Introduction

In this chapter, I present data and analysis regarding how headteachers and principals in England are increasingly being hierarchised, and their space for agency constrained, by newly powerful regional actors. The latter may either belong to a corporate elite or succeed through adopting their methods, and are achieving newly exalted positions within an education policy landscape of corporate-inspired structural reform. These elite system-leaders are building empires of education provision, and are defining what is possible as a headteacher for others in such empires and even what is meant by school leadership.

The neoliberal and neoconservative reform agenda to which education has been subjected since the mid-1980s in England has enabled a corporate elite to open or acquire publicly funded schools. This elite embodies the ideal, entrepreneurial leader, constructed through policy and lauded by policy makers. In England, for instance, from 2000, ‘under-performing’ local authority (or district) schools have been replaced by independent, business-sponsored, state-funded academies (homologous with charter schools in the US). Their architect, Andrew Adonis, lavishly praised elite corporate leaders of academies’ forerunners as ‘highly capable sponsor-managers, who ran their schools free of the shifting sands of local and national education bureaucracies’ (Adonis, 2012, p 56). Some, such as Peter Vardy and Harry Djanogly,2 see this preferment formalised through a knighthood or through membership of key networks.

So, the phenomenon of elite, corporate education providers at the state court is not new. These courtiers market key state policies through embodying their objectives, means and privileged status. What is new, and what is explored here, is how the subjectivities and practices of headteachers and principals are being structured and subordinated by corporatised elites. This is happening in and through the regional empires that these elites are establishing, which draw on corporate structural models facilitating expansion and acquisition, and through their personal contacts with powerful actors. These arguments make a contribution to the literatures concerning how headteachers position themselves, and are positioned, in relation to external change (for example Grace, 1995; Gunter and Forrester, 2009; Thomson, 2010) and/or within a local field (for example Coldron et al, 2014; McGinity, 2014). To make this contribution, I discuss and typologise three responses to headteacher/principal subordination to corporate elites: the ‘follower’; the ‘acquired’; and the ‘excluded’.