1 ‘Managing’ managerialism: The impact of educational auditing on an academic ‘specialist’ school Abstract: This paper seeks to nuance arguments about the impact of broad policy technologies of auditing processes upon teachers’ practices by providing empirical evidence of the effects of such processes, in context. Specifically, the paper draws upon a cross-section of teachers’ accounts of schooling practices in a specialist, academically- oriented secondary school and languages college in the British Midlands to reveal the complex ways audit practices influence teachers’ work, professional development and student learning under current policy conditions. The paper reveals that teachers endeavoured to actively ‘manage’ audit processes by strategically focusing upon student needs, and critiquing and problematising the more superficial aspects of performance management, systemic inspections, and a narrow focus upon academic results. However, even as these tactics were employed, there was also evidence of a simultaneous focus upon simply ‘managing’ to cope, particularly when audit processes added considerable pressure upon teachers to improve students’ test scores, and when they encouraged conditions antithetical to more educative concerns. This sometimes had dramatic effects upon student and teacher learning and teacher identity. Capturing this empirical complexity, in the context of specific schooling settings, provides evidence to nuance the more general literature on educational auditing, including in European and other trans- national settings, and existing understandings of such practices at local sites more generally Keywords: Audit culture; managerialism; neoliberalism; educational practice; continuing professional development. Introduction: The research presented in this paper reveals the complex ways in which broad audit processes to measure and manage teachers’ work and student outcomes influence current schooling practices. To provide insights into this complexity, the paper argues for the exploration of schooling practices at specific sites, in light of broader contextual conditions. To do so the paper reveals the nature of audit processes by drawing upon the example of a specialist, academic school in the British Midlands, England under current national and international policy pressures for improved performance. Drawing upon the insights of a group of teachers from an inner-city 11-18 secondary school specialising in
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‘Managing’ managerialism: The impact of educational auditing on an academic ‘specialist’ school
Abstract: This paper seeks to nuance arguments about the impact of broad policy technologies of auditing processes upon teachers’ practices by providing empirical evidence of the effects of such processes, in context. Specifically, the paper draws upon a cross-section of teachers’ accounts of schooling practices in a specialist, academically-oriented secondary school and languages college in the British Midlands to reveal the complex ways audit practices influence teachers’ work, professional development and student learning under current policy conditions. The paper reveals that teachers endeavoured to actively ‘manage’ audit processes by strategically focusing upon student needs, and critiquing and problematising the more superficial aspects of performance management, systemic inspections, and a narrow focus upon academic results. However, even as these tactics were employed, there was also evidence of a simultaneous focus upon simply ‘managing’ to cope, particularly when audit processes added considerable pressure upon teachers to improve students’ test scores, and when they encouraged conditions antithetical to more educative concerns. This sometimes had dramatic effects upon student and teacher learning and teacher identity. Capturing this empirical complexity, in the context of specific schooling settings, provides evidence to nuance the more general literature on educational auditing, including in European and other trans-national settings, and existing understandings of such practices at local sites more generally Keywords: Audit culture; managerialism; neoliberalism; educational practice; continuing professional development. Introduction:
The research presented in this paper reveals the complex ways in which broad audit
processes to measure and manage teachers’ work and student outcomes influence current
schooling practices. To provide insights into this complexity, the paper argues for the
exploration of schooling practices at specific sites, in light of broader contextual
conditions. To do so the paper reveals the nature of audit processes by drawing upon the
example of a specialist, academic school in the British Midlands, England under current
national and international policy pressures for improved performance. Drawing upon the
insights of a group of teachers from an inner-city 11-18 secondary school specialising in
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languages education, the paper reveals how broad more managerial policy conditions –
emphasising the ongoing collection of numeric data as evidence of teacher and student
performance – influence subsequent schooling practices, and more intrinsic educational
purposes. However, this is not a straightforward process, and the way in which teachers
respond reveals a nuanced, active understanding of, and approach to, more performative
concerns. The paper provides insights into the nature of these audit processes, and details
about how teachers are influenced by, and responsive to, more performative pressures.
The paper begins by providing an overview of audit practices under current policy
conditions, including how more performative pressures encourage audit processes. These
audit processes are construed as a vehicle for managing risk within a risk averse, and
increasingly competitive social milieu. Through processes of global policy borrowing,
these audit technologies have expanded in influence, including in education. Such
technologies serve as public policy instruments which are not innocuous, simply
reflecting prior decision-making processes, but instead have direct effects upon the
publics to which they are directed. That is, ‘every instrument constitutes a condensed
form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it’ (Lascoumes & Le
Gales, 2007, p. 3). However, and at the same time, there is also evidence of resistance,
more productive applications, and the ability to ameliorate negative effects of such
processes. Such responses are evident at more localised settings (such as individual
schools), at the level of the nation-state, and trans-nationally. More detailed explorations
of such practices, in specific educational settings, is useful for determining the plurality
of practices which characterise audit-in-action.
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In this vein, the paper explores how audit processes influenced educators’ practices, and
the effects of these processes, including the nature of continuing professional
development practices, in a specific, specialist school site. Reflecting their dominance
within the data, particular emphasis is given to teachers’ responses to how their
performance was monitored through performance review processes, the influence of
school inspections (described as ‘Ofsted’ [1] inspections), and the focus upon improved
academic outcomes.
The challenge and challenging of audit practices
In a neoliberal context extolling the virtues of individual enterprise (Clarke, 2005), there
is a significant emphasis upon managing all aspects of human endeavour, at the level of
individual performance. In large part, this management process feeds into a broader
‘economism’, which reifies the economic above other social and political practices
(Teivainen, 2002). People are treated as ‘crude calculable units of economic resource’
(Shore 2008, p. 284) in need of constant monitoring. Under such circumstances, in all
areas of endeavour, not just the economic, the capacity to manage performance becomes
as important as actual practices themselves; as Ranson (2003) argues, ‘accountability is
no longer merely an important instrument or component within the system, but
constitutes the system itself’ (p. 459). That is, there is a tendency towards what Lyotard
(1984) described more than a quarter century ago as ‘performativity’. While Lyotard
(1984) employed the concept in a more restricted sense (optimal input-output ratio), the
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term is used in a broader sense in this paper to refer to a broad set of technologies,
capabilities and mechanisms of control which can be used to determine the worth of
individuals’ actions and capacities. Ball (2000) provides a useful overview of the term:
Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation, or a system of
'terror' in Lyotard's words, that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as
means of control, attrition and change. The performances (of individual subjects
or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of
'quality', or 'moments' of promotion (there is a felicitous ambiguity around this
word) or inspection. They stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or
value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement (Ball, 2000, p.
1).
In its current instantiation, such performativity is manifest in broad policy support for
generic measurement practices, designed to determine how efficiently resources have
been utilised in any given setting, and as a means guiding and influencing subsequent
activity and engagement. As part of this enactment of performativity, the development
of quantified data to enable processes of comparison – locally, nationally and globally –
is particularly salient. The adoption of various ‘audit’ technologies (Strathern, 2000;
Power, 1997) trends towards the quantification of practice, and potentially limits and
devalues those practices less amenable to quantification. Also, and as part of this
process, what is valued is the public hearing, examination or judgment associated with
the audit itself (Shore & Wright, 1999). The very absence of alternative discourses is
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another indicator of the pervasiveness of the push to measure and manage various
practices, including education.
In many ways, this desire to measure constitutes part of a broader risk averse society – a
‘second modernity’ (Beck, 1999) – which seeks to control the unexpected outcomes of
modern society. This desire to control entails projecting into the future to identify and
redress potential threats, ‘to foresee and control the future consequences of human action’
(Beck, 1999, p. 3), and to do so on a global, rather than a national scale. However, this is
no longer possible in an increasingly ‘world risk society’ in which fixed norms are no
longer pertinent, significant threats can be neither predicted nor contained, and experts
and industries identify, or ‘manufacture,’ new risks. Within this context of multi-faceted
and perpetual risk, risk management is now a dominant concern of public service
provision and management (Power, 2004). Such risk management entails a broad-based
approach to organisational life, arguing that organisations are inherently ‘risky’ and need
to be constantly managed to minimise any negative consequences. Such risk
management entails the capacity to exercise management processes in areas not
previously subject to such processes, but also comes at the risk of replacing what Power
(2004) describes as ‘valuable – but vulnerable – professional judgment in favour of
defendable process’ (p. 11). Under conditions of manufactured uncertainty, the audit
process has ‘broken free from its moorings in finance and accounting’ (Strathern, 2000,
p. 2), and is part of a broader apparatus of technical rationality or what Beck (1999)
describes as the ‘logic of control’ (p. 139) which characterises modernity. This is part of
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a process of trying to predict the unpredictable, of making some form of ‘determinant
judgement’ (Lash, 1999) about that which can not be readily or easily determined.
This trend towards the ‘auditing’ of social practice influences all aspects of human
endeavour, including education. Under these conditions, Ozga and Lingard (2007)
describe how a global policy elite is responsible for fostering an approach to education
which values quantifiable measures of educational attainment, such as test scores, above
all else. Such measures are treated as definitive evidence of the benefits, or otherwise, of
schooling. The result is what has been described more generally as a process of
‘governance by numbers’ (Rose, 1999), manifest in education as ‘policy by numbers’
(Ozga & Lingard, 2007) and resulting in ‘teaching by numbers’ (Taubman, 2009).
Strong emphases on accountability and accountancy form part of a neoliberal imaginary
which effectively limits the pedagogies enacted (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), and encourage
rationing of education by limiting investment in those areas deemed most institutionally
beneficial, with significantly detrimental implications for the most marginalised (Gillborn
& Youdell, 2000; Saltmarsh & Youdell, 2004).
These audit processes are evident through a variety of performative practices in schooling
settings, and involve a shift in governance structures away from more obviously and
overtly centralised forms of regulation to seemingly more decentralised approaches.
Pivotal to this governance turn is a strong central demand for data, and an emphasis upon
the use of such data (Ozga, 2009). The development of such data feeds into broader
perceptions of education as a vehicle to assist in economic development, and of the need
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to constantly monitor and compare educational outcomes in an intensely competitive
international climate (Nόvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). This emphasis on data also occurs
in spite of the clear limitations of some measures at the school level; ‘value-added’
scores, for example, have been criticised for failing to account adequately for influences
beyond the control of schools, and cannot therefore adequately serve as a performance
indicator for schools (Taylor & Ngoc Nguyen, 2006). This focus on data enables
performative technologies including target setting, the development of comparative
league tables based on academic results, the constant monitoring of results and
performance management of teachers.
However, while these processes have exerted significant influence, detailed empirical
inquiry reveals this influence is complex and contested, including within specific
European national settings. The more performative aspects of audit processes have been
found to influence school and teaching practices in problematic (Ball, 2003; Jeffrey,
2002) as well as more nuanced ways. In the context of policy support for both
performativity and creativity in England, for example, Troman, Jeffrey and Raggl (2007)
reveal how primary teachers felt that more stringent and prescribed national curricula
could be made less restrictive by exploring more creative teaching practices. This more
creative teaching was desired and implemented by teachers, even as there were strong
pressures to ensure compliance with particular literacy, numeracy and science content
within the national curriculum. Furthermore, the emphasis upon clear curriculum goals
contributed to increased efficacy amongst teachers as they experienced greater
curriculum coverage and sense of task completion. At the same time, there was also
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evidence of teachers deriving psychic rewards from teaching as a result of engaging, for
example, with modified testing practices involving teachers assessing and moderating
student work rather than having it assessed externally. Similarly, in his focus upon
primary school teacher identities, Troman (2008) revealed how primary teachers
mediated more performative school cultures, maintained more nurturing dispositions, and
sustained an interest in developing more creative approaches to their teaching. Teachers
held onto humanistic ideals even as they were increasingly strategic and protective of
their self-identities in more performative settings.
Furthermore, more performative influences are also construed as simultaneously
accommodated and resisted (always within historically contingent and vernacular ways)
across specific European national contexts. While more performative audit processes are
evident through the policy technology of ‘Quality Assurance and Evaluation’ (QAE),
with its emphasis upon increased transparency, accountability and goal-setting, and its
collection and use of data for these purposes, such influences have not gone
unchallenged. Andersen, Dahler-Larsen & Pederssen (2009) argue romantic and
communitarian approaches as part of a traditional Danish conception of enlightenment
have continued to exert influence, even as increased goal-setting, testing and other
accountability technologies have had an impact. Segerholm (2009) reveals how QAE
processes in relation to national schooling policy are construed as less problematic than
might be anticipated in a context of earlier national regulatory mechanisms to assure
quality in schooling, and also how alternative discourses (democratic participation,
equality) continue to exert influence. Simola, Rinne, Varjo, Pitkänen and Kauko (2009)
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also argue that while QAE processes are readily evident in Finnish compulsory schooling
contexts, policies are also promoted which challenge trans-national testing and ranking of
school performance. Although fragile, such foci are evident.
This paper seeks to add to this nascent literature about the specificity and complexity of
audit practices by identifying how teachers responded to the use of various forms of data
to ensure the quality of educational practices in an academic specialist schooling context
in England. While there is some evidence of the effects of auditing processes in specific
secondary school settings (such as in relation to Ofsted inspections in a school placed in