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This article was downloaded by: [University of Texas Libraries] On: 28 October 2014, At: 14:04 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK British Journal of Educational Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbje20 Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era Jane Perryman a , Stephen Ball a , Meg Maguire b & Annette Braun c a Institute of Education , University of London b King's College , London c Institute of Education , University of London Published online: 21 Jun 2011. To cite this article: Jane Perryman , Stephen Ball , Meg Maguire & Annette Braun (2011) Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era, British Journal of Educational Studies, 59:2, 179-195, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2011.578568 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.578568 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,

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Page 1: Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era

This article was downloaded by: [University of Texas Libraries]On: 28 October 2014, At: 14:04Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

British Journal of EducationalStudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbje20

Life in the Pressure Cooker –School League Tables and Englishand Mathematics Teachers’Responses to Accountability in aResults-Driven EraJane Perryman a , Stephen Ball a , Meg Maguire b &Annette Braun ca Institute of Education , University of Londonb King's College , Londonc Institute of Education , University of LondonPublished online: 21 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Jane Perryman , Stephen Ball , Meg Maguire & Annette Braun(2011) Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and MathematicsTeachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era, British Journal ofEducational Studies, 59:2, 179-195, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2011.578568

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.578568

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,

Page 2: Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era

claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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British Journal of Educational StudiesVol. 59, No. 2, June 2011, pp. 179–195

LIFE IN THE PRESSURE COOKER – SCHOOL LEAGUETABLES AND ENGLISH AND MATHEMATICSTEACHERS’ RESPONSES TO ACCOUNTABILITYIN A RESULTS-DRIVEN ERA

by JANE PERRYMAN, STEPHEN BALL, Institute of Education, University of London,MEG MAGUIRE, King’s College London and ANNETTE BRAUN, Institute of Education,University of London

ABSTRACT: This paper is based on case-study research in four English sec-ondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematicsdepartments because of their results being reported in annual performancetables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies ofachievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achievebrings and the possibility of resistance.

Keywords: accountability, policy enactment, performance tables, examina-tion results, pressure

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper explores the pressures to ‘deliver’ which bear upon English secondaryschools, particularly within English and maths departments. It is part of a largerstudy on ‘policy enactments’ in which one of our findings was that schools arepreoccupied with policies of achievement, particularly public examination results.This has led schools to adopt a results-driven approach, with a plethora of strate-gies aimed at improving results. These include Easter and Saturday revisionclasses for students about to take public examinations, targeting students on theC/D borderline to increase the numbers of students achieving five A∗–C grades inGCSE examinations,1 interviews of ‘under-achieving’ students by senior leader-ship teams, entering students early for exams and timetabling for intensive revisionclasses. The main driver behind these ‘interventions’ is to improve the numbers ofstudents achieving five A∗–C grades in GCSE examinations, the key national pub-lic indicator of school performance as reported in English league tables. SchoolPerformance tables were first introduced in 1992 as part of the then Conservativegovernment’s ‘choice’ agenda – intended to provide information to enable parentsto make choices between schools. However as Baker (2007) reports:

Since then though, governments have found another purpose for the tables, usingthem as a lever to direct the school system down one particular track or another.They have become the Fat Controller’s equivalent of the railway signal box. More

ISSN 0007-1005 (print)/ISSN 1467-8527 (online)© 2011 Society for Educational StudiesDOI: 10.1080/00071005.2011.578568http://www.informaworld.com

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focus on the 3Rs! Quick pull the maths and English lever. Worried about ‘coasting’schools? Throw the value-added switch.

So important are the league tables that certain schools developed inventive, evendubious strategies and techniques to boost their performance in these tables, inparticular the use of the intermediate General National Vocational Qualification(GNVQ), a vocational qualification assessed largely through coursework thatwould count for the equivalent of four of the required five GCSEs. One school,Thomas Telford in Shropshire achieved the highest average GCSE-level points inEngland in 2004 by developing and then marketing its own online IntermediateGNVQ in ICT (Eason, 2005). In 2007 having realised that large numbers ofschools were achieving the required threshold for students passing five GCSEsA∗–C without necessarily achieving passes in the basic subjects of maths andEnglish, the government introduced the requirement that the reported GCSEpass rates must include these subjects. This change, that created the specific andcontemporary pressures on English and maths departments to enact achievement-focused policies, is the focus of this paper. At the time of writing, the newCoalition Government has just published League tables that reflect success infive subjects: English, maths, science, a modern foreign or ancient languageand a humanity, which comprise the ‘English Baccalaureate’ (DfE, 2010). Thiswill bring other subjects into the pressure cooker already occupied by Englishand maths, and affect how they, too, enact policy. Of course English and mathshave traditionally been core to the school curriculum in the form of the ‘threeRs’.2 More recently Kenneth Baker, education secretary responsible for the 1988Education Reform Act which brought in the National Curriculum, revealed thatwhilst he ‘demanded 10 subjects all the way up to 16, including technology,history, geography, foreign languages, art, music and sport; [Prime Minister]Thatcher wanted it confined to English, maths and science’ (cited in Woodward,2008). In 1998 the Literacy Hour was introduced into primary schools, meaning(at least) an hour of structured reading and writing a day for pupils aged 7–11, andthe national Numeracy strategy followed a year later. The Key Stage 3 Strategywas introduced to secondary schools in 2001 (aimed at pupils aged 11–14), furthercementing the importance of English and maths.

However, the disaggregation of English and maths based performance indi-cators raises the stakes even higher. Insisting that maths and English results beincluded in the five passes has caused some schools to fall precipitously down theleague tables. According to Baker (2007) ‘the effects on some schools have beendramatic. One school went from a score of 82 per cent passing the equivalent offive A∗–Cs to just 16 per cent when maths and English were included’. Mansell(2006) noted ‘At Greig City academy, headline results plummet from 55 per centto 10 per cent when the measure changes. At Walsall academy, the fall is from 65to 18 per cent’.

With the reputation and status of the whole school depending on these per-formance indicators, it is unsurprising that our interviews made it apparent that

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the pressure to improve results and to enact the policies linked to this goal is feltparticularly intensely amongst English and maths teachers.

2. THE POLICY CONTEXT

The policy background to the study, and to this paper, is the accountability culturein English schools. Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, the work of teachershas been increasingly regulated, with the introduction of the National Curriculum,SATs3 and League Tables, leading to a low trust regime of increased accountabilityin education. The policy explosion of the last twenty years has been made possi-ble in part because a constant stream of criticism has led to public and politicalacceptance of the idea that teachers are in need of reform (Chitty, 2004; Gleesonand Husbands, 2001; Tomlinson, 2001), and this reform needs to be monitored byincreased surveillance (part of a public sector reform package) and performancereporting. The ‘natural’ conclusion to the sustained attack on the professionalismof teachers was the acceptance of the need for greater accountability. Hence LordDonoghue reminisces:

What had clearly become one of the great weaknesses of our system was its non-accountability. The secret garden had become a weed patch . . . you could nolonger depend on the total dedication of the teaching force; it therefore needed moreaccountability. (quoted in Chitty, 1989, p. 67)

Charting the resulting changes in teacher autonomy, Gleeson and Gunter (2001,p. 142) characterise the period from the 1960s to the mid-1980s as one of ‘rela-tive autonomy’. In this period, teachers were accountable to themselves throughinformal reflection and peer review. They worked within curricula establishedby headteachers and there was some voluntary appraisal of their teaching per-formance. Any evidence about performance was collected informally and therewas a professional emphasis on ethical commitment. Gleeson and Gunter referto the period from the 1980s to the 1990s as ‘controlled autonomy’. During thisperiod teachers in secondary schools were accountable to themselves through for-mal reviews. Line management systems were set up and the senior managementteam put these systems under surveillance with the introduction of mandatoryappraisals from 1991. Evidence was formalised through classroom observationand teachers were set targets from professional development discussions based ondata from self-reviews and observations.

Under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher (1979–1991), therewas an emphasis on the use of markets and free enterprise to produce and todistribute the goods and services wanted by consumers with a minimum of regu-lation. But paradoxically in education, central government took over some of thefunctions more traditionally performed by local government and teachers.

Between 1988 and 1994 there was at least one Education Act passed peryear (Tomlinson, 2001). The various provisions had considerable impact on the

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work of teachers, with the overall effect that teachers became more like ‘a tech-nical workforce to be managed and controlled rather than a profession to berespected’ (Tomlinson, 2001, p. 36). Generally, since the 1988 Education ReformAct, there has been a shift in accountability from teacher professionalism, char-acterised by accountability of teachers to themselves, their colleagues and theirstudents (self-regulation), to accountability to agencies such as the Qualificationsand Curriculum Authority (QCA) and OfSTED.

After the 1997 election, the new Labour government continued, with adapta-tions, to use the frameworks of curriculum assessment and accountability whichhad been introduced through the 1980s and 1990s. They produced a Green Paperon the reform of the teaching profession, which introduced a form of perfor-mance management, linking teacher performance to promotion through a nationalthreshold (Mahoney and Hextall, 2001). Targets were to be set annually in theperformance management cycle for both headteachers and teachers who had suc-cessfully passed the performance threshold. Teachers’ work became even morefocused on pupils’ performance. A main focus for headteachers became themanagement, deployment and development of teacher performance in order toenhance student performance. Governors formally approved targets designed byteachers for students’ performance based on data and national attainment targets.School targets were derived from national targets, and teacher and student targetsfrom school targets. Thus Labour, especially in the 1997 White Paper Excellencein Schools, continued and added to the unrelenting pressure to ‘improve’, asTomlinson noted:

The new government have made clear that there is to be no return to a decentralisedsystem or attempts to build democratic partnerships with LEAs and teachers. Thecurriculum was to remain centralised, teachers would be even more heavily policed,with management of their performance based on private sector models, parentswould remain vigilantes in scanning the tables, acting as extra hands in classroomsand government-appointed bodies and individuals were to control major educationaldecision-making and spending. (Tomlinson, 2001, p. 93)

Since 2000, teachers have worked with what Gleeson and Gunter (2001, p. 142)call ‘productive autonomy’. There have been numerous Education Acts, WhitePapers and Green Papers, and teachers are now accountable through formalaudits of student learning outcomes controlled by senior management. Teachingis framed and driven by the National Curriculum and a performance frameworkthat is backed up by performance management, pay and target-setting. Evidenceabout performance is based on pupil outcomes, classroom observation and per-sonal statements. Pupils become objects and targets and the headteacher and seniormanagement team are publicly accountable. Ball (2008) argues that educationalchange since the 1988 reform act has had a ‘ratchet effect’ on change, bring-ing small incremental, cumulative moves over time which have fundamentallychanged taken-for-granted practices. ‘Each move makes the next thinkable, feasi-ble and acceptable’ (Ball, 2008, p. 97). This notion of ‘taken-for-granted practices’

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is key – increasingly, for many teachers, they know of no other way. All of thiscontributes to what Apple (1986) calls intensification of teachers’ work.

As Poulson (1998, p. 420) argues, ‘few people would disagree that increasedaccountability is a good thing; or that standards in schools should be raised . . . .However accountability is an ambiguous term in discourses about education;within it are condensed a range of meanings and emotions’. Accountability ispart of an interrelated set of what Ball (2008) calls policy technologies deployedin the arenas of markets, management and performativity to transform the publicsector. ‘Policy technologies involve the calculated deployment of forms of organi-sation and procedures, and disciplines or bodies of knowledge, to organise humanforces and capabilities into functioning systems’ (Ball, 2008, p. 41). Ball arguesthat policy technologies in education are part of a movement of global educa-tion reform which advocates a ‘one size fits all’ approach to modernisation andimprovement. Thus ‘targets, accountability, competition and choice, leadership,entrepreneurism, performance related pay and privatisation articulate new ways ofthinking about what we do, what we value and what our purposes are’ (p. 43). Inthis context the greater part of a school’s work is now primarily focused aroundmeasurements derived from the demands of this accountability, notably in theproduction of examination results, and the pressure to meet targets and improveperformance levels year-on-year falls particularly heavily on English and mathsteachers.

3. THE SCHOOL CONTEXT

The paper draws on data from an ESRC funded study of ‘policy enactmentsin secondary schools’ (RES- 062-23-1484), which was based on ‘case-study’work in four schools. The study had two main objectives: one theoretical, thatis to develop a theory of policy enactment, and one empirical, that is a criticalexploration of the differences in the enactment of policy in ‘similar’ contexts. Itfocused on four main issues: (1) the localised nature of policy actions, that isthe ‘secondary adjustments’ and accommodations and conflicts which inflect andmediate policy; (2) the ways in which many different (and sometimes contradic-tory) policies are simultaneously in circulation and interact with, influence andinhibit one another; (3) the interpretational work of policy actors; and (4) the roleof resource differences in limiting, distorting or facilitating responses to policy.We researched in four co-educational, non-denominational and non-selective sec-ondary schools which were performing at around the national average in terms ofSchool Performance Tables. The sample included Atwood School, a communityschool in central London; two more in suburban education authorities, GeorgeEliot and Wesley School; and a fourth, Campion School, located in a smallercounty town. (All these school names, and the names of our respondents, arepseudonyms). As the project commenced and developed over the two and a halfyear period of its duration, we collected a wide range of contextualising data fromeach school. We also ‘audited’ the range of policies in play in each school. This

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information was collated from sources such as Ofsted reports, school brochures,in-depth interviews with head teachers and experienced members of the staff ineach school. Documents were collected and analysed in relation to specific poli-cies and policy interventions and we had access to the school intranets wheremany policy documents were lodged. We analysed national policy documentationand outputs from local authorities.

In addition, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with the headteachers; other senior managers, including the bursars or school managers; a rangeof classroom teachers (more and less experienced); union representatives; sup-port staff; Local Education Authority support partners and consultants. In thisstudy, the focus was deliberately with those with some responsibility for and whowere/are legally accountable for enacting the specific policies that we have iden-tified for study. The interviews explored the ways in which policies were selected,interpreted and translated and ‘how’ they moved from the Senior Leadership Team(and elsewhere) into lesson planning and classroom activities and other aspects ofschool life.

This is where the specific focus for this paper started to take shape. When weinterviewed teachers in English and maths department about policies, particularlythose relating to achievement, we became aware that their relationship with policyenactment was in a way different to those in other departments. We also notedthat members of senior management frequently made specific reference to Englishand maths departments and their results. To explore this specific issue further, thispaper draws on interview transcripts from English and maths teachers in the fourschools.

4. PRESSURE

The GCSE results of our schools are mixed. In 2009, Atwood had 57 per cent ofstudents achieving five A∗–C grades at GCSE including maths and English and 67per cent without, and this represented a great improvement on previous years, thefirst time the school had been above the average for the local authority. Similarlyin 2009 Wesley, with 65 per cent A∗–C including the core subjects, was above theLEA average for the first time, and near the 72 per cent achieved without the coresubjects. George Eliot fell just below the LEA average with 52 per cent of pupilsachieving the required five good passes including maths and English, and 65 percent without, and Campion had 43 per cent with maths and English which wasslightly below the LEA average and below the figure of 58 per cent that the schoolachieved without including maths and English.

Clearly, as noted already, pressure on the core subjects has increased since theinclusion of English and maths in the statistics for the five ‘good’ passes at GCSEand this pressure, it appears is not only from the senior management, but fromother staff.

I think government knows what it wants, it says English and maths because that’s fun-damental to learning so we, as a school, we’re sort of being pushed in that direction.(Philip, headteacher, Wesley)

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I think that has changed our focus but even before we did that we had identifiedthat it’s so important for students to have English and maths.(Hazel, Deputy Head,Wesley)

Naturally English and maths have to; I think they feel that they need to be a bit- orthey are more accountable for the results and so on, so they do do more becausethat’s, obviously, what the government measure the results on. (Alice, Head ofTechnology, Campion)

An example for me personally would be to keep going back to the attainment in thecore subjects, so English, maths and science, levels of students, certainly in Year 9.(Ewan, KS3 manager Campion)

You know, Maths, English and science, there’s a huge pressure on them because,obviously, being core subjects, you know, if they don’t get their- the seventy percentA to C then it has a big impact on the school’s results overall. (Wendy, Head of SocialScience, Wesley)

As colleagues throughout the school concentrate on the performance of thesetwo departments the sense of pressure, and very visible performance within theEnglish and maths departments was intense.

We’re going to have to keep pushing the school targets up . . . everybody knows thatmaths and English are crucial. (Adrian, head of maths, Campion)

The school is very keen, obviously, to get its five A-Cs now it includes maths andEnglish. (Sonja, maths teacher, Atwood)

Yeah, the school’s definitely very concerned about the GCSE results in maths - every-one wants the maths department to do well, ultimately, and hopefully we will do.(Daisy, maths teacher, Campion)

And there’s enormous pressure put on us: can they get a C grade? And the wholeschool’s reputation is based on [the] percentage of the students can they get to a Cgrade and also how that relates to how many students we’re expected to get to a Cgrade. (Neil, deputy head of English, Wesley)

I mean, we’re under a lot of pressure as maths department especially, you know,maths and English, to get our results. (Roger, deputy head of maths, Campion)

So the pressure is very much on English to perform this year because, as SLT keeptelling everybody, you know, we need the five A-star to C including maths andEnglish. (Carla, head of English, Campion)

Ball (2003) argues that performative systems lead to a change in the way in whichwe value each other, and judgements are made according to the productivity of col-leagues, rather than their personal worth. Performativity achieves its goals throughwhat Ozga (2009, p. 152) calls ‘disciplined self-management’ of individual orgroup. Such pressure can lead to stress, another emerging theme from our data.

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5. AFFECTIVE PRESSURE

One of the key themes emerging from the data from the English and maths pres-sure cooker was stress. These teachers are not alone. Studies in the UK by Brown,Ralph and Brember (2002) estimated that one-third of teachers were sufferingfrom stress. They indicated that from the beginning to the end of the 1990s thenumber of teachers leaving the profession through ill health nearly trebled. Theybased their research on teachers from Manchester primary and secondary schoolsand conclude ‘it is apparent that teaching staff are increasingly feeling inadequatein the face of rising expectations and greater responsibilities and workloads beingplaced upon them’ (Brown et al., 2002, p. 11). The responsibility for the successof a school via its league table performance must weigh heavily indeed.

There are many studies of a similar nature including Travers and Cooper’sstudy (1997) that surveyed 800 teachers in England and France about stress andfound that 55 per cent of the English teachers reported recently considering leav-ing teaching. Like their French counterparts they cited classroom discipline, lowsocial status and lack of parental support as stressful, but the English teachersreported more problems with political interference and long hours. Johnson andHallgarten (2002, p. 2) found that:

since the 1987 Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act and the 1988 Education ReformAct, teachers had felt themselves under a government cosh whose blows became pro-gressively heavier. They believed they suffered an imposed and outdated curriculum. . . a punitive inspection system, worsening staffing levels and tightening budgets,continually worsening pay levels . . . ever increasing bureaucratic demands and con-tinued attacks on the profession by the government, which together produced lowmorale, below target recruitment to training, and the beginnings of staffing shortages.

Stress generates emotions such as anxiety, guilt and shame, thus stress and emo-tion are intimately connected. The relevance of emotion to teaching, accordingto Day and Leitch (2001), is controversial and often studied only in terms ofhow emotions are managed to ensure the organisation runs smoothly. Emotionsare important in teaching as they are in all professions in which performance(Goffman, 1959) plays such an important part. Hochschild (1983) differentiatesbetween ‘surface acting’, where a worker pretends emotions that they do not feel,and ‘deep acting’ where they actually alter what they feel. She calls this ‘emotionwork’, or the management of feelings to create bodily and facial displays requiredin a job. Teaching is a highly interactive job, and teachers have to invest their selfin their work, which leads to a sense that self-esteem becomes very bound up insuccess. Nias (1996, p. 108) concurs, writing that teaching calls for ‘a massiveinvestment in the self’.

Hence as well as stress, under the pressure to produce exam results, teachersmay experience emotional dissonance, a crisis of their sense of professional selfworth, and a sense of loss of control. It is this feeling of jumping through hoopsin order to meet targets that can lead to teachers’ sense of emotional dissonanceas they lose their sense of professional independence. As Mahony and Hextall

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(2000, p. 78) write: ‘increasingly there are sets of regulations and requirementsand expectations built around those teachers who are at the peak of their profes-sional expertise and yet who don’t have the autonomy to define how they work’.The Teacher Support Network (2008) specifically cites league tables as a sourceof stress, stating that 62 per cent of secondary school teachers who respondedto a survey said that performance league tables have a negative effect on theirwellbeing.

Under extra pressure from league tables, as described previously, it is per-haps unsurprising that our teachers reported loss of control, frustration at havingto work to others’ agenda and lack of creativity. Some of our sample expressedfrustration about the plethora of initiatives and intervention strategies they wereexpected to respond to that meant ‘there’s a sense that you can’t trust teachers totake control of the curriculum and say, “Right, well, we’ll assess in our own way”’(Paul, head of English, Wesley). Neil (deputy head of English, Wesley) agrees,saying ‘any sense of the teacher’s opinion, even though they’re the people thatactually deal with it every day, it’s completely ignored. Totally ignored. It’s allabout awareness of grades going up, awareness of parental pressure, awareness ofgovernment pressure’.

Loss of control is linked with lack of creativity and convergence or standardi-sation as Sonja (maths teacher, Atwood) complains that teaching to the test meansthat ‘it’s very much everyone who’s teaching the same set and the same yearteaches the same lessons’ and complains that teachers are told ‘Here’s the strategy;this is how you’re going to teach it’.

Neil (deputy head of English, Wesley) takes the themes of lack of control,absence of creativity and standardisation further:

It’s too rigid – you can spend ten minutes making sure everyone in the class hasgot the learning objective written down and you could have done something inter-esting rather than copy something off the board. How is copying something off theboard interesting or going to help them improve their English? It isn’t it turns thewhole process into a robotic administrative process and you spend more time doingthe robotic admin side of it and the formal aspects of meeting this criteria and lessengaging and communicating with the students . . . but you’re so swamped witheverything else that sometimes that’s the bottom of your list and it should be the topof your list of priorities. [The three-part lesson] is a suggestion has been turned intoalmost a fascistic kind of rod with which to beat people and they have to do it thisway. And I think it’s dreadful.

Paul (head of English Wesley) complains, ‘it feels like you’re more part of themachine now, in that way, than it being a holistic or any sort of natural linkto developing a writer’, and Roger (deputy head of maths, Campion) says sus-piciously ‘It’s part of the government’s plan, isn’t it, to make every teacher thesame?’ In the light of these complaints the findings of Carlyle and Woods (2002,p. 62) that ‘a sense of autonomy is essential to emotional well-being’ are a concern,particularly as they say that without this autonomy ‘teachers found that instead

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of demanding but pleasurable emotional labour, they endured burdensome andstressful emotional toil’ (2002, p. 25).

This toil can worsen to fear, especially when exams and therefore results aredrawing near. Neil (deputy head of English, Wesley) explains, ‘I don’t want tobe crude, but they’re literally balls in a vice kind of effect. If you haven’t doneanything about this policy then you’re going to fail. And if you fail then that’syour job and that’s it’, and Paul (head of English, Wesley) adds ‘there’s a fearabout being judged’. Nicola, head of English, Atwood says ‘to be honest, I’mslightly dreading the summer because this is my first results summer as head ofdepartment so I can’t tell you exactly how that will be’. Raiida (head of maths,Wesley) discussing the targets for her department says:

But to go from seventy-two to eighty-one, it’s a bit scary. Considering we were atthe sixties, like, you know, mid-sixties, consistently for three or four years, it’s, youknow, I mean that’s a pressure, isn’t it? Isn’t that pressure to try and hit eighty-one?I think that’s quite scary.

So, as discussed, the teachers in the English and maths departments are under agreat deal of pressure and this can be stressful and deprofessionalising. However,we have found some advantages to life in the pressure cooker.

6. POWER

As previously described, the pressure to generate A–C grades in GCSE examina-tions including maths and English means that English and maths departments canbe prioritised above other subjects, because the whole school cohort takes publicexaminations in the subjects, and because of the traditional primacy of literacy andnumeracy. There has always been rivalry between departments, and even resent-ment from other ‘less important’ curriculum areas in situations where English andmaths are or are perceived as getting more resources or (even) more curriculumtime. This has intensified in the situation where English and maths results affectthe whole school in such a high stakes way. Other subjects have to concede cur-riculum time as English and maths are prioritised, and this is no longer contended.Adrian (head of maths, Campion) reports ‘they might not like it but they’re notgoing to argue with it because they know the reality of the game now’. He refersdirectly to the ‘pecking order’ now in schools:

This is going to sound terrible but there’s a pecking order of subjects these days . . .I know that what I’m saying is as head of maths and that’s quite a key role in theschool now and that’s carrying weight . . . you can’t escape the fact that maths andEnglish have got certain responsibilities which they have to carry out and sometimesneed to be a bit more equal than the other subjects, I think. (Adrian, head of maths,Campion)

Others across all the schools discuss the elevated status of these departments, andof themselves as staff within the departments:

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. . . senior management, and the students know for themselves that maths andEnglish are now the subjects. Do you know what I mean? . . . that suddenly mathsand English are elevated to a completely different status. (Martin, head of maths,George Eliot)

I suppose with the changes that are taking place, English has become more and moreimportant and seen to be more important. So I think, in terms of profile within aschool, in terms of heads of department, I suppose head of English is seen as one ofthe key jobs alongside head of maths. For some reason, maths and English are nowseen as the premier subjects, if you like. (Paul, head of English, Wesley)

it’s always been, you know, it’s always been maths, English, science are the threecore subjects . . . they are taken more seriously in some ways, you know, with-out belittling any other subjects. But how has it changed now? I think it’s changednow because everybody knows that maths and English are crucial. (Adrian, head ofmaths, Campion)

In our case-study schools, as indicated at the beginning, most of the English andmaths departments are doing relatively well (in terms of making a ‘good’ con-tribution to the league table statistics). They are good cases in this respect, asthey demonstrate the strength of pressure in ‘ordinary’ schools and not those inextremis. The combination of being successful and important can actually makethe pressure bearable. Paul (head of English, Wesley) points out that ‘English andmaths are seen as a strength of the school’ and Adrian (head of maths, Campion)says there is no problem being a key subject as ‘we’re proving that we’re doingthings right, so people don’t . . . argue with us . . . because we’re doing well’.This is key. Whilst the core subjects are doing well in terms of the results, thedepartments can be left to make their own decisions, prioritise policies as they seefit, and run themselves internally. Should results fall, they can expect much greaterintervention from the senior leadership team. Again, this mirrors national policy inrelation to whole school performance. As it is, the relationship between the depart-ments and the senior leadership team is supportive. Some Heads of Departmentparticularly benefit from direct access to the Senior Leadership Team in a way thatnon-core subjects might not. Adrian (head of maths, Campion) says, ‘I will go toany member of Senior Leadership Team and ask them what’s going on there andperhaps other staff wouldn’t do that’. The core subjects are also more likely to bea key player in staff meetings and to influence whole school policy.

I suppose in that sense, in a wider sense in the school then, I suppose I’m one of thepeople who might lead things in staff meetings or be seen to have a responsibility toinfluence or explain whole-school policies in staff meetings. I suppose those are thekey things, really. (Paul, head of English, Wesley)

7. RESOURCES

Another advantage that these powerful core subjects have is the ability to demandresources. Paul (head of English, Wesley) directly states, ‘I see it as a bargainingtool, actually, to sort of say, well, English is now very important and you better,

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sort of, pay up if you want the results to happen’. Nicola (head of English, Atwood)explains that ‘the intervention budget’ pays for much of the extra resources andshe adds that ‘very rarely when English asks for any support money, we never getturned down because English does – English and maths do have, you know, prior-ity’. Daisy (NQT maths, Campion) agrees: ‘It’s like those two subjects are alwaysgoing to get . . . . But then you do get more support, I suppose, you probably, kindof, get more of a budget to photocopy things. You know, I’m sure we get, like,other benefits, so it balances out’.

The ability to attract resources perhaps explains why most of our maths andEnglish departments are perceived as being strong. In most cases, our respon-dents commented on stable staffing, strong experienced teachers, and enthusiasticand resourceful NQTs. The Heads of Department seemed to be able to rely oncooperation and good will rather than coercion.

I’ve got a very good team now, it’s such an excellent team . . . the . . . departmentin the school is strong . . . I think there’s a big thing here about the students havingconfidence in their teachers, they know we work as a team, they know that we’re agood team. (Adrian, head of maths, Campion)

And because we’ve got quite a strong- I think we’ve got quite a strong department,I think we’re all really good, like, friends and we all get on really well. (Daisy, NQTmaths, Campion)

We’re quite lucky and we’ve got good schemes of work and good, reasonablycompetent teachers. (Neil, deputy head of English, Wesley)

I’m quite happy in a really strong maths department. . . . Doing really well, leadingthe way on new initiatives and quite enjoying doing that. It’s quite – there’s a goodatmosphere. . . . Yeah, we have a laugh. (Roger, deputy head of maths, Campion)

This indicates the other side of stress – as Ball (2003) suggests, performativesystems offer to some the opportunity and satisfaction of being excellent. Thisperhaps alleviates some of the pressure, or at least compensates for it, or turns itinto something else.

Importantly the reputation of the departments enhances their strong positions.Paul (head of English, Wesley) says ‘the English department is perceived as a gooddepartment in the school’ and Roger (deputy head of maths, Campion) says thatthis perception releases the pressure: ‘I don’t feel pressure personally because Ifeel confident in the job that I do and I think most of us feel the same way in themaths department’. This means that in some ways the departments can go theirown way with respect to policy, picking and choosing the extent to which they getinvolved, and leading on some initiatives, an earned autonomy, provided that theyremain successful.

8. POLICY EVASION

This section is called policy evasion rather than policy resistance, because noneof our departments could actually resist the policies around attainment. Once dis-aggregation of maths and English has been normalised it is not about resisting as

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much as resistance within accommodation, or evasion. However, the strength ofsome of the departments means that they can position themselves as leading notfollowing policy, and making their own judgments about whether aspects of poli-cies are worth implementing or not. On the issue of policy resistance, Foucaultwrites, ‘my problem has always been . . . the problem of the relationship betweensubject and truth. How does the subject enter into a certain game of truth?’ (citedin Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1988, p. 9). Foucault argues that power relationshipsonly exist when there is the possibility of resistance, and that no authority canmake resistance impossible:

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By thiswe mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilitiesin which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behaviourare available. (Foucault, 1994, p. 342)

In schools, resistance to a technology such as performativity is not easy, as it is sorooted within the discourse of what is important, and those in power will often bethe defenders of the discourse. Bennett (2003, p. 53) explains that:

In organisational settings, the power which drives and shapes the cultural and struc-tural constraints on individual action is exercised by individuals – ‘cultural players’who possess particular forms of power resources which they have acquired byfirst accepting particular norms and then developing, articulating and sustaining aparticular interpretation of them.

Most of the departments spoke in robust terms about their involvement, or other-wise, in school policies. Nicola (head of English, Atwood) makes the point thatsometimes the English department actually leads policy: ‘I don’t really think I’vehad very much policy directed on me. I tend, if anything, to take it to them and say,“This is what’s going on in English”’. Adrian (head of maths, Campion), interest-ingly, has the attitude that the department will always show willingness ‘to givethings a go but if it can’t be done it can’t be done’. He explains this within thecontext of a strong, hard-working department that is in many ways leading on ini-tiatives. Thus; ‘if we miss things, and we do miss things, then I’m not too worriedabout that’.

Neil (deputy head of English, Wesley) feels that he has the power to rejectwhat he does not find educationally sound, such as ability grouping: ‘I know thegovernment policy is for setting classes but we don’t do that in English becausewe don’t believe in it’. There is very much a sense here of picking and choosing.Similarly Paul (head of English, Wesley) reports ‘we take on board what is reallygood practice, what we consider to be really good practice. And some of the thingsthat we find very rigid, dogmatic and downright boring, we reject . . . the emphasisis on education, not what somebody tells us we must do’. He is explicit in sayingthat this ability to resist is because of the success of the department (in terms ofGCSE results) saying that the headteacher ‘left me to it but if the results hadn’timproved then he probably would have come out and forced us to do these things’.

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Roger (deputy head of maths, Campion) was reluctant to include personal, learn-ing and thinking skills (PLTs) in maths, ‘it was an absolute disaster as far as I wasconcerned . . . there’s no way we’re going to sit there and just do thinking skillsand key processes and not teach them any maths’. Raiida (head of maths, Wesley),discussing new assessment procedures, explains:

But the way it’s been presented at the moment there’s huge, huge resistance becauseit’s, kind of, a lot of people who’ve been in teaching for a long time feel like it’s kindof going backwards to what we were doing when I first started teaching about fifteenyears ago, you know, the tick-box thing and, you know, you had to check off and . . . .So there’s a lot of resistance in my department so we’re kind of slowly pushing it.

Here Raiida implies that although there is what she calls resistance from the restof the department this is not intractable and change will be slowly introduced,perhaps in a way specific to her department ‘we try and, kind of, go alongside thatwith what we’re doing. But we don’t just stick to the whole-school thing, we kindof do our own departmental thing’. As she elaborates, it is difficult to insist onpolicy ‘when you don’t actually strongly believe in something, it’s quite hard topush it’. Leading the reluctant department is difficult when you are not the policydriver, but the unenthusiastic recipient.

Our English and maths departments speak back to policy and seek to evade atleast some bits of policy from a position of strength, or accommodate accordingto their needs as the following three extracts illustrate.

But we’ll also, if there are things that just we don’t think they work or don’t thinkit has to be that way, we’ll question it and think, well, we’ll do something in analternative way. (Paul, head of English, Wesley)

I’m not happy with it because for me, again, it always comes back to the classroom.And I believe that what should be happening is good quality teaching and learningin the classroom that obviates – I haven’t used that word for a long time – obviatesthe necessity to have intervention on the scale that we do. (Carla, head of English,Campion)

The head’s emphasis is always just on results, clearly, but he will be open to try-ing things that might improve things for our students, which is good. There’s notvery great an emphasis on doing things for the sake of it, so if I argue a case fordoing something differently that’s pretty much always taken on board, which is nice.(Nicola, head of English, Atwood).

9. CONCLUSION

This paper has arisen out of research into how schools respond to and enact policy– English and maths departments were not intended to be the main focus of ourresearch. However, one of the crucial points about policy in schools is the way itimpinges differently in different places and on different people, and changes therelations between actors and between individuals and their work. Policies workin and on schools in complex ways. Policies can present opportunities or entail

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constraints and demands. In this case our respondents discussed the pressure toget good results, not only for themselves and the students, but also for the wholeschool. This has stressful and untoward affective consequences for some of theteachers we interviewed who reported feeling frustrated at having to work to anexternally imposed agenda, and feeling uncreative and deprofessionalised.

Interestingly, however, this focus on English and maths was not all negative.Some heads of department relished the fact that with pressure to enact policiesof achievement comes power – as department heads (or curriculum leaders) of thecore subjects they have the ear of senior management, can make demands for extraresources and curriculum time at the expense of other subjects, and can adapt andreform policies that do not work for their subject. This issue of relative resistance,if that is not too strong a word, is interesting as it is only really possible withinthe context of relative success – the institutional equivalent of ‘earned autonomy’.All realise that should results start to fall, the pressure to enact policy would begreater and the benefits fewer. The situation is, at the time of writing, made moreintense by the election of a new government and the possibility that once again, asschools and departments learn to become successful the goal posts may be movedand the pressure ratcheted up once again – as with the introduction of the newEnglish Baccalaureate referred to in the introduction. It certainly seems unlikelythat Sonja’s wish will ever come true:

I do wish, and I know this is never going to happen, but I would love to see whatwould happen to a school where they just didn’t introduce any new policies for fiveyears and just to see what would happen at the end of it. Because I don’t suspectthat any of the teaching would actually change because I don’t think it actually hasan influence on what happens. Not . . . it does have an influence on what happens inthe classroom, certain things will change in the classroom, but I don’t think it willchange how people learn. (Sonja, maths teacher, Atwood)

10. NOTES1 General Certificate of Education, the public examination taken by students in their final

year of compulsory education, usually at age 16.2 Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic – a term attributed to Sir William Curtis from a speech

made at a Board of Education dinner in 1825.3 Tests in English, maths and science which pupils take in most state schools at age 7, 11

and 14.

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Ball, S. J. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity, Journal of EducationPolicy, 18 (2), 215–288.

Ball, S. J. (2008) The Education Debate (Bristol, Policy Press).

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CorrespondenceDr Jane PerrymanInstitute of EducationUniversity of LondonDepartment of Arts and Humanities20 Bedford WayLondon WC1H0ALEmail: [email protected]

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