The recent ITV documentary, Britain’s Strictest Headmistress, focused on Katharine Birbalsingh, chair of the Social Mobility Commission and head of the controversial Michaela Free School in East London, examining the school’s ethos and values. While there is no denying Ms Birbalsingh’s good intentions and high expectations for her pupils, the focus on the ‘strict’ aspect of the school’s educational approach – not only by the documentary makers, but by many in government and the inspectorate, has tended to polarise educational commentators and academics.

This debate raises important questions – what are schools for, and whose interests do they serve? Schools in England have a public duty to promote the ‘fundamental British values’ of mutual respect and tolerance. The very fact that a school can advertise its approach to its own pupils’ behaviour as ‘zero tolerance’ and the juxtaposition between zero tolerance and tolerance is never even noticed, let alone counted against the school, points to something wider that has changed in the rules of the game, the ways that schools are managed, increasingly being encouraged to see themselves as setting out a distinctive brand in a competitive marketplace.

The marketplace of school leadership comes to the fore in another recent development: the announcement by the Department for Education of the new National Institute for Teaching – a dedicated university degree-awarding partnership which will oversee the training of teachers and leaders for the future. All of the major partners in this initiative are multi-academy trusts that have worked hard in turning around failing schools, making use of a process termed ‘rebrokerage’, through which a school placed into special measures by the inspectorate, Ofsted, can be taken away from its Local Authority and community governors, and given to a new academy trust to run. The process parallels the way a failing company could have its resources bought out by a more successful competitor.

In a forthcoming book, School Leadership Between Community and the State: The Changing Civic Role of Governance, I trace the origins of some of these developments, identifying a hidden shift away from community governance and leadership, taking place according to a logic of shared ‘we identities’, towards a politically determined set of values, enforced through market processes. This changes the relationship between school leaders, their parents and parent governors, away from co-operation, toward seeing parents as a ‘market’, and governors as trustees, holding a fiduciary responsibility for the school. In this environment, a school’s ethos and values no longer reflect those of the local community but become a part of the ‘brand’. Tracing the origins of these changes back to a dissolution of clear institutional identities, and further back into colonial governance techniques involving the separation of custom and value, I attempt to provide an understanding of the spaces of agency which still exist for school leaders within this rapidly shifting context.

As schools seek to develop their ‘brand’, ‘strictness’, of the kind modelled by Michaela’s headmistress, comes to be a unique selling point. Viewers of the ITV documentary will have seen the joy some parents had in being accepted to the school, masking an anxiety about their children attending less well managed schools elsewhere. For successful schools, perception and branding become a self-fulfilling prophecy – attracting the most ambitious families provides schools with an easier base from which to build success. There is no doubt that Michaela Free School achieves fantastic results with the pupils whose parents choose the school, and much of the controversy the school attracts centres on a distinction between what might be best for young people in the abstract, and the lived experience of Michaela teachers of the realities experienced by pupils in their community context. Through becoming their own admissions authority, however, some schools can set even more stringent tests to filter out the families they don’t want, serving a very narrowly defined community, sometimes resulting in an endless game of brinkmanship with one of the regulators of this marketplace, the Schools Admissions Adjudicator.

In the case of other schools, ‘strict’ and ‘zero tolerance’ approaches to discipline are adopted, not in the service of high expectations, as at Michaela, but rather to affect what in the corporate world would be termed ‘constructive dismissal’. By making the lives of challenging pupils ever more difficult, imposing detentions, internal isolation and exclusions, such schools often find their old intake of pupils leave, providing the new management with a clean slate for the journey ahead.

The success of schools like Michaela in a market environment, further, encourages other schools to imitate its ‘strict’ approach as a branding exercise, without the same coherence or purpose. Michaela Free School’s headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, the self-styled ‘strictest headmistress’ is unlikely, for example, to lose that title to the headteachers of Urswick Church of England School, or Fulham Boys School, both of which were made to pay out legal settlements for strictly enforcing rules about acceptable hairstyles which were found to be discriminatory toward Black children. The performative branding of ‘strictness’ in the case of Michaela’s ethos is a successful example of the influence high profile figures have in a world where schools have been divorced from the institutions of local democratic control. It has the effect of raising the profile of ‘strict’ schools for the parent market, as something school leaders aspire to emulate, without formally changing the policy framework against which schools are judged.

The ’brand’ of education offered by two of the partners in the new National Institute for Teaching evidences other ways that the current environment blurs boundaries. Oasis Academies and Star Academies Trust are both in an odd category in that their trustees are driven by a faith ethos – Evangelical Christianity in the case of Oasis, Islam in the case of Star – yet they do not primarily run faith schools. Star Academies Trust, originally named Tauheedul Education Trust, made its first foray into managing non-faith schools when it was asked to take on Highfield Humanities College in Blackpool in 2015, and while it moved to reassure parents that it had no intention to introduce an Islamic ethos, parents voiced concerns, and the school remained significantly under-subscribed. The distinctive ethos and values which Oasis and Star have sought to inculcate in their schools have clearly served them and their pupils well in many cases, but these kinds of tensions and mismatches with local parents highlight a significant change in the ways schools are expected to relate to the communities they serve. That these academy trusts are now to play a National role in the preparation of future teachers suggests these patterns will be further entrenched in the future. Might this mean that the next generation of school leaders see an even narrower field of possibility as they attempt to engage the challenges of the communities they serve?

Dr David Lundie is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Glasgow School of Interdisciplinary Studies. School Leadership Between Community and the State: The Changing Civic Role of Governance is out later this year, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

First published: 15 February 2022

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