Critical qualitative and ethnographic perspectives on the academies experiment

Inside the English education lab offers a range of qualitative and ethnographic explorations of the academies programme in England. Drawing on examples from primary and secondary academy institutions, a free school and Multi Academy Trusts, the collection explores how promises of academy policy are often at odds with everyday practice. Data and evidence throughout the collection highlight a multitude of ways in which the academies 'experiment' retrenches rather than reforms inequalities. Methodological insights and innovations are also a central feature of the collection, where authors interrogate what it means to collect and produce data in the current political context.

Foreword - Diane Reay

Introduction: A time and a place: doing critical qualitative and ethnographic work across an academised educational landscape - Christy Kulz, Ruth McGinity and Kirsty Morrin

Part I - 'Privatisation': Positioning policies and publics: academies, governance and agency
1 Academisation and the law of 'attraction': an ethnographic study of relays, connective strategies and regulated participation - Andrew Wilkins
2 When the MAT moves in: implications for legitimacy in terms of governance and local agency - Helen Ryan-Atkin and Harriet Rowley

Part II - 'Practice': Schooling the body and bodies in schooling: practice, strategy and the everyday
3 Free schools, inclusion and social capital of children with special educational needs and disabilities - Clara R. Jørgensen and Julie Allan
4 The great education 'permanent revolution'? Shape-shifting academies and degrees of change (and 'success') - Katie Blood
5 What 'these kids' need: discipline, misrecognition and resistance in an English academy school - Sarah Leaney

Part III - 'Reflexivity': In the contours and on the margins: re-imagining the academy
6 Producing the academy school: Foucault and the study of policy production - Jodie Pennacchia
7 The 'contradictory space' of the entrepreneurial academy: critical ethnography, entrepreneurship education and inequalities - Kirsty Morrin
Conclusion - Embedding an educational settlement: coercion, contestation and localised struggles - Christy Kulz, Kirsty Morrin and Ruth McGinity

Afterword: Polyvalent and incoherent: the academies programme and the English educational apparatus - Stephen J. Ball

Index

Editors

Dr Christy Kulz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University Berlin's Institute of Sociology
Dr Kirsty Morrin is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool
Dr Ruth McGinity is an assistant professor in Educational Leadership and Policy at the UCL Institute of Education