Below decks on the youth justice flagship: the politics of evaluation

Squires, Peter; Measor, Lynda

doi:10.1332/policypress/9781861346063.003.0002

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…But others argue that the incursion of private sector marketised models into public sector evaluation systems has left evaluation systems lacking in terms of their core function-to improve service delivery (Squires & Measor, 2005;Talyor & Balloch, 2005) Earlier work carried out by Deem, Brehony and Heath (Deem, Brehony, & Heath, 1995), along with more recent work carried out by Wilkins (2014), looks in depth at governor accountabilities and outlines a shift in focus for governors -arguing that new government and media discourses around school governing, alongside the professionalization of governing bodies are streamlining the number of accountabilities, in some cases eradicating the need for democratic accountability that featured in governance structures from the late sixties until the mid-seventies (See Thody, 1994 andSallis, 1998 In order to find out whether there is indeed a reduction in governor accountabilities, this paper uses Flinders seven objectives of public service accountability requirements to investigate the extent to which, differing emphases on accountability requirements appearing within Ofsted reports and head teacher interviews and discourses around governance reflect current regulatory requirements. The paper also looks at whether the changes to governors' work and accountabilities in this new school education landscape appear to be producing the kinds of negative behaviours outlined earlier.…”

Section: Reduces Flexibility Focus and Stability Discouraging Innovmentioning

confidence: 99%

School governor regulation in England’s changing education landscape

Baxter¹

2016

Educational Management Administration & Leadership

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The changing education landscape in England combined with a more rigorous form of governor regulation in the form of the Ofsted 2012 Inspection Framework are placing more demands than ever before on the 300000 volunteer school governors in England. School governors who, in many cases, are directly accountable to the Secretary of State for Education. Using a form of Goffman's frame analysis and drawing on theory that indicates that head teachers and inspection reports are highly influential to the ways in which governors make sense of their environment and accountability, this paper traces the development of a system which is highly specific to England, in order to evaluate to what extent present governor regulatory accountabilities can be seen as conflicting or in harmony with head teacher and inspector understandings of the role. The paper concludes that there is considerable evidence that the current regulatory framework combined with conflicting and often contradictory head teacher and inspector understandings of governance is giving rise to what Koppell terms 'Multiple Accountabilities Disorder' and that this is creating tensions in the system of education governance and regulation in England.

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Section: Reduces Flexibility Focus and Stability Discouraging Innovmentioning

confidence: 99%

School governor regulation in England’s changing education landscape

Baxter¹

2016

Educational Management Administration & Leadership

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“…They also emphasize that interested parties can attempt to influence evaluations (Bovens et al 2006, p. 324). A case in point is the study by Squires and Measor (2005) who demonstrate that, in the UK, an evaluation of the Youth Justice Strategy by local evaluators was severely limited by a national template which only allowed evaluators to assess performance against targets, as opposed to asking whether the interventions actually worked or not. In essence, measures of success were nationally driven by the Home Office and the Youth Justice Board, seeking evidence that a flagship programme was delivering a reduction in youth crime.…”

Section: Complexity Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Framework for Establishing Policy Success

Marsh

McConnell

2010

Public Administration

232

207

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Claims that a particular policy has been a 'success' are commonplace in political life. However, a few of these claims are justified in any systematic way. This article seeks to remedy this omission by offering a heuristic which practitioners and academics can utilize to approach the question of whether a policy is, or was, successful. It builds initially on two sets of literature: Boyne's work on public sector improvement; and the work of Bovens et al. on success, failure and policy evaluation. We discuss the epistemological issues involved in whether it is possible to produce an objective measure of 'success'. Subsequently, we present a framework for assessing success, focusing on three dimensions: process success; programmatic success; and political success. We then move on to raise a series of what we term complexity issues in relation to success for whom; variations across time, space and culture; and methodological issues.

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“…First, the Blair government's declared commitment to ‘evidence‐based’ reform and practice, however hollow it proved to be in practice whenever evidence ran up against political convenience or bureaucratic interest (see, for example, Squires and Measor 2005), helped to boost PA research capacity in at least three ways. One was the effect of the large number of commissioned research studies by government departments on PA topics in the decade, which perhaps unintentionally provoked a new generation of mostly sceptical work on the politics of evaluation of public services (see, for example, Taylor and Balloch 2005).…”

Section: British Public Administration In the 2000s: A Bleak Decade Amentioning

confidence: 99%

IT'S PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, ROD, BUT MAYBE NOT AS WE KNOW IT: BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE 2000s

Hood¹

2011

Public Administration

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This paper assesses what happened to academic public administration (PA) in Britain in the 2000s in the light of Rod Rhodes' gloomy prognostications about the future of the subject in the late 1990s. It argues that British PA had such a good decade in the 2000s, in funding, output, academic‐practitioner interaction and institutional developments, that it could almost be said to have ‘never had it so good’, even if ‘British PA’ was probably less internationally distinctive in the 2000s than a century before. But even if the subject flourished against the odds in the 2000s, Rhodes' sombre assessment of its future cannot be dismissed. British public administration faces several potential threats in the 2010s and beyond: in funding, research, and teaching capacity. But extinction still seems an unlikely fate for British PA even when a sombre view is taken of the funding outlook and the changing balance of supply and demand.

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Below decks on the youth justice flagship: the politics of evaluation

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

School governor regulation in England’s changing education landscape

School governor regulation in England’s changing education landscape

Towards a Framework for Establishing Policy Success

IT'S PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, ROD, BUT MAYBE NOT AS WE KNOW IT: BRITISH PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE 2000s

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