the multiple initiatives would be available to every school) whereas now the ethos is very much about setting the bar high

  1. Academic Standards

It is clear that Ministers see high autonomy, high accountability (e.g. Academies, Trusts) as a means of driving a much sharper focus on outcomes. They are quite content to let schools get on with it – but will not tolerate excuses for not reaching the standards set.

He felt that government had put into place a variety of means to raise academic standards in schools. For example, the status of vocational qualifications had been reduced because, ‘all the evidence is that GNVQs are not helping create better employment prospects’. Course work assessment was being replaced by traditional examinations and the introduction of an ‘E Bacc’ pathway had resulted in the more ‘aspirational’ schools changing their curriculum in order to adopt a ‘cluster’ of 5 GCSEs which are more academically traditional.

  1. Equity

Although the ‘pupil premium’ was, in his view, helping to ‘incentivise’ schools, he could see no evidence that the ‘achievement gap’ was closing. In this sense, he identified a tension between efforts directed at increasing equity and promotion of a more academically rigid curriculum.

There’s a group of heads working in disadvantaged contexts who argue that the ‘new’ curriculum is not helping.

  1. Negative effects on teachers of work intensification

He pointed out that TALIS (OECD, 2014) showed that headteachers and teachers in England worked for more hours than in comparative countries.

If you’re in a well- run school, working your socks off, then it’s a satisfying job. The reverse is also true…It doesn’t seem as the highly autonomous system has also been detrimental.

  1. Strong academic accountability

The outcome of the emphasis on a razor sharp accountability focus means that the focus on classrooms is strong – but there is the issue of whether it is about instrumental, exam based outcomes, perhaps to the detriment of the improvement of ‘broader’ outcomes.

Here, a tension was identified between the instrumental purposes of education and the broader, more humanistic purposes. So, while schools were now focussed more closely on teaching and learning in classrooms, this focus was primarily upon achieving measurable pupil outcomes in core areas of curriculum.

  1. ‘Best’ policy initiatives (from central to local ‘hierarchies’)

These were identified as:

i)‘London Challenge’ – a ‘significant’ means of ‘improving’ the work of schools in disadvantaged communities;

ii)Multi-Academy Trusts and Federations which had ‘turned around’ school performance in ways which local authorities had not;

iii)National Leaders of Education (NLEs) which had positively impacted;

iv)The National College, which he saw as providing ‘world class’ evidence-based training for leaders, though the NPQH had its critics for being ‘too policy driven’. He regarded the decision to ‘close down’ the licences as ‘potentially disastrous’; and

v)Headteacher Boards, which would be given a far more active role in policy implementation through the formation of a Teaching Council (cf. the Singapore model).

  1. Four Policy Narratives
  • World class, ‘no excuses’ [raise the bar, more demanding Ofsted etc., but over-reliability on accountability as the vehicle for improvement]
  • Freedom to teach – ‘Because you’re free, because you can decide who to employ, you will improve’ [but there is as yet no evidence for this]
  • Market – ‘the market will trump all’, but the OECD have found only minimal, differential benefits.
  • System leadership – teaching schools, school-to-school support etc. As a result, there are tensions (though not insurmountable) e.g. between building collaborative mechanisms and relationships and competition for pupils.