In recent years in England, the political shift towards decentralisation of government has manifested, within the field of education, in the advocating of the school-led, self-improving system. The emerging policy was crystallised in the 2010 White Paper, The Importance of Teaching (Department for Education, 2010). The Paper called for those leaders and schools who were most effective to ‘narrow the gap’ between the outcomes of pupils in neighbouring schools through the formation of Teaching Schools (TS). It was intended that these Teaching Schools would to form local networks to meet local need, known as Teaching School Alliances (TSAs). This study will explore the implementation of one strand of the 2010 policy, which stipulated that TSAs should recruit and deploy a new type of consultant, Specialist Leaders of Education (SLEs), to engage in the school-to-school support.
However, through personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I became aware that SLEs were frustrated that their TSA was unable to engage, or ‘broker’, them as frequently as they had anticipated, so they were not being deployed into schools to support improvements. Consequently, I was compelled to investigate if other TSAs were brokering their SLEs more frequently or, if not, identify the factors inhibiting the process. This study will identify three case study TSAs and investigate the factors affecting the brokering of their SLEs. I will address the issue of SLE brokering through three key research questions: the extent to which SLEs are being brokered by each TSA; the organisational factors which affect the brokering of SLEs; the individual characteristics of the SLEs, their brokers or client schools which affect brokering.
In order to gather data from participants in each case study Teaching School Alliance, I requested the Teaching School’s records of deployments undertaken by all SLEs during the scope of my research, the timeframe for which is explained in Chapter 3, and I also carried out interviews with the school leader responsible for overseeing the brokering of the SLEs who were designated to carry out school-to-school support. From then, I triangulated the deployment data I had collated and analysed and the broker interviews with two further, concurrent waves of interviews: I interviewed two SLEs from each TSA, 6 in total, gathering the views of an SLE who had been deployed more frequently, and an SLE who had been deployed less frequently in each case. I also interviewed those operating at a more strategic level, namely the Schools Commissioner for the Department of Education, Frank Green, and a senior member of the then recently-formed Teaching Schools Council; the roles of these educational leaders will be defined in Chapters 2 and 5.
The study will find that the lack of a clear blueprint, coupled with the pace of change in the school system, has given rise to great variance and complexity in this school-led system, and that none of the three TSAs where deploying the SLEs to extent intended by the policy, thereby not comprehensively addressing the local need to improve schools. A key factor was that, due to this lack of blueprint and clear commissioning protocols in the early stages, SLEs were recruited and designated who would not be in demand; from the macro-level, increased pressure of accountability, coupled with a lack of funding, was causing schools to narrow their priorities. In addition, issues pertaining to finance, capacity, geography, local and National political issues, the recognition of the role of SLEs, as well as the organisation and governance of TSAs, all presented barriers to broking in all three case study TSAs. Essentially, the complexity and diversity in the new school-led system, for some TSAs, had resulted in a tension between competition and collaboration that prevented SLEs from being brokered as frequently as the policy had anticipated.
