Introduction

That those identified as ultimately responsible for school outcomes, variously called ‘headteachers’, ‘principals’ and ‘chief executives’, are and should be better leaders continues to travel around the world as a legitimate game to play (about Australia, see Addison, 2009; Eacott, 2011). It is an example of what Rizvi and Lingard (2010, p 17) identify as ‘global flows’ of abstracted generic effective behaviours and improvement strategies that ‘are “vernacularized” in the context of specific nations as they meet local cultures and politics’. There is some emerging independent evidence of the realities of working lives in England and internationally, and in this chapter I open up the dilemmas and tensions in how heads position themselves in regard to regime practices. Following Thomson (2008), there is a need to move away from binaries of ‘resistance or compliance’, towards ‘the idea of the discursive positioning of headteachers, and/or interrogate their habitus and their “stakes” in the field, in order to show what actions are possible in specific circumstances’ (p 87). Headteachers were meant to be consumers in the educational leadership industry and some have become manufacturers and retailers, but it is also the case that some have retained and continue to use rival products.

Policy, policy, policy

I intend drawing on thinking by the critical education policy community in order to frame the positioning of and position-taking by headteachers during the New Labour period in office. I take from Ball (1994a) and Gewirtz and Ozga (1990) that there is a need to examine what educational professionals actually do and how they position themselves at a time when policy is clearly positioning them within neoliberal projects, using managerialism to maintain the boundaries and denying the possibilities of other positions. Whereas policy science seeks to examine whether what was intended has actually been delivered, policy scholarship is concerned with the antecedence, experience and trajectories of policies and how they interrelate and are experienced by professionals (Grace, 1995). As Ozga and Jones (2006) have argued, policy ideas may travel, but the embedded reading of those policies matters, with reading taking place with and against what is proposed: ‘faced with homogenizing traveling policy; particular groups or societies can be encouraged to revisit and reconstruct the value basis of their organizations; and generate new energy in its production within social and cultural institutions’ (p 14).