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‘Managing’ managerialism: The impact of educational auditing on an academic ‘specialist’ school

Abstract: This paper seeks to nuance arguments about the impact of broad policy technologies of auditing processes upon teachers’ practices by providing empirical evidence of the effects of such processes, in context. Specifically, the paper draws upon a cross-section of teachers’ accounts of schooling practices in a specialist, academically-oriented secondary school and languages college in the British Midlands to reveal the complex ways audit practices influence teachers’ work, professional development and student learning under current policy conditions. The paper reveals that teachers endeavoured to actively ‘manage’ audit processes by strategically focusing upon student needs, and critiquing and problematising the more superficial aspects of performance management, systemic inspections, and a narrow focus upon academic results. However, even as these tactics were employed, there was also evidence of a simultaneous focus upon simply ‘managing’ to cope, particularly when audit processes added considerable pressure upon teachers to improve students’ test scores, and when they encouraged conditions antithetical to more educative concerns. This sometimes had dramatic effects upon student and teacher learning and teacher identity. Capturing this empirical complexity, in the context of specific schooling settings, provides evidence to nuance the more general literature on educational auditing, including in European and other trans-national settings, and existing understandings of such practices at local sites more generally Keywords: Audit culture; managerialism; neoliberalism; educational practice; continuing professional development. Introduction:

The research presented in this paper reveals the complex ways in which broad audit

processes to measure and manage teachers’ work and student outcomes influence current

schooling practices. To provide insights into this complexity, the paper argues for the

exploration of schooling practices at specific sites, in light of broader contextual

conditions. To do so the paper reveals the nature of audit processes by drawing upon the

example of a specialist, academic school in the British Midlands, England under current

national and international policy pressures for improved performance. Drawing upon the

insights of a group of teachers from an inner-city 11-18 secondary school specialising in

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languages education, the paper reveals how broad more managerial policy conditions –

emphasising the ongoing collection of numeric data as evidence of teacher and student

performance – influence subsequent schooling practices, and more intrinsic educational

purposes. However, this is not a straightforward process, and the way in which teachers

respond reveals a nuanced, active understanding of, and approach to, more performative

concerns. The paper provides insights into the nature of these audit processes, and details

about how teachers are influenced by, and responsive to, more performative pressures.

The paper begins by providing an overview of audit practices under current policy

conditions, including how more performative pressures encourage audit processes. These

audit processes are construed as a vehicle for managing risk within a risk averse, and

increasingly competitive social milieu. Through processes of global policy borrowing,

these audit technologies have expanded in influence, including in education. Such

technologies serve as public policy instruments which are not innocuous, simply

reflecting prior decision-making processes, but instead have direct effects upon the

publics to which they are directed. That is, ‘every instrument constitutes a condensed

form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it’ (Lascoumes & Le

Gales, 2007, p. 3). However, and at the same time, there is also evidence of resistance,

more productive applications, and the ability to ameliorate negative effects of such

processes. Such responses are evident at more localised settings (such as individual

schools), at the level of the nation-state, and trans-nationally. More detailed explorations

of such practices, in specific educational settings, is useful for determining the plurality

of practices which characterise audit-in-action.

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In this vein, the paper explores how audit processes influenced educators’ practices, and

the effects of these processes, including the nature of continuing professional

development practices, in a specific, specialist school site. Reflecting their dominance

within the data, particular emphasis is given to teachers’ responses to how their

performance was monitored through performance review processes, the influence of

school inspections (described as ‘Ofsted’ [1] inspections), and the focus upon improved

academic outcomes.

The challenge and challenging of audit practices

In a neoliberal context extolling the virtues of individual enterprise (Clarke, 2005), there

is a significant emphasis upon managing all aspects of human endeavour, at the level of

individual performance. In large part, this management process feeds into a broader

‘economism’, which reifies the economic above other social and political practices

(Teivainen, 2002). People are treated as ‘crude calculable units of economic resource’

(Shore 2008, p. 284) in need of constant monitoring. Under such circumstances, in all

areas of endeavour, not just the economic, the capacity to manage performance becomes

as important as actual practices themselves; as Ranson (2003) argues, ‘accountability is

no longer merely an important instrument or component within the system, but

constitutes the system itself’ (p. 459). That is, there is a tendency towards what Lyotard

(1984) described more than a quarter century ago as ‘performativity’. While Lyotard

(1984) employed the concept in a more restricted sense (optimal input-output ratio), the

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term is used in a broader sense in this paper to refer to a broad set of technologies,

capabilities and mechanisms of control which can be used to determine the worth of

individuals’ actions and capacities. Ball (2000) provides a useful overview of the term:

Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation, or a system of

'terror' in Lyotard's words, that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as

means of control, attrition and change. The performances (of individual subjects

or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of

'quality', or 'moments' of promotion (there is a felicitous ambiguity around this

word) or inspection. They stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or

value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement (Ball, 2000, p.

1).

In its current instantiation, such performativity is manifest in broad policy support for

generic measurement practices, designed to determine how efficiently resources have

been utilised in any given setting, and as a means guiding and influencing subsequent

activity and engagement. As part of this enactment of performativity, the development

of quantified data to enable processes of comparison – locally, nationally and globally –

is particularly salient. The adoption of various ‘audit’ technologies (Strathern, 2000;

Power, 1997) trends towards the quantification of practice, and potentially limits and

devalues those practices less amenable to quantification. Also, and as part of this

process, what is valued is the public hearing, examination or judgment associated with

the audit itself (Shore & Wright, 1999). The very absence of alternative discourses is

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another indicator of the pervasiveness of the push to measure and manage various

practices, including education.

In many ways, this desire to measure constitutes part of a broader risk averse society – a

‘second modernity’ (Beck, 1999) – which seeks to control the unexpected outcomes of

modern society. This desire to control entails projecting into the future to identify and

redress potential threats, ‘to foresee and control the future consequences of human action’

(Beck, 1999, p. 3), and to do so on a global, rather than a national scale. However, this is

no longer possible in an increasingly ‘world risk society’ in which fixed norms are no

longer pertinent, significant threats can be neither predicted nor contained, and experts

and industries identify, or ‘manufacture,’ new risks. Within this context of multi-faceted

and perpetual risk, risk management is now a dominant concern of public service

provision and management (Power, 2004). Such risk management entails a broad-based

approach to organisational life, arguing that organisations are inherently ‘risky’ and need

to be constantly managed to minimise any negative consequences. Such risk

management entails the capacity to exercise management processes in areas not

previously subject to such processes, but also comes at the risk of replacing what Power

(2004) describes as ‘valuable – but vulnerable – professional judgment in favour of

defendable process’ (p. 11). Under conditions of manufactured uncertainty, the audit

process has ‘broken free from its moorings in finance and accounting’ (Strathern, 2000,

p. 2), and is part of a broader apparatus of technical rationality or what Beck (1999)

describes as the ‘logic of control’ (p. 139) which characterises modernity. This is part of

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a process of trying to predict the unpredictable, of making some form of ‘determinant

judgement’ (Lash, 1999) about that which can not be readily or easily determined.

This trend towards the ‘auditing’ of social practice influences all aspects of human

endeavour, including education. Under these conditions, Ozga and Lingard (2007)

describe how a global policy elite is responsible for fostering an approach to education

which values quantifiable measures of educational attainment, such as test scores, above

all else. Such measures are treated as definitive evidence of the benefits, or otherwise, of

schooling. The result is what has been described more generally as a process of

‘governance by numbers’ (Rose, 1999), manifest in education as ‘policy by numbers’

(Ozga & Lingard, 2007) and resulting in ‘teaching by numbers’ (Taubman, 2009).

Strong emphases on accountability and accountancy form part of a neoliberal imaginary

which effectively limits the pedagogies enacted (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), and encourage

rationing of education by limiting investment in those areas deemed most institutionally

beneficial, with significantly detrimental implications for the most marginalised (Gillborn

& Youdell, 2000; Saltmarsh & Youdell, 2004).

These audit processes are evident through a variety of performative practices in schooling

settings, and involve a shift in governance structures away from more obviously and

overtly centralised forms of regulation to seemingly more decentralised approaches.

Pivotal to this governance turn is a strong central demand for data, and an emphasis upon

the use of such data (Ozga, 2009). The development of such data feeds into broader

perceptions of education as a vehicle to assist in economic development, and of the need

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to constantly monitor and compare educational outcomes in an intensely competitive

international climate (Nόvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). This emphasis on data also occurs

in spite of the clear limitations of some measures at the school level; ‘value-added’

scores, for example, have been criticised for failing to account adequately for influences

beyond the control of schools, and cannot therefore adequately serve as a performance

indicator for schools (Taylor & Ngoc Nguyen, 2006). This focus on data enables

performative technologies including target setting, the development of comparative

league tables based on academic results, the constant monitoring of results and

performance management of teachers.

However, while these processes have exerted significant influence, detailed empirical

inquiry reveals this influence is complex and contested, including within specific

European national settings. The more performative aspects of audit processes have been

found to influence school and teaching practices in problematic (Ball, 2003; Jeffrey,

2002) as well as more nuanced ways. In the context of policy support for both

performativity and creativity in England, for example, Troman, Jeffrey and Raggl (2007)

reveal how primary teachers felt that more stringent and prescribed national curricula

could be made less restrictive by exploring more creative teaching practices. This more

creative teaching was desired and implemented by teachers, even as there were strong

pressures to ensure compliance with particular literacy, numeracy and science content

within the national curriculum. Furthermore, the emphasis upon clear curriculum goals

contributed to increased efficacy amongst teachers as they experienced greater

curriculum coverage and sense of task completion. At the same time, there was also

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evidence of teachers deriving psychic rewards from teaching as a result of engaging, for

example, with modified testing practices involving teachers assessing and moderating

student work rather than having it assessed externally. Similarly, in his focus upon

primary school teacher identities, Troman (2008) revealed how primary teachers

mediated more performative school cultures, maintained more nurturing dispositions, and

sustained an interest in developing more creative approaches to their teaching. Teachers

held onto humanistic ideals even as they were increasingly strategic and protective of

their self-identities in more performative settings.

Furthermore, more performative influences are also construed as simultaneously

accommodated and resisted (always within historically contingent and vernacular ways)

across specific European national contexts. While more performative audit processes are

evident through the policy technology of ‘Quality Assurance and Evaluation’ (QAE),

with its emphasis upon increased transparency, accountability and goal-setting, and its

collection and use of data for these purposes, such influences have not gone

unchallenged. Andersen, Dahler-Larsen & Pederssen (2009) argue romantic and

communitarian approaches as part of a traditional Danish conception of enlightenment

have continued to exert influence, even as increased goal-setting, testing and other

accountability technologies have had an impact. Segerholm (2009) reveals how QAE

processes in relation to national schooling policy are construed as less problematic than

might be anticipated in a context of earlier national regulatory mechanisms to assure

quality in schooling, and also how alternative discourses (democratic participation,

equality) continue to exert influence. Simola, Rinne, Varjo, Pitkänen and Kauko (2009)

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also argue that while QAE processes are readily evident in Finnish compulsory schooling

contexts, policies are also promoted which challenge trans-national testing and ranking of

school performance. Although fragile, such foci are evident.

This paper seeks to add to this nascent literature about the specificity and complexity of

audit practices by identifying how teachers responded to the use of various forms of data

to ensure the quality of educational practices in an academic specialist schooling context

in England. While there is some evidence of the effects of auditing processes in specific

secondary school settings (such as in relation to Ofsted inspections in a school placed in

‘Special Measures’ (Perryman, 2009)), in primary schooling (e.g. Troman, Jeffrey &

Raggl, 2007; Troman, 2008) and at the broader national policy-making level (such as in

relation to Quality Assurance and Evaluation more generally), there appears to be

relatively little focus upon the actual complexity of responses to broad policy support for

audit processes in specific schooling settings at the current moment in time.

Furthermore, there appears to be little evidence of such studies in relation to academic

specialist secondary schools in England. Such schools might be ostensibly considered

‘successful’ by virtue of their capacity to provide specialist services in particular

academic areas of the curriculum, thereby automatically and advantageously

differentiating themselves from other schools in a broader competitive, academic market

characterised by increased individualism and greater public scrutiny of school

performance. This paper seeks to reveal the complexity of teachers’ responses to these

auditing processes at such a site.

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‘Midlands High’

A school has stood at the site of ‘Midlands High’ since the mid 16th Century. During

much of its history, the school was a privileged private, boys’ school which later attained

the status of a grammar school. Reflecting demographic and social changes within the

city throughout the last century, by the 1960s, Midlands High had become a

comprehensive, coeducational state school. However, in spite of a much more diverse

and comprehensive intake over time, the school’s history as a traditional academic

institution has continued to exert influence, as evident in the retention of, and continued

focus upon, a traditional academic curriculum, and an expectation within the school

community that students will aspire to a high academic standard, regardless of

circumstances. This status is further reinforced by the designation of the school as a

specialist languages college in the city in which it is located. Currently, the school draws

upon a very diverse student body, representative of approximately 25 different

nationalities. The specialist status of the school, together with its long history of

academic achievement, give it significant esteem within the city, as evident in its ability

to draw from a much wider catchment area than many other schools in the area.

With a population ranging from1600 to 1700 students, the school employs approximately

150 teachers, including a core of more mature, experienced teachers who have worked at

the school for many years. Reflecting a school of this size, there is also a significant

cadre of younger teachers ranging from ‘newly’ and ‘recently’ qualified first and second-

year teachers, mid-career teachers, through to more mature teachers. Several relatively

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younger teachers with ten to fifteen years experience occupy, or are seeking to occupy,

junior and senior middle management positions (including Heads of Department (HOD),

assistant Heads of Department, and pastoral responsibilities for particular year levels)

within the school.

Exploring current educational practices at Midlands High

The data constitute individual interviews with eighteen educators from multiple

faculties/subject disciplines, including English, Mathematics, Science, Languages, Art

and the Social Sciences, and with varying roles within the school, including full-time

classroom teachers, middle-managers and senior administrators. Interviews were

approximately 30 to 60 minutes duration, and initially focused upon the nature of the

teacher professional development practices undertaken by teachers, under current policy

conditions, but broadened out to include the educational practices in the school more

generally. Initial questions related to recently experienced professional development

practices, and how educational practices more generally had been influenced by the rise

of league tables, performance-based management and current government initiatives and

policies. As the school had just experienced an ‘Ofsted’ inspection at the time of the

interviews, interviewees were also asked to reflect upon the nature and effects of these

inspections upon educational practices within the school. While the interviews were

originally intended to focus upon revealing the nature and complexity of the continuing

professional development practices experienced by teachers under current audit-oriented

conditions, reflections on these circumstances stimulated much broader insights into the

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nature of educational practices more broadly. The interviews served as a vehicle for

‘meaning making’ (Warren, 2002) amongst participants, contributing further to

understanding the richness of the particular study site.

In the context of a focus upon the influence of audit practices in educational settings, an

emergent thematic analysis approach, involving searching for patterns within the data

(Shank, 2002), indicated a strong emphasis upon the measurement and management of

educational practices as well as challenges to these practices. This complexity and

contestation were evident in relation to three themes: teaches’ responses to individual

performance management processes; how teachers engaged with Ofsted inspections, and;

how teachers responded to the strong focus upon students’ examination results. Each of

these themes is elaborated in the findings section below, and then analysed in the

subsequent discussion section in light of the earlier overview of audit practices

Findings: Educational accounting

This section draws upon interview data collected during the research process to reveal

how teachers responded to the educational auditing processes within which their work

was located. Specifically, teachers’ comments reflected insights into, and concerns

about: the individual performance management processes which were undertaken

annually in the school; the role of Ofsted in relation to what teachers perceived to be the

core purposes of their work, and; the increased attention to test scores within the school.

However, and at the same time, the data also revealed teachers displaying an agentic

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capacity, and seeking to maintain a focus upon what they believed to be the more

intrinsically educational purposes of their work, even as these processes of accounting for

their work were strongly evident. These competing tensions were sometimes starkly

evident, and clearly existed in a state of considerable unease in relation to one another.

This section provides insights into these tensions, and presents selected participant

comments reflective of participants’ responses more broadly.

Responding to performance management processes

At the individual level, there was an emphasis upon performativity (Lyotard, 1984),

expressed as a focus upon performance management processes per se. This was reflected

in how continuing professional development (CPD) undertaken at the school level was

construed as linked to and influenced by this performance management process:

[performance management] has implications for CPD as well, of course. The way

we run this is that when the targets have been set, we then identify CPD needs

linked to those targets. (Mary [2], Director of Languages)

More managerial aspects of performance management were also evident discursively,

including how teachers frequently spoke about target and goal-setting, and referred to

more senior staff to whom they were responsible as ‘line managers’:

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…I'm consulting with my line manager about the type of targets we need to be

setting …(Leonard, HOD Art)

... every year we have to have a meeting. You have a meeting with your line

manager, you rate your performance against your three objectives for the previous

year... (Kenneth, GCSE [3] Mathematics co-ordinator)

... one of my targets was to create a bank of resources for ‘A Level [4]’, and my

line manager has already come to observe me a couple of times, and to look at the

resources that I’ve made... (Angus, languages teacher)

However, even as performance management processes were evident, and recognised as

exerting influence, this was not a straightforward process, with teachers sometimes

engaging in such processes in superficial ways:

…I think, very often [individual performance management targets] are agreed by

the person who's helping to set the targets, and the person setting the targets. I

think it's agreed and then, very often, put into a drawer or filed away on the

computer and forgotten about. (Lisetta, English teacher)

The busyness of teachers’ work, concerns about relevance of performance management

practices in school settings, and superficial compliance conspired against potential

benefits:

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Well, I think we are so busy doing all the things you do – and we know what we

do. It's not that I think it's bad to be reminded of good practice, or to actually stop

and reflect on how we're doing things, but I do think that - I do think some of the

things that we’re asked to do, particularly before with the management side of

things are, as I say, very ‘business oriented’. And you have this idea of sort of

jumping through hoops and then ticking boxes. (Lisetta, English teacher)

Having ‘broken free’ of its origins in the business world (Strathern, 2000), this business-

oriented, auditing process was found to be somewhat wanting and not always practically

relevant in the context of the complexity and busyness of actual schools:

So in a sense it is ridiculous, because it is kind of a meaningless paper exercise,

but you can choose to give it significance ... And yet, what happens is, you get so

wrapped up in what the teaching job throws at you – and actually, that class that

you thought might be a big challenge, might settle down. Another class might

start creating problems. And that departmental objective actually becomes

sidelined to something else. Another opportunity occurs which you throw yourself

into, and at the end of the year, you can't remember what your three objectives

were! And you look back and you say, ‘Oh, crikey! I haven't done any of those,

but I have been really busy! I do feel like I've done a good job; I've done all of

these things!’ ... I think that it is a useful process, but it never quite seems to

work. (Kenneth, GCSE Mathematics co-ordinator)

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Teachers sought to make such practices educative, but the busyness of daily school life

militated against these best intentions.

Ofsted as a vehicle for self and public-policing

Ofsted inspections were another policy-supported audit technology which was felt to

exert influence within the school, and sometimes in unintended ways.

For a deputy head with formal management responsibilities at the school level, such

inspections were construed as time consuming, but also as a means of reinforcing the

good practice which teachers should expect of themselves:

So [Ofsted] does affect a lot of what you do in that respect because, clearly, you

need to be spending quite a bit of your time doing quality assurance activities like

... observation, line management meetings, performance management, work

scrutiny; all that kind of stuff. So you're actually demonstrating what you would

expect in yourself, in other words, is really what it's about. And, that therefore

you can be trusted to get on with it for the next three years after the inspection;

they’re coming to validate your judgements. (Tristan, Deputy Head)

Ofsted inspections involved a strong focus upon examination results, and comparisons

between school-generated interpretations of teaching performance, and Ofsted inspectors’

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analyses of such performance. Such an approach entailed considerable preparation on the

part of those in schools at the same time as it was seen as validating school-based

judgments:

Well before the Ofsted inspectors actually come into the school, when they have

announced that they are going to visit, they have a couple of days where they trawl

through all of the data for the school. So they look at examination results ... they’ll

always look at the last three years. And they also read the very detailed school SEF

– School Evaluation Framework ... But what they’re doing is trying to check out

whether the school’s judgements about itself are accurate. So, when they come in,

they will then observe lessons and check whether the percentage of lessons that

they deem are good or outstanding, or satisfactory, is similar to the percentage we

had said that they are … So, the Ofsted inspectors are kind of assessing our

judgements, really, as a school. (Anika, History/English teacher)

The principle of being open and accountable for one’s work was considered fair and

reasonable:

... I think having people come in and look at what you do is utterly reasonable and

should be part of any job. Anybody should be expected to have their work

scrutinised, and I have no objection at all to Ofsted coming in … (Clinton,

Chemistry teacher)

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An emphasis upon compliance was also seen as beneficial for improving record keeping,

including the development of lesson plans for Ofsted inspections, as well as department

plans produced as part of the school annual plan:

I think what Ofsted did was enabled us as a department to have to quickly

galvanise ourselves from an administrative point of view… what was really

interesting was we've got an NQT [5] who's just come through all the lesson

planning. Very, very tight. Sort of everything - every ‘i’ has to be dotted, every

‘t’ crossed. So she was able to input a lot of information as regards what was a

good ‘paper piece’ of lesson planning. It enabled me to, as the head of

department, to sort of have a look at the framework that we have as a department,

and help me refine and galvanise more, the annual plan that's in place with

departments. (Leonard, HOD Art)

However, there was also a feeling that such inspections could be deleterious, potentially

narrowing and impoverishing the curriculum, with detrimental effects for student

learning:

The down-side – which I think really is a significant one - is that we teach to the

test more than we've ever done before. Kids don't use textbooks; they use course

guides! They don't want anything peripheral, and ultimately we're producing

students who can't problem solve and there’s lots of evidence for this. The Royal

Society of Chemists has conducted a number of studies into this. And I have only

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to listen to academics over there in the Chemistry department [at a neighbouring

university] say, ‘We’ve got students coming in with very high grades, but they

don't seem to know much. And they don't seem to be able to process much …’

And the kids these days have become very cute at getting the right results because

we tell them how to ... And when they're faced with something slightly different,

they can't do it. And we daren’t test that because if we did test that, results would

go down, and that would be holistically disastrous … (Clinton, Chemistry

teacher)

External audit practices had led to increased concern about results, which limited

pedagogical practices, and substantive student learning in general.

Reflecting the dominant policy proclivity to conceptualise education as numbers (Ozga &

Lingard, 2007), and of the high-stakes application of such numbers, there was a very

clear understanding of the repercussions of low examination results and poor Ofsted

inspections, particularly for ‘failing’ schools:

Well, if you were working in a school where examination results were very low, it

would have a considerable impact, because if you actually fail an inspection and are

seen as a ‘failing’ school, you would then have all sorts of targets that were being

set very much from the outside in, if you like. And, typically, then you would have

– you might have a replacement of the head of the school; you might have a

different head … the middle management, the year leaders, the curriculum leaders

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are the particular targets … And of course, there would be very rigorous targets in

terms of raising of achievement in exam results for the following year.(Anika,

History/English teacher)

Teachers also treated the Ofsted inspections as requiring a particular type of performance,

of performativity (Lyotard, 1984), and which involved presenting information in

particular formats:

Look, the kids were almost shocked at the lessons they were receiving on a daily

basis! They were all well resourced and learning objectives were on the board,

and I mean, these things just don't happen on a day-to-day basis. And the fact that

it was a show for Ofsted is not to say that the quality of the learning that was

happening was any more; I don't necessarily think it was. But it was definitely

being presented in a different way just to jump through hoops. (Jackson,

Geography teacher)

More substantively, an indication of the negative effects of compliance and public

policing measures associated with Ofsted was the way in which it contributed to a sense

of anxiety amongst students themselves:

I just think, in a sense, that any form of ‘outsider’ coming in to watch is always a

little bit of a, is a bit of an invasion, really. I think I was more concerned about the

impact on the students. I felt that they, their behaviour in the broader sense of the

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word, changed. I think some children displayed elements of what I would see to

be almost panic, or worry, or anxiety about having an inspector come in. I think

some students had listened to the things said to them in assemblies about, ‘The

inspectors are coming in. You have to be like this. You have to do this.’ And I

think they felt very much like it was up to them. And if we didn't get a good

report, then they would be to blame. So I think there was an anxiety culture

created inadvertently by Ofsted visiting, and the students copped that really in the

end. Even the staff were quite anxious, but I think the students, being younger,

absorb those things more. (Leonard, HOD Art)

The impact of pressure to ensure results were adequate was also evident in the way

schools were perceived to manipulate their subject offerings as a result of poor Ofsted

ratings. One teacher described how a neighbouring school, given a ‘notice to improve’

by Ofsted, responded by introducing a raft of vocational education subjects which

attracted equivalent ranking to more traditional GCSEs, but which were seen as

potentially ensuring greater numeric results across the school as a whole:

…so some schools have actually overtaken Midlands High. And most people that

know these schools quite well would be amazed if I said that ‘school A’ – I won't

mention it completely – ‘school A’ had actually, on paper, appeared to do better

than Midlands High, given that school has also been given ‘notice to improve’ by

Ofsted! So I think the whole thing’s completely contradictory. And it's because

they've cleverly chosen courses, because they're under the ‘cosh’. Schools are

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bound to do whatever they can to change the paper results and how it appears;

bound to. You'd be a fool not to! (Clinton, Chemistry teacher)

In this way, performance-related issues were seen to have unanticipated outcomes.

Strong public policing of outcomes led to manipulative practices which, while criticised,

were nonetheless considered reasonable coping strategies, under the circumstances.

The focus upon improved academic outcomes

There was also evidence of audit processes at work in the strong focus upon and push to

improve academic results more generally. The school engaged in a lengthy and ongoing

process of collectively developing school and departmental objectives and pre-specified

targets, all of which were then revised in response to examination results:

We have a training day in June where at least half of the day is for teams of

people to evaluate the work of the year and write a framework for objectives for

the coming year, and they have to link in with the overall school objectives, but

they will be much more detailed; these are quite lengthy documents. And then,

we revise those in September in light of the examination results. And they should

be open and working documents that will be added to as things happen through

the year. (Anika, History/English teacher)

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This focus on results also involved pressure to meet ‘aspirational targets’ set at the start

of each year for each cohort of students, and in relation to each individual teacher:

… as a curriculum leader I am under quite a lot of pressure to ensure that targets are

met ... grades are always compared to specific target grades that we are given,

which are very aspirational anyway. So even by meeting them, we are actually

doing very well, never mind exceeding them. But one thing that I am very careful

of is not to put too much pressure on the people within my team, other than on the

first training day of the year when we’ll go through the exam results for each

person, so they can actually see how well their classes have done. (Keith,

Geography Head of Department)

However, in spite of assurances to ameliorate the worst effects of such audit processes,

the public way in which this was done – the public hearing (Shore & Wright, 1999) – of

aspirational and actual academic targets, caused angst amongst some teachers. This

included a young Geography teacher commencing his third year who had just received

notification of the final results of his first GCSE class. This teacher’s description of how

his school utilised a data analysis package (provided through the ‘Fischer Family Trust

(FFT)[6]’) to generate the aspirational targets exemplifies how quantitative data could be

used as a tool to publicly monitor teachers’ practice:

An FFT is like, basically they take into consideration a lot of different things... it

calculates what [students] should be getting for different types of exams. And so

this year when I passed – did the first GCSE class I'd taken through – I was given a

sheet of the results I got, and a sheet of their FFTs, which aren’t my predicted

24

grades. And the FFTs are different to that, to what I predicted. And then I was

given ‘residuals’, so ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ so whatever I got – if it was an ‘A star’ and

the FFT was a ‘B’, I got ‘plus 2’ residual. And then if it was a ‘C’ but they were ‘A

star’, I got a ‘minus 3’. And at the bottom, it was all calculated, and I got a total at

the bottom.

And so the pressure! And that was given out to the whole department, for everyone

to see! And that's there, and it’s quite a lot of pressure to sort of, to try and meet

those things. But it's not based on my professional judgement; it's based on the

FFT. (Jackson, Geography teacher)

In spite of criticisms of how this process abstracted student learning and denigrated

professional judgment, for this teacher, this audit process became embodied as a sense of

failure:

…so for example this year I was ‘minus 8’, and therefore, I suppose deemed a

failure in that respect that I didn't do as well. It did feel … you know, I've let them

down like, in a way … (Jackson, Geography teacher)

As well as undertaking public audit processes in relation to individual staff, there was

also a push to measure the proportion of students receiving a specific range of grades in

any given cohort. One teacher reflected upon the push to measure the proportion of

students receiving grades ‘A’ to ‘C’ on a traditional ‘A-E’ scale at the GCSE level:

25

So we have targets within school and we issue those targets for Key Stage 4/Key

Stage 5 performance things, like the percentage of ‘As’ to ‘Cs’ including maths and

science, which is a real big one now. (Clinton, Chemistry teacher)

This teacher was highly critical about this process which led to the targeting of resources

to those students on pass/fail (‘C/D’) borderlines, in an effort to make schools appear

more educationally effective:

I also worry money can be invested in those students that are ‘C/D’ borderline. So

recently there was money available in English I think, specifically, and quite a bit

of money was made available to tip kids over the D to C borderline. … I feel the

C to D, D to C, borderline is actually no more important than the E to D or the C

to B or the G to F! Irrelevant! They're invented levels, and therefore to devote

disproportionate amounts of money to get kids over that! Well we know why that

happens, but I define that as morally unacceptable… an example of money being

spent with the sole aim of massaging figures. (Clinton, Chemistry teacher)

Such ‘educational triage’ practices (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000) focused attention on those

students deemed likely to improve sufficiently to attain passing levels of achievement to

boost overall school ratings. Booher-Jennings (2005) refers to such students who achieve

just-below-passing-grades as ‘bubble kids’ – students whom, with additional attention,

are considered capable of bursting through the pass/fail barrier.

26

In association with such demands, teachers also engaged in myriad strategies to ensure

improved academic results:

Yeah, we all want to do well; we want our students to do well and we all try to get

good amounts of passes at GCSE ... I mean, I suppose in my position of

responsibility I would do other things, about trying to ensure good GCSE results,

in that I might assign certain teachers certain classes. I might move certain

disruptive kids out of certain classes which are critical for a certain pass rate. And

so there's lots of tactical things we do with staff and with kids and with group

sizes and things. And putting on revision classes ... (Kenneth, GCSE Mathematics

co-ordinator)

While more manipulative practices were undertaken to maximise results to respond to

such market pressures, teachers also challenged such stances. For a school which

incorporated a specialist languages college, the charter of which included responsibility

to contribute to the professional development of languages teachers in neighbouring

schools, such performative processes were also seen as particularly problematic:

You know, we provide lots of training for the schools [in the city]. What I would

really like to do is set up networks where there’s a genuine exchange of best

practice, rather than people skiving off others, with them trying to improve their

results and ... the ‘one-upmanship’, as the English say … And I think, the league

27

tables don’t help that at all. You know, where one wants to be better than the

other, rather than all becoming better together… (Mary, Director of Languages)

In this way, teachers challenged more restrictive practices at the same time as more audit

practices exerted influence. They sought to foster conditions for more genuine

educational practices for teachers, as well as students, even as they were complicit in the

more performative manifestations of such technologies.

Discussion: Managing managerialism

Teachers from Midlands High were thoughtful, experienced, and highly professional in

their outlook towards their roles, and their students’ needs. Evidence provided indicates

they cared about their students and sought, as best they could, to provide worthwhile

educational experiences for these students. The way in which they were able to elaborate

upon their own professional practice, their insights into the nature of current practices

within their school more generally, and their sometimes substantive critiques of these

practices, all point to these as competent and capable teachers.

While particular policy instruments create their own effects (Lascoumes & Le Gales,

2007), the way in which teachers responded to and managed more managerial processes

also reveals an emphasis upon more substantive educative practices in schooling settings

than might be anticipated under current managerial conditions, or as expressed in some of

the more general educational policy-related literature. While auditing practices were

28

clearly pervasive – down to teachers’ discursive reference to Heads of Department and

senior administrators as ‘line managers’ – such practices did not go unchallenged.

This more ‘tactical’ response included the active challenging by teachers of more

managerial practices in the form of critiques of some of the audit processes which had

become embedded within the school. This included criticisms by some teachers about

the way in which the performance management process sometimes seemed to be

undertaken for its own sake, rather than as a means of contributing to improving the

nature and quality of their own and students’ learning within the school. While

influenced by it, teachers treated the more business-oriented, ‘governance by numbers’

(Rose, 1999) approach which encouraged the setting of more narrowly conceived,

simplistic and often overtly quantitative goals as not particularly relevant in relation to

the complexity of actual teaching practice. In these teachers’ opinions, such processes

seemed to downplay the unpredictability of teaching which was not readily amenable to

more prescriptive performance-management practices. Specific classes and students

were seen by teachers as complex and multifaceted and requiring of close and careful

attention, while the performance management practices in which teachers were obliged to

participate were seen as inflexible, and inept at recognising this complexity. That

performance management goals could be tactically ignored at times, by both those

undertaking the appraisal and those being appraised, reveals a lack of genuine attention to

such foci. Teachers critiqued more business-oriented models of such processes which

seemed to focus on issues of compliance, rather than improved practice. One teacher’s

reference to ‘jumping through hoops and ticking boxes’ revealed a level of frustration

29

sometimes associated with this process. While there is some evidence of how

professional accountability has been supplanted by neoliberal corporate accountability

(Ranson, 2003), the data also reveal a more nuanced engagement with actual audit

processes. Superficial engagement with more corporate performance management

processes was indicative of concerns that such processes were insufficiently responsive to

more genuinely educational practices. In these ways, teachers tactically ‘managed’ the

management process, seeking to reduce its negative effects.

This did not mean audit practices were not readily evident, or had significant influence.

A culture of performance management was clearly evident in teachers’ perceptions of the

policing role of Ofsted inspections. Reflecting the logic of business (Strathern, 2000),

Ofsted was overtly described as a means of ensuring ‘quality assurance’ and

‘performance management’ by teachers and administrators within the school. More

substantively, the auditing process was expressed as a comparative exercise which

opened up teachers’ classroom practices by firstly requiring schools to police teachers’

practices themselves, and then making this process itself the object of inquiry of Ofsted

inspectors. These observations were mechanisms to audit the school’s capacity to

monitor itself. In a sense, this capacity to monitor the monitoring process represents the

apotheosis of performative practices. In conjunction with ‘no-notice’ inspections,

Perryman (2009) describes this self-evaluation process as ‘the perfect state of panoptic

performativity’ (p. 628). This emphasis upon the regulation of the self is in keeping with

the shift to a governance model which involves centrally controlling and regulating

teachers’ work, whilst giving the appearance of greater local control. As Ozga (2009)

30

argues, such processes ‘invoke the rhetoric of self-evaluation but retain key elements of

managerial accountability or “answerability”’ (p. 152).

However, and again reflecting a more tactical approach to managerialism, there were

times when this self-policing role was also taken up in more educationally-constructive

ways. That Ofsted inspections relied upon comparisons between the school’s evaluation

of itself and Ofsted inspectors’ perceptions of observed lessons were seen as a means of

validation of good work – of ‘what you would expect in yourself.’ While the self-

policing approach adopted (– an approach made more explicit since the adoption of the

2005 Inspection Framework (Perryman, 2009) –) was evidence of an audit technology in

action, there was at least some evidence of a proactive appropriation of more

performative practices for more substantive and morally-oriented educational purposes.

Rather than simply entailing the performance of inspection alone, teachers sought to

explore how the Ofsted inspection could inform the more substantive work which

occurred in the school. This contrasted with the situation in some schools, such as that

starkly outlined by Perryman (2009), who revealed how teachers in a school in ‘Special

Measures’ engaged in a process of presentation of the school in the best possible light for

inspection, but how this emphasis on the performative aspects engendered a sense of

cynicism amongst teachers about the whole process once the Ofsted inspection had been

completed. This, in turn, led to a sense of disappointment amongst teachers about their

own role in this process. (At a more prosaic level, Ofsted inspections were also

considered beneficial for improving record-keeping processes!)

31

This did not mean teachers simply accepted managerial processes, particularly when they

construed them to be problematic. This was evident in how the high stakes nature of

Ofsted inspections was critiqued for having ‘thinned out’ the ‘purposes, pedagogies and

potential of education’ (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p. 197). Teachers expressed concern

about students’ capacities to apply their knowledge and understanding to new and

different situations.

Furthermore, the targeted allocation of funding to those students on the border-line

between passing and failing (e.g. students receiving A to C in GCSEs) – a form of

‘educational triage’ (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Saltmarsh & Youdell, 2004) – was

criticised vehemently. Teachers argued it was not considered acceptable that only those

students whose results would contribute to making the school appear favourable on

league tables were worthy of additional attention and resources, and that those students

deemed less ‘valuable’ should be left to their own devices. The description of such

practices as ‘morally unacceptable’ reinforces a capacity and willingness to critique more

performative effects upon student learning. Consequently, and even as heavily

influenced by them, teachers did not passively accept the more spurious effects of the

auditing and economising practices with which they had to contend. The lack of

specificity typically associated with value-added measures (Taylor & Ngoc Nguyen,

2006) was recognised. Teachers also argued openly and sometimes vehemently against

the more performative aspects of performance-based management practices, the

development of league tables, and manipulation of examination results. League tables

were felt to militate against genuine sharing and collaboration between teachers from

32

different schools. This was a particularly problematic situation for this school as a

specialist languages college because of its remit to engage in professional-development

related work with neighbouring schools in the wider educational community, including

beyond its own catchment. The public ascription of value to schools via league tables

was seen as encouraging perverse professional development practices amongst teachers

which occluded forms of genuine collaboration and sharing of ideas. Competitive

practices antagonistic to more substantive teacher (and student) learning were condemned

when they were seen to militate against more active engagement by teachers in their own

learning.

At the same time as teachers employed these tactics to proactively ‘manage’ the more

problematic aspects of the audit-oriented conditions within which teachers worked, it was

clear that teachers also simultaneously struggled to respond effectively to some

performative pressures and audit demands. There was recognition that a culture of fear

of reprisals portended conservative teaching and assessment practices. While teachers

were concerned about evidence that students’ understanding was inadequate, there was a

sense that these concerns were insufficient for challenging more dominant schooling

practices which arose in the shadow of concerns about the public portrayal of poor

academic performances. This paralysis reveals the power of such practices, reflecting the

impact of the influence of policy as numbers (Ozga & Lingard, 2007), risk averseness in

society more generally, and a subsequent desire to manage existing risks (Beck, 1999;

Power, 2004). While they struggled with this situation, these teachers also recognised

that it had the potential to strip schooling of its educational intent.

33

Even as they took measures to ensure they were as well-represented as possible for

Ofsted inspections, the effects of the public-policing impact of Ofsted inspections were

also evident in concerns about the creation of an ‘anxiety culture’ within the school.

Concerns about the ‘invasion’ of teachers’ classrooms, and how the monitoring process

appeared to have been transferred onto students, such that some students themselves

displayed concern about Ofsted visits, revealed a general air of concern and anxiety in the

face of managerial demands. Teachers worried that students could become implicated in

broader auditing processes about which they should have been oblivious. There was

some evidence that the audit process was not only evident to students, but appeared to

have influenced the nature of the schooling practices they experienced. Again, such an

outcome is an unforseen circumstance of the pressure to manage a particular type of

educational ‘risk’, to predetermine the indeterminable (Lash, 1999).

Teachers were also struggling to cope in the context of audit technologies focused upon

improved examination results per se, and various strategies to achieve this goal. The

public sharing amongst colleagues of teachers’ class results, at the beginning of each

school year, exemplifies the auditing process as public spectacle (Shore & Wright, 1999).

Teachers’ practices were not simply regulated through the more private performance

review process, but were also subject to annual scrutiny amongst peers. The public use

of aspirational targets, such as measures derived through the Fischer Family Trust, and

comparisons of these targets with actual student performance, constituted evidence of the

importance of being seen to ‘value-add’ to students’ learning according to numeric

34

measures of achievement, and of the humiliation which could ensue should such targets

not be attained. Even as they were critiqued by teachers, the application of these

measures had specific and immediate effects, including pressure on heads of department

and teachers to achieve improved academic outcomes over time. Just as the language of

comparison has become naturalised for performative purposes at the national and

international level (Nόvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003), so too has comparison at the level of

individual teacher become part of the educational landscape for similar purposes more

locally. Under these circumstances, the ‘managing’ practices evident often involve

teachers as simply trying to cope with the negative ramifications of such processes.

Strategies such as changing examination boards, assigning particular teachers to classes

to ensure or improve GCSE ‘A to C’ pass rates, and moving particular students from one

class to another to ensure specific outcomes were further instances of strategies employed

to try to maximise what were construed to be the principal markers of educational success

under audit conditions.

Conclusion

That there is considerable evidence of the impact of policy-supported performative audit

technologies within a school considered successful on a variety of both academic and

social measures, and in terms of broader conceptions of esteem (such as perceptions

within the broader community), reveals just how powerful and entrenched audit

technologies have become in recent years. The focus upon improving test results,

concerns about test results per se, and the more performative aspects of Ofsted

35

inspections were clearly evident. However, the ways in which teachers in the school

responded to these demands also reveals evidence of a more complex set of practices and

processes at play. The immediacy, contingency and variability of teachers’ work, the

recognition of some educational benefits associated with external inspections, the

sustained professional focus upon student learning and the desire to improve practice all

contributed to the challenging and more active ‘management’ of more audit-oriented

processes. While more audit-oriented practices exert influence, how they actually play

out in schooling sites is worthy of further attention to nuance and better understand

current practices.

It seems reasonable to suggest that schools with less of a sense of themselves or their

place within their community, and without the status associated with being a specialist

college, and/or a long history as a successful academic institution, would be influenced

differently by the pressures of performativity. Increased policy support for audit

processes in education has serious consequences for the sustained focus upon students’

learning, in all its complexity, and recognition of the specificity and situatedness of

students’ schooling experiences. Audit technologies, by their very nature, are not

designed to take into account the multifaceted circumstances which influence students’

learning, and teachers’ efforts to further such learning.

This has significant implications for education in England, but potentially, Europe more

generally. Given the English context can be ‘described as the most “advanced” in Europe

in terms of data production and use’ (Ozga, 2009, p. 149), the concomitant rise in policy-

36

as-numbers (Rose, 1999) in education policy-making (Lingard, 2011) and increased

processes of policy-borrowing across national contexts (Rinne & Ozga, 2011; Rizvi &

Lingard, 2010), the ways in which education is governed via data in England serves as an

example for policy-makers in other European countries of how tightly controlled

governance processes can be effected. In a context in which populations are increasingly

subject to, and subjecting themselves to, evaluation and measurement in response to

conceptions of global competitiveness, these processes of enumeration further reinforce

the value and validity of quantitative data as a principal indicator of educational

attainment. Even though England exists as something of an outlier in Europe, the

existence of such elaborate governance processes within England resonate with increases

in demands for data from the European Commission, and how such demands help

constitute rationales for policy direction within national systems. Calls for the increased

collection of data for Quality Assurance and Evaluation processes, for example,

exemplify modes of governance which help constitute this European education space

more generally (Grek, Lawn, Lingard, Ozga, Rinne, Segerholm & Simola, 2009). In this

way, this call for numeric data contributes to a policy-as-numbers approach which serves

as a mode of governance at the transnational level; this has significant influence (albeit

always differently, depending on context) within individual European states, and across

Europe as a whole. This adds to already existing national policy making processes

involving policy brokers effectively constructing a European Education policy space

through processes of constant comparison of numeric education data, and justifying such

responses as necessary to ensure educational quality (Grek et al., 2009). Such

governance processes, with their emphasis upon numbers, are further enhanced by the

37

role of international comparisons on the basis of numeric outcomes on international tests

such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as

the World Bank and UNESCO, and, to a lesser extent, the International Association for

the Evaluation of Educational Assessment’s (IEA) Trends in International Mathematics

and Science Studies (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study

(PIRLS). In a context of global policy-borrowing, such measures also help constitute an

emergent global education policy field (Lingard, Rawolle & Taylor, 2005; Rizvi &

Lingard, 2011), beyond the state, which serves to further enhance more

neoliberal/competitive conceptions of Europeanisation, the way in which the European

community might be ‘imagined’ more generally, and individual European states

(although, again, always differently for different countries). The way in which England

serves as a ‘highly responsive “bridge” or transmitter’ (Grek et al., 2009, p. 8) between

the global (in its Anglo-American iterations) and the rest of Europe also means the

findings of this research may have more saliency for conceptions of a European

education space than may at first appear to be the case. Further fine-grained research of a

similar ilk in other European countries would seem beneficial to further explore these

associations, their links and lineages.

But how these technologies play out in actual sites cannot be assumed, and necessitates

careful inquiry, in situ. To gloss over these differences is not only to fail to take into

consideration the specificity of the challenges faced by educators in context, but to ignore

exploration of varying schooling practices which may assist considerably in challenging

more performative pressures and demands. The insights which arise from such research

38

has the potential to reveal a much richer conception of educational practice, alternatives

to more reductionist approaches to the influence of audit technologies, and a necessary

nuancing of the literature which sometimes speaks in generalities about the effects of

such processes, without careful consideration of empirical evidence. That the teachers in

the research presented were not simply passive victims of more managerial audit

practices is noteworthy, and further inquiries into the nature of their work might usefully

inform the work of both policy makers and practitioners as they struggle to promote

genuinely educational practices in more managerial times.

Notes

[1] The ‘Office for Standards in Education’ (Ofsted) is a national body responsible for

regulating educational standards in English schools. A large proportion of this work

involves conducting school inspections.

[2] All names are pseudonyms.

[3] The GCSE – General Certificate of Secondary Education – reflects students’

achievements across a range of subjects from ages 14 to 16.

[4] The English ‘A-level’ is the highest qualification undertaken by senior English

students (aged 17 to 19), post-GCSE.

[5] Newly Qualified Teacher.

[6] FFT: The Fischer Family Trust is an independent, not-for-profit organisation which

describes itself as supporting projects designed to improve and develop education in the

UK. A key part of its work involves providing performance data to schools and local

39

authorities to foster self evaluation and subsequent target setting. (See

http://www.fischertrust.org/ )

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