Blog post Part of special issue: Covid-19, education and educational research

Bubble, toil and trouble: School leadership as Shakespearean tragedy in and after Covid-19

Paul Armstrong, Reader at University of Manchester Steven J. Courtney, Professor of Sociology of Education Leadership at University of Manchester Alexander Gardner-McTaggart, Senior Lecturer at University of Manchester Helen Gunter, Professor Emerita at University of Manchester Belinda (Bee) Hughes, Lecturer at University of Manchester 16 Mar 2021

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches exacerbate divisions, push ambition through brute force, hierarchy and power; their interventions end in the wicked destruction of leadership potential and human lives. In this blog we draw on a famous line from the ‘Scottish play’ – ‘Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble’ – as a metaphor to problematise the dominant discourse surrounding school leadership and think through the pressures facing headteachers and the trouble brewing for the school system as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The current market for school leadership products is a crowded space overflowing with resources offering simple, accessible and decontextualised solutions to the challenges of headship. Much of this is sold on the basis of increasing efficacy and improving tangible outcomes, intensifying the dependency on numerical data (see Ozga, 2009) and of prioritising what is measurable. In normal times, this is open to legitimate question. In the current circumstances, the means by which we hold school leaders to account have been rendered obsolete as, for example, last summer’s exams fiasco and the current planned disruption to examinations in England in summer 2021 demonstrate (see Gibbons, 2021). Covid-19 has changed schooling and school leadership hugely, with some headteachers reporting that their role is currently more about logistics and organisational management than education.^[1]

Bubble

Covid-19 has further intensified (see Gunter, 2011) identity changes from educational professionals to ‘bubble’ managers. The shift is away from pedagogy, curriculum and assessment towards the organisational conditions in which teaching and learning happen when all members of the school community and beyond are rendered vulnerable to illness and death. The UK government has provided guidance for schools about how to sustain ‘bubbles’ to prevent Covid-19 transmission, and vignettes by professionals outlining how they have done it effectively. However, the rationality of risk assessment and the use of functional command-and-control technologies is not new. Public services in England have been rendered insecure certainly from 1988 when schools were turned into businesses (see Gunter, 2018). Bubbles are a new form of segregation between and within schools. The profession is used to the menacing threat of endemic failure in managing the separation of children, but Covid-19 generates extreme complexities regarding the impact of austerity and accumulated exhaustion (EAGLE, 2020). We knew before Covid-19 that school leadership is constituted of myths, as highlighted in this BERA Blog post. Covid-19 has once more made the case for educative leadership (see Gunter & Courtney, 2020).

‘What is actually required are effective management skills to enable headteachers to respond immediately to complex government regulatory demands, and inspirational leadership skills to maintain morale.’

Toil

For headteachers and their staff, Covid-19’s challenges are unprecedented, with widespread reports of unsustainable workload, increased stress and decreasing morale as raised in this Schools North East Blog post, with headteachers reaching breaking point (Lightfoot, 2020). Headteachers are working on the frontline, toiling to ensure within-school safety while responding to ever-changing components of regulation. Indeed, as schools reopened to all students on 8 March, those in the secondary sector now face the ‘mammoth task’ of regularly testing all pupils for Covid-19 again. What is actually required are effective management skills to enable headteachers to respond immediately to complex government regulatory demands, and inspirational leadership skills to maintain morale. Present toiling operates against funding shortfalls, increasing staff absence and parental pressure. Available ‘leadership’ products illuminate the superficiality and uselessness of the leadership models that continue to dominate the popular discourse, and they fail to address headteachers’ current travails (Harris & Jones, 2020). School life has fractured, inequalities have grown, and children have missed out (Pensiero, Kelly, & Bokhove, 2020), while headteachers’ work is diminished, reduced to logistics and incessant labouring against the backdrop of pandemic fatigue.

Trouble

Trouble is brewing for a field of educational leadership. As we emerge from Covid-19 into a new epoch of climate catastrophe, racial injustice and divisive national inequality, educational leaders must focus increasingly on addressing these troubling realities (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020), and less on meeting and recording arbitrary performance metrics. Dominant leadership discourse promotes the self-serving myth of top-down leadership. It deploys magical, unevidenced thinking to promote the belief that our nation’s publicly funded schools, colleges and nurseries are best run effectively and efficiently, according to private interests and corporatised dispositions. As witnessed by the rise of the so-called chumocracy in Britain, it is unclear how such isolated spheres of private thinking will tackle our nation’s troubles together, nor how policymakers’ interventions in education will benefit teachers and teacher leaders. These interventions often concern elitist, ‘golden-age’ features such as terminal exams or, earlier, grammar schools. Mostly, policymakers are more comfortable as flâneurs, looking detachedly onto a purposively depoliticised landscape for whose misshapen form they can claim plausible deniability. No policy destination exists beyond fictional nirvana: the journey is the political objective. Our children and the teaching profession deserve better; they require a collective, political strategy incorporating a reconceptualised and reinvigorated educational leadership to address the trouble that is brewing. The next normal, the post-pandemic school, will need to repudiate and discard outdated leadership practices and develop new, more appropriate and inspiring ones which are in sync with the everyday social realities of schools and education in general.

Footnote

[1] See for example this blog (posted 8 November 2020): https://smithsmm.wordpress.com/

References

Emergency Advisory Group for Learning and Education [EAGLE] (2020). Schools in England: A safe return in September? Retrieved from https://eagleresearchgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/How-can-schools-reopen-safely.pdf

Gardner-McTaggart, A. (2020). Educational leadership and global crises: Reimagining planetary futures through social practice. International Journal of Leadership in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2020.1811900

Gibbons, A. (2021, January 4). GCSE and A-level 2021 exams won’t happen ‘as normal’. Tes. Retrieved from https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-gcse-and-level-2021-exams-wont-happen-normal

Gunter, H. M. (2011). Leadership and the reform of education. Bristol: Policy Press.

Gunter, H. M. (2018). The politics of public education: Reform ideas and issues. Bristol: Policy Press.

Gunter, H. M., & Courtney, S. J. (2018). A new public educative leadership? Management in Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/0892020620942506

Harris, A., & Jones, M. (2020). COVID 19: School leadership in disruptive times. School Leadership & Management, 40(4), 243–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2020.1811479

Lightfoot, L. (2020, October 3). Near breaking point: Headteachers worn down by ‘non-stop Covid crisis’. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/oct/03/near-breaking-point-headteachers-worn-down-by-non-stop-covid-crisis

Ozga, J. (2009). Governing education through data in England: From regulation to self‐evaluation. Journal of Education Policy, 24(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930902733121

Pensiero, N., Kelly, A., & Bokhove, C. (2020). Learning inequalities during the Covid-19 pandemic: how families cope with home-schooling. University of Southampton. Retrieved from https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/442619/

Paul Armstrong, Dr

Reader at University of Manchester

Paul Armstrong is a senior lecturer in education in the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester. His research interests concern contemporary forms of educational leadership and management, and professional collaboration between educators. Paul has over 17 years’ experience in education research, leading on national and international projects and publishing across a number of areas, including educational improvement, networking, leadership, management and policy.

Steven J. Courtney, Professor

Professor of Sociology of Education Leadership at University of Manchester

Steven J. Courtney is Professor in the Sociology of Educational Leadership in the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE), University of Manchester. Steven co-leads the MIE research group, Critical Education Leadership and Policy. He uses critical sociological approaches to explore the interplay between agency and structure in education policy and leadership.

Alexander Gardner-McTaggart, Dr

Senior Lecturer at University of Manchester

Alexander Gardner-McTaggart is a senior lecturer in educational leadership at the Manchester Institute of Education as well as academic lead for transnational flexible learning for the University of Manchester. His scholarship, research and teaching seek to better understand and articulate globalising pressures on education and its leadership through the lens of equity, distinction and power. His research interests are in educational leadership, international education, and global citizenship education.

Helen Gunter, Professor

Professor Emerita at University of Manchester

Helen M. Gunter is Professor Emerita in the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and recipient of the BELMAS Distinguished Service Award 2016. Her research focuses on the political sociology of knowledge production in the field of education policy. Her most recent book is A Political Sociology of Education Policy (Policy Press, 2023), and her research has been the focus of a festschrift: Fitzgerald, T. and Courtney, S. J. (Eds.) (2023) Critical Education Policy and Leadership Studies: The Intellectual Contributions of Helen M. Gunter. Springer.

Belinda (Bee) Hughes, Dr

Lecturer at University of Manchester

Dr Belinda (Bee) Hughes is a lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, lecturing in contemporary issues of educational leadership. Her work focuses on policy studies, educational leadership (specifically leadership of multi-academy trusts) and the thinking of Hannah Arendt. Recent research projects include working with university colleagues on area-based school partnerships where findings were published by the Staff College in the Turning the Tide report (2023). Belinda was the recipient of the BELMAS doctoral thesis of the year award in 2020, and she has many years’ experience as a senior leader teaching in Hong Kong and the UK.