The intellectual capital of schools: analysing government policy statements on school improvement in light of a new theorization.

Ideology without competence is a dangerous vice. But competence without ideology is a limited virtue. (D. Miliband, Minister of State for School Standards, DfES) Opportunistic attempts have been made by successive governments to establish--some would say impose--sets of criteria against which the effectiveness of not-for-profit organizations like schools can be gauged. Most have been subjective: the extent of staff involvement in decision-making, the appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, the percentage of inspected classes regarded as 'good', and so on. Lately, UK government rhetoric, using a lexicon borrowed from Business and Economics, suggests a willingness to move to new systems of reportage; centred on improvement rather than blame, on critical friendship more than on confrontation. There appears no longer to be the puritanical tendency among policy-makers to adopt measures that cause pain in the belief that they alone can be right, but do they constitute (as critics like Thrupp suggest) a random collection of well-intentioned but poorly theorized policies, or can they be cogently conceptualized into a whole? Previously, improvement measures judged schooling simply, in terms of external stakeholder outcomes, but failed to capture the essence of what it was to be (or what it took to become) a successful improving school. This paper suggests that current government policy, whether knowingly or not, is essentially describing improvement from a different perspective--an internal perspective of 'intellectual capital'. The paper knits together government policy statements on school improvement with a re-conceptualization of intellectual capital specifically designed for schools, offering an imposed coherence to government policy that could potentially change the way we think about inspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]