To what extent can a Multi-Academy Trust support its senior leaders to use practices to improve their schools that contribute to social justice agendas?

Tyler, Angeline (2023) To what extent can a Multi-Academy Trust support its senior leaders to use practices to improve their schools that contribute to social justice agendas? Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

The aim of this research is to explore whether Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) can provide opportunities for their staff to develop collaborative and dialogical approaches to school improvement that reflect more socially-just relationships and in doing so, ‘prefigure’ (Fielding and Moss 2011: 147) more democratic practice as well as subvert and challenge the very narratives of privatisation that gave rise to the Academies Policy (2014) in the first place. The research uses critical realism (CR) as a methodological approach to enable the exploration of the conditions that give rise to educational practice (Bhaskar 1975) and asses to what extent these conditions enable or constrain these collaborative approaches. To this end it undertakes focus groups and semi-structured interviews to collect data on the attitudes, values and practices of a group of 19 of the Trust senior leaders and uses thematic analysis to examine and report on the extent to which the participants’ educational purpose addresses social justice agendas and translate into their school improvement practice. The original contribution of this research lies in a number of areas: it explores the processes and practice of a unique school improvement tool that the participating MAT has designed to build a dialogical improvement culture; it suggests preferred school improvement practices for social justice; it considers the potential of a Multi-Academy Trust as a site for such practice; and it relates democratic and dialogical practices directly to school improvement practices. This research takes a critical1 approach to education policy. It argues that neoliberal agendas, where the predominant purpose of school is to develop the skills that young people can later exchange for work in the job market (Sellar and Zipin 2018), have appropriated the approaches and practices to improving schools in England that have built up since the 1970s (Fielding 1997). This appropriation has included the subversion of approaches to forms of shared, distributed or collaborative leadership and team-work so that they are used as technologies to reinforce the instrumental purposes of neoliberalism (Misfud 2017). Its findings and conclusion demonstrate that, even in a neoliberal context where senior leaders are impacted by instrumental approaches, and taking into account the inconsistencies and tensions this creates, school improvement processes provide an opportunity for subversion when they are predicated on approaches that undermine and replace neoliberal social arrangements. 1 In the thesis, ‘critical approach’ refers to the range of theoretical approaches that are critical of policies or positions which deny that social inequality has its foundations in forms of unequal social arrangements.