Allusion has been made to this point about the impact of globalization on policymaking and on research utilization in policymaking. Whitty (2012) wrote about this impact in a paper on the (mis)use of evidence in policy borrowing. 2 He noted how 'international policy tourism' had become a phenomenon in our globalizing world and one in which league tables of national performances on international large-scale assessments such as the OECD's PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) have had increased policy influence. Outstanding performance on PISA had positioned various schooling systems as sites of educational tourism and of policy borrowing; for example, Finland, Shanghai after PISA 2009, the Canadian province of Ontario. These have become new reference systems. Interestingly in that context, Whitty considered why there has been ongoing policy attraction between the USA and England, neither of which has performed well on PISA. He suggests in that context that others' reforms are often used as justifications for one's own, what he calls their 'discursive and legitimatory work' (Whitty 2016b: 46). He notes the significance of the media here and its failure to distinguish advocacy research from social scientific educational research. Policy borrowing between the USA and England had occurred historically and continues to occur, he argued, because of 'elective affinity' between policymakers' assumptive worlds in both nations. This, he further argues, reflected the 'globalization of policy making' as much as policy borrowing. Given this globalization of policymaking, Whitty suggests we perhaps ought to emphasize 'what doesn't work' in other national contexts and think about inoculating national policymaking against globalizing policy discourses.

#### Emerging issues in education research–policy relationships

Globalization and education research–policy relationships

Elsewhere, Fazal Rizvi and I (Rizvi and Lingard 2010) have argued that each element of Easton's old public policy definition – policy as the authoritative allocation of values – has been challenged substantially by globalization. Thus, policy authority today, the legitimate right to exercise power, functions globally, as well as regionally, nationally and sub-nationally. For example, think here of the policy influence of the OECD in respect of the schooling systems of wealthy member nations or of the authority of the World Bank in relation to policy in developing nations in receipt of its loans. Think also of the significance of the EU in education in European nations (Lawn and Grek 2012), despite education being the responsibility of member nations under the principle of subsidiarity.

Allocation processes are changing because of state restructurings and new practices of statecraft. These restructurings occurred through new public management with the state steering at a distance in a post-bureaucratic way through performance indicators and subsequently through the instantiation of network governance. The latter has witnessed civil society actors and private sector actors enter into the complex game of public policy formation, decision-making and implementation (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004: 25). This network governance is stretched globally, catalysing new scales and spaces of policy influence. Here we see different values coming into play. This is the third element of Easton's definition, values, which we might also see as ideology and discourses. Today these circulate globally. These matters have substantially reshaped and rescaled the ways research is utilized in policymaking. Research evidence flows more rapidly across national borders and research conducted by private consultancies, multinational consultancy firms and edu-businesses has a more significant place in policymaking in the situation of network governance (Hogan *et al*. 2015). Another impact of the globalization of education policy on research utilization occurs through the global condition of what Peck and Theodore (2015) call 'fast policy making'.

#### The condition of fast policymaking and education research–policy relationships

Peck and Theodore (2015) describe the contemporary condition of fast policymaking to grasp the 'debordering' of policy imaginaries; that is, the ways in which policy from elsewhere enters national and local policy conversations and considerations and how this contracts timelines for policy production with implications for the place of research. They refer to this debordering as the 'porosity of policy making locales' (224). We see here as well the '[t]ransnationalization of policy discourses' linked to the '[c]osmopolitanization of policy actors and actions' (224). These globally circulating discourses encourage '[d]eference to global best practices and models' and to ideas that work (224–5). This is the mobility of 'what works' on a global scale. For Peck and Theodore, fast policymaking is actually about global policy mobilities, rather than simple policy transfer (6). The former approach emphasizes relationalities and multi-directionality, while the latter depicts unilateral, one-way transfer effects.

It should be stressed that Peck and Theodore in outlining and researching the conditions of fast policymaking are not only attempting to pick up on the increased velocity of policymaking today, but also its global reach and relationality. In terms of research, they argue that fast policymaking witnesses a 'foreshortening' of the phases of research and development (R&D) in policymaking. They argue that, 'compressed R&D is a consequence and cause of compressed turnover time in policy designs' (224). Often, I would suggest, this goes beyond foreshortening to the elision of research done locally, as the policy model becomes mobile and 'touches down' in national and local contexts and in the process is recontextualized and perhaps mutates. Peck and Theodore (2015: xvi) note that policy enactment 'remains a stubbornly localized, context-specific process' and thus reject outright any suggestion that we are witnessing convergence globally in both policy and policymaking under conditions of fast policymaking. The relevant point here about fast policymaking is that the rapid global circulation of policy models is accompanied by the rapid circulation of the research that underpinned the original model and as such contextualized research in the national context is not an element in the local, path-dependent take-up of the policy.

#### The rise of data governance in education and education research–policy relationships

Across recent decades computational capacities have increased exponentially. This has entailed enhanced datafication of the social world. This is the way in which aspects of the social world, including schooling, have been enumerated into quantifiable forms to make them subject to computational and statistical analyses. These factors have seen the ushering in of a form of digital governance in education (Williamson 2016). Data have thus become central to policymaking in education with standardized testing being an important element of digital governance in education. Williamson (2017: 66) describes the significance of this new mode of digital governance in education in this way, 'While the production of educational data is nothing new, the appearance of new technologies for its collection, analysis and use at the beginning of the twenty-first century has catalysed significant new ambitions around data–driven educational policy'. In terms of policymaking in education and the push for evidence-based policy, Williamson (2017: 68) notes, 'Digital data makes education knowable, governable and amenable to intervention, via advanced data analysis techniques and the global exchange of information between diverse actors that can be used to make informed, evidence-based decisions'. Two observations are important here: digital governance, including the place of data, is linked to fast policymaking and is also central to the enhanced significance of data in modes of global governance in education (Lingard *et al*. 2016). The latter is a reflection of the fact that numbers, data and statistics are technologies of distance (Porter 1995). The significance of digital governance in education is that it is also potentially and actually linked to the increased velocity of policymaking and the global scale of policymaking and influences on policy. There are implications for the place of education research in policymaking here.

Digital governance functions through data infrastructures, which now constitute schooling systems and enable the flows of data central to their structuring. Often private providers are involved in these infrastructures and as such we see network governance at work, as the private sector is actually involved in the very structuring of systems through the provision of these infrastructures (Lingard 2019; Sellar 2017; Easterling 2016). Developments in respect of testing, for example, moves to real-time, computer adaptive testing and the related production of census big data have significant potential to change policymaking and practice in education, as data become central to both. There are possibilities here for algorithmic governance and greater use of artificial intelligence (AI), both of which carry implications for the place of research in policymaking in education.

The relevant question here in relation to research relationships with both policy and practice is whether data can be seen as research and as research evidence that then ought to underpin both. Is the use of data in policymaking an example of research informing policy? If one answers in the affirmative: is data research? There are interesting issues here that need to be considered by contemporary educational researchers and their organizations (e.g. BERA and its North American and Australian counterparts, AERA and the Australian Association for Research in Education, AARE) in defence of a pluralist definition of educational research, as argued for by Geoff Whitty. Furthermore, there are significant matters to be considered in relation to the future impact of education research on actual education policy, as data become more important in the structuring and functioning of education systems and in the pedagogical work of teachers.

#### Post-truth and affective politics and education research–policy relationships

The *Oxford Dictionary* chose 'post-truth' as the 2016 word of the year. The dictionary defined post-truth as 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal beliefs'. The Trump presidency and debates prior to the UK's Brexit vote are indicative of this context of post-truth. Climate science denial is another exemplar of a post-truth context and an example of the broader phenomenon of 'science denial' (McIntyre 2018). It is interesting to contemplate how this context sits against the considerations in the previous section of this chapter of the emergence of digital governance and the new positivism evident in that emergence. As noted earlier, Whitty argued that education researchers ought to seek to influence public opinion as an indirect way their research might have enhanced impact on policymaking. The post-truth context raises a number of perplexing issues for education researchers seeking such policy impact in this way.

Post-truth must be seen as one contemporary manifestation of the broader phenomenon of the significance of the affective in politics and policymaking. As Berlant (2011: 226) has observed, public spheres (politics and policymaking) are always 'affect worlds'. More recently, critical policy scholars working in education have also paid attention to the significance of affect in policy processes (e.g. Sellar and Lingard 2018; McKenzie 2017). Media and the (social) mediatization of policymaking are very important in this situation of the affective in politics and policymaking and in the context of the significance of post-truth.

Earlier in this chapter, the argument was sustained that we can only ever speak of evidence-informed or research-informed policymaking. The contexts of post-truth politics and the significance of thinking of public worlds as affect worlds also add another dimension to Head's argument (2008) that research is only one of three contributing factors in policy: the others being values and professional knowledges. We might need to add in affect here as an additional factor that means we can only speak of research-informed policy. However, we also need to acknowledge that the significance of post-truth and the affective in policymaking precipitates significant questions for education researchers seeking to influence actual policymaking through impact on public opinion, particularly through legacy and social media.

#### Conclusion

Geoff Whitty's policy sociology in education has been my focus in this chapter, specifically his insightful work on the multiple and entangled relationships between research and policy and practice in education. He documented both uses and misuses of research in policymaking in an imperfect and globalizing world. Whitty's support for a pluralism of research types has been outlined and endorsed, as well as his acknowledgement that there is a place for research in actual policymaking and encouragement to education researchers to play a public intellectual role so as to have influence over public opinion as a way to affect policy.

I have then considered the emergent conditions of fast policymaking, data governance in education, and the affective in policymaking in a post-truth world in terms of their significance for understanding education research's relationships with policymaking. There are inherent tensions between the enhanced significance of the affective and the emergence of policy as numbers as a new positivism in policymaking. Luke and Hogan (2006) have written about the new imbrications of educational research and educational governance, linked to the enhanced significance of data. They observe, 'the centrality of data and numbers to contemporary modes of governance means that current debates over what counts as evidence in state policy formation are indeed debates over what counts as educational research' (170). Data are now central in governance in both schools and national policy. In the everchanging world of research and of policymaking, it is here that Whitty's defence of both research for use in policy and practice and research for understanding and the production of new knowledge will have to be defended yet again by researchers and their professional bodies such as BERA, AERA and AARE. They will need to be ever vigilant of fast policymaking and the impacts of big data, algorithmic governance and AI in education and in relation to education research and its remit, including its place in policymaking.

#### Notes

#### References

Bacchi, Carol. 2009. *Analysing Policy: What's the Problem Represented to Be?* Sydney: Pearson.

Ball, Stephen J. 1997. 'Policy Sociology and Critical Social Research: A Personal Review of Recent Education Policy and Policy Research', *British Educational Research Journal* 23 (3): 257–74. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. *Cruel Optimism*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Burns, Tracey and Tom Schuller. 2007. 'The Evidence Agenda'. In *Evidence in Education: Linking Research and Policy*, 15–32. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Easterling, Keller. 2016. *Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space.* London: Verso.

*Commodification, the Market and Business Involvement*, edited by Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Christiane Thompson, 135–55. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

### Chapter 11 Revolutions in Educational Policy: The Vexed Question of Evidence and Policy Development

Hugh Lauder

One of Geoff Whitty's presiding concerns was the relationship between research evidence and policy. As he noted, 'It is important not to gloss over the disjunctions that exist between policy facing research and the realities of policy making in practice' (Whitty and Wisby 2016: 2). These disjunctions have been well captured theoretically by Ladwig (1994), while in the practical world we have to cope with the limited interest that policymakers have in evidence (Watermeyer 2019).

The difficulties posed by the vexed research–policy relationship are sharpened when we note that too often educational and indeed social science research is seen as a weapon to be used in ideological battles; we know too well that any scrap of evidence that can be legitimized as research can be hurled into the public debate. It is as if all forms of research have methodological equivalence when it comes to knowledge claims. In a post-truth era when, as Rudi Guliani recently claimed, 'truth isn't truth', and as Kellyanne Conway asserted, there are always 'alternative facts' (*sic*), the relativism that has been embraced by polarized political debate is exacerbated.

These issues are centre stage at a time when it is clear that the neoliberal paradigm in education, in England, is in its death throes. Across education, from higher and further education, through secondary and primary schooling to the early years, the fissures in this policy paradigm are appearing. In higher and further education, there are fundamental issues concerning funding, as the leading assumption of policymakers, that this sector should be seen as the servant of the economy, crumbles (Brown *et al.* 2019; Lauder *et al.* 2018). In secondary and primary education, the state theory of learning, which views education as merely teaching to the test, has come to the end of the road. Too many students have suffered mental ill health under its influence (Brown and Carr 2019).

The argument of this chapter is that while at the inception of neoliberalism in education there was some intellectual credibility to the policy revolution that ensued, that is no longer the case. It is for this reason that the cracks are being papered over by rhetoric in order to keep the political interests associated with this policy paradigm in place. This is particularly the case when policies are based on ideological conviction albeit supported by what was at the time a novel theoretical approach to education.

However, there are two problems that need to be addressed in making this case. The first is that all revolutions are necessarily complex; new institutions are created, the existing are restructured and the relationships between them reconfigured. How then, can we best make the case that this is a revolution that no longer has an intellectual justification? Clearly, we need to grasp the underlying theories and evidence on which the architecture of neoliberalism has been built. In order to do this, this chapter examines three theories that may be considered central to the paradigm: markets in education, school effectiveness and human capital theory. Together, they cover the primary and secondary sectors and higher education. In order to analyse these three theories and the evidence that has been adduced for and against them, a modified account of theories is taken from Imre Lakatos (1970).

The notion of theory has been introduced because there are questions to be raised about the warrant related to evidential claims used in policy debates. This concerns what we mean by evidence. The desirability of evidence-informed policy is often cited but as it stands it smacks of empiricism, as if evidence can be considered apart from the theories that generate it. However, if we take a post-empiricist view of research, then, as Haig (1987) has argued, the most significant insight of post-empiricist epistemology is that it is from our best theories that we make knowledge claims.1 These claims are always provisional because we may not always be able to assess what the best theory is at any given time and even if we do, it may be superseded by a better theory. In this sense the theories of neoliberalism may always be a work in progress, but, after 30 years it seems they have had more than enough time to prove their warrant.

The second problem takes us into the realm of politics and practice. Dismantling the neoliberal paradigm may be as difficult as it was to construct it. This means that we need to go beyond the questions of theory appraisal to articulate the paradoxes that a change of paradigm will involve, as a way of thinking through the application of alternative policies.

#### Lakatos' view of theories

Lakatos saw the distinguishing features of what he termed research programmes to be the development of a series of theories that retained their unity by virtue of a common world view, what he called the 'hard core' of a research programme. For example, in orthodox economics, which relates to two of the theories to be discussed, a hard core assumption is that *of homo economicus*, that people are calculating pleasure machines who can rationally plan the means to the ends of their self-interest.2 This world view acts as a heuristic that points the way in which phenomena are to be investigated and interpreted, and the theories and methods to be used in that investigation. For Lakatos, it could be expected that every theory that is tested will encounter anomalies that challenge the theory. When this occurs, new theories are developed to explain the anomalies and to create new predictions and explanations. However, the new theories have to be consistent with the world view embedded in the hard core: a failure to achieve this is to employ ad hoc theories that are, in terms of the research programme, illicit. He referred to research programmes in these cases as degenerating.

#### Research programmes and policy

Research programmes may provide the framework for policy implementation but they do not guide the details of implementation, since that requires a range of further additional assumptions about, for example, local contexts, cultures and ethical considerations. However, in the cases being considered, each new policy step has an underlying theory that supports or justifies particular policies; when we examine the market architecture of education in England, this will become apparent. In this sense, the development of policy, of the kind discussed in this chapter, is analogous to Lakatos' notion of a research programme: each new step in the policy has a coherence with the underlying world view that drives both theory and practice. In these cases, the underlying world view is that of neoliberalism, which, as Foucault (2008) argued, is closely related to the extreme tenets of human capital theory.

There is a further point. When we turn to the neoliberal approach to markets in education, it is apparent that, although there has been a clear attempt to change the practice and thinking of educationists, they have been applied in ways they resist because they do not correspond to their professional identities.3 In current debates this is clearly seen in higher education (Watermeyer 2019; Collini 2012, 2017), while younger school teachers are voting with their feet. The consequence of imposing crude proxies in incentive and accountability policies is that they produce undesirable unintended consequences. When we refer to these theories, the testing must also include such unintended consequences: something that is often neglected in educational research and policy (Zhao 2018).4 One way in which such unintended consequences can be identified is through counterfactual analyses of the kind developed by Gorard (2018), which is discussed below.

#### Markets in education

Markets in education were initially hailed as a solution to the problems of low educational standards and inequality of opportunity: neoliberal enthusiasts thought that markets should 'be allowed to work their wonders . . . for everyone's benefit' (Chubb and Moe 1992: 10–11). As such, the introduction of markets into the state sector of education was seen as a novel approach to these seemingly intractable educational problems.

If we consider the hard core of the theory of markets in education we should start with key concepts of orthodox economics, which are then applied to all areas of economics, where the orthodox view holds sway. These concepts form the hard core of the theory.5 The focus is on markets because they are considered the most efficient way to allocate goods and services. In terms of policy, there will always be historical and social factors that will come into play when markets are applied, as in the case of education. The standard policy strategy in this context is to argue that 'it makes good sense to determine their (markets) ideal form and examine why and how actual markets differ from the ideal' (Dasgupta 2007, chap. 4: 72). Where they differ, this is considered a market failure in which inefficiencies will be created. Hence, 'understanding ideal markets enables us to uncover clues as to how markets could improve matters in situations where households, communities and governments don't work so well' (Dasgupta 2007, chap. 4: 72). In education, it is assumed that this world view, as to the superiority of markets, anchored in *homo economicus*, is then applied to families and, in particular, children. On this basis, school choice becomes central to the idea of markets in education. This is the hard core of the theory.

If we then turn to educational markets we can see that there are a series of testable theories that are developed to defend the hard core (Lauder *et al.* 1999). These are:

Since a perfectly competitive market has many buyers and sellers, it is assumed that schools will be like small businesses. In this sense school effectiveness and good leadership are considered the responsibility of schools, as we shall see when we turn to the school effectiveness research programme.

Each of these hypotheses have been subject to testing and it is noteworthy that where the findings have not been consistent with these hypotheses there has been a competing explanatory account, framed by Bourdieu's theories of reproduction and distinction, that can provide more powerful explanations for them (Lauder *et al.* 1999). In other words, in an explanatory sense, there is a competing account to be given on the effects of education markets.

Of the hypotheses listed, the first is central and that is why much of the focus on education markets has been on parental inequalities in school choice. Here the general consensus from research has been that the introduction of markets exacerbates inequalities rather than reducing them (Reay 2018; Whitty *et al*. 1998; Ball *et al*. 1995; Brown 1990). But this raises a question as to how much time should be given to see whether all parents acquire the knowledge and power to make good choices; in other words, until they become socialized into market behaviour. For example, Gorard *et al*. (2001) sought to argue that working-class parents could learn the 'rules of the game', but only after a period of time, which raises precisely the question of when in a research programme's development evidence should be used.

#### Complicating the policy application of the market research programme

Despite the enthusiasm of some market exponents, few governments were prepared to embrace untrammelled free markets, and auxiliary hypotheses and practices were introduced to lock home the advantage that markets were assumed to be able to provide.

The first concerned the publication of league tables of exam and test performance, so that parents, as consumers, could judge schools by their results. However, the raw results were seen as unfair to schools and teachers because they did not take into account the nature of the student intake, and so value-added scores or contextual measures were introduced into the league tables. While these were a significant improvement in principle, the value added that was taken into account was that of those eligible for free school meals. This measure led to misleading results when compared to more fine-grained measures of disadvantage (Lauder *et al*. 2010). The consequence is that school performance was being judged on questionable evidence. More recently, the government in England has scrapped contextual value-added scores and introduced a measure of student progress ('Progress' 8) but it is based on prior achievement and does not take into account the wider socio-economic factors that can influence educational achievement.

Underlying these judgements was a theory and policy that advocated the repeated testing of student performance because it would give added impetus to raising standards. Here we should note Carr's (2016) argument that the state theory of learning (Lauder *et al.* 2006) flies in the face of our best theories of learning. However, this theory of learning was also a way of meeting the New Public Management demand for accountability, and in this respect the latter may be seen as producing unintended consequences. As Bowles (2016) has argued, the demand for accountability may produce undesirable outcomes; in this case, teaching to the test, which has led, among other things, to the downgrading of the teaching of knowledge (Young 2008).

Testing may also have been introduced to strengthen what may be considered a flaw in the application of the theory of perfect competition to the real world: namely, that in many instances schools cannot be allowed to fail and close. Therefore, other spurs and incentives are required to induce teacher and school achievement. Thus, a further auxiliary policy was based on the creation of Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted), a national inspectorate for the school system. In addition to classifying schools according to league tables, it was assumed that an inspectorate that issued summative judgements about school performance would enhance the information that parents needed to make informed choices, while at the same time ensuring that schools complied with the market rules that had been constructed. The problem has been, as Gorard (2018) has argued, that the judgements that Ofsted has made have been informed by league table results, which are related to school intake. As he notes:

The schools rated 'outstanding' are more likely to be single-sex, especially girls-only schools. They are staggeringly more likely to be selective than comprehensive, and much less likely to be the majority secondary moderns left over after the selection to grammar school. (110)

However, the state-led theory of pedagogy and testing and its underlying theory of learning is not the only augmentation, or, in Lakatos' terms, auxiliary hypotheses, to defend the market theory of education. New types of school have been introduced: charter schools in the United States and New Zealand, and academies and free schools in the UK, which potentially complicate the way education markets are applied.

This raises a significant difficulty in testing ambitious policies. Their effects are often clouded by additional changes, which make cause and effect difficult to disentangle. However, research can also shed light on these complexities. For example, Gorard's (2018) research reports on the counterfactual case in which if schools were more equally mixed, by removing formal and informal selection from grammar schools and academies there would be a 5 per cent improvement in exam results (206). When these auxiliary hypotheses and strategies are challenged by research, the question is raised as to what the beneficial effects of markets are, if we are taking the population of all school children rather just the interests of the professional middle class (Ball *et al*. 1995; Brown 1990).

Given this analysis, it seems the introduction of markets in education has not met the early hopes. While there has been an apparent acknowledgement of the need for diversity in the curriculum in the introduction of free schools, this does not allow them to escape the demands of the machinery of accountability and the league tables and Ofsted reports by which competition and performance are measured. At the same time, the improvement in test and exam results have not eventuated by the government's own goals. Torrance (2018) reports that the tests at age 11 flatlined in science, maths and English between 2000 and 2010. While in 2017, 72 per cent of students met the new expected standards in reading, well below the 80 per cent standard that, he notes, was achieved in 2010. For school leaving exams for those aged 16, there is a rise in those achieving this outcome between 1975 and 2010, from 21 per cent to approximately 68 per cent, with a decline from 2010–2015 to 62 per cent.6 What is interesting about this apparent improvement in grades is that there is no uptick with the introduction of markets in the 1990s or their maturation.

Underlying this assessment, there are two key points to emerge. The first is that it is highly questionable that the focus on tests and exams is creating the kind of creativity and mental flexibility that will be required for the labour market that is now emerging (Brown *et al.* 2019). In part, this is because it is not clear that students who are trained for the test retain the gains officially recorded. We know, for example, that literacy skills atrophy if the students who have achieved them live in cultures where they are not used. The second concerns the theory that can provide the best explanations for school performance. There has been a school of thought that it is school composition or school mix that is a key determinant of educational achievement (Gorard 2018: Lauder *et al.* 1999). Market theory predicted that schools would become better mixed, which has not proved to be the case. Of course, there are limits to the integration of social classes in schools because those that do not have the advantages of cultural, social and monetary capitals outnumber those that do. In other words, while schools can certainly be better mixed, and this can make a difference to achievement (Gorard 2018), there will be a limit to the benefits that accrue. We will have to consider further ways of addressing this issue. Education needs to change, but we will also need to look outside the school, for, as Thrupp (1999) has noted, the primary causes of educational success and failure lie outside the school walls.

Given the complexities of the educational market in England, it is not surprising that there have been few attempts to measure the overall success or failure of choice and competition in the education market. One study, by Gibbons *et al.* (2008), distinguishes between choice and competition and finds no effect on achievement as a result of school choice but finds a small effect for competition on achievement. While this is not an outcome that the hard core of the programme would have predicted, because it assumed parental choice would lead to higher achievement, the small effect of competition would be consistent, if disappointing. However, competition in this case has not been of the kind imagined by orthodox economists but enforced by a complex compliance architecture, in which success is, largely, due to teaching to the test, with all the undesirable unintended consequences.7

It is at this point that we should turn to the school effectiveness research programme, since the causal boundaries that it drew around the school as the focus of policy has proven to be equally problematic. This, however, has not much concerned policymakers, who have often assumed or rather hoped that test outcomes can largely be caused by school effects.

#### The received model of school effectiveness

The hard core of this research programme makes a series of assumptions that enable empirical research in this programme to be developed. These assumptions are as follows:

While the school effectiveness research programme has undergone significant methodological changes, it can be argued that these hard core assumptions remained, until recently, at the centre of its research. That said, it should also be noted that in its early period school effectiveness research (SER) was distinguished from the school improvement research (SIR), with the former being quantitative and empiricist and the latter qualitative. While SER, with the advent of multilevel modelling, can in principle address all four propositions, SIR focused more on the latter two. Where they have been combined utilizing a realist methodology, they have been in heterodox enquiries that have challenged the basic propositions of the received model, such as the Smithfield Project in New Zealand in the 1990s (Lauder *et al.* 1999; Thrupp 1999) and the Hampshire study of the early 2000s (Brown 2015; Lauder *et al.* 2010).

If we examine the first two propositions of SER, then the first point to make is that the research in SER has come to a consensus that somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of the school effect lies outside the walls of the school. These have been consistent estimates over 30 years, with few outliers. In turn, this led to a debate about the degree to which schools can be effective in raising achievement. Rutter (1979) was, among others, an early advocate of the view that improving schools can make a significant difference in individual student achievement. SER was given added political support because in neoliberal countries like the USA and England, great weight was placed on education to improve social mobility and alleviate poverty in the face of growing inequality. Hence the intense focus on SER and school improvement.

In part, SER seems to have adopted organization theory assumptions that changes to schools as organizations can bring about widespread improvements to them. Where there were areas of investigation such as the role of school ethos in promoting achievement, this was undertaken by operationalizing items, which when taken together and demonstrating statistical significance could be defined as ethos. In other words, this was a good example of SER's empiricism, in which there was no prior theory that was being tested.

But this focus ignored a key factor in school outcomes, namely the school composition or mix of students. In other words, the proposition, that schools have a degree of autonomy from society such that schools could have independent effects ignored the fact that every morning the school gates open and students from the wider society march in.

This is not a debate that has died. The success of London schools has raised the question of the cause of their test achievement. On the one hand, Burgess (2014) has argued convincingly that a clear cause has been the nature of the ethnic mix in London when compared to other parts of the country. In response, Blanden *et al.* (2015) have argued that, while the ethnic effect is a contributory cause, there are others relating to the history of London schools, especially at the primary level that also need to be taken into account. While this is a far more sophisticated debate than those relating to the early days of SER and SIR, despite politicians continuing to articulate simplistic accounts of the effects of school leadership and management, it remains locked into the earlier debate by focusing on test outcome measures. This may have everything to do with teaching to the test more effectively and little to do with education. It tells us nothing about the manipulation of outcomes through school exclusions or issues of mental health or arguable knife crime.8 It is also telling that one of the leading researchers in SIR, Alma Harris, has argued that child poverty has an impact on school effectiveness and improvement (Harris *et al.* 2006). This is a significant advance for those that were once on the inside of the received research programme, one that challenges the original hard core propositions concerning the relative autonomy of schools.

We should place these recent debates within the earlier work of SER and SIR. The outcomes of this research were interminable checklists of what schools could do to improve. However, this cavalier advice was pitched at such a high level of abstraction that it failed to take into account the multidimensional aspects of improvements in school achievement and failed to place schools in their social and economic context (Lauder, Jamieson, *et al*. 1998). There are exceptions: Harris *et al.*'s (2006) discussion of school improvement in historically deprived areas is one. However, what the debate over London schools does is to take seriously history and context.

Thus, while some policymakers are clearly not up to speed with these developments, it can be said that the core propositions of SER have now changed. SER, which was once seen as the handmaiden of market policies in education (Slee *et al*. 1998), now seems to be treading a more independent path. Once issues of school composition and child poverty are taken into account then the idea that there are no social limits to the possibilities of school improvement has to be challenged. Building school improvement just on the foundations of re-engineering the organization and culture of schools in the hands of outstanding school leadership is far too unstable a basis for any widespread attempt at raising school achievement.

Evidence for such a claim comes from the observation that while schools in deprived neighbourhoods may achieve exam success from time to time, it is unlikely that the success can be sustained, simply because of the pressure on these schools and the likelihood of staff churn. The contrary claim could be made in reference to the success of London schools. Here, we have a test case as to whether, as Burgess (2014) has shown, the backbone of London schools' sustained success is the ethnic composition of these schools; is it this that provides continuity and stability? If so, then it may be that this continuity has enabled successful school practices and cooperation between schools to be established. Or, should we consider the conclusion drawn by Blanden *et al.* (2015), that good practice in London primary schools preceded rather than accompanied the changes in London schools' student composition? What is clear is that the London case needs to be understood in relation to its context. Generalized claims for the transferability of the London experience would need to be treated with extreme caution.

The evidence concerning school composition and the impact of poverty on school achievement suggests that the hard core of this theory is now being abandoned, and with it a research programme directed by it.9 However, it remains to be seen as to when policy makers will follow this research lead. We may have some time to wait.10

#### The justification for the instrumental view of education: Human capital theory

The rationale of introducing an education market in England and applying intense pressure to raise exam scores has been economic. Underlying education policy has been the key assumption that in an imagined 'knowledge economy' ever more workers will need high-level educational qualifications to promote individual and national economic returns. The key theory(s) to legitimate this view has been human capital theory (HCT) and its offspring, skill bias technological change theory. However, whatever the virtues of this theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the period from the 1970s until the present day has not presented a labour market profile that conforms to its predictions and explanations. Two questions follow: if labour market trends do not reflect the predictions of HCT, how are we to explain this? And why has HCT retained currency to the point where major policy investments have been made in the development of mass higher education? There are good reasons as to why we should have mass higher education, but they are educational not economic.

In work undertaken with Phil Brown and Sin Yi Cheung over seven years, we have now reached the point when we can argue with confidence that HCT and its offspring are degenerating research programmes (Brown *et al.* 2019). To see why this is we should turn first to the hard core of HCT and its attendant propositions. The hard core, as with that of markets in education, is that of orthodox economic theory. A series of propositions to defend the hard core with respect to education and the labour market then follow:

The policy implications of this hard core are profound because human capital theorists, especially its doyen, Gary Becker (1964), argued that the benefits of a general education accrue to the individual and that it should be seen as a private good, paid for by the individual: hence the justification for tuition fees, and the way higher education is to be funded.

Two further points need to be made about the hard core set of propositions. The first is that the view of causation here is consistent with Say's law, in that it is the supply of students that creates the demand. This has been the dominant policy view in England, although there are different accounts of causation in the academic literature (Lauder *et al.* 2018). We also need to note the methodology that is employed, particularly since HCT conforms to the idea that economics should be modelled on an empiricist view of the history of the natural sciences, particularly physics. To this end, HCT seeks to establish law-like regularities.11

When we examine the labour market trends in the UK and USA we find that since 1970, which may be regarded as the start of the fourth industrial technological revolution, there is on average a small graduate premium. However, the average wage hides much that is revealing. When the comparison between graduate and non-graduate earnings are disaggregated, the picture becomes far more complex. It is clear that those graduates in the top decile of the labour market have received returns consistent with the predictions of HCT: over time their wages rise and they earn far more than all other graduates and non-graduates. For all other graduates and non-graduates, wages declined between 1970 and 2010. In drawing this picture it is important to emphasize that women at all deciles have earned and continue to earn significantly less than men. The same picture emerges when we look beyond first degrees to those with doctorates and master's degrees (Brown *et al.* 2019). A clear inference to be drawn is that we do not live in the world of a knowledge economy with a near infinite demand for graduate workers; rather, we live in a knowledge capitalist economy characterized by standardization and cut price brain power (Brown *et al.* 2011).

These data also speak to propositions 2 and 3. We now have a more highly educated population in England than ever, yet this has not been accompanied by a rising level of productivity. In fact, there is a productivity problem (Lauder *et al.* 2018). Moreover, there is now a significant proportion of underemployed graduates, with some estimates close to 50 per cent. It is the case that these graduates, although not doing graduate jobs, still earn more than non-graduates, for reasons that are not well understood. This would also contribute to that headline figure that there is a graduate premium, just not in the sense that policymakers assume.

Given these data, why has HCT continued to have such policy currency? If we go back to the empiricist aim in orthodox economics to establish law-like regularities, then the idea of a graduate premium does just that. And it is only by considering this methodological point that we can explain a puzzle: why have HCT theorists not disaggregated the data on educational earnings? An answer would be that it complicates and disrupts their search for a Humean causal theory, and, of course, it may lead to a refutation of their hard core assumptions. But then we know from Kuhn (1970), that researchers are committed to the hard cores of their research programmes and will not question them until there is a crisis.

For educationists the anomalies generated by HCT is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, they have reluctantly played the game of talking about the importance of education to the economy, because that has justified government funding. On the other, they have often rejected this instrumental view of education. As neoliberal policymakers realize that their promise that a good education will lead to good jobs is empty, there may be a backlash against education.12 Education will have to be defended on new philosophic and policy grounds.

#### Conclusion

The general conclusion to be considered in this paper is that the research programmes that have underpinned current policies with respect to educational markets, school effectiveness, and the economic rationale for education are all in a process of degeneration. It would take a much longer analysis to firmly establish this point, but hopefully enough has been said here to at least make a *prima facie* case. If so, the question now is what policy lessons can be learned?

The first is that the main theories that comprise the revolution in educational policies, which established the neoliberal hegemony of education, are not subject to decisive refutation in a short time period. Rather, the painstaking task that educational researchers have undertaken is to take the propositions defending the hard core of the research programmes on which they are based, one by one, and subject them to testing. However, since these market-based research programmes and policies were indeed revolutionary the defence can always be made that people need time to be socialized into market behaviours. We have seen this in the view that all parents would eventually adjust to exercise market behaviour in their choice of schools. The further point is that, because these are ambitious policies there will be many complex elements to testing these theories, especially so in the light of policy adjustments. Nevertheless, what we are witnessing in all three major theories is the accumulation of anomalies: death by a thousand cuts.

This brings us to the second problem, which is one of policy development and implementation, rather than the intellectual grounds for the policy. Policymakers now face a conundrum. If the policies that have been developed over 30 years are part of degenerating programmes, then what kind of policy approach that is more open to evidence and testing is appropriate? An answer, which illustrates the conundrum, is to return to Popper (1963, 1966) and argue that policies should be developed incrementally and then tested. This suggests a slow roll-out with sound pilot studies. Many in the research and policy community would applaud such an approach, and, indeed, it is being attempted in some countries in relation to the revolutionary idea of universal basic income (IPR 2016). However, when it comes to education policy, how do we incrementally change policies when the neoliberal foundations have been shown to be flawed? The temptation is to implement a counter revolution. But that could lead to similar problems in terms of testing grand theories over time. The need to dismantle the educational policy architecture of neoliberalism is clear. And pressing. Young teachers are leaving the profession in large numbers because of this architecture and the attendant intensification of work. The key is to develop a new set of educational policies over time and incrementally, so that they can be more readily tested. But the tension between taking down the neoliberal architecture and adopting incremental policies is also clear, as Geoff Whitty would have observed. To address this tension is beyond the realm of educational research, because it would require a change in political culture in which the grand gestures and concern about legacies, which have dominated policymakers' thinking, would have to be replaced by the humble work of developing educational policies that work for all.

Above all, once it is acknowledged that the relationship between education and good jobs is now fractured, there is an opportunity to revisit a debate which we have not had in the neoliberal Anglosphere countries for over a quarter of a century: that is, what should be the aims of education?

#### Notes

#### References

### Part III PRACTICE

### Chapter 12 Why Isn't This Empowering? The Discursive Positioning of Teachers in Efforts to Improve Teaching

Jennifer Gore

#### Unfinished dialogue

In 2018 I had the privilege of presenting Geoff Whitty with his honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle, Australia. This recognition acknowledged Geoff's four-year tenure as the university's inaugural Global Innovation Chair, a period during which he made an invaluable contribution to the institution and provided sage advice to so many – from members of the professoriate through to early career researchers, postgraduate students and professional staff. He helped put Newcastle on the map, sharing his networks with scholars around the world to generate new relationships and opportunities for Newcastle colleagues that might not otherwise have occurred.

Prior to his time at Newcastle, Geoff and I had crossed paths at conferences and knew something of each other's work. In my mind, he was a leading sociologist in education. But I had no sense of the breadth of his scholarship, or of his interest in practice. Indeed, I was worried he might have little time for a scholar like me whose current research focused on improving pedagogy through teacher development. I was so wrong. We discovered deeply shared values and a commitment to social justice and professionalism. In contrast to the regulatory and accountability agendas currently driving educational reform, particularly in England, we found we both held a profound respect for and trust in teachers. And we uncovered similar frustrations with the slow pace and piecemeal nature of educational change. Unravelling these vexations forms the basis of this chapter.

Geoff and I had begun to draft a paper, which we thought to call 'Why Isn't This Empowering…?'. The title was a deliberate nod to Liz Ellsworth's 1989 paper 'Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering?'. Like Ellsworth, who mounted a field-changing critique of critical pedagogy and questioned academic efforts to transform relations of domination in school classrooms, we hoped to interrogate current moves to improve teaching through teacher development. Our conversations were rich and wide-ranging, addressing the field as a whole rather than taking on one particular approach. We particularly enjoyed asking tough questions, even of the field's most time-honoured approaches. I was always struck by the scholarly and respectful way Geoff delivered even the most incisive critiques. Sadly, with Geoff's untimely death we never completed the paper. Thus my aim here is to sketch the argument we were developing.

#### The push to improve practice

Globally, we are witnessing intense interest in improving teaching and enormous investment in teacher education and teacher development. Policy borrowing abounds, innovations are trialled and often fail, educational reform advances at a snail's pace or blazes ahead on poor evidence and/or showmanship. Thousands of students are bored or disengaged (De Bortoli 2018; Goss *et al*. 2017) and poor outcomes from schooling are documented time and again, especially in disadvantaged communities (Banerjee 2016; Perry *et al*. 2016; Lamb *et al*. 2015; Berliner 2009).

Too often teachers are targeted as the problem, without also acknowledging the systemic and structural constraints on educational reform. These include inadequate school funding, lack of time provided for teachers to focus on quality of instruction and countless misguided regulations. Geoff and I were firm in our belief that schooling is always enmeshed with 'other social institutions and social problems that are neither the making nor the responsibility of teachers' (Gore 2011: 3).

Nonetheless, whether in academic, policy or public discourses on schooling, teachers are frequently constituted as both the problem and the solution. The following snapshot of recent headlines conveys their positioning:

Between us, Geoff and I had nearly nine decades of engagement in educational research and debate on teachers and teaching. We shared a certain fatigue with teacher development that fails to make a positive difference for teachers or students. We wanted to step back and ask: to what extent do our most hallowed efforts to improve teaching contribute to the slow pace of change? Why do the same old debates and (often) hollow slogans on reflective practice, teachers as researchers and collaboration keep recurring with so little apparent change? Why is policy amnesia so rife, policy that misrepresents the provenance of 'new' ideas? Why is there such naivety about the complex process of learning to teach?

Our preliminary provocative answer to some of these questions was that the very approaches designed to improve teaching might actually be impeding growth, because of the multiple ways in which they position teachers as inadequate, inexpert and uninformed. While our discussions moulded these ideas, the responsibility for their articulation now rests with me. In the remainder of this chapter, I hope to advance our musings, without my valued dialogic partner. I examine, briefly, a sample of conceptualizations of how to improve teaching – clinical practice, research-informed practice, inquiry-oriented practice and collaborative conversations – selected because of their prominence in the field. I explore how each positions teachers and consider consequences for building the profession. I then consider my more recent work with colleagues at Newcastle on Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR), an approach to teacher development that seeks to simultaneously empower teachers and improve teaching.

Geoff was a great advocate of this work, excited by the careful attention to power relations and effects on teachers, combined with a research-informed pedagogical framework to guide teachers' analysis of practice. He valued its capacity to accelerate teacher learning and its potential to make a difference to student outcomes. And the way in which it seemed to forge connections between forms of accountability and empowerment that are meaningful to teachers. But first, I turn to a brief analysis of four approaches that occupy significant status in the field, but do not always lead to empowering reform.

#### Clinical practice

Clinical practice approaches to teacher development are widely advocated, if somewhat poorly defined. The term is employed to encompass school-based experience (practicums) during teacher education as well as coaching and mentoring sessions for practising teachers. At the heart of such approaches are two key premises: first, that teachers can become more skilful with deliberate practice, especially with the help of experts, coaches, mentors or more experienced colleagues; second, that breaking teaching (curriculum and pedagogy) into its constituent parts and working on perfecting those parts is a powerful means of professional learning.

Aligned with apprenticeship and laboratory approaches (Shulman 1998), these are not new ideas, instead originating in the work of John Dewey. Peer or master–novice relationships are formed and practical skills are developed. Ideally grounded in educational theory, laboratory and clinical approaches aim to train teachers to be 'interventionists' (McLean Davies *et al*. 2013: 97) who can assess and treat students in much the same way that doctors treat patients.

Peer coaching (Joyce and Showers 1980), a popular form of clinical practice, explicitly seeks to shift the discourse from blaming teachers for poor practice to a proactive approach of implementing new teaching strategies. Such coaching provides novice teachers with access to more experienced colleagues (Glickman *et al*. 2001), a productive approach provided that 'objective data is given in a nonthreatening and supportive climate' (Garmston 1987: 18). However, the effectiveness of this approach is highly dependent on the compatibility and shared values of coach and coached (Kahan 2002) and an ever-present danger is that teachers simply engage in repetitive tasks with little opportunity to exercise their judgement.

Indeed, clinical practice approaches tend to treat teaching technically, guiding teachers to improve specific aspects of practice, usually one at a time. The aim is to develop routine ways of working through a deliberate process of rehearsal, intended to refine particular skills (Burn and Mutton 2015). Such emphasis on the actions of teachers, rather than their professional judgements, can be effective, but it ignores the fact that professional judgements are ultimately value judgements, not simply technical judgements (Biesta 2007). Moreover, the complex realities of classrooms require minute-to-minute decision-making across multiple dimensions, making it impossible to practise, in a clinical way, everything teachers might encounter.

So, why might clinical practice not be empowering for teachers? Depending on how it is enacted, it can rely too much on the expert practitioner and leave teachers doubting their capacity to independently solve problems of practice. The reliance on the expert coach/mentor's knowledge positions teachers as extremely dependent on superiors who know better. The result, Geoff and I feared, is diminished confidence in teachers' own knowledge, with teachers feeling unsure of their skills and/or in need of continued, external validation not easily found in most school contexts. Similarly, more extreme forms of clinical coaching such as bug-in-ear feedback (Scheeler *et al*. 2006) and imposed coaching can lead to contrived collegiality (Hargreaves and Dawe 1990), which can in turn undermine genuine engagement with the complex nature and greater purposes of teaching (Hargreaves and Dawe 1990; Warren Little 1984).

While there is a place for clinical approaches, including clinical supervision (Glickman *et al*. 2001), there are limits to which the metaphor can be stretched, given that schools are not clinics in terms of either their conditions or their purposes. As Zeichner (2006) argues, such clinical approaches can treat teachers as automatons in a way that is unrealistic and ignores the unpredictability and messiness of the classroom, where countless decisions are made by teachers at every moment. As an aside, we should note similar limitations to clinical practice in medical settings given the challenges of complex decision-making there.

#### Research-informed practice

The fundamental premise of research-informed practice is that teachers need to engage more fully with research – as consumers, critics, implementers and producers. From this perspective, research provides an 'insightful account of educational reality at a theoretical level [and produces a] reliable warrant for professional action' (Winch *et al*. 2015: 203). A report by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) (for which Geoff was a member of the steering committee), for example, argued that a 'focus on research and enquiry needs to be sustained throughout teachers' professional careers, so that disciplined innovation and collaborative enquiry are embedded within the professional culture and become the established way of teaching' (BERA–RSA 2014: 19).

Within this paradigm teachers are positioned as not sufficiently engaged with research and not sufficiently research-literate. They are faulted for not reading or not implementing the findings of (high-status knowledge) research, even though they may find it irrelevant and counterintuitive (Gore and Gitlin 2004; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1990). The reality is that most teachers rarely comb the research literature to interpret their students' problems or devise alternative teaching practices. Furthermore, bringing research to teachers assumes that researchers' knowledge is the best foundation for action (Hiebert *et al*. 2002).

Arguably, research-informed practice asks teachers to do something that: (a) most do not know how to do; (b) most do not have time to do; and (c) education academics themselves rarely do – that is, make sense of the broad field of educational research to identify strategies to improve practice and raise student outcomes. Imploring teachers to be researchinformed can therefore leave teachers feeling stretched, incompetent, uncertain and frustrated.

Implementing research-informed practice requires school executives to grant agency (Leat *et al*. 2015) and time for teachers to positively engage in research. This approach must be valued within the school and a network of support created. Moreover, to enable empowerment, researchers need to facilitate positive relationships with teachers that are non-burdensome and attuned to the time constraints of teaching (Gore and Gitlin 2004).

Why is this not empowering? It positions teachers as not ever having enough knowledge, as reliant on others' research and doubting their own decisions. Taken to its extreme, this discourse positions teachers as ignorant and unvalued (Leat *et al*. 2015), which is exactly the opposite of what research-informed practice aims to achieve.

Given the conflict between research and policy (Whitty 2006) on the one hand, and the realities of education in practice and teacher capacity (Leat *et al*. 2015) on the other, achieving balance in the push for research-informed practice is no easy task. While the approach potentially positions teachers as experts, school environments that do not provide adequate resources, knowledge or support networks for engagement in research will fail to obtain buy-in from their teachers.

#### Inquiry-oriented practice

Inquiry-oriented practice urges teachers to engage in systematic inquiry in order to bring fresh insights to their context-specific practice and to the wider profession, embedding these ways of working into their practice and their schools. Like research-informed practice, the focus is on investigating practice, but the teacher is positioned differently – not 'as technician, consumer, receiver, transmitter, and implementer of other people's knowledge' (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1999: 16), but as a producer of knowledge in her/his own right.

The conception of teacher as researcher has its provenance in the work of Lawrence Stenhouse (1975), Elliot Eisner (1984), Stephen Kemmis (1980) and others. The approach positions the teacher as a 'senior learner' rather than an intellectual authority in discussions about practice, who, by reflecting on and refining their teaching, can learn how to improve their practice (Stenhouse 1975). Work in this field enacted a slow shift from seeing the teacher as a 'technician' or 'implementer' to a deeper more holistic view of the teacher as a 'knower, thinker and researcher' (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1999; Berthoff 1987).

Inquiry-oriented practice values practitioner knowledge in ways that research-informed practice does not, encouraging the development of strong teacher professional voice and identity through authentic reflection (Mockler and Sachs 2011). Teachers are positioned as capable of generating theories grounded in practice and producing valuable context-specific knowledge that is worth sharing with others. However, as others have argued, it requires teachers to research practice in ways that have limited currency in the broader field (e.g. Kincheloe, 2012; Anderson *et al*. 2007; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1999; Noffke 1997; Fenstermacher 1994; Richardson 1994). For example, and notwithstanding important critiques of what counts, questions have been raised about whether teachers *can* create knowledge about teaching practice unless the methods used to do so meet agreed 'evidentiary standards' that warrant epistemic merit (Fenstermacher 1994: 37–8).

Inquiry-oriented approaches, particularly action research, have also been criticized for being 'insufficiently rigorous, both methodologically and theoretically' (Tom 1985: 39), providing little guidance to the teacher in terms of the tools necessary to interpret, test and implement new knowledge (Tom 1985; Schaefer 1967; Hodgkinson 1957). Others emphasize the highly variable context of teacher experiences and the difficulty of understanding and interpreting research in educational settings, when the researcher is also the participant in these events (Huberman 1996).

So, why doesn't this feel empowering? Unfortunately, the intended reunification of 'pedagogy, research and philosophical enquiry' (Elliott 2012: 93) has been lost in the siloed nature of school environments. Inquiry-oriented practice provides limited tools for teachers to conduct small-scale research, which is not easily shared with others given that each context is seen to be unique. Hence, although inquiry-oriented approaches are founded on respect for teachers, the knowledge teachers produce is not widely valued in the broader field. As a result, teachers can be left feeling that they are simply inquirers, and their efforts are simply local, partial and personal, even when carried out in groups and even when published/publicized in professional and other outlets.

#### Collaborative conversations

The premise of collaborative conversations is that teachers need time to converse in ways that will enable them to develop solutions to their own problems of practice, according to their needs. It involves an iterative process of asking questions, examining evidence and thinking about what the evidence means in a particular context (Earl and Timperley 2009). In particular, its advocates argue that 'it involves deep and sometimes demanding dialogue, candid but constructive feedback, and continuous collaborative inquiry' (Hargreaves and O'Connor 2018: 3).

Within this paradigm, teachers are positioned as knowledgeable, capable, insightful and as good listeners and communicators. They 'have solidarity with each other as fellow-professionals as they pursue challenging work together' (Hargreaves and O'Connor 2018: 3). Their evidence-informed conversations 'can set the stage for fresh knowledge to emerge as participants encounter new ideas or discover that ideas they've held as "truth" don't hold up under scrutiny' (Earl and Timperley 2009: 2).

Teacher professional collaboration has been linked with improvements in student achievement, as well as strengthening relationships and trust among teachers (Timperley 2009; Bryk and Schneider 2002). Teachers are viewed as holders of knowledge (which is valuable and relevant yet highly contextual), who must be willing and able to articulate their ideas about teaching while remaining open to critique (Earl and Timperley 2009).

However, the growing focus on collaborative conversations as a solution is fraught with many of the same dangers as inquiry-oriented and research-informed practice. There are many conditions to be met, and those in the field concede that productive conversations incorporating data are difficult, particularly when traditional thinking and ideas are challenged. Teachers often avoid difficult conversations (Hargreaves 1991, 1994) and can resist examining aspects of their practice that have not been previously examined (Mason 2002). Such difficulties remain present even in recent, 'deeper' approaches that emphasize precision in structure and a stronger basis in positive, trusting teacher relationships (Hargreaves and O'Connor 2018).

In reality, such conversations can be idiosyncratic, substantively weak and hit-and-miss depending on the particular participants and their individual experiences (Bowe and Gore 2017). In some cases, more attention is given to the form (collaboration, communities of practice) than to the substance of conversations, making it difficult for teachers to glean quality insights (Bowe and Gore 2017). When professional conversations about practice lack direction, tensions can arise that make useful practical outcomes more elusive (Bowe 2016/17).

So, why is this not empowering? While the aim is to improve practice and ultimately student learning, there are no guarantees of new knowledge or insights emerging. 'Without any means of adjudicating among teachers' diverse views, they can be trapped in data collection and description' (Bowe 2016/17: 57). As a result, conversations can be unfocused or too focused, can be unhelpful to some group members and can leave teachers feeling frustrated or unsure of whether their hunches and the approaches they are taking are valid and/or productive.

#### Quality Teaching Rounds

QTR is a relatively new approach to teacher development, devised in collaboration with my colleague Julie Bowe. While it builds on the strengths of previous approaches, it is deliberately designed to help teachers feel powerful as both analysts and practitioners who can impact student learning (Bowe and Gore 2017). QTR involves teachers working in professional learning communities of four or more to observe and analyse each other's teaching. There is a growing body of research that uses the term 'rounds' in relation to teacher development (Goodwin *et al*. 2015; Elmore 2007), but QTR is distinctive in two ways: it is founded on a rigorously developed pedagogical model, known as Quality Teaching, and it attends carefully to the power relations inherent in collaboration.

#### The pedagogical model

The Quality Teaching (QT) model, developed by Ladwig and Gore (NSW DET 2003), guides teachers to ask three major questions about their practice: to what extent is there evidence of intellectual quality? In what ways is the environment supportive of student learning? How can learning be made more significant or meaningful for students?

While most other attempts to improve teaching lack a specific mechanism for developing a shared understanding of good teaching, the QT model provides teachers with a tested conceptual framework for articulating, sharing, assessing and refining their practice. It is derived from a comprehensive review of empirical studies providing evidence on aspects of classroom practice that make a difference for students (Ladwig and King 2003) and was refined through hours of classroom observation and sophisticated statistical analysis involving multilevel modelling and factor analysis (Ladwig 2007).

Recognizing that what matters most is what teachers actually do in their interactions with students, QTR emphasizes pedagogy. This is unlike approaches to teacher development that begin with content or the use of instructional material or techniques, or teacher's own concerns, interests or insights; QTR begins with principles. These principles distil the knowledge base on pedagogy and help teachers reconceptualize what good teaching is. As a result, teachers are empowered to do more critical and holistic analytical work on their practice, always with the aim of improving student learning.

#### Attention to power relations

The approach is also founded in a deep understanding of power relations and profound respect for teachers. QTR explicitly builds on what teachers already know and do, extending their professional knowledge and capacity to refine their own teaching. This approach stands in stark contrast to approaches that seek to improve teaching through accountability regimes. It also challenges approaches to teacher development that rely heavily on external sources of authority, such as mentors, coaches and overly prescriptive accounts of good teaching practice. QTR, by contrast, aims to build teachers' confidence by empowering them to identify and fortify quality, as defined by the QT model, in their own and others' practice.

QTR provides tools to articulate what is happening in classrooms, regardless of a teacher's experience or status in the school. It does away with subject, grade level and other boundaries in schools that often obstruct dialogue, exchange and sharing or that prohibit junior teachers from challenging their more experienced colleagues. As a result of using a shared lens on good teaching, with the QT model, and a non-judgemental mode of critique, through QTR processes, collaborative relationships thrive. One experienced teacher captures the transformative effect:

Previously they did not like me, and I did not like them, which was on hearsay and reputation alone. . . . I did not know them from a bar of soap. But when I was in the room with them and working with them, I respected them and I learned to trust them and I learned who they really were. (Gore *et al*. 2017: 110)

#### Conducting Quality Teaching Rounds

Currently, QTR begins with the participation of at least two teachers per school attending a two-day workshop. The workshop provides: an overview of the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of QT and QTR; a detailed account of the dimensions and elements of the QT model; two opportunities to practise using the model to analyse classroom practice using video-recorded lesson extracts; a detailed account of the essential features of QTR; an overview of the importance of elaborating group norms for the conduct of QTR, with an emphasis on confidentiality; two opportunities to practise the QTR discussion process; an outline of practicalities associated with implementing QTR; and, time to plan how to implement QTR in school. Through these sessions, the workshop develops teachers' understanding of quality in accessible and measurable ways – extending teachers' repertoire, not in terms of skills, but rather in their conception of what it means to teach well. It also ensures they have clear ideas on how to introduce and implement QTR in their own school contexts. Unlike so many approaches to teacher development that rely on continued external support, teachers who attend these workshops are empowered to implement QTR without further external input, a feature of the approach that contributes to its scalability.

Teachers who participate in QTR (within or across schools) work together in professional learning communities on four days spread over a period of weeks, to discuss readings, carry out lesson observations and engage in detailed discussions of pedagogy, with each teacher taking their turn to host a lesson. The host teacher's lesson (typically 30–80 minutes) is observed by a small group of peers. Coding and discussion follow immediately after lesson observation. First, all the teachers (including the host) code the lesson, using 1-to-5 descriptors of quality associated with the three dimensions and 18 elements of the QT model. Next, they engage in extended discussion (typically one to two hours) with each teacher sharing and justifying their codes, drawing on evidence gathered during the lesson. The goal is to reach consensus, a process that generates lively interaction and goes well beyond providing feedback to the host teacher. In constructive ways, teachers share targeted and critical insights about the lesson and about teaching more broadly, knowing that soon it will be their turn to host a lesson.

#### Building on previous approaches

Elsewhere, Bowe and I have argued that QTR 'reassembles' other specific approaches to teacher development, such as the use of professional learning communities and instructional rounds (Bowe and Gore 2017). Similarly, QTR builds on broader paradigms in teacher development, including those discussed earlier. Each of these approaches goes part of the way but is also constrained in delivering powerful professional development, either in the conception itself and/or in its execution. QTR aims to harness the power of existing approaches while putting a foil on the constraints. In a nutshell, we can capture the connections as follows:

the discussion of readings that is integral to the conduct of QTR provides structured time for teachers to engage with research.

#### Moving forward

All approaches to teacher development are underpinned by a commitment to educational change. In his 2017 introduction to the third edition of *Sociology and School Knowledge*, Geoff wrote that he began and ended his career in education wanting to make a difference, to policy and to practice. As a young teacher, he recognized that 'change, even in a relatively favourable environment, [is] neither easy nor predictable in its consequences' (Whitty 2017: 3).

How right he was! My argument here is that widespread educational change, however conceptualized and determined, has been difficult and slow to achieve. In general, teacher development approaches have achieved limited impact and even contributed to the slow pace of change because:

c. teachers are continually asked to reinvent practice, often starting from scratch, which is not only inefficient but perpetuates a lack of faith in what teachers know, further undermining their confidence.

At heart here is a failure of our profession to come to terms with what constitutes good teaching in ways that are meaningful to teachers, as well as a certain naivety about the realities of teachers' work, individually and collectively. That is, imploring teachers to read research and/or conduct their own inquiries neglects the extent to which vast numbers of teachers already feel overworked and undervalued, perceiving insufficient time to even enact their pedagogical roles in the face of excessive bureaucratic demands (e.g. Stroud 2016). Imploring teachers to work together to co-construct solutions to local problems overlooks the micropolitical environments of schools and staffrooms that make such collaborative efforts unpredictable and often unsatisfactory. And asking teachers to rely primarily on research evidence to guide their pedagogical choices is at best limited and, to put it more bluntly, misguided (TES Editorial 2015; TES Opinion 2015), given deepening debates and divides over valued forms of evidence.

QTR is showing clear signs of being able to improve teaching at scale, quickly, in ways that teachers experience as empowering. Elsewhere we have published preliminary findings into the effects of QTR, demonstrating significant impact on the quality of teaching and teacher morale (Gore *et al*. 2017), as well as positive effects for beginning teachers (Gore and Bowe 2015). We have recently completed a paper on the powerful effects for experienced teachers (Gore and Rickards, under review). And we have commenced a series of experimental studies investigating the effects on student outcomes (including academic growth, efficacy and school connectedness).

Importantly, QTR provides a counterpoint to the common pendulum swings in the field, where advocacy tends to be framed in 'either/or' terms when it needs to be 'both/and' – either practitioner knowledge or scientific knowledge, either collaborative or provided by experts, either research-informed or developed through teacher inquiry. Geoff wrote of his own 'frustrations [with] alternation between extreme positions' (Whitty 2017: 3) in seeking change.

Geoff and I often talked about the need to embrace multiple perspectives in the quest to improve practice. A principled commitment to valuing teachers' own knowledge, for example, should not obscure recognition of their need for conceptual and practical guidance. Nor should valuing scientific processes and external sources of input ignore the practical wisdom of teachers. It is critical that we reconceptualize how teachers are positioned in efforts to improve teaching, particularly if we are to address the aspirations of governments *and* ensure the well-being of the profession. Such work, our work, has significant consequences for how teachers are understood and represented within wider policy and public domains. There is perhaps no more fitting way to close this chapter than to call for a deep questioning of our own best efforts at educational change – a fitting way to honour a man whose own openness to new knowledge, commitment to change and humble scholarly disposition no doubt contributed to his vast contributions to our field.

#### References

### Chapter 13 Can Teachers Still Be Teachers? The Near Impossibility of Humanity in the Transactional Workplace

Sharon Gewirtz and Alan Cribb

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

Throughout my years as a student and professor, I have been most inspired by those teachers who have had the courage to transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assemblyline approach to learning. Such teachers approach students with the will and desire to respond to our unique beings, even if the situation does not allow the full emergence of a relationship based on mutual recognition. Yet the possibility of such recognition is always present. (hooks 1994: 13)

In this chapter we argue that shifts in the conditions of teaching are producing an ontological shift in the nature of teaching. Specifically, we suggest that the ideology of 'deliverology', and associated processes of datafication and metrification, work to constitute teachers as employees and 'transactors' and, in so doing, erode the possibility of human relationships being constitutive of teaching. Drawing on contemporary developments in schools and higher education, we seek to illuminate how this heuristic distinction between the transactional and the relational broadly corresponds with competing conceptions of teacher professionalism and with tensions between narrower and broader conceptions of social justice. The shift towards the transactional, we argue, has substantial implications for what counts as a teacher and for the potential for creative expressions of agency, including political creativity, in education. Although we suggest that there are reasons to fear that we are locked in a downward spiral in which a growing preoccupation with the 'delivery of outcomes' is threatening to dissolve the very essence of teaching and learning, we propose that it may be nevertheless still possible to change direction by starting from a radical reframing of approaches to accountability.

#### Being and becoming a teacher

When we remember an influential teacher what comes to mind includes, but is much more than, the substantive content of whatever they taught. What comes to mind is likely to be something about their personal, intellectual and moral style, and the kinds of support and challenge they offered to us and other people. Being a teacher is an expression of the full humanity of an individual. This chapter, using the case of education in England, explores some of the threats to this expansive conception of teaching. It is fitting that it is being written in honour of Geoff Whitty, first, because his influence as a teacher and an academic greatly transcended the body of his written scholarship, substantial and important though that is, and, second, because we hope that the tone of the chapter – seeking to combine critical and constructive elements – mirrors Geoff's intellectual and moral style that inspired it. Our title asks whether teachers can still be teachers, but we will first approach this through the question of teacher recruitment and retention; that is, through the question of why people want or do not want to be teachers in the first place.

A UK parliament Public Accounts Committee report of 2018 warned of a 'growing sense of crisis' in teacher recruitment and retention in England (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2018: 3). For the previous five years, the government had missed its targets for recruitment to initial teacher training (House of Commons Education Committee 2017: 5), with only 80 per cent of the required number of secondary school teacher trainees recruited in 2016–17 (DfE 2017). At the same time, growing numbers of teachers have been leaving the profession for reasons other than retirement (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2018: 10). The same report cited a survey of school leaders conducted by the National Audit Office (2017: 34), which found that in 2015/16 schools only managed to fill around half of their vacancies with suitably qualified teachers. These poor figures are particularly worrying at a time when the demand for school places is rising, with DfE figures projecting a 15 per cent increase in secondary school student numbers between 2018 and 2027 (DfE 2018: 3).

There are, no doubt, many complicated causes of the crisis. However, the Public Accounts Committee report identifies the main reason to be excessive workloads resulting from larger class sizes, the rapid and simultaneous introduction of many substantial changes to assessment and the curriculum, and the additional workload caused by the financial savings schools are being forced to make in response to significant reductions in their budgets. The report echoes the findings of several surveys carried out in recent years (see, for example, Sellen 2016; Hutchings 2015), including a survey commissioned by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) (Neumann *et al*. 2016) showing that workload intensification is having a detrimental impact on teachers' job satisfaction, work-life balance, and physical and mental well-being. The following quote is fairly typical of the kinds of responses teachers wrote in the free text boxes in the NUT survey:

. . . workload has hugely increased in [the] last five years and . . . students and teachers are more stressed out than ever before. I know many teachers who are quitting, or who have quit, who were great teachers but constant changes to exam specifications, and a huge decrease in teacher morale due to constant monitoring and accountability measures, which have stifled creativity in the classroom, have led to the very best finding alternative careers, or often quitting with no job to go to, just burnt out and exhausted. (Quoted in Neumann *et al*. 2016: 54)

We want to dig beneath the surface of the kinds of well-being concerns being expressed here by exploring how the nature of teacher professionalism and teachers' work in England is being transformed as a consequence of a range of shifts in the conditions of teaching, of which workload is just one – albeit very important – part. We are suggesting that at the root of the crisis is a more fundamental shift in the nature of teaching in England, which means that it is becoming an inherently less desirable and meaningful activity. While our main focus in the chapter is on the schooling sector, there are worrying indications that higher education may be moving in the same direction and we will allude to some of this in what follows.

The chapter is in three parts. First, we will summarize shifts in the governance of education underpinning the changes in teacher professionalism and teachers' work that are the focus of our concern here and briefly try and capture something of the lived experience of these changes. We will then go on to say something about what we see as the more fundamental significance of these changes, which we summarize in terms of a shift from a relational to a transactional mode of being a teacher. In the final section, we will rehearse some alternative approaches to the governance of education that may be better suited to facilitating relational teaching.

But first we need to say something about the risk of golden-ageism. It is all too easy when talking about policy change to romanticize the past and overstate the awfulness of the present. While there is no doubt that the changes we will be discussing are real and damaging in many fundamental respects, we should also provide a 'health warning' about the dangers of the simplifying lens that we are adopting and, in particular, the dangers of either idealizing the past or demonizing the present. Past and present are not so easily separated. The past was not all good and much of what was good no doubt survives and is also accompanied by accommodations and struggles through which teachers seek to realize their ongoing and emerging ideals.

#### Managerial control and the rise of organizational professionalism

If we use Julia Evetts's (2009) broad distinction between occupational and organizational professionalism, school teaching is a domain where the shift to organizational professionalism has been very dramatic. This shift has been produced by a whole series of changes that have had pervasive effects on the lives of schools and the role of the school teacher. What is happening in higher education is at an earlier stage and arguably less radical but has significant parallels such that the lessons from school teaching are very relevant here. Roughly speaking, the occupational model emphasizes the authority of professionals, as individuals and collectivities, to define the nature and ends of their work according to standards that are internal to the activity and domain in question; whereas in an organizational model professional activity is defined in terms of whatever is relevant to organizational success within a particular policy settlement. While occupational professionalism 'is based on autonomy and discretionary judgement and assessment by practitioners in complex cases', organizational professionalism 'involves the increased standardization of work procedures and practices and managerialist controls [and] relies on externalized forms of regulation and accountability measures such as target-setting and performance review' (Evetts 2009: 23).

There is a longer history of efforts to control what teachers do in schools, but the more recent history starts in the 1980s and 1990s with the introduction of the national curriculum, national assessments and parental choice of school as part of a whole swathe of reforms based on a combination of quasi-market and managerial thinking (Gewirtz 2002). Since then, what counts as a good school and good teaching has been increasingly defined by specified indicators of success largely based on the performance of students in high-stakes tests, which have changed and become more sophisticated over time. In practice, this means that, in a typical secondary school, teachers will have virtually no say over how the work of their students is going to be assessed and thus over what forms of knowledge matter.

Since the New Labour administrations of 1997–2010 the policy ideology of deliverology (Barber *et al*. 2010) has come to dominate official thinking on the governance of education. In line with this ideology, popularized by Sir Michael Barber, individual teachers are given specific targets, pupil by pupil and subject by subject and, at the same time, are under pressure to teach in prescribed ways informed by a national inspection framework. Barber was subsequently appointed as the first chair of the newly constituted university regulatory body, the Office for Students, established by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.

In some ways, it is as if the prevailing system in schools is directed towards producing better designed teaching machines or task-oriented robots, but, of course, it is using human teachers as the raw material. This inevitably generates cognitive and moral stress (Cribb 2011) in addition to the workload stress arising from intensification (see, for example, Neumann *et al*. 2016; Hutchings 2015). This is because, most critically, the performance regime has profound implications both for the school concerned and for teachers' own careers. It is difficult to exaggerate the stress that is produced by these organizational inflexibilities, which can verge on the totalitarian.

The governing regime in schools has been steadily refined since the 1990s. The net result is that, rather than organizational norms presenting a series of more or less marginal side constraints that need to be taken into account and that thereby inflect teacher professionalism, these norms increasingly come to shape the dominant discourses through which everyone in schools thinks and acts such that they become constitutive of teacher professionalism. It is not impossible for teachers to think outside of the dominant norms and, as it were, to occupy two parallel professional identities, but it is ever more difficult for them to do justice to both of these identities in the ways that they act. In both occupational and organizational modes of professionalism teachers are accountable in more than one direction, but the decisive shift towards organizational forms of professionalism means that, in practice, accountability to one's employing organization becomes an overriding consideration. This is especially so given the significant resource pressures in schools, which mean that teachers, particularly in schools serving the most socio-economically disadvantaged communities (Maguire *et al*. 2019) are stretched just to do things in the ways that are prescribed without attempting to overlay their own vision of the duties of teachers on top of that.

Although we will not develop the point here, it is important to note that organizational professionalism does open up new opportunities and provide new roles for those teachers who, more or less enthusiastically, embrace the prevailing performance regime and align their own notion of success with organizational success (Ball *et al*. 2011). For such teachers, these strict performance regimes have the clear advantage that it becomes easier to specify personal career, promotion and school management goals, providing that you do not waste time railing against what others see as the instrumentalization and commodification that they entail.

The continuous refinement of organizational regimes in recent years has also served to reinforce the plausibility and apparent defensibility of the performance measures in use. Successive governments have signalled their readiness to adjust and recalibrate the measures to respond to perceived weaknesses in the regime prevailing at the time. A recent manifestation of this in secondary education is a move away from the crude school performance measure of the percentage of students gaining at least five General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications at grades A\*-C,1 which had the perverse effect of schools and teachers focusing disproportionate attention on students at the C/D borderline (Gillborn and Youdell 2000). One of the headline measures now in place measures the progress of all students across eight subjects, thereby, at least in theory, 'encouraging entitlement to a broad curriculum . . . with "high status" knowledge at [its] heart' and incentivizing 'support for lower attainers as well as middle and higher attainers' (Francis *et al*. 2017). In some respects, these adjustments have won over some ideological critics of previous regimes (e.g. Francis *et al*. 2017). However, we would argue that such refinements only serve to reinforce the underlying logic of deliverology and it is this logic that needs to be challenged and dismantled.

Louise Ceska, a head teacher, has captured some of the lived experience arising from these changes as part of her doctoral work. This included a section in her thesis (Ceska 2018) about the 'death of Snow White', which refers to an earlier period of her teaching life when, working as a French teacher (which she still does), Louise would finish the formal curriculum early and use the remaining time to write, rehearse and perform a satirical version of Snow White in French. This provided an opportunity to continue teaching and learning French, but also to have fun, to learn about and participate in performance, and to let different children shine in different ways and generally to have a space in which Louise could have new kinds of relationship with her students and at the same time exercise her own imagination and autonomy and model and encourage civic attitudes. In the current climate, such an excursion from organizational norms is virtually impossible – hence her conclusion that Snow White, and all that her students' performance of Snow White represents, is dead.

Up to now what we have been outlining is probably in large part a recognizable critique of recent public sector change. Specifically, we have been underlining the threats to professional autonomy posed by new organizational forms. However, we have also already tried to indicate that these changes have a foundational significance that is sometimes missed. In the case of school teachers at least, what we are talking about is not simply new sets of incentives and disincentives that teachers need to incorporate into their day-to-day calculations, but arguably we are seeing something that amounts to a change in the nature of the teaching profession itself such that what was once meant by teaching is now a near impossibility.

There are already early signs of a similar malaise affecting teaching in higher education (see, for example, Hall 2018; Tomlinson *et al*. 2018; Hall and Bowles 2016; Neary 2016), with an expectation of larger class sizes; students increasingly configured as consumers; performance measures like the National Student Survey established; the rise of learning analytics and the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF), which at the time of writing is in a relatively primitive but evolving state; 'lecture capture'; centrally organized module evaluations; and all of this feeding into individual performance measurement and performance-related pay. Again, we have also started to see new career paths and opportunities opened up to those staff who are happy to align themselves with these changes – 'TEF leads', 'REF [Research Excellence Framework] leads', 'impact leads', 'student experience leads', and the like. However, it seems to us that to date these developments fall far short of the totalizing effect of performance regimes in schools and still leave considerable room for university teachers to shape their own work inside the classroom. 2

#### The relational and the transactional teacher

The crux of what we are getting at by referring to the near impossibility of teaching – at least in the sense in which teaching is a rich expression of humanity – depends upon a contrast between two ideal types of teaching, and it is the former ideal type that is arguably becoming less relevant. For heuristic purposes, we will use the distinction between relational and transactional ideal types. This is a distinction that has been used by a range of scholars in different sub-disciplines, but we have in mind those scholars, for example, Broadbent and Laughlin (2009), influenced by the Habermasian analysis of the relationship between life-worlds and systems (Habermas 1987). In the context of discussions about professional identity and work, this distinction overlaps in many respects with Evetts's occupational versus organizational distinction.

The relational ideal type is centred on interpersonal relationships situated within a broader community. Here the teacher may have subject expertise, but they are also a mentor, an advisor, a critical friend and a fellow citizen, and relationships between teachers and students are potentially quite open-ended and emergent. In the transactional ideal type teachers are contracted to deliver a specific subset of educational goods or outcomes to a particular client group and have defined sets of accountabilities to specific stakeholders. As we have noted, in the current settlement within the English state school sector these defined accountabilities are to teachers' employer organizations. Each ideal type carries a risk. The risk of the relational ideal type is that the roles of teachers can be ill-defined and can lend themselves to neglect or abuse of various kinds unless some effective forms of accountability are in place. The risk of the transactional ideal type – and this is the risk we are concentrating on here – is that much of what matters about teachers in the relational sense is either compromised or erased.

One way of capturing the distinction we are making here is through Martin Buber's (1970) distinction between encountering other people and experiencing them as objects. In a school where every educational transaction – at a very fine-grained level – is reduced to something that can be weighed, measured, audited and rewarded or punished, there is much less scope to relate to students in open-ended and human ways and thereby, in turn, for students to be given opportunities to develop their own relational capabilities. So much of the discourse in schools is dominated by what are seen as definitive facts about students (e.g. their test scores in different subjects) and so little by the whole of their individual and collective personhood. Indeed, the ubiquity of metrics in education, which are central to the logic of deliverology, means that both students and teachers are often defined in terms of numbers or patterns of numbers; and what has been called datafication (Lingard *et al*. 2014; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013) is a key component of the ontological reconfiguration of educational identities.

Encountering other people, at least in some of their richness, by contrast, involves a large repertoire of possible social relations. For Buber (1970), authentic human encounter is precisely not about instrumentalizing people; relationships and community are ends in themselves. In an educational context, for example, this means that although we should not treat encounters merely as means to 'learning outcomes', they can provide the conditions for the most profound and expansive forms of learning, as is eloquently captured in the quotation from bell hooks with which we started this chapter. One manifestation of this, which many people will recognize from their own experience, is that it is quite common for education proper to start where the curriculum is left behind. Louise Ceska's Snow White performance, for example, does not just illustrate individual professional autonomy, but also shows an openness to educating the whole person and all that entails by, for instance, encouraging and supporting creativity and risk-taking, experimenting with meaningful forms of collaboration, providing new kinds of platforms for some children to be centre stage and for others to support them and for everyone to learn about empathy and team-working in conditions of uncertainty. Without the performance of Snow White, or its very many equivalents, something about the richness of relations between persons is lost. This is only partly about failing to nourish the full personhood of the students; it is also about not nourishing the whole capability set and soul of the teacher. Some part of Louise's teacher identity is left to die, or at least is left dormant, with the loss of Snow White. Under these circumstances work becomes inherently less meaningful and this directly connects to a loss of morale and a threat to mental well-being.

The distinction between relational and transactional ideal types also has strong resonances with debates about competing conceptions of social justice. As Nancy Fraser (1998) has shown, justice embraces concerns with recognition and participation as well as concerns about the distribution of valued outcomes. Education policies that define fairness around delivering 'successful' outcomes to as many students as possible risk being insensitive to other, equally crucial, dimensions of justice. Educational goods may be effectively transacted, but at the same time, and through the same processes, the possibility of valuable relationships may be undermined. Specifically, the identities and voices of both students and teachers can be marginalized or erased by dominant transactional mindsets.

The rise of the transactional workplace coincides with the squeezing of space for artistic, social and political creativity in schools. As far as the former is concerned, the worries represented by the account of Snow White dying have been further exacerbated in recent years by the exclusion of creative and expressive arts subjects from the English Baccalaureate, one of the new headline school performance measures introduced by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010 (Neumann *et al*. 2016). As a result, fewer students are being entered for GCSE qualifications in creative subjects, with statistics analysed by the Cultural Learning Alliance (2016) indicating a 21 per cent decline in arts GCSE subject entries between 2010 and 2016 and the Education Policy Institute (Johnes 2017) reporting a 30 per cent decline in entries to creative subjects (across all levels) by Key Stage 4 cohorts (students aged 14–16) between 2007 and 2017. In a survey conducted by the *Guardian* newspaper in 2018, 9 per cent of 1,000 teachers surveyed reported that 'either art, music or drama is no longer offered at their schools' and 20 per cent reported that 'one or more of these subjects has been given reduced timetable space' (Ratcliffe 2017).

But the prevailing settlement is not just a threat to artistic creativity within the classroom; it is also a fundamental threat to social and political creativity. Indeed, one of the most serious implications of prevailing organizational norms is that teachers are encouraged and expected to zoom in on narrow within-organization indicators whose primary social relevance lies in their use for institutional competition. This emphasis makes it much more difficult for teachers to direct their attention towards larger debates about the nature and purposes of education, the contribution of education to social life and the political and economic organization of education, all of which should be central to any occupational model of professionalism. Within an occupational model, members of the profession would be expected to conscientiously embrace their position as social actors, both in relation to education policy narrowly understood and in relation to the kind of society they and their students might wish to build. The more successfully a transactional workplace is shaped by prescribed organizational norms, the more difficult it is to realize these richer forms of occupational professionalism.

In other words, to return to our 'health warning', we are not saying that the enactment of a more relational and expansive model of good teaching has become impossible in English schools. However, we are saying that, to the extent that transactional norms dominate and define the workplace, becoming constitutive of teachers' identities and professionalism, the possibility of rich, broad-based encounters between people who work and study in schools diminishes, as does the chance that such encounters are properly valued. Fortunately, of course, transactional norms are not fully dominant and are, in any case, resisted by both teachers and students, and schools remain places where meaningful encounters take place. Humanity cannot and has not been abolished. The danger, however, is that it is becoming less central in, and less relevant to, conceptions of teaching and that it comes at a high cost. It is evident that many good 'relational' teachers still exist and still exercise considerable creativity (see, for example, Hall and Thomson 2017; Povey *et al*. 2017; Craft *et al*. 2014). However, such teachers are swimming against an ever-stronger tide. In order to overlay their own vocational visions and commitments on top of the official norms of English schooling, they need both a stout heart and a school context that is happy, to some degree, to support their resistance to transactional norms. Even with strong support from colleagues, the cognitive and moral stress entailed is seriously burdensome and it is no wonder that even the most remarkable professionals may succumb to the temptation to walk away.

#### No way out? Rethinking accountability

It is difficult not to be pessimistic about the future of school teaching in this climate where transactional modes of teaching defined around narrow performance measures have been steadily ratcheted up and become established as policy common sense. Arguably pessimism is even more fitting for teaching in higher education where the same forces are in play but where many staff may feel they are still only teetering at the top of the ski slope. But, as we have indicated, the direction of travel seems set, because, at least in the case of school teaching, perceived weaknesses in the regime are just looped back into new or refined measures. The logic of deliverology based around organizational accountability fills up the whole landscape.

However, we do not want to completely succumb to pessimism. Nor would that be at all appropriate in a piece written in appreciation of the work of Geoff Whitty. Throughout his own scholarship, Geoff sought to steer a careful course between the twin dangers of naive optimism and pessimistic determinism. In steering this course, his work brought together theoretically informed critical readings of education policies and empirically informed constructive and concrete proposals about how things might be done better. In relation to our critique of transactional teaching contexts, this means, we suggest, exploring ways of ending or transcending the reign of deliverology. The most hopeful direction, we think, is to go back to the drawing board in relation to professional accountability. This would include an inversion (or at least a partial inversion) of the idea of organizational accountability. Instead of concentrating on the respects in which teachers are accountable for their professionalism to employing organizations we should also, or even primarily, be asking how organizations are accountable for creating the conditions for teacher professionalism. This version of intelligent accountability has been elaborated by Dirk Vriens and colleagues from the Faculty of Management Science at Radboud University Nijmegen. Vriens *et al*. (2018) posit their conditional approach as a solution to the detrimental effects of prevailing calculative forms of accountability. For Vriens *et al*., alongside 'perverse incentives and . . . instrumental behaviour', these effects include 'alienation . . ., decreased professional responsibility . . . and lack of empathy' (2018: 1180). They also include the squeezing out of opportunities for the autonomous and creative exercise of contextsensitive professional discretion and of the dedication and wider societal agency required for professionals to fulfil their obligations to their clients and wider society in meaningful ways. Vriens *et al*.'s conditional approach to accountability involves organizations being required to demonstrate the degree to which organizational goals and infrastructural arrangements enable professionals to apply and further develop their professional expertise and experience, to exercise their professional discretion and to remain dedicated to the values of their profession. Given the tensions between professional, market and bureaucratic logics, highlighted by Freidson (2001), those organizations emphasizing profitability, market success or economic efficiency as their primary goals or implementing essentially managerial forms of governance would not perform well in any conditional accountability scheme.

This kind of organizational accountability could potentially be combined with a more democratic model of community-based accountability. This is one of the many areas in which Geoff Whitty himself made an important intellectual contribution. In particular, in his 2002 book, *Making Sense of Education Policy*, he argued for the development of a new democratic teacher professionalism, which would, among other things, open up 'deliberation and decision-making to excluded constituencies' (Whitty 2002: 19). This was part of his desire to translate the 'choice agenda' into a new conception of citizen rights that would 'give voice to those excluded from the benefits of both social democratic and neoliberal policies' and reassert 'collective responsibility for education without recreating the . . . over-centralised planning' characteristic of social democracy (20). These arguments grew out of his broader concern to reflect on how the more 'positive aspects of choice and autonomy' could be used 'to facilitate the development of new forms of community empowerment' without reinforcing social inequality (62). Geoff's concern here was to avoid the twin traps of the exclusionary statism of the social democratic era and the stratified marketization of neoliberalism.

Translating Geoff's vision into practice might, for example, involve extensive cross-institutional peer-led inspections, co-designed and conducted by partnerships between teachers, students, parents and other community actors. It may be that in such a system some form of national guidelines regarding expectations around the curriculum and other aspects of provision could be retained, and within limits these may well be a good thing. But such a system, rather than demanding universal compliance, would allow for justified variation, thus enabling institutions to find ways of counting things as valuable that might be lost by or squeezed out of uniform templates. In so doing, they would also be allowing for fuller encounters between teachers, students, and others in which more of the full personhood of each is nourished and harnessed, and in which the basic civic notion that we each must take responsibility for shaping the social world is recognized and encouraged rather than killed off.

It seems to us that, unless this kind of root-and-branch rethinking, or something closely analogous to it, takes place, then the foundational crisis in teacher recruitment and retention will not be addressed. Reforms to salaries and workloads would be a substantial help, but they most likely will not address the core issue of the meaningfulness of teachers' work and lives. Unless teachers are allowed to bring, not just their broad-based agency, but their whole humanity into the profession with them, they may choose to stay away or leave. Furthermore, we would suggest – more contentiously – that, unless the reign of deliverology comes to an end, the workforce that is left will only qualify as teachers in a diminished sense. The critiques of public sector change with which we began contain well-rehearsed insights into the ways in which forms of marketization and managerialism can 'crowd out' (Sandel 2012) less instrumental and economistic values and can colonize teachers' identities in corrosive ways. We wish to underline, in addition, that what is at stake may be much more than inflections of teachers' subjectivity but can add up to ontological transformation: the ultimate risk is that tomorrow's teachers will no longer be able to be teachers.

Finally, we would add that it is not alarmist to worry about similar reductionist tendencies consuming higher education. Key facets of academic work are increasingly defined and managed through metrics (Feldman and Sandoval 2018); and algorithms that can attach specific numbers to the organizational value of individual academics are coming to the surface. In this context, there is an obvious danger that what really matters about academic work is dissolved in the acid of numbers. What is at risk is the distinctiveness, richness and integrity of a contribution such as the one Geoff Whitty made. This kind of contribution depends upon a human alchemy that brings together teaching through mentorship and teamwork (as well as in more direct forms), original intellectual contributions to a field, and the nurturing and sustaining of institutional collegialities. Anyone who has any experience of what this means will be, as Geoff Whitty (Whitty *et al*. 2016) himself was, profoundly impatient with calculations about 'what works'.

#### Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to Tania de St Croix for her characteristically insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

#### Notes

#### References

### Chapter 14 Contestation, Contradiction and Collaboration in Equity and Widening Participation: In Conversation with Geoff Whitty

Penny Jane Burke

What does [contestation and contradiction] mean for future policy and practice? Is it possible to make any further progress under current conditions and what might that look like? If we agree that progress is possible, then what action might be taken to achieve short term gains? (Whitty *et al.* 2015: 52)

In this chapter, I reflect on my work with Geoff Whitty in establishing, as its co-directors, the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) at the University of Newcastle, Australia; the first centre in the world of its kind, focused on developing a unique, decentred and innovative praxis-based framework for equity and widening participation. This process necessitated close collaboration and deep, challenging discussions about the nature of 'equity work', which we both understood in relation to social justice. We discussed what it means to be 'inclusive' and 'equitable' and how we understood 'access', 'equity' and 'widening participation', concepts that had challenged us both for many years in our mutual commitment to social justice in and through education. Shaped by an eclectic interweaving of critical, feminist and post/structural perspectives, praxis enabled us to 'foreground the need for critical reflexivity in dynamic spaces constituted of complex relations of power and difference', 'creating spaces of refusal against hegemonic frameworks that are complicit in insidious inequalities and misrecognitions' (Burke, Crozier and Misiaszek 2017: 28). Geoff and I were concerned to make our understanding of praxis as accessible to others as possible, particularly for those outside of the critical sociology of education, which is where we were both positioned. In collaboration with our colleagues in CEEHE, we developed the following definition of how we understood 'praxis' in the context of equity and social justice in higher education:

CEEHE brings together research, evaluation, theory and practice in continual conversation because one of our guiding principles is that equity practice should be informed by research, and equity research should be informed by practice. CEEHE fosters this dialogue by drawing on the notion of 'praxis', an approach that brings theory and practice together in cycles of reflection-action and actionreflection. The dialogic relationship between critical reflection and critical action is reflected in the collaborative and participatory ways of working that CEEHE encourages. A process of ongoing exchange helps sensitise participants to the multiple layers, contexts and challenges that characterise the field of equity in higher education. These methods help us to question and disrupt entrenched and historical inequalities that are often sustained by taken-for-granted assumptions. Through this distinctive praxis-based framework, CEEHE provides spaces for critical reflection (reflexivity) to generate the highest quality research-informed equity practices and in doing so to create sustainable equity frameworks.1

Our conversations had started much earlier on, in the mid-2000s, when I was appointed as head of the School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies (EFPS) at the Institute of Education (IOE) in London, the department in which Geoff would have been based had he not been in the role of director of the IOE at the time. EFPS was the school at the IOE most explicitly committed to a disciplinary approach to social justice, housing the sociology, philosophy and history of education. During this period, wider sociopolitical forces were increasingly impacting higher education institutions, including corporatization, neoliberalism, new managerialism, institutional cultures of performativity and marketization, all of which were creating profound contradictions and challenges for EFPS as a space deeply committed to social justice education, practices, principles and frameworks. These challenges were confronting me as an early-career academic leader and required deep learning in relation to the inevitable contestations and contradictions posed by the aim to develop accessible, participatory, equitable and inclusive spaces in higher education. My leadership was particularly embedded in and framed by feminist praxis and pedagogies, but I had to face the challenge that theory does not neatly translate to practice (Clegg *et al*. 2016) and these early experiences of educational leadership taught me about the significant tensions between social justice research, policy and practice. Throughout these challenging experiences, and perhaps in relation to the insights emerging from his own struggles, Geoff was a quiet, patient and gentle mentor, collaborating with me to make sense of the contradictions we were compelled to recognize, live and negotiate. This is apparent as I reread some of his work on equity and widening participation and the way he engages in these pieces with my work. He does this respectfully and with great sensitivity to the commitments I articulate while understanding the significant tensions that exist in the spaces between social justice research, policy and practice. I will explore these themes in this chapter, paying tribute to Geoff as an educational leader and mentor.

#### Widening participation policy and practice: Contesting and contradictory discourses of aspiration

Some commentators have criticised the premises underlying New Labour policies—for example, those of Aimhigher—for focusing on the assumed deficits of individuals rather than structural issues (Gewirtz, 2001; Archer & Leathwood, 2003; Burke, 2012). While these may be valid criticisms, increasing awareness about university among under-represented groups was necessary and continues to have value. (Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015: 37)

A large body of work in the sociology of education draws attention to the problematic nature of 'raising aspirations' which underpins a significant piece of widening participation policy and practice in both the UK and Australia. These critiques are fuelled by a strong commitment to draw attention to the intricate power relations at play in relation to the discourses of 'aspiration' and the processes by and contexts in which aspirations are formed. There is a profound distortion articulated through hegemonic discourses of aspiration that material poverty is 'poverty of aspiration' and such notions became (and continue to be) embedded in the public statements of politicians and policymakers seeking to raise the aspirations of 'the disadvantaged' through targeted widening participation activities. There is so much that is problematic about this, including the notion that the problem lies in the bodies of those class/ified as 'the disadvantaged' and the underpinning deficit imaginaries of those with the power and influence to construct and implement the policy and those for whom the policy is projected. This continues to play out as policy language has increasingly shifted from widening participation to social mobility, with particular forms of aspiration and 'character' being privileged and valued.