Since the 1980s state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of 'good governance' (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise and 1
is Reader in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. He writes about education policy and governance and governing relations with a focus on privatisation management, meta-governance, attraction and soft governing, risk responsibility, expert administration, regulated participation, and democratic cultures. His recent books include Modernising School Governance (Routledge 2016) and Education Governance and Social Theory (Bloomsbury 2018).
is Reader in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. He writes about education policy and governance and governing relations with a focus on privatisation management, meta-governance, attraction and soft governing, risk responsibility, expert administration, regulated participation, and democratic cultures. His recent books include Modernising School Governance (Routledge 2016) and Education Governance and Social Theory (Bloomsbury 2018).
For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy. Yet the 'hollowing out' of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs)-private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools-to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management. On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.
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