Abstract
Introduction
Educative leaders, leading and leadership are not officially recognised or enabled for or within public educational services in England. The modernisation of education may add ‘educational’ to ‘leadership’ in spoken and written texts, but the change imperative is usually premised on ‘school’, ‘distributed’, ‘instructional’ and ‘transformational’ leaders, leading and leadership as organisational and performance technologies. Thinking and doing otherwise tends to be officially ignored or condemned as rebellious, with those involved being denounced as ‘the enemies of promise’ (Gove, 2013). While recognising these dangers, our commentary sets out to reveal the importance and authenticity of educative leaders, leading and leadership as a relational and activist pedagogy, in which we present a standpoint that is rooted in Economic and Social Research Council-funded primary research and is informed by social science theorising (Courtney, 2017; Gunter, 2012, 2018).
An in-common educative leadership?
Our research-informed standpoint is underpinned by a commitment to educational services that are owned, funded and accessed in common as a public good. What and who we might label as leaders, leading and leadership are a resource available for all, and this ‘all’ includes children, parents, communities, professionals, researchers, business owners, taxpayers and local and national policymakers who are located within and committed to in-common teaching and learning. We present important intellectual resources to support our standpoint:
Therefore, educational leadership is educative when it is ‘communal and shared’ and so: The issue is that leaders are embodied individuals, while leadership is a shared and communal concept. This means that while leaders occur in a certain time-space context, it is neither necessary nor sufficient that leadership be identified for all of time and space with these individuals. One of the generative aspects of leadership is that leaders exist only because of the relationship attained with followers, and that this relationship allows followers to assume leadership and leaders, in turn, to become followers. Leaders, in short, create other leaders, and it is in this fashion that leadership becomes a shared and communal process” (Foster, 1989: 57, original emphasis).
Foster (1989) identifies two aspects to thinking and doing ‘educative’ leadership: first, the importance of analysis, or how organisational systems and structures are examined in order ‘to reveal the “taken-for-granted” features of institutional life, and to allow for commentary on the ways and means that the institution either restrains or promotes human agency’ (p. 54); and second, the use of narratives to promote a vision or idea about possibilities, ‘to show new social arrangements, while still demonstrating continuity with the past; to show how new social structures continue, in a sense, the basic mission, goals and objectives of traditional human intercourse, while still maintaining a vision of the future and what it offers’ (p. 54). Such an approach is educative because it enables problem posing about why something is the way that it is and seeks to address those problems productively: ‘the educative aspect, in other words, attempts to raise followers’ consciousness about their own social conditions, and in so doing to allow them, as well as the “leader”, to consider the possibility of other ways of ordering their social history’ (p. 54). This is a different approach to what currently dominates as ‘transformational leadership’ in educational services: in Bourdieuian (2000) terms, a fixation on numbers generates misrecognition of the context in which those numbers are created and legitimised; and visioning by seduction legitimises the symbolic violence of subjugation to a narrative disconnected from the realities of those required to comply.
Intellectual resources for in-common educative leadership
Another narrative is possible. The field has the resources to rethink professional identity and practices as a form of in-common educative leadership:
Teaching and learning: children’s contribution to pedagogy, the curriculum and assessment design (e.g. Lingard et al., 2003);
Professional networks: pedagogic partnerships between professionals (e.g. Wrigley et al., 2012);
Organisational arrangements: restructuring that enables active participation in decision-making (e.g. Apple and Beane, 1999);
Cultural values: the ways of thinking that recognise and work for social justice opportunities (e.g. Anderson, 2009); and
Biographical narratives: accounts by activist professionals that locates a school within a wider community (e.g. Winkley, 2002).
Such resources are presented as illustrative of a range of ideas and evidence in a plural field (Gunter, 2016), which we exemplify by considering the relationship between in-common educative leadership and notions of distribution. Mapping the range of resources regarding ‘distributed leadership’ has been undertaken (see Gunter et al., 2013), and here we take up the challenge of rethinking educative forms of ‘distribution’ by using two resources: first, self-governance and anarchy and second, politics and micro-politics:
Self-governance and anarchy: the idea that a human being as singular and plural can govern the self and selves without the formality of organisational mandates. While there are different versions of what this means and how to achieve it, it is the case that ‘what links them all is the rejection of external authority, whether that of the state, the employer, or the hierarchies of administration and of established institutions like the school and the church’ (Ward, 2012: 3). When this idea appears in the field it tends to be equated with disorder (e.g. Hargreaves and Fink, 2006), but the potential for thinking differently has been recognised by Western (2008) who argues that anarchism is a productive outcome of exchange relationships through ‘spontaneous…leaderless action’ (p. 46). He goes on to present research evidence and claims that instead of thinking hierarchically regarding the organisation as ‘leaderless’ we need to consider relational action as ‘leaderful’ (p. 47). This speaks to Gronn’s (2000) work on the realities and regularities, habits and instinctive practices of distributed leadership, where not everything that goes on in a school is causally linked to a head teacher, and with the potential to link to the activism recognised by Hatcher (2005) in regard to doing things differently in educational services.
Politics and micro-politics: the idea that exchange relationships within organisations is not only formal through line-management accountability but is also informal through how people both come to terms with external policy demands and relate to each other with shared histories, intimacies and animosities. This is what Hoyle (1999) identifies as ‘policy micropolitics’ and ‘management micropolitics’ and requires recognition of ‘the dark side of organisational life’ (p. 43) where there can be disruption and potentially unethical conduct. It seems that effective and efficient models of school leadership (as transformational, instructional, functionally distributed) may be glossed over with entrepreneurial dynamics that actually require compliance. However, as Blase and Anderson (1995) argue, such approaches constitute a ‘fool’s errand’ because organisations are replete with struggles over position and recognition, but there is more than this to take into account. If we shine a light on the ‘dark side’ we may see the energy, ideas and potential that are in effect necessary for the type of productive leaderful action that Western (2008) alerts us to. Following Fielding (1996), there is a need to appreciate how empowerment has been reworked as a process that renders the teacher enthusiastically compliant with the market, and how we may need a new language if we are to give recognition to relational exchanges. Freedom is not a possession through power capture, but is, in Arendtian (2005) terms, based on plurality and ‘exists only in the unique intermediary space of politics’ (p. 95). This speaks to debates taking place using a range of conceptual tools to think about the educative potential of exchange relationships through focusing on ‘productive leadership’ for learning (Lingard et al., 2003) and on the interplay of power with the relational turn in the field (Blase and Anderson, 1995)
What these resources illustrate is a serious intellectual problem. Leadership in all of the educative potentiality outlined here are automatically considered to be dangerous and so tend to be handled through non-educational thinking and doing. An agenda for educational practices needs developing.
What is to be done?
We know that there are serious barriers to be overcome, some are visible, others are not. There are barrier-defending strategies that are pertinent to denouncing educative positions: Public investment into in-common education has been too successful but is being dismantled because of what Chitty (2007) identifies as the fear and ‘threat of mass education’. Ranson (1984) reports a civil servant saying that the government feared unrest and so ‘there has to be selection because we are beginning to create aspirations which increasingly society cannot match’ and so ‘people must be educated once more to know their place’ (p. 241). The supply of school places in England is privatised with between 70 and 90 different types of schools (Courtney, 2015), and the demand for such places is framed around social mobility and economic productivity that is underpinned by eugenics ideology that enables segregation to be legitimised (Gunter, 2018). Educational professionalism is being redesigned as functional delivery at a time of brutal employment conditions (see Courtney and Gunter, 2015). A globalised consultancy industry is shifting the location and methodologies of knowledge production, and the legitimacy of who the authoritative experts are (Gunter and Mills, 2017).
Such complex obstacles have been exposed as integral to reform hoaxes (Ravitch, 2014) and we have to confront them because as Apple (2006) argues, those who promote them speak and act in ways that make sense and are acceptable to the public. For example, parents have been told repeatedly that they would be failing in their duties if they did not strive to secure a ‘good school place’ for ‘their’ child, and yet a public education system requires parents to care and take action about and for all children and their access to ‘all school places as good’.
In addressing this situation, we can in Bourdieuian (2003) terms ‘fire back’: Investment in the in-common school has worked in England (see Benn and Chitty, 1997), and elsewhere (see Lubienski and Lubienski, 2014; Sahlberg, 2015). Teachers, head teachers, parents and children are speaking up and taking action about the damage being due to un-common schools (Gunter, 2018). The claims about anarchic impracticality have been challenged by shifting the focus away from the normality of a hierarchical division of labour towards asking: ‘what sort of leadership’ do we require, and how do we ‘create and support leadership that is not oppressive’ (Western, 2008: 48).
Such thinking generates potential contributions to the idea and reality of the provision of school places where there are a range of approaches internationally, and here we note the differences between the privatised system in Chile compared with Finland (see Seppänen et al., 2015). In England, there are debates about how to secure more coherence in a privatising system with proposals for a National Education Service (e.g. Benn, 2018; West and Wolfe, 2018). Such policy proposals create additional questions about how researchers who focus on educative leaders, leading and leadership might make a contribution. Current resources that could be used to support thinking are (a) ‘system leadership’ (Hopkins, 2007) and (b) ‘self-improving school-led system’ (Greany and Higham, 2018). Both have traction in current policy discourses regarding bottom-up partnerships and solution provision, but both do not examine the implications of segregated school places. Much of what is labelled as educational leaders, leading and leadership is designed to do non-educational work, not least by categorising and calculating in order to discount and dispose of children and families. The forms of leadership required to exclude children because they do not fit the school brand, to close down a school because of how the market is working, or to academise (see Rayner et al., 2018) are not educational leadership that is actually educative. We have noted elsewhere (Courtney and Gunter, 2019) the corporatised fabrications or lies that are told to and by school ‘leaders’ to maintain the illusion that it is. Field intellectual resources are available – it is time to take Smyth (1989) off the shelves to read and think differently. Field resources are plural – it is time to undertake novel conceptual and empirical projects that are relational through including all, activist by working for social justice, and educational because we all learn from each other through our practice.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
