Helen Gunter

The University of Manchester · School of Education

This book aims to restore the role of political analysis in education policy by presenting a new political sociology for framing, conducting and presenting research. In doing so, it will be the first in the field to connect political thinking from Arendt with sociological thinking from Bourdieu.

Introduction Peacehaven Heights and Telscombe Cliffs Primary Schools were in the news in spring 2021 because parents and staff are campaigning to stop the schools being academised and run by a MAT. The parents want the LA to keep running the schools but the LA want to hand over the schools to a MAT. The first take-over attempt by a MAT was in 2019,...

Introduction In June 2021 it was announced that Eton College had signed an agreement with the Star Academies MAT to open three selective sixth forms in the Midlands and North of England, with the aim from 2024 to ‘fast-track young people, often from deprived communities, to the UK’s most academic universities’ (Dennett 2021: NP). The plan is that:...

Introduction On 28 November 2021, The Sunday Telegraph published a front page story under the headline: ‘Woke’ anti-Government speakers barred from Whitehall. Malnick (2021), the journalist who broke the story, reveals that a leaked memo to civil servants states that they must do ‘due diligence’ on proposed speakers regarding their public statement...

This book aims to restore the role of political analysis in education policy by presenting a new political sociology for framing, conducting and presenting research. In doing so, it will be the first in the field to connect political thinking from Arendt with sociological thinking from Bourdieu.

Introduction The 2020–2021 COVID-19 lockdowns in England have revealed much about the disparities in wealth and the impact of poverty on children’s learning: ‘a mother wakes at dawn to copy out worksheets for her children onto pieces of paper. Secondary school pupils attempt to write essays on their mobile phones, while younger children queue to wa...

Introduction In the wake of the abduction and subsequent murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in London in March 2021, the issue of physical and reputational violence against women has become a focus of intense and sustained public debate. People came forward to give testimony, and included within this are accounts about how and why...

Introduction MATs have been reluctant to take on schools where certain pupils and communities could damage the brand, and so there are schools that have become ‘orphans’ because no Trust will take them on (Mansell 2017). In addition, local authority schools have not all leapt at the lauded opportunities of voluntary conversion (Rayner and Gunter 20...

Introduction In August 2020 the examination results for 16- and 18-year-olds in England were released. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown meant that assessment was undertaken by teachers who provided an estimated grade for each student and a comparative ranking to allow for standardisation. An algorithm was used to adjust the grades based on the school...

Introduction It is estimated that ‘two in five children living below the poverty line are not entitled to free school meals’ (Butler 2021: NP), where during the COVID-19 pandemic food insecurity intensified leading to the increased use of foodbanks in England. The Trussell Trust has reported: As more and more people across the country face destitut...

Introduction On 21 June 2021, the UK Department for Education that governs education in England published a tweet in which they pronounced 25 June as ‘One Britain One Nation Day’, ‘when children can learn about our shared values of tolerance, kindness, pride and respect’, with the support of the then Secretary of State, Gavin Williamson (Harding 20...

This book aims to restore the role of political analysis in education policy by presenting a new political sociology for framing, conducting and presenting research. In doing so, it will be the first in the field to connect political thinking from Arendt with sociological thinking from Bourdieu.

Introduction In 2019, the UK media reported the case of a housing development in London where a communal recreational area had been provided but the children living in rented social housing were prevented from accessing it and playing with the children of homeowners (Grant and Michael 2019). This is one of an accumulation of cases of proactive segr...

This book draws on interdisciplinary social science and philosophical frameworks to offer new dimensions to debate about intellectual leadership and higher education. The chapters are focused on provoking readers to think critically about intellectual leadership in precarious times. The contributors frame critical questions about the unevenness, am...

This book draws on interdisciplinary social science and philosophical frameworks to offer new dimensions to debate about intellectual leadership and higher education. The chapters are focused on provoking readers to think critically about intellectual leadership in precarious times. The contributors frame critical questions about the unevenness, am...

The segregation of education services is based on an education reform claimocracy that espouses eugenicist beliefs in order to sustain oligarchic club sovereignty as modern and modernising. This book presents empirical data and conceptual analysis from a range of projects to understand and explain segregation through undertaking a political sociolo...

Understanding and explaining the durability of segregated education requires the Thinking Politically-Sociologically Framework. The starting point is to examine vantage points or the organisational location of the person or group located in the claimocracy. Four vantage points are examined: core, privileged, marginal, and othered, and the data show...

Understanding and explaining the durability of segregated education requires the Thinking Politically-Sociologically Framework. Following on from examining vantage points is the need to investigate viewpoints or the knowledge production position of the person or group who create and espouse the claimocracy. Three ontological and epistemological pos...

Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy mortality...

Educational professionals are not ordinary everyday critics using experiential expertise to comment on practice. Instead, they are critical researchers who are concerned with debates about the purposes of education, social justice and equity, and how research is vital to understanding and explaining change. Using the reflexive views of six educatio...

An education reform claimocracy is rule by assertion, and in this article we examine the claims made for the academisation and MATification of the provision of and access to school places in England. We examine the claimocracy at work in regard to the Conservative government white paper, Opportunity for all. Strong schools with great teachers for y...

Introduction Consider the following statements from New Labour education policy texts: The quality of the head often makes the difference between the success or failure of a school. (DfEE, 1997, p 46) The £19 billion is a substantial commitment on our part to do what we can … investment for reform, for change and for pursuit of higher standards and...

This timely book analyses the relationship between the state, public policy and the types of knowledge that New Labour used to make policy and break professional cultures.

Introduction The New Labour period in office continues to be the focus of scholarly analysis and debate (Walford, 2005; Chapman and Gunter, 2009), and what the specific focus on the politics of knowledge production has achieved is to interrelate policy texts and research evidence with the power relations that produced and used it. So the original q...

Introduction The explanation for the leadership of schools game begins in the conceptualisation of the state and its relationship with civil society as a form of institutionalised governance. The UK state has intervened in and adapted to the interplay between hierarchy, markets and networks in public and education policy in England. So, for the New...

Introduction That those identified as ultimately responsible for school outcomes, variously called ‘headteachers’, ‘principals’ and ‘chief executives’, are and should be better leaders continues to travel around the world as a legitimate game to play (about Australia, see Addison, 2009; Eacott, 2011). It is an example of what Rizvi and Lingard (201...

The Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-000-23-1192) and began in January 2006 and was completed in December 2007. The project explored the relationship between the state, public policy and knowledge by focusing on New Labour's investment in the leadership...

Introduction The front page of the right-of-centre newspaper The Mail on Sunday on 10 November 1991 had the following headline, ‘Back to the blackboard’, with a story about how Kenneth Clarke, the then Education Secretary, planned ‘a radical overhaul of state primary schools’ (Lightfoot, 1991, p 1). The approach to be adopted was to return to whole...

Introduction Institutionalised governance has provided an explanation for how public institutions have a structured and structuring policy relationship with elite private interests, and how they stimulate as well as seek to control those interests. I intend in this chapter to use regimes of practice as an explanatory tool for knowledge production w...

Introduction The deployment of regimes of practice has so far enabled the presentation and analysis of positioning by knowledge producers and their relationship with each other and with education policy. Knowledge production as a social practice can be for and/or about the game in play: political and economic elites determined the purposes of schoo...

Introduction The leadership of schools game needed players who would generate and communicate beliefs, ideas and evidence. Specifically, New Labour needed to draw upon and construct intellectual work, and to do that it needed intellectual workers who would produce, package, transmit and legitimise knowledge and its mode of production. Such workers...

This form part of our Critical Education, leadership and Policy research group (CELP) where we regular blog about issues in education,

Introduction The following quotation is from an academy principal: ‘This is how it's gonna be. You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. And if you’re on the bus, then we’ll do everything we can to help and support you. But if you’re not, then you’re off the bus. And that's either through redundancy, through a restructure, through a change in...

This book critically examines the key issues facing the public with implications for education policy makers, professionals and researchers, confronting current issues about social justice and segregation. The author uses Arendtian ideas to help the reader to ‘think politically’ about education and how public services education can be reimagined.

Introduction The research reported in this book has been prompted by Arendt's (1958, p5) call to do ‘nothing more than to think about what we are doing’. In doing so I have used her thinking to help to think about the catastrophe that is unfolding in plain sight in public services education and the wider political culture in which it is located. Th...

Introduction Let me begin with a quotation: Those who have always lived in liberty do not appreciate the enormous power of freedom that earlier generations fought for. Hundreds of millions of people reap the benefits of freedom and stability but have no memory of life without democracy. For those lucky enough to live without the scars of lost gener...

Introduction The following quotation is from a headteacher: it's still that thing about making sure that every child actually can thrive in terms of our social democracy, making sure that you create a sense in which you open up what it counts to be successful in terms of a learner rather than just five A to Cs and, that you have an absolute remit t...

Introduction The following quotation is from a headteacher: I love to see the kids’ faces when they achieve. I like to see the fact that you can impact, you can help to shape children's lives by giving them opportunities. And I really enjoy to see those opportunities taken by children. (Gunter and Forrester 2010, p60) What is being said gives recog...

Introduction I want to begin with two different school situations. The first is a city academy that was formed from the closure of two ‘failing’ secondary schools (policy launched in 2000), and where data shows how the children were bewildered about the process they had been forced to accept and responded to this by often absenting themselves. The...

Introduction The following quotation is about an academy sponsor: Lord Harris of Peckham, sponsor of seven Academies plus other specialist schools, keeps a very close eye on his schools. He does not interfere with the professionals on a day-to-day basis, but he does judge quality and ask searching questions. His own success has permeated the cultur...

Introduction A research project in a secondary school in England enabled discussions with children who identified that they attend a good school where they know that their aspirations will be recognised, enhanced and supported, but who asked: “Why do they keep testing us?” Such a glimpse into the world of children displays their trapped location in...

Leading scholars combine theory and case studies to reveal how elite corporations are increasingly influencing how public education provision and services are delivered across the world.

Research and practice regarding politics within and for the educational management administration and leadership community are well established. The 50th anniversary issue of the journal educational management, administration and leadership is an opportunity to examine knowledge production where I have developed a new conceptual framework based on...

The Literacy Policy Project examines the trends in UK government policy interventions into literacy curriculum and pedagogies in schools in England. We undertake a policy scholarship methodology to read policy texts through a conceptual framework that frames policy interventions with functional, realist or socially critical purposes. We identify ho...

The intellectual history of the field of educational leader, leading and leadership continues to be determined by a ‘what works agenda’ that is enabled by privatised forgetting. Educational professionals as researchers and/or teachers and/or role incumbents learn to forget and keep forgetting that another way is possible and desirable. Individualis...

Much research into structural reform in education has reported on the success or failure of individual projects. Less attention has been paid to how the discourses associated with reform are normalized in teachers’ and head teachers’ thinking, and realized in their actions. In this article, we engage with resistance at the interface of legal policy...

Cambridge Core - American Studies - Policy Consultancy in Comparative Perspective - by Caspar van den Berg

ABSTRACT: Education reform under the modernisation agenda both in England and internationally has signified the restoration of the ‘private’ and the decline of ‘public’ education. Deploying Arendtian thinking on assimila- tion and identity, we argue that these ongoing reforms are indeed dark times for education professionals. We examine what ‘new d...

At a time when public education and reform agendas are changing the way we approach education, this book critically examines the key issues facing the public with implications for education policy makers, professionals and researchers. Drawing on empirical evidence gathered over 20 years, Helen Gunter confronts current issues about social justice a...

This chapter discusses the deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity, which shows how the state has adopted a form of depoliticisation by contract as a form of risk-management-promising, where the trend is towards proactive private as distinct from public contractualism based on the binary risk of failure–success designed to secure an...

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The chapter recaps that the book used Hannah Arendt's thinking to explore the catastrophe that is unfolding in plain sight in public services education and the wider political culture in which it is located. The investigation into education policy reveals the ‘new modes of negatin...

At a time when public education and reform agendas are changing the way we approach education, this book critically examines the key issues facing the public with implications for education policy makers, professionals and researchers. Drawing on empirical evidence gathered over 20 years, the book confronts current issues about social justice and s...

This chapter suggests that complex forms of discrimination are developing within and external to schools: within-school segregation is happening through the use of data to determine particular curriculum pathways and ability grouping of children; between-schools segregation through the use of data to determine high-status academic schools in compar...

This chapter considers the continued dominance of the private over the common purposes of education. It focuses on access to a school and examines what this means for plurality. Notably, through the deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity, it gives prime attention to the demand side and how deregulation by the state means that paren...

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book presents a new conceptualisation, so-called Knowledgeable Polities , and identifies and deploys the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity as the methodological means of examining the dynamics of the state, people, practices, ideologies and networks. Such an approach allows the s...

For Hannah Arendt, education ‘turns children toward the world’, and so ‘it is care for the world, not technical skills or moral development, that is its hallmark’. However, this chapter shows how the trend in this ‘turn to the world’ is usually the first rather than the second case as a form of regulated natality within a segregated education syste...

This chapter suggests that the combination of the ‘uncommon’ knowledges for and about the curriculum and teacher readies both for schools as businesses, where data on pupil outcomes has come to dominate the design and delivery of the curriculum and pedagogy for a segregated marketplace. Core to this has been a shift in accountability away from coll...

In the high stakes context of biopolitical distinctiveness, what matters appears to be selecting data and using it to make performance claims by smoothing a narrative. This chapter examines how this is integral to segregating the system using Hannah Arendt's (2003) thinking about responsibility and judgement, where she identifies what happens when...

This book critically examines the key issues facing the public with implications for education policy makers, professionals and researchers, confronting current issues about social justice and segregation. The author uses Arendtian ideas to help the reader to ‘think politically’ about education and how public services education can be reimagined.

Privatisation of public services education is a key feature of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), where policy convictions, ideas, and strategies are integral to the “spreading and mutating” of reforms. While there are important projects that seek to describe and explain major changes to restructuring, ownership and funding, what has not...

Reforms to public education systems in western‐style democracies have sought to make major interventions into the identities and practices of serving and aspiring school principals. Neoliberal transformation strategies continue to construct the school as a corporate business, and the school principal as entrepreneur. This chapter reads the data thr...

In this article we report on the distribution of authority over information practices observed in a postgraduate taught course at a large research university located in the UK. The course was designed using principles from information literacy (IL) pedagogy and represents the operationalisation of Radical Information Literacy (RIL) theory. By analy...

In this article we report on the distribution of authority over information practices observed in a postgraduate taught course at a large research university located in the UK. The course was designed using principles from information literacy (IL) pedagogy and represents the operationalisation of Radical Information Literacy (RIL) theory. By analy...

How and why human beings go about thinking, doing, and talking within and for activity is as old as time and remains core to research conceptualizations and fieldwork designs underpinned by a range of ontological and epistemological positions. The field of educational administration is no exception, and where primary research draws on discipline-lo...

Women have long been under-represented in organization leader roles within higher education. Research has identified, mapped and examined the data, with recommendations for change. The research reported in this article adds to current knowledge, and raises methodological questions by focusing on senior female leaders in higher education in Banglade...

The research reported in this article contributes new understandings of systemic change by studying the form of system redesign known in England as academisation. The data illuminate tensions within the neoliberal policy complex that are surfaced in a single secondary school. Although several studies have described academy conversions retrospective...

This chapter sets out to summarise the key messages and trends in the research reported in the essays in this book. We take forward the idea of corporatised governance, where we examine what the data and analysis has to say about the privatisation of public service education, and the particular contribution of corporate elites. Specifically we iden...

This chapter reports on primary research into the experience of education professionals who are located at the interface of the privatisation of public education in England. Specifically data are provided from “dispossessed experts” who have moved into private consultancy through the push of redundancy from the public system and/or the pull of busi...

Just what is the role and impact of corporate elites in contemporary reforms of public sector universities and schools? Providing fresh perspectives on matters of governance and vibrant case studies on the particular types of provision including curriculum, teaching and professional practices, Gunter, Hall and Apple bring together contributions fro...

This book reports on primary research into the role and influence of corporate elites in regard to the reform of public education. This introductory chapter outlines this purpose, with a focus on corporatised governance. We outline the trends in reform, and the role of elites and corporate elites in particular, and we then provide an over view of t...