English GCSE Reform from Whitehall to the Classroom: Reform, Resistance, Reality
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English GCSE Reform from Whitehall to the Classroom: Reform, Resistance, Reality James Craske Submitted for the qualification of PhD in Education University of East Anglia, School of Education and Lifelong Learning February 2020 99,980 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived therefrom must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Abstract This thesis develops a “policy trajectory” (Ball 1993) study of the content, aims, and ambitions of the 2013 reforms to GCSE English, and their ongoing enactment by practitioners since 2015. The study utilises a cross-sectional design to capture different moments in a policy’s life seeking to understand and analyse how policymakers, politicians and teachers, in their different ways, construct ideas about “school English”, “teaching” and “the teacher”. Firstly, using concepts provided by the logics of critical explanation (Glynos and Howarth 2007), it examines how, through politicians’ speeches and policy documents, the state constructs relatively stable (though contingent) notions of “teaching” and “English”, arguing that the functions and purposes of [English] teaching are organised by the “master signifier” of professional autonomy. This pivotal concept ties together a seductive programme of new actors, ideas about autonomy, knowledge acquisition, and managerial practices all grounded within intellectual frameworks of neoliberalism and cultural conservatism. Secondly, through an in-depth case study of a single secondary school, the thesis demonstrates the complex ways that practitioners ‘enact’ policy, and how at ‘the front line’ this converges with or departs from elite policy goals. The thesis thus contributes to an emerging strand of education policy sociology that emphasises “enactment of policy” (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), and builds on it by going beyond semi-structured interview data to consider ethnographic accounts of policy work in English classrooms, staff room discussions and interactions. It develops empirical and theoretically- informed arguments about the processes of enactment and their connection to broader discourses concerning teacher professionalism, subjectivity, praxis, and the workings of power, showing that whilst the reforms and their embedded discourses prompted new ways of working with data practices and standardisation, many “softer” interventions on curriculum and pedagogy were largely ignored or subsumed by external contexts. 1 Contents English GCSE Reform from Whitehall to the Classroom: Reform, Resistance, Reality ......................................................................................... 1 Abstract ...................................................................................................................... 1 List of Figures and Tables ............................................................................... 5 List of Acronyms and Abbreviations ............................................................ 6 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... 7 Introduction Chapter ............................................................................................. 8 Research Questions ............................................................................................ 9 Policy Trajectories: From Whitehall to the classroom ..................................... 11 Reform, Resistance, Reality: the sociologist’s three ‘R’s. ..................................15 Why English? ..................................................................................................... 21 Structure of the Thesis ...................................................................................... 22 Chapter One ............................................................................................................ 27 Literature Review ...................................................................................................... 27 1.1 Issues in Education Policy Research .................................................................... 27 1.2 Continuities and Discontinuities in UK Schooling Policy ................................. 34 Governance Issues ............................................................................................. 34 Curriculum, Assessment and Pedagogy ........................................................... 38 1.3 The Contested Terrain of School English .......................................................... 42 A Brief History ................................................................................................... 42 The 1988 National Curriculum and its Subsequent Iterations ........................ 47 The Contested Canon: Politics and school English ......................................... 52 1.4 The 2013 Reforms: Neoliberalism and cultural conservatism ............................ 55 The Many Worlds of the 2013 English Reforms ............................................... 58 1.5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 64 Chapter Two ........................................................................................................... 67 Towards a Policy Trajectory for English Reform: .... Policy theory, methodology, methods .................................................... 67 2.1 Theorising Policy Enactment ............................................................................. 69 Other Important Theoretical Contributions .................................................... 74 Policy Interventions .......................................................................................... 79 2.2. Research Methodology, Study Design and Methods ........................................ 81 Problematising English Reform ........................................................................ 81 A Policy Trajectory: Reading policy from corpus to classroom ...................... 84 Case Study ........................................................................................................ 88 2 Into the Field: A school in its context .............................................................. 91 Access and Ethical Considerations ................................................................... 92 Data Collection and Analysis ........................................................................... 94 (Non)Participant Observations ....................................................................... 98 Interviews ........................................................................................................ 100 Documents ...................................................................................................... 102 Policy Artefacts/or the artefactual...................................................................103 2.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 104 Chapter Three ....................................................................................................... 106 Problematising the 2013 Reforms to GCSE English ............................................... 106 3.1 Research Strategy ............................................................................................... 107 Analytical tools and register(s) ....................................................................... 109 Intervention ...................................................................................................... 112 3.2 Reading the Reforms .......................................................................................... 115 An Educational Worldview .............................................................................. 117 A Programme for Professional Autonomy ...................................................... 119 The Logics of Knowledge-Dispersion .............................................................. 123 The Logics of Outcome-based Evaluation (for intelligent accountability) .. 128 The Logics of Responsibilisation ..................................................................... 132 3.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 138 Chapter Four .......................................................................................................... 141 Reform in its Institutional Context(s) .................................................................... 141 4.1 A Framework for Context-Based Policy Analysis ............................................. 143 Context and the Participant Methodology..................................................... 145 4.2 A School in its Place.......................................................................................... 147 4.3 Enacting English Reform .................................................................................. 154 Networks, Exam boards, Text selection ......................................................... 156 Cultural Literacy: Policy discourse, entrepreneurs, and the route to path- dependency ..................................................................................................... 165 4.4 Conclusion .......................................................................................................