Youth work,performativity and the new youth impact agenda: getting paid for numbers?

A growing policy emphasis on measurement and outcomes has led to cultures of performativity, which are transforming what educators do and how they feel about themselves in relation to their work. While most analysis of performativity in education has focused on schools, this article investigates parallel developments in youth work. Youth work is a practice of informal education, in which young people learn and develop through activities, conversation and association. Its evaluation and monitoring have changed over the past two decades, as funding has become tied to targets and measureable outcomes. This article focuses on the English context, where government and third sector organisations are promoting a ‘youth impact agenda’, encouraging organisations to predefine and measure their outcomes. Drawing on data from interviews and focus groups with youth workers, the article argues that the current emphasis on impact risks further marginalising youth work at a time when this practice is already suffering from extensive spending cuts. The article concludes that we need to re-think the purposes and processes of evaluation and accountability - in youth work and beyond – in ways that genuinely value the perspectives of young people and grassroots practitioners.     

School autonomy,accountability and collaboration: a critical review

English education has recently experienced radical policy reform in the areas of school autonomy and accountability. The key focus of this paper is on how schools might best navigate through these policy moves. It highlights how these moves have constructed schools, teachers and students in problematic ways but also how they are offering possibilities for improving the quality of schools and schooling. The focus here is on the promise and scope of school collaboration. The difficulties of creating socially responsive and responsible collaboratives in the current ‘heterarchical’ and market-oriented policy environment are acknowledged. Guided by quality democratic governance, they are, nonetheless, presented as crucial in supporting schools to productively deal with the demands of this environment.     

The performative shift: middle leadership ‘in the line of fire’

ABSTRACT

State school inspection in Norway is currently changing with targeted schools becoming subject to more complex methods of inquiry. Not only school principals but middle leaders are exposed to this shifting system, for the latter are in the frontline of their schools’ everyday practices. The article examines how state school inspection is used as means of controlling legal compliance, as well as evaluating the formative assessment routines and practices of schools, middle leaders, and individual teachers. Drawing on the concepts of accountability and performativity, field observations of inspectors interrogating department heads in primary education are analysed. The empirical study demonstrates how use of standardised rubrics steer the inspection process in schools, aiming more towards completing on task, rather than supporting middle leaders in their struggle to comply with legal standards. During such interrogation, the department heads comply with the system, and are at the same time open towards the inspectors’ questioning concerning the school’s lack of fully implemented routines.     

Mediated diffusion: Translating professional practice across schools in a high-stakes system

Educational systems across the globe are attempting to reshape the vertical and horizontal dimensions of school accountability. The vertical dimension involves devolution of responsibility to individual schools while the horizontal typically entails promoting the professionalism of leaders and teachers through school networks and school-to-school pairings. In many systems, these shifts occur within an environment of high-stakes accountability. Little is known about the ways that high-stakes consequences for individual schools shape the translation of professional practice across schools. The study reported here traces the diffusion of data-informed practices in a formal pairing of two primary schools in England—a school ranked as “outstanding” and a school in “special measures,” a persistently low-achieving school. Study findings trace the ways in which the threat of consequences under which the low-achieving school operates shapes the diffusion of professional practice across schools. The study details how the lead school brokered, or mediated, state requirements, co-constructing the supported school’s narrative of improvement. Findings from this study illuminate the ways that vertical relationships within the system of schooling influence horizontal relationships across schools. Clarifying the shaping of professional practice across schools is increasingly critical as patterns of provision of schooling proliferate and the links among the state and schools become increasingly complex.     

Creativity and performativity: Counterpoints in British and Australian education

This article explores the complex interplay of power between performativity and creativity agendas—a mutual tension that resides in British and Australian education. Accountability constraints and conflicting policy debates are problematised against the wider imperatives of similar government agendas. This ‘counterpoint’ of freedom and control has significant implications for pedagogy and, through accommodating performativity, teacher agency and professionalism are under threat. The authors propose a ‘rebalancing’ where pedagogy transforms from a site of struggle for control, to one where a higher trust is placed in teacher professionalism. The idea of ‘rebalancing pedagogy’ offers a way for teachers to navigate and be supported through the opposing demands of performativity and creativity. It acknowledges the importance of teacher agency and where teaching is judged against the characteristics of a systemic approach that facilitates the building of creative learning communities capable of supporting any curricula or content‐focused programmes in and beyond schools.     

Speaking ‘over’ performativity

In a time where standards and accountability override trust in teachers and principals, mandated versions of pedagogy have recently appeared in the Australian landscape. This article critiques one pedagogical reform initiative and suggests that in performative times, it may be preferable for principals and teachers to speak ‘over’ reform than to speak ‘back’ to it. While reference to competency standards increasingly replaces discussion about professionalism, the argument is developed here that key elements of professionalism include trust, agency, identity and judgement, which are excluded from the standards discourse. The article proposes that the tenuous hold teachers have on professionalism might be strengthened by critical school leaders adept at navigating their way around performative demands and who encourage teachers to speak ‘over’ codes about appropriate behaviour to instead explore what it means to be a teacher professional.     

Professionalism and competing responsibilities: moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform

Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other school systems. Entrepreneurial policies focused on competition, compliance and improved performance make schools, their leaders and teachers, more responsible to external accountabilities. At the same time, autonomy is creatively exercised by leaders due to public service orientations associated with traditional teacher professionalism. This analysis of two Australian case studies of IPS, a secondary school in Queensland and a primary school in Western Australia, illustrates how school leaders navigate conflicting demands of the audit and performance culture by exercising autonomy according to differing notions of professional responsibility, disrupting and moderating the more inequitable priorities and effects prevalent in many performative systems.     

‘There is Still a Long Way to Go to be Solidly Marvellous’: Professional Identities,Performativity and Responsibilisation Arising From the Send Code of Practice 2015

Special educational needs and disability (SEND) professionalism can be seen as a microcosm of the wider policy arena where traditional policy frameworks of professionalism and bureaucracy are challenged by frameworks of managerialism, consumerism and individual rights and where the neoliberal policy technologies of performativity and responsibilisation challenge and change collaborative working practices and professional identities. The recent introduction of the statutory SEND Code of Practice 2015 in England brings this transformation into relief. An exploratory qualitative interview study highlights how individual professionals respond to, are changed by and sometimes resist these demands.     

Standards-based accountability: reification,responsibility and the ethical subject

Over the last two decades, teachers in Australia have witnessed multiple incarnations of the idea of ‘educational accountability’ and its enactment. Research into this phenomenon of educational policy and practice has revealed various layers of the concept, particularly its professional, bureaucratic, political and cultural dimensions that are central to the restructuring of educational governance and the reorganization of teachers’ work. Today, accountability constitutes a core concept of neoliberal policy-making in education, both fashioning and normalizing what counts as teacher professionalism in the ‘audit society.’ This article focuses specifically on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia, and raises questions about the impact of this reform on the work practices of English literacy teachers in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. The article traces the ways in which teachers’ work is increasingly being mediated by standardised literacy testing to show how these teachers grapple with the tensions between state-wide mandates and a sense of their professional responsibility for their students.     

Measuring ‘progress’: performativity as both driver and constraint in school innovation

Abstract

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.     

Perform or else: the performative enhancement of teacher professionalism

The Singapore Ministry of Education's Enhanced Performance Management System (EPMS) was instituted in 2005 as a system of professional accountability to enhance the standards and stakes of teacher professionalism in schools. This essay explores how the EPMS, with its underlying paradigm of performance management, functions as a “technology of discipline” within the political economy of teacher professionalization in Singapore. The analysis centres on the discursive mechanisms of a standardized appraisal instrument known as the Work Review Form. Applying speech act theory via the insights of J.L. Austin and J. Butler, I argue that teachers' professional qualities are not only described and prescribed but also produced by the appraisal protocols of the EPMS – a process contingent on the discursive performativity of the Work Review Form. Implicated in this notion of performativity are the rhetorical manoeuvres by which teachers perform “on paper” under the pressure to perform. Such performance pressures point to a range of ethical ambiguities surrounding the “enhanced management” of teachers' work under the profit-motive of performance excellence.     

The pedagogy of saneness: a schizoaffective storying of resisting sane pedagogy

This article is an autoethnographic account of a ‘schizoaffective’ sufferer learning about and navigating the environs of saneness as a graduate student resisting traditional sane pedagogic structures. Culling from theories found in adult education, Whiteness Studies, and Mad Studies to show that saneness can be conceptualized as a site of critical pedagogy, the author narrates numerous ways in which saneness is embedded in schools and society. In addition, he describes how sane performativity is taught and made educational by inducting a new notion into educational studies: the pedagogy of saneness.     

The Search for Reform: An Interview with Seymour B. Sarason

Leadership demands in American public schools have changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Whether–or how–the practice of leadership will change to meet those demands is an open question. The change in demands is largely a consequence of the introduction of performance-based accountability—policies that evaluate, reward, and sanction schools on the basis of measured student performance. While the merits of these policies are debatable, the fact that they have changed—probably fundamentally—the demands placed on school leaders is not.     

Accountable for what and to whom? Changing representations and new legitimation discourses among teachers under increased external control

This article discusses how teachers construct new representations about accountability and professionalism in the context of increased external control. Over the last decade in particular, concerns about the quality of schooling and the quality of teachers has been raised by both politicians and the public alike, while prominent policy responses have seen an increased emphasis on student performance and the external control of professional work. Based on a 1 year long fieldwork in a Norwegian municipality, the findings imply how forms of external accountability are accepted by many teachers as a necessary and desirable development, but also one that is resisted as the policies are seen to downplay the broader aims of education. In this tension of external and internal accountability, however, alternative discourses have developed. In particular, an emphasis on scientific knowledge and research-informed practice becomes an important representation for enhancing professional legitimacy and trust. By opening up the concept of accountability, it is possible to investigate how teachers’ representations of being accountable may take new forms when teacher professionalism is reconstructed in policy.     

美国医学教育中的职业化问题:从证据到责任

职业化是维护公众对医学职业信任的核心要素,也是医患关系的本质所在.但有证据表明,公众对医学职业的信任日渐消失,医生也在维护医学职业价值观念时面临着各种挑战.本文在医学教育背景下界定"职业化"的定义和框架,描述了职业化面临的各种挑战,也详细论述了医学院校和教学医院在维护医学职业化过程中的角色和作用.此外,还评述了现行和试行中的评价职业化的工具、方法.最后,作者还提出一些建议供医学院校和教学医院参考.     

A special teacher for a special child? (Re)considering the role of the special education teacher within the context of an inclusive education reform agenda

Notwithstanding the recent signing and ratification by Cyprus of another International Convention on the rights of students designated as having special educational needs and/or disabilities to attend mainstream schools on an equal basis with their peers, local policy and practice promote an ‘exclusionary inclusion’ that draws a discernible line between general and special education. This paper concentrates on exploring the role of special education teachers in Cyprus in the light of policy concerns about providing the ‘least restrictive’ learning environment for this group of students and enabling them ‘to reach their full potential’. It is suggested that the role of special education teachers embodies and reflects reductionist forms of inclusion informed by deficit-oriented and assimilationist special education perspectives, while there is also evidence of a lack of professionalism and accountability. The paper draws on head teachers’ and special education teachers’ interviews in order to portray the ways in which they view and experience the role of special education teachers in mainstream schools in Cyprus. New objectives and future directions are identified and discussed.     

Professionalism and performativity: the feminist challenge facing early years practitioners

In this discussion paper, I seek to understand the complex interaction between notions of ‘professionalism’ and gendered identity constructions against the backdrop of increased state regulation and demands for performativity in the early years. I seek to explore the ways in which ‘teacher professionalism’ is constructed by government and how this transcends into a ‘discourse of derision’, which then becomes a subtle, yet powerful, means of controlling this occupational group. I conclude by presenting an alternative feminist conceptual framework for assessing the gendered nature of identity formation, and as an opportunity to consider the role agency can play when seeking to resist/renegotiate the rapid and powerful policy reform agenda in the early years.