The amount of ink that has been spilled over the duty of schools to promote “fundamental British values” from the time they were introduced in the 2014 Ofsted inspection handbook to their burial beneath layers of attendant values in the 2021 handbook’s focus on “Personal Development” gives pause for thought – what’s so controversial about labelling values as British?
The emergence of this agenda in the moral panic that followed the Trojan Horse allegations in Birmingham in 2014 has recently been under the microscope again thanks to the New York Times’ podcast series on the issue.
Going into schools as part of a recent Templeton Foundation-funded project into young people’s values, there are plenty of flag-bedecked wall displays on the British values that have clearly been gathering dust since that moment in 2014.
In researching this, and other topics for my book – School Leadership Between Community and the State – I was able to unearth an untold history of Britishness in education.
The first publicly funded schools run by the British government, some 40 years before the 1870 Elementary Education Act brought state schools to England, were established under the British East India Company; it was here, for example, that the first class readers in English poetry were composed – at a time when public school pupils back home in Britain would have been studying the Latin classics.
This concern with manufacturing Britishness for a colonial “other” is a theme with parallels in the residential schools established for the cultural retraining of indigenous populations in Australia, Canada and elsewhere.
Even in this colonial context, a particular vision of “tolerant” Britishness was advanced, a religious neutrality which later came to define English approaches to teaching about religions, beliefs and worldviews.
The shift from Community Cohesion to Fundamental British Values which came about nearly a decade ago, however, represents more than just a shift in language. It came at a time when schools were increasingly moving away from community governance, toward the trusteeship of distant, corporate academy trusts.
The trust of Labour and Conservative governments alike in market mechanisms to drive up school attainment and quality led schools into an increasingly customer-oriented relationship to their local communities.
Within that context, schools became increasingly attentive to the brand they presented to the local community. Bagley, Glatter and Woods (1997), who carried out one of the first studies of schools after parental choice was introduced in the 1990s, found schools carefully curating their extra-curricular offerings, language, signage and outreach to persuade the “right” parents and, equally importantly, dissuade the “wrong” ones.
That process of quasi-marketisation, where schools are accountable for their results as if these are a return on investment, takes place alongside a less-studied process of real marketisation.
While schools had many budgets devolved to them under academisation, the resource to manage those budgets was not devolved. In practice, this meant schools responsible for their own payroll who didn’t employ any HR professionals, and this in turn meant the rise of a new class of mid-level policy enactor, private sector consultancies such as Capita Education, which would provide schools with the kinds of professional services they could previously rely on the local authority for.
My own first introduction to this new world of private mid-level consultants came in relation to the Trojan Horse affair and British Values – here I encountered the same figures I had met 10 years earlier as local authority and QCA RE advisors, rebranded as Prevent and British Values consultants.
In the area of values, schools can choose from a wide variety of these mid-level enactors, from the UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools Award, through to “military ethos character-building” courtesy of the likes of the UK Military School and others.
These charities and consultants, operating in a real market, are the “investment” side of the calculation, while the quasi-market targets of Ofsted ratings and league tables are the “return” side.
The fact that one of these transactions takes place in a real private market, and the other only in a quasi-market is often hidden from sight. So much of our research and management thinking in school leadership presumes that we know what the mid-levels between policy and practice look like, and much of this market/quasi-market complexity is absent from our assumptions and working models.
Another thing hiding in plain sight with this new arrangement is the juxtaposition of schools which both “promote” the fundamental British value of tolerance, and explicitly employ “zero tolerance” approaches to behaviour management.
When faced with this kind of contradiction, the late anthropologist David Graeber suggested we should look at the ways a society is structured such that these contradictory parts never come into people’s minds at the same time.
How is it, for example, that believers in sympathetic magic can attempt to curse or cure through wax dolls or other effigies, yet they never attempt to hunt their prey or water their crops in effigy?
These contradictions, Graeber suggests, often point us to the hierarchies in those societies, with decisions about magical things taken at a different level, by different people, to decisions about mundane things.
In the case of schools, our own sympathetic magic often takes the effect of imitating the successes of publicly “successful” school leaders, those who rise to the top of multi-academy trusts, or who make a career for themselves by courting the preferences of political leadership.
This has the effect that “zero tolerance” approaches (or “warm/strict” in the latest Ofsted parlance) are not seen as belonging to the same sphere of influence that they might ever become a barrier to schools being judged to promote individual liberty and tolerance.
I am not drawing attention to these structural factors in a pessimistic or fatalistic way. Rather, if school leaders are to understand the realities of their influence, it is important for them to understand which parts of the policy world still work, and how.
While some policy areas have been reduced to elaborate social performances, others have become real markets, which offer opportunities for new, values-led providers to carve out a niche for themselves.
Knowing how to exercise agency in relation to these different spheres of life in the context of rapid, at times chaotic change, requires a different skill-set to the models of governance and leadership that worked for schools at the turn of the 21st century.
- Dr David Lundie is senior lecturer in education at the University of Glasgow. His book, School Leadership Between Community and the State: The changing civic role of governance is due out in April 2022, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Further information
- Bagley, Glatter & Woods: Choice and Diversity in Schooling: Perspectives and Prospects, Routledge, 1997.