The use of standards and regulation to justify harmful impacts has a history in education. In this blog post we highlight the recent controversy facing the school inspectorate in England and Wales that again raises questions about power and about regimes justifying the use of standards. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), has come under scrutiny following the death of headteacher, Ruth Perry, which was a story foretold. Through our experience as a school leader and researcher, we are concerned that the structural intersection of power (inspection) with membership of an occupation of concern (teaching), results in a myopic limitation of a teacher’s sense of identity (Reid, 2018a). Power and a discursive inspection process that highlights difference through categories, labels and dysphemism (and we include school inspection outcome categories here) is redolent of systemic unfairness and the foundation for unconscionable acts of reason.

We have previously raised concerns, both directly to inspectors and through research findings, about how they exercise their power, and have argued that the inspection process for many teachers is intimidating, lacks fairness due to a ‘perverse’ system of accountability (O’Neill, 2013), disrespects them by reducing the person to a narrow set of indicators and outcomes, and silences them (Reid, 2018a). Such inequity is unethical: by Ofsted’s own admission there has been no specific ethics training for inspectors in the past (Reid, 2018b).

While we are all familiar with the ‘grand drama’ of regulation and accountability through technical, measurable means that foreground performance data and pupil attainment, there has been less research interest in the ‘micro drama’ of teachers’ lived experience of inspection (Clarke, 2004, p. 139), especially of the reach of inspection into other aspects of teachers’ daily lives; what Grek & Lindgren (2015) posit as a tension between the mediation of a teacher’s work and their affective register. We argue this is a silencing of their consciousness, or awareness, of themselves as something other than teacher – a lack of concern or recognition of their wider identities and embodiment as a partner, parent, brother, sister, friend and so on – that affects what they do both inside and outside the school (Reid, 2018a). We believe the inspection process could and should recognise that a teacher’s consciousness of self involves their awareness of the objective reality of work and of their subjective ideal – their wider sense of themselves as a person – because these are entwinned and inseparable (Allman, 2007).

‘…there is a need for a new approach to inspection to avoid unconscionable acts of reason.’

Currently, inspection judgments are based on observations of teachers in their daily work, on records of interviews and reviews of documentation. There are moves towards consideration of an individual’s words, spoken and written, and presentation  within an inspection process, with permission to pause if necessary. Nonetheless, such an approach to the inspection and accountability contract between those who hold and exercise the power and who assume a moral responsibility for developing the rules and contracts with which others must comply, continue to encourage a particular approach to trust aligned to the concept of power (Baier, 1986).

Consequently, there is a need for a new approach to inspection to avoid unconscionable acts of reason. To borrow from Ball (1997), an inspection process that ignores its own orienting power and organising potential engages in a dangerous and debilitating conceit. Our experience and research highlight that current approaches to inspection are unhelpful. Indeed, ‘many things that are important for education cannot be counted, or added, or ranked because there is no genuine unit of account’ (O’Neill, 2013, p. 14). Inspection is relational and what is required are relational judgments of success. The focus should not be on performance indicators convenient to processes of accountability, but on what teachers actually do and their recognition of their wider relationships. Failure to do this leads to unconscionable acts of reason and the silencing of teachers.

References

Allman, P. (2007). On Marx: An introduction to the revolutionary intellect of Karl Marx. Sense Publishers.

Baier, A. (1986). Trust and antitrust. Ethics, 96(2), 231–260.

Ball, S. J. (1997). Policy sociology and critical social research: A personal review of recent education policy and policy research. British Educational Research Journal, 23(3), 257–274.

Clarke, J. (2004). Changing welfare, changing states. Sage.

Grek, S. & Lindgren, J. (Eds.). (2015). Governing by inspection. Routledge.

O’Neill, O. (2013). Intelligent accountability in education. Oxford Review of Education, 39(1), 4–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2013.764761

Reid, J. (2018a). Primary teachers, inspection and the silencing of the ethic of care. Emerald Insight. https://doi.org/10.1108/9781787568914

Reid, J. (2018b). Towards a (more) ethical school inspection process. University of Huddersfield. https://blogs.hud.ac.uk/hudcres/2018/november/ethical-school-inspection/