Introduction: The polity around the school

It may be an unwelcome truth to the architects from the 1980s of neoliberal Education policy to its re-articulation in the 2022 White Paper. But just as the possibilities for teaching are framed by the communities schools serve – and what the children bring in with them – schools are also framed by communities beyond those they serve directly. Tensions or prosperity in the countryside, parts of towns and cities, housing estates, whole regions, or even nations in terms of the pandemic, affect the way state schools need to act, react and think their role.

Crucially, however, on a more frequent and regular basis, they are affected by the wider network of organisations within which they sit – the local ecosystem – that affect decision making. Ecosystems are constructed differently: some schools serving the same housing estate, for example, or a market town, may collaborate. They may do so via the organisations they are part of formally, including managerial parastatal conglomerations such as multi-academy trusts (MATs) (but see later), the wider directly elected local government ecosystems (their councils), and that of the policy context and implementation of central government. None of these relationships are linear or simple, but form particular ecosystems of mutual relationships, or polities, when decision making is involved.

Fullan (1993, 1999, 2003) refers repeatedly to the governance aspect of all this – as opposed to just the various community interests involved – as the ‘tri-levels’ involved in ‘reform’: central government, local government or whatever constitutes a middle ‘tier’, and the schools themselves. The reality as he says is that, however attenuated or varied, the day-to-day supervision and regulation of what happens to nearly nine million children in England in classrooms occur at all three levels. Therefore, effecting changes in any of these organisations in this wider network affects the others, and provides a context for impeding or accelerating the realisation of reform or change at each level and therefore more widely. This is the stark conclusion of the British Academy (2021a) and the problem with withering away the lower levels. So, as will be argued in this chapter, the articulation of the ‘tri-levels’ is chaotic in English schooling, complex and overall an unstable assemblage that by its very nature remains unstable. Sadly again, this messiness does not just exist in Education.