Post-Panopticism, School Leaders, and Inspection in England

• In Event: Global New Public Management 2.0: How Neoliberal Reforms in Education Are Reshaping “the Public”

Abstract

The Foucauldian metaphor of the Panopticon is frequently deployed or invoked in conceptualisations of accountability and performativity in education. The present analysis seeks to make a significant contribution to theory and understandings of policy by developing rather than confirming this conceptual framework. It does this through examining school leaders’ experiences of inspection in England in order to answer the question of how the post-NPM relationship between school leaders and the state might be theorised. I argue that repeated changes to the framework employed by Ofsted should be understood holistically rather than as an evolutionary series of panoptic regimes.
The study from which these findings are drawn employed mixed methods: statistical analyses were conducted on quantitative data from a questionnaire completed by 36 Headteachers of schools inspected soon after the introduction of the 2012 inspection framework. These enriched qualitative data from six of these Headteachers who subsequently volunteered for interview. My analysis of these data and of the continually changing school inspection policies from 2009 to 2013 suggests that these frequent changes to inspection frameworks and school inspection policy are purposively constitutive of a post-panoptic regime.
Post-panopticism is characterised by subjects’ visibility; ‘fuzzy’ norms; the exposure of subjects’ failure to comply; the disruption of identity-constituting fabrications; its dependence on external ‘experts’; and its neo-conservative devalorisation of the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. Post-panopticism in school inspection is designed to wrong-foot school leaders, disrupt the fabrications they have constructed to withstand the inspectors’ gaze, and make more visible the artifice of the performances that constitute their identities. It depends for its legitimacy and effectiveness on subjects having become disciplined through panopticism, whose apparatus it employs.  
As an expression of power, I argue that post-panopticism is concerned not so much with school leaders’ compliance as with the exposure of their constructed and differential ‘incompetence’. This speaks directly to how the post-NPM landscape might be understood; school leaders are positioned within this regime of power such that their agency within that regime is limited or illusory. Subordinated, they invest that agency in attempting to comply with the latest ideal construction of leader rather than in seeking to change the rules of the game out of a democratically inspired notion that they are equal.

Author

• Steven John Courtney, University of Manchester