English GCSE Reform from Whitehall to the Classroom: Reform, Resistance, Reality
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.
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