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This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the 'panopticon' in educational research, problematising its validity and offering a fresh conceptualisation of teacher surveillance. The school as a 'panopticon' is a well-established concept which helpfully enables a consideration of aspects of high-stakes accountability. The present paper explores the question of how contemporary teachers perceive themselves to be subject to scrutiny and the consequences of this surveillance. It is argued that whilst the panopticon (and its variants) remain very valid notions for understanding performativity in contemporary schools, that a complementary metaphor can be offered which enables a fuller consideration of the 'unseen' behaviours induced by a high accountability environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the growing importance of measures of progress in judgements of schools’ effectiveness in England, with a focus on the role of the early years (settings for children aged 2–5) in providing data for these measures. Qualitative data from a research project involving three diverse school-based and pre-compulsory early years settings are used to explore how teachers and school leaders prioritise the collection of data in their every-day practice, in order to show how children make continual progress. The need for a narrative of progress as children move up through the primary school, an ‘Ofsted story’ for the school inspection service, is discussed alongside recent policy which requires a ‘baseline’ assessment at age four. We argue that there is a reification of progress in schools and early years settings, and that this changes the status of early years within the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alongside debates concerning managerialism, marketisation and performativity, the question of accountability in higher education has come to the fore in recent commentary. Discussion of the subject has tended to be divided into two distinct camps. On the one hand, there are strong calls for more accountability to the public purse - a desire to witness more productive returns and efficiency on investment in higher education. On the other, there are academics who rail against the oppressive, panoptican-like nature of the audit culture, emphasising the debilitating effects of quality assurance mechanisms on academic life. The paper suggests that one way out of this impasse is to place the current accountability agenda - what Travers refers to as the 'new bureaucracy' - in the context of Max Weber's account of bureaucracy and rationality. Habermas' reconstructed version of Weber's work is identified as a possible means of delineating the reaches and limits of modern bureaucratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to 'modernisation'. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of governmental appropriation of professionalism: the specification by the Training and Development Agency for Schools of new 'standards' for both initial teacher training and teachers' subsequent career progression. It is argued that although this enterprise represents itself as a species of purely common-sense reform, it is in fact a mode of competency training that is rooted in selective appropriation of elements of post-fordist management theory and a loose form of behaviourist psychology. The capacity of this training discourse to suppress awareness of its own presuppositions and of alternative or competing conceptions of professions and professionalism is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using qualitative data from two Chilean public schools, I interrogate the expectation that standardised testing motivates staff to critically self-assess themselves and to be accountable for failing evaluations. The research findings bring new insights into looking at ways in which school members, especially head managers, strategically debate, highlight and obscure scores, classifications and ranking positions to generate narratives of institutional success, while defending themselves from negative outcomes. Members are both disciplined by state technologies, but are also actively committed to produce school identity narratives in creative ways as a manner to make sense of the school and maintain its value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although high-stakes tests play an increasing role in students' schooling experiences, scholars have not examined these tests as sites for socialisation. Drawing on qualitative data collected at an American urban primary school, this study explores what educators teach students about motivation and effort through high-stakes testing, how students interpret and internalise these messages, and how student hierarchies develop as a result. I found that teachers located boys' failure in their poor behavior and attitudes, while arguing that girls simply needed more self-esteem to pass the test. Most boys accepted their teachers' diagnosis of the problem. However, the boys who felt that they were already 'doing their best' and 'working hard' began to doubt that educational success is a function of merit and effort. I conclude that students learn about much more than the three Rs through their experiences with high-stakes testing, and argue that future research should attend to the social dimensions of these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]