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This article considers questions of ‘employability’, a notion foregrounded in the Green and White Papers on the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The paper first questions government imperatives concerning employability and suggests a series of mismatches that are evident in the rhetorics in this area. This summary opens up elements of what I am calling the first ‘folly’ in the field. The second section of the paper considers recent research with individual academics engaged in employability activity. This research suggests another series of mismatches in the aims and outcomes of ‘employability initiatives’ and opens up a further series of ‘follies’ in the day-to-day practices of academics and students’ responses to them. The third section of the paper turns to academics’ reports of student behaviour in relation to the outcomes of their degree. This section develops an argument that relates to the final ‘folly’ associated with the current focus on employability. I argue that students’ focus on outcomes (which at face value suggests they have internalized the importance of employment) is contributing to the production of graduates who do not have the dispositions that employers – when interviewed – say that they want. The highly performative culture of higher education, encouraged by the same metrics that will be extended through the TEF, is implicated then innotpreparing students for the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the discursive shifts of emphasis of school headship since the 1980s in England, and the ways in which the repositioning of head teachers has gradually transformed professional work and relationships in schools via a discourse of management. Specifically, the paper identifies a ‘trilogy of school headship in England’ to indicate a process by which school headship has been repositioned – from head teacher, to manager, and to leader from the Education Reform Act of 1988 onwards. Drawing primarily on policy texts, the construction, within policy, of a head teacher endowed with power, responsibility and freedom will be detailed. Informed by both Fairclough and Foucault’s conceptions of discourse, this paper concludes that as a policy technology management subjects head teachers to ‘a twin process of autonomization plus responsibilization’ within which they become the linchpin of the delivery chain of policy and play a key role in the formation of ‘performative professionalism’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat UK coalition Government in 2010, there has been an urgent intensification and focus upon early years numeracy and literacy and promoting systematic synthetic phonics. This paper argues that the current narrowing of early years assessment, along with increased inspection and surveillance, operates as a policy technology leading to an intensification of ‘school readiness’ pressures upon the earliest stage of education. The paper suggests that this governance has encouraged a functional ‘datafication’ of early years pedagogy so that early years teacher’s work is increasingly constrained by performativity demands to produce ‘appropriate’ data. The article argues that early years high-stakes national assessments act as a ‘meta-policy’, ‘steering’ early years pedagogy ‘from a distance’ and have the power to challenge, disrupt and constrain early years teacher’s deeply held child-centred pedagogical values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, education and family policy in the UK has sought to incorporate the views of children and young people through an active participation agenda, in the fulfilment of children's rights under the obligations of the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child. Drawing on empirical evidence, this paper suggests that this aspiration is flawed. The inclusion of young people's voices in decision-making is context dependent, and influenced by individual relationships, both positive and negative. It is framed by policies that subjugate children within disciplinary technologies that determine a regime of 'truth' about effective and appropriate participation. Drawing on data gathered as part of a wider study on the relationships between services users and services providers in special educational needs, this paper demonstrates that active inclusion of the voice of the child can be illustrated to be at least variable, and at worst prejudiced. It is suggested that the notion of participation produces tacit forms of 'government' that further classify and divide young people, magnifying their marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on theBuilding Colleges for the Future(BCF) initiative (2008) which saw a wave of new-build Further Education (FE) colleges spring up across England in the final years of the New Labour government. It draws on qualitative data from a research study focusing on four new-build colleges in the West Midlands of England to theorise the BCF initiative. Using theory derived primarily from Lefebvre, the paper contextualises BCF within a frame of neoliberalisation and discusses the impact of the ‘production of space’ represented by the initiative with a research focus on two areas: pedagogy and ideology. The main findings are that these new-build colleges can be interpreted as spatial expressions of policy-makers and others’ perceptions of teaching and learning; in ideological terms, they also trumpet a ‘new lifestyle’ and a ‘new art of living’ for FE staff and students that is however, in tension with residual pedagogical practices and values. The article concludes that despite being an expression of neoliberal abstract space, these new-builds can still be seen as providing a frame for alternative individual and collective encounters with education which may subvert and outlast the processes of neoliberalisation that they appear to embody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe one secondary school’s radical attempt to rethink the shape and purpose of education for its pupils, and its subsequent return to more traditional methods in the face of pressures of performativity and accountability. Framing our analysis within activity theory and its emphasis on contradiction as a driver for change, we describe the school’s move towards a thematic curriculum and ‘personalised learning’ as a process of productive tensions which enabled the development of new approaches to education. While these innovations were considered to be of major benefit to both teachers and pupils, a fundamental contradiction between the focus on individual development underpinning the new approach and the demands of accountability in a persistent culture of performativity proved to be insurmountable. We argue that this particular contradiction highlights the dominance of measurability in judgements of school success and individual progress, with consequences for the pupils’ longer term education futures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]