Introduction

MATs have been reluctant to take on schools where certain pupils and communities could damage the brand, and so there are schools that have become ‘orphans’ because no Trust will take them on (Mansell 2017). In addition, local authority schools have not all leapt at the lauded opportunities of voluntary conversion (Rayner and Gunter 2020) and there are cases of local resistance (see Chapter 4). The policy response has been to tempt schools by using a ‘Try before you buy’ scheme that enables MATs to take on identified failing schools (Dickens 2016: NP). Economic incentives that are ‘time limited’ are used to encourage schools to experience the membership of a MAT, where for the price of ‘a service charge’, a MAT will open its ‘networks and services’ with a school to demonstrate the benefits (Dickens 2021: NP). The use of targeted funding to lever system change is not new (McGinity and Gunter 2017) and currently it is premised on a form of benign coercion underpinned by the assurance that it is reversible, but in reality, schools and MATs become locked in, and so the actual conversion process with potential parental opposition is eased. The academisation of schools in England is incomplete (22 per cent primary and 68 per cent secondary), and so the remaining unconverted maintained local authority schools are a problem for UK governments that want to dismantle local democracy in favour of markets underpinned by eugenicist populist ideology. A huge contradiction exists whereby school, teacher, student, and democratic system failure are integral to education policy, and yet specific reform interventions cannot be seen to fail, and so those involved must navigate in choppy waters.

Investigating such matters through the EPKP projects requires explanation through the TPSF. This validates the importance of vantage points in education policy, or the organisational location of the person or group involved in public decision-making. Research within the EPKP projects demonstrates that the core is the prime vantage point, and I examine policy violence through Theme 1: System Design.