Inside the English education lab: Critical qualitative and ethnographic perspectives on the academies experiment

By Manchester University Press

Inside the English education lab offers a range of qualitative and ethnographic explorations of the academies programme in England. Drawing on examples from primary and secondary academy institutions, a free school and Multi Academy Trusts, the collection explores how promises of academy policy are often at odds with everyday practice. Data and evidence throughout the collection highlight a multitude of ways in which the academies ‘experiment’ retrenches rather than reforms inequalities. Methodological insights and innovations are also a central feature of the collection, where authors interrogate what it means to collect and produce data in the current political context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526145406

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Inside the English education lab

Inside the English education lab

Critical qualitative and ethnographic perspectives on the academies experiment

Edited by

Christy Kulz, Kirsty Morrin and Ruth McGinity

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 5261 4538 3 hardback

First published 2022

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Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

List of abbreviations

Foreword – Diane Reay

Introduction – A time and a place: doing critical qualitative and ethnographic work across an academised educational landscape – Christy Kulz, Ruth McGinity and Kirsty Morrin

Part I – ‘Privatisation’: Positioning policies and publics: academies, governance and agency

1Academisation and the law of ‘attraction’: an ethnographic study of relays, connective strategies and regulated participation – Andrew Wilkins

2When the MAT moves in: implications for legitimacy in terms of governance and local agency – Helen Ryan-Atkin and Harriet Rowley

Part II – ‘Practice’: Schooling the body and bodies in schooling: practice, strategy and the everyday

3Free schools, inclusion and social capital of children with special educational needs and disabilities – Clara R. Jørgensen and Julie Allan

4The great education ‘permanent revolution’? Shape-shifting academies and degrees of change (and ‘success’) – Katie Blood

5What ‘these kids’ need: discipline, misrecognition and resistance in an English academy school – Sarah Leaney

Part III – ‘Reflexivity’: In the contours and on the margins: re-imagining the academy

6Producing the academy school: ethnography, Foucault and the study of policy production – Jodie Pennacchia

7The ‘contradictory space’ of the entrepreneurial academy: critical ethnography, entrepreneurship education and inequalities – Kirsty Morrin

Conclusion – Embedding an educational settlement: coercion, contestation and localised struggles – Christy Kulz, Kirsty Morrin and Ruth McGinity

Afterword – Polyvalent and incoherent: the academies programme and the English educational apparatus – Stephen J. Ball

Index

List of figures

2.1Chalkdown MAT. Source: author. Chalkdown MAT. Source: author.Chalkdown MAT. Source: author.Chalkdown MAT. Source: author.Chalkdown MAT. Source: author.Chalkdown MAT. Source: author.

6.1Performative noticeboards. Source: author.

Contributors

Julie Allan is Professor of Equity and Inclusion and former Head of the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on inclusive education, disability studies and children’s rights and she has been advisor to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Dutch and Queensland governments and Council of Europe. Her recent books include Psychopathology at School: Theorising Mental Disorder in Education (with Valerie Harwood) (Routledge, 2014) and the 2020 Routledge World Yearbook in Education – Schooling, Governance and Inequalities (with Valerie Harwood and Clara Rübner Jørgensen).

Katie Blood is an independent class-based Bourdieusian social researcher. Her postgraduate research conducted at Nottingham Trent University, under the umbrella of the sociology of education, was an ethnographic study exploring newly established academies in marginalised settings. Her research interests and theoretical framing lies in social justice.

Clara Rübner Jørgensen is a Lecturer in Childhood, Youth and Education Studies at Coventry University. She is a social anthropologist and has carried out fieldwork in educational settings in the UK, Spain and Central America. Her research focuses on social inclusion, educational inequalities, children and young people’s experiences of schooling and the social and cultural contexts of childhood and youth. She has published in international journals including Childhood, British Journal of Sociology of Education, European Journal of Special Needs Education and British Educational Research Journal. Her recent books include Kid Power, Inequalities and Intergenerational Relations (with Michael Wyness) (Anthem Press, 2021) and the 2020 Routledge World Yearbook in Education – Schooling, Governance and Inequalities (with Julie Allan and Valerie Harwood).

Christy Kulz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Technical University Berlin’s Institute of Sociology where she is researching British migrants in Germany in the wake of Brexit. Prior to this Christy was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, working on a research project exploring how schools and their subjects are governed through the education market. While her research interests are diverse, they coalesce around intersectional formations of inequality in urban contexts, race, whiteness and nationalism in Europe and how neoliberalism shapes institutional practices. Christy’s research monograph, Factories for Learning: Producing Raced and Classed Inequality in the Neoliberal Academy School (Manchester University Press, 2017), won the Society for Educational Studies’ first place book prize and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrahams Award.

Sarah Leaney is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton. Her research focuses on the formations of classed identities, and the role of ‘affect’ in understanding the formation and reformation of classed selves. She also explores the everyday, material and social experiences of people who live on council estates and has published on this in journals such as Housing, Theory and Society, and Ethnography and Education.

Ruth McGinity is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the Institute of Education, UCL, UK. Ruth’s research is organised around three main themes and seeks to critically investigate new models and structures of schooling, theorise professional identities and practices and explore knowledge production within and for the field of educational leadership. Ruth is an elected Council member of the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society and an Associate Editor of its flagship journal, Educational Management, Administration & Leadership.

Kirsty Morrin is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. Her research is based in sociologies of ‘class’, and education. In particular, she explores ‘class’ formations and processes, theories of social mobility, and the increased preference for ‘entrepreneurship’ or ‘entrepreneurial agendas’ in education. Empirically her work has recently been focused on the academies programme in England, specifically state intervention and sponsorship in the programme, and localised resistance to this initiative.

Harriet Rowley is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Community at Manchester Metropolitan University. She teaches students on undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in the Department of Children, Youth and Education Studies. As a researcher, Harriet uses ethnographic approaches with arts-based methods and relational practices in educational and community settings to support individuals to voice their experiences in creative ways. Harriet is particularly interested in youth participation, forms of social engagement through the arts and forms of democratic practice to promote the representation and recognition of marginalised groups. She has led and contributed to EU-funded projects in these areas including PARTISPACE (H2020), Partibridges (Erasmus+) and OUYE (Erasmus+). During her sabbatical in 2018, Harriet was a visiting scholar at Flinders University, Adelaide (Erasmus+ Higher Education Mobility Programme). Her forthcoming books include Reshaping Youth Participation: Manchester in a European Gaze (with Janet Batsleer and Gráinne McMahon) (Emerald, 2022) and Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development (with Janet Batsleer and Demet Lüküslü) (Policy Press, 2022). Harriet was awarded her PhD entitled ‘Schools and deprived communities: A case study of a community-oriented school’ in 2013 from the University of Manchester. She used critical policy sociological perspectives to carry out a longitudinal, ethnographic study of a sponsored academy by a social housing trust.

Helen Ryan-Atkin is a Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education at Manchester Metropolitan University. She teaches on both the BA and PGCE programmes in the School of Teacher Education and Professional Development, and is a Partnership Coordinator with the university’s network of over 500 school partners in the region. Helen’s research interests include governance, accountability and trust within Multi-Academy Trusts, using critical social policy theories to give a voice to the various stakeholders within these organisations, including those less heard. Her current doctoral study addresses these themes, particularly in the context of MAT expansion, and the implications for democratic representation and legitimacy within trust governance. The research involves a longitudinal study using ethnography and life-history approaches. She is co-author of the chapter ‘Developing through reflection and collaborative enquiry’ in the book by Moira Hulme, Rebecca Smith and Rachel O’Sullivan, Mastering Teaching: Thriving as an Early Career Teacher (OUP, 2021).

Andrew Wilkins is Reader in Education Policy and Co-director of Research in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Andrew is Associate Regional Editor (Europe) for the Journal of Education Policy and serves on the editorial board for the British Journal of Sociology of Education, The Australian Educational Researcher and Journal of Applied Social Theory. His recent books include Modernising School Governance (Routledge, 2016) and Education Governance and Social Theory (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Abbreviations

Foreword

This is a book that reveals just how much the English educational landscape has been transformed over the twenty-first century. We now have the wholesale academisation of English state schooling with 91% of all secondary schools operating as academies in 2020, and a Conservative government putting money and political clout into creating more. As the editors assert, total academisation is the single future model for English schooling. Given this situation, Inside the English education lab: critical qualitative and ethnographic perspectives on the academies experiment, could not be more timely. Most English people have little idea of the extent to which English education has been privatised, and even less of the strong trends towards authoritarianism that permeate many academies, particularly those ‘serving’ disadvantaged communities.

The editors, Christy Kulz, Kirsty Morrin and Ruth McGinity, have an impressive track record of researching and developing academic understandings of, the ‘academies project’. That expertise is evident in powerful, yet nuanced and well-crafted, analyses that dive deep under the surface of the aspirational rhetoric that has become the hallmark of the academies project.

This book discloses a wealth of different ways in which the policy of academisation is being used to create a new marketised educational system that is simultaneously highly centralised and locally autonomous. The policy also valorises competition. As the editors point out in their introduction, hyper-competitive processes are encouraged at all levels: between academies and state-maintained schools, between and within Multi-Academy Trusts, as well as within schools between students and teachers through continual processes of ranking, comparison and observation.

It also shows the ways in which class, race and disability are at the heart of such practices and performances within academies. Across the chapters we see how inequalities both govern and are governed by the academisation of schooling. The chapters work to illustrate how power and inequality are central to the academies project. It is immediately evident from many of the chapters that understanding the academies experiment requires a recognition of how corporate and private interests are moving into the English educational system. Throughout the book we see the everyday ways in which private interests sustain themselves in academy institutions. The book makes very clear the methods by which such private interests work against rather than support the public interest. In Chapter 2, Helen Ryan-Atkin and Harriet Rowley write of the shift in governance from a local democratic process to a centralised appointed body, highly dependent on the CEO of the academy chain. They catalogue the resulting marginalisation of the local community and the negative implications for localised democratic oversight.

Relatedly, in Chapter 1, Andrew Wilkins presents a vivid example of how governance is practised in academies. The drive to ensure business interests are at the heart of governance works to constitute members of the local community and parents as unprofessional, and consequently unsuitable to be part of the governing body. In their place are representatives of the business world who prioritise audit and performativity over teaching and learning. Such shared priorities and commitments position them as technicians of compliance and evaluation, rather than having any deep concern with the learning experiences of students in classrooms.

There are also interruptions and ruptures, and attempts at contestation at grassroots levels as parents and teachers come together in groups like the Anti-Academies Alliance. There is a recognition of struggle and resistance alongside power and hierarchy. In Kirsty Morrin’s chapter on Milltown Academy (Chapter 7) we glimpse everyday acts of subversion amongst pupils and staff, while in Chapter 5 Sarah Leaney’s primary-aged girls attempt to employ docility as a form of resistance, and in Chapter 6 on Eastbank Academy Jodie Pennacchia shows how the students resist being subject to processes of academic acceleration. But everyday acts of non-compliance on the part of the relatively powerless rarely change existing power dynamics, and overall the project of academisation is seen to entrench inequalities despite the many grassroots challenges it faces.

The chapters demonstrate the numerous ways in which education, governance and pedagogic approaches enter powerfully into how both pupils and teachers construct and negotiate their identities within the academy experiment. There is a potent affective current that surges through what Kulz and her co-writers have called ‘the English education lab’. Despite waves of resistance and subversion, more often we see fear, anxiety and compliance – as the conclusion describes when it talks of ‘a palpable climate of fear being created amongst teachers and school management staff in the wake of austerity politics and chronic underfunding’.

The chapters in the book reveal the myriad ways in which the powerful aspirational discourse that saturates academy schooling remains primarily at the level of rhetoric rather than reality. Rather, as Katie Blood in her chapter on a Midlands academy (Chapter 4) concludes, meritocratic ideology merely entrenches and encodes distinctions in a harsher form. There are a multiplicity of rationing practices that work to separate the few winners from the many losers. The authors, contrary to the pervasive positive messaging around social mobility and meritocracy, raise important and timely questions about what happens when students are not successful.

We see the same forms of social control of the poor and disadvantaged that Ashurst and Venn (2014) write so eloquently about in their historical genealogy of school exclusion. Kulz et al. perform a similar forensic excavation to reveal the tendency of academies to ‘responsibilise’ children, their families and working-class communities (Muncie, 2006). The collection details the expanding control apparatus, including behaviour hubs, isolation booths and a range of behaviour and performance incentive schemes, to manage poverty and deprivation rather than addressing it. We are provided with vivid illustrative examples to show how those who fail to be docile and disciplined are increasingly subject to interventions designed to punish rather than alleviate distress and disadvantage.

This book is particularly prescient at a point in time when there is increasing concern about the erosion of the public sector, the impact of hyper-competition, and a preoccupation with individual excellence rather than on the well-being of children and young people in schools. It also shines a light on the entangled relationship between neoliberal policy interventions and the worrying development of populist authoritarianism across English society. There is a disquieting relationship between that growth of populist authoritarianism and the movement of society more generally towards privilege and exclusion. Superficially, they appear to operate in opposition rather than tandem, yet the ways in which their damaging co-existence works to stifle democratic inclusion and participation forms a powerful undercurrent throughout the book. We see in the academies experiment a microcosm of the social ills and symbolic violence troubling twenty-first-century England. Hyper-competition, low trust of ‘others’, resulting in increasing surveillance and disciplining of those deemed not to measure up, is combined with a valorising of the private over the public sector, and an emphasis on individual responsibility over collective endeavour.

The academies project, at its inception, promised a transformation of the educational system for the good. We are desperately in need of educational transformation, but academies are not the answer – they are a central part of the problem. This book reveals just how concerned we all need to be.

Diane Reay, University of Cambridge

References

Ashurst, F. and Venn, C. (2014). Inequality, Poverty, Education: A Political Economy of School Exclusion. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Muncie, J. (2006). Governing young people: coherence and contradiction in contemporary youth justice. Critical Social Policy. 26(4), pp. 770–793.

Introduction

A time and a place: doing critical qualitative and ethnographic work across an academised educational landscape

Christy Kulz, Ruth McGinity and Kirsty Morrin

The last two decades in England’s educational policy history have attracted both criticism and admiration across the world, with both detractors and supporters identifying the rapidity and experimental nature of the suite of reforms as either a cause célèbre or a cause for concern. Stephen Ball invoked the metaphor of a laboratory in his book The Education Debate, indicating the position of England as both a creator and exporter of global educational reforms (2008). One of the most enduring reforms that has radically altered the structure of schooling in England is the academies programme, initiated by the New Labour government under Tony Blair. In 2000, the initial concept was that independently run state schools sponsored by wealthy businesses and philanthropists in urban areas of entrenched disadvantage and underachievement would provide an innovative approach to tackling ‘failing’ schools and communities. Yet the idea of enabling schools to run independently from the state was not born out of this initiative; in fact, the first such schools operating like this were the City Technology Colleges (CTCs) introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government through the Education Reform Act in 1988. Walford (1991) describes how the appeal of CTCs was connected to breaking the influence of perceived leftist Local Authorities (LAs) by attracting selected pupils into a private-sector provision while also claiming to provide opportunities for inner-city youth. New Labour’s academies were a reincarnation of CTCs using public–private finance; a private sponsor would contribute £2 million in exchange for shaping the school’s ethos and providing inspirational leadership, while the government footed the vast majority of the bill. While only 206 new academies were opened over the period of New Labour’s term of office, the seeds of change had been planted. After the general election of 2010 delivered a hung parliament, the Conservative-led coalition rapidly expanded the academies experiment and in the decade that followed England’s school system changed beyond recognition. This cemented England’s reputation globally as a hot house of educational reforms inspired by autonomy and high-stakes accountability, committed to the disintermediation of middle-tier governance arrangements. The exponential growth of academies in England, from May 2010 when there were 206 to April 2021 where there were 9,588 (in total, roughly 75% of secondary and 32% of primary schools in England),¹ demonstrates a rapid and intensified process of de-regulation of the school system.

These limited companies with charitable status (exempting members and trustees from personal liabilities) occupy a central space in the patchwork of provision in England, which is further complicated by the introduction of and growth in the mid-tier organisational structures known as Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). There has been a growth in the establishment of MATs as the preferred governance structure in England (Collins et al., 2021); in many ways these bodies replace the LA. A MAT has a single board responsible for all aspects of operation and performance. MATs are constructed in various ways, attesting to the loose, heterarchical principles of autonomy and diversity which underpin the academies reform movement in England (Ball, 2009). When an academy joins a MAT, the school ceases to exist as a legal entity, and all assets are transferred to the central MAT. As of January 2020, there were 1,200 such organisations operating around 7,600 academy schools in England.² Schools can become academies and join MATs in two ways. Schools deemed successful by the national inspectorate (Ofsted) can voluntarily convert to become an academy, and either choose to join an existing MAT or establish their own MAT. The other route results from being rated as ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted, and subsequently being forced to become a sponsored academy within an existing MAT. Schools that are deemed failing (‘inadequate’) are more likely to be located in areas of greater deprivation (Harford, 2019) and thus, by dint of socio-economic status, children from poorer homes are less likely to be in schools that are judged good or outstanding, compared to their richer peers. As a result, children from poorer homes are more likely to see their school forced to convert as part of a takeover.

Centralisation, standardisation and the erosion of Local Authorities

This post-2010 education settlement privileging market and data-driven structures and mechanisms over local accountability is not a sudden shift, but builds on decades of the disintermediation of LAs through increasing centralisation coupled with the steady decline of comprehensive education and greater equality as desirable goals (Courtney and McGinity, 2020). The spirit of the Swann Report (1985) and its aim of ‘education for all’ where schooling should addresses racism and promote an understanding of multiculture have become past-tense concerns at the national level. In fact, these concerns are frequently associated with educational failure. Despite Labour’s attempts to promote equality in education by abolishing the tripartite school system in 1965, full comprehensivation was never realised as many Conservative LAs retained their grammar schools. Progressive educational methods were denounced by the New Right as early as the late sixties through appealing to a ‘silent majority’ that feared their children would be damaged by anti-racist or feminist education allegedly infiltrating leftist comprehensive schools. New Right pamphlets like the Black Papers framed comprehensives as harmful to intelligent working-class children, while eugenicists were referenced to conclude that intelligence was hereditary and made class differences inevitable (Cox and Dyson, 1969: 20). Much as we see in the wake of the banking crisis through austerity politics, the 1970s Right drew on justifiable insecurities in the face of an economic downturn to place marginalised groups in competition with one another while appealing to the individual’s perceived powers to exercise choice, which was eventually legislated for in the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA).

Progressive methods were posited as the cause of falling educational standards, while LAs attempting to address inequalities were branded as bastions of the ‘loony left’. The New Right used numerous fictitious tales targeting white anxiety to attack anti-racist education, presenting it as the cause of British cultural decline (see Gordon, 1990). Concerns over local progressive movements were crafted ‘into popular chains of meaning ’, which provided an ‘ideological smokescreen and hence popular support for the Thatcherite onslaught on town hall democracy’ (Butcher et al., 1990: 116). Outlandish tales of political correctness gone wrong blurred the lines of causality, with New Right organisations tying left-wing extremists and slumping educational standards to the development of anti-racist education (Tomlinson, 1993: 25–6). Tomlinson (2008) describes how there was far more commentary on anti-racist, multicultural education than action within schools. Yet the political climate of the late 1980s veered towards framing anti-racists, rather than racist attitudes, as the problem (Ball and Solomos, 1990: 12). This dynamic persists today, as movements like Black Lives Matter or critical race theory are positioned as problematic rather than the inequalities that they are attempting to address (see Conclusion). Moral panics centred around national decline not only hewed raced and classed divisions, they set the stage for more aggressive, market-oriented reforms. Ball describes how a focus on competition as a means to raise standards relinquished any idea of equitable provision for all to the dustbin, as ‘market rights’ replaced ‘welfare rights’ (Ball, 1990: 6–8). The promotion of individualistic policies like parental choice did not promote equality, but rather rewarded parental positioning (Gewirtz, 2002: 71), as white, middle-class cultural capital was privileged and outcomes reflected the power held by those entering the educational marketplace (Reay, 1998).

Labour’s Lord Adonis (2012: 7) proclaimed that the initial New Labour academies reinvented the inner-city comprehensive; however, academies work from a fundamentally different premise. Funding was progressively shifted towards some disadvantaged areas of England to give New Labour’s programme a social justice angle, yet the discursive shift from welfarism to a new managerialism remained intact (Gerwirtz, 2002: 46). There were legitimate problems in education including a chronic lack of funding, buildings in disrepair and social inequality; however, many of these issues had been caused or exacerbated by Thatcherite policies. Mirza describes how a failure–success binary became the bedrock of debates, without recognition of how the 1988 ERA’s market-led reform structured this binary by plunging many urban schools into daily crises through a lack of funding that left little time for strategic management and subsequently fostered low standards and poor teaching quality (Mirza, 2009: 26). Yet instead of the negative perceptions and unfortunate condition of some English schools from the late 1980s throughout the 1990s being directly related to the ERA’s market-led reforms and chronic underfunding, they came to be associated with anti-racist education or the goal of a comprehensive system.

Academies and New Labour’s third way politics more generally became a way of sidestepping and allegedly transcending these tensions by presenting a technocratic solution that would promote social justice in urban areas. However, Ball (2007: 160) describes how these first academies embodied the contradictions of these public–private finance initiatives that championed entrepreneurism and featured ‘heroes of enterprise’ as social saviours. Academies were ‘a break from roles and structures and relationships of accountability of a state education system. They replaced democratic processes of local authority control over schools with technical or market solutions’ (Ball, 2007: 177). Although some individuals may have gained access to better resources and futures, this shift to marketisation fundamentally altered how the education system worked – and opened up new possibilities for how it could work in the future.

Austerity politics and the acceleration of academisation

The acceleration of academisation has taken place within a social and economic context shaped by the Conservative-led Coalition government’s imposition of austerity policies in the wake of the publicly funded bank bailouts of the late 2000s. The framing of the policy has developed in a number of ways since 2010, with austerity mobilised as a tactic of governance which urges centralisation as a financial cost-saving measure. Initially it was promoted as a way to get more funding, freedom and autonomy; a 2011 poll of headteachers conducted by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) found that three quarters of converting heads were driven by financial concerns (Sellgren, 2011). Education spending in England was cut by seven billion pounds between 2011 and 2019 (Buchan, 2019), and more recently many schools have appealed to parents for donations, with some schools closing early on Fridays or scrapping the arts due to funding cuts (Coughlan, 2017). A NASUWT teachers’ union survey recently found that 20% of teachers personally paid for items like paper or books once per week (Adams, 2019). The crisis has become so severe that in 2018 over two thousand headteachers marched on Downing Street to protest the debilitating effect of continual cuts on their schools (Adams, 2018; McGinity and Fuller, 2021). Despite funding cuts to education, between 2013 and 2020 over 34.7 million pounds was spent by the Department for Education (DfE) on transferring schools from failing MATs to new sponsors (Whittaker, 2020), while between April 2010 and March 2012 8.3 billion pounds was spent on academies with one billion of this being diverted from other departmental budgets (Richardson, 2013). It is against this backdrop of increasing financial insecurity that more schools have converted to academy status – although the extra funding attached to academisation dwindled after 2012 (Abrams, 2012). Joining a MAT has increasingly been encouraged by the DfE as a way to weather pressures and ensure efficiency. As Rayner et al. (2018) have highlighted, the declining capacity of LAs in the face of cuts also provided a powerful incentive for headteachers to seek out alternative structures of support. Thus, MATs have been identified in the policy arena as capable of delivering economies of scale. While this approach might have enabled more schools to survive austerity, it also renders the selling points of freedom and autonomy devoid as stand-alone schools must sacrifice their existence to join a MAT, with levels of autonomy generally determined by the MAT central board (Greany and McGinity, 2021).

These shifting promises show the various rationales used to push academisation, which Rayner et al. (2018) suggest is not simply a policy assemblage but the largest systemic educational change in England since comprehensive schooling was introduced in the 1950s. The authors develop Gewirtz’s notion of the ‘post-welfarist education policy complex’ (2002: 3) to claim we are now living with the ‘Academisation Policy Complex’ (2018: 3). Moreover, they assert that this fundamental restructuring of education not only affects schools that have undergone academisation, but non-academised schools are also embracing the activities and practices typical of academisation to instigate ‘non-policy system redesign’ (2018: 16). Here we can see how system redesign is pushed forward by creating an unstable atmosphere where schools must grapple with the hollowing out of traditional governance structures coupled with an acute lack of funding.

Academisation and neoliberalism

We can see how neoliberal governance and