Managerialism is a brilliant tool for makers of tinned soup.

We can readily judge whether a vegetable ingredient for the soup is fit for consumption or not - mould is a bit of a giveaway.

And we can tweak the conveyor belt so that tins can be filled up more quickly without scalding anyone, and thus produce more tinned soup in a week.

Judging whether a soup is exceptional, though, is much more problematic.

Against whose criteria is it exceptional? The homeless person who has not eaten a hot meal in days will have different criteria than, say, the Michelin Guide or celebrity chefs.

The rise of managerialism in schools

Yet the application of this form of managerialism to what can only be subjective judgement, with the idea that we can then measure it and improve it, seems to be seeping into school life - from wellbeing to equality, diversity and inclusion.

Paying attention to the wellbeing of staff and students, or asking what diversity and inclusion in education looks like, is welcome, of course.

But a “managerialist” approach to this seems to be at best an oversimplification of deeply complex topics, and at worst more management tyranny that leaves us at the mercy of additional “benchmarking measures” and “impact evaluations”.

A live example is the proposed new inspection framework from the Independent Schools Inspectorate, which has committed itself to making wellbeing the primary focus through which it will judge independent schools.

t looks like policy as dogma. One of its changes is the introduction of the concept of exceptionality, which, as we’ve seen, is deeply flawed in any kind of measurement system.

The ISI’s new framework is the subject of consultation until Friday 16 September 2022, and you can give your views online. 

Questions, questions...

Why is this kind of managerialism problematic? The most obvious reason is that the things to be measured are about people living and working in contexts that are nuanced and specific to them.

Schools have hundreds of people in them, and claims that reliable judgements can be made about schools in the few days that the clipboard people spend in them are unrealistic.

We are all bound to fail, servant and master, if the new framework goes through as it stands.

Here’s an example of the problem with making reliable judgements: on return from holiday, I asked a friend to rate their sense of wellbeing. Could they rank that on a scale of 1 to 10? Why that number? What number would you say you were at before the holiday? Other than the holiday, what else has changed? Are there other things that are likely to change your ranking of wellbeing in the week ahead?

How much of that is in your control? Can you say for certain that your measure of wellbeing is the same as the one your boss uses? How would you know?

This conversation led to the revelation that at the firm my friend worked at, like many others, they have started using an online wellbeing survey to measure these things.

What happens to the data? How reliable is the question bank? Who wrote the questions? And on what authority of knowledge?

Yet despite all this, we are, as a school, signed up to run online wellbeing surveys for our staff -  surveys that purport to also benchmark against other schools.

Using data - but to what end?

I admit I am curious about the metrics and what, if anything, we can learn from them - not least whether our school is more or less miserable than the one next door. What it won’t tell us is why.

Perhaps it is no surprise that, even with my scepticism, we are signed up because in schools I do understand the value of benchmarking - when done right.

For example, salary comparisons with other schools similar in kind and size to ours help to set accurate pay. Comparisons of teacher-to-pupil ratios tell us if we need more staff or less, and comparisons of room optimisation help us to keep our estate in order.

We could even crosscut the data and see if we’re spending proportionally more on one subject or another.

This is all based on hard facts and empirical data.

Move beyond this, though, and we’re in immediate trouble. Some subjects cost more to teach, and some narrow-interest subjects might be expensive to run relative to so-called core subjects.

On whose value system are we to judge whether an expensive narrow-interest subject is worth the money or not? Do we throw that to the market and ask the parents to decide? What do the children think? On what basis are they making judgements? Children and young people can be poor decision makers with limited understanding of consequence.

As a species, we are notoriously bad at making judgements around such things as effectiveness and performance in areas that are conceptual and abstract, like wellbeing or happiness.

There are obvious examples where we can judge winners and losers, and there is substantive and valuable work around evaluation for such things as goal setting: athletes in a race spring to mind, or whether a salesperson has met their target or not.

Yet managerialism, and the magic that it purports to wield, is now so firmly lodged in our corporate thinking that we can no longer act with confidence without some form of evaluative judgement being made by someone else.

We’ve been drawn into the lie that we are essentially incompetent and cannot be trusted.

Latterly, EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) benchmarking “tools” have been springing up all over the place, against which we can measure ourselves and, inevitably, discover that we are lacking in some important way.

Toolkits, by their nature, tend to be leading and assumptive. Here’s a question from a real EDI toolkit: Does teaching material include positive starting points to learn about people with protected characteristics, avoiding casting them as victims? The general premise of the question seems at first to be OK, but pick it apart for a moment: “positive starting points”? Why not just “starting points”?

And the sub-clause “avoiding casting them as victims” is leading. As it stands, the question limits almost the entire canon of literature. Why stop there? As an English literature graduate, there are all kinds of other perspectives I might also benchmark our curriculum against: Marxist theory, queer theory, feminism, neoliberalism, post-modernism...

Creating the very problem we seek to solve

Managerialism seeks to atomise people into units of measurement who are, if put on the right course, then told the right things to think, are given the right support, and saved from themselves and others.

As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her seminal text The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become.”

A colleague recently described the challenges in the American schooling system because of what has become a protected category culture that is, they say, creating division, not inclusion. In my recent trip to Canada, and talking to educationalists there, they, too, confirm that the diversity drive is working against inclusion, which is not its intention.

I am not arguing against the central tenet of inclusivity, but there is a lot more thinking to be done, and managerialism is a poor model for change. 

What about 10 years of austerity and with it the death of social mobility? Instead, our attention is being redirected away from national policy decisions that led us here. The message to pupils is that meritocracy is alive and well and if they feel down it’s a wellbeing problem that schools will now have a responsibility to fix.

There will be a management tool to help you do that, or a consultant you can book for Inset.

The issue for schools 

Yet it was managerialism that made all this worse in the first place: high-stakes exams increase stress levels for students (and parents), teachers fret about inspections, leaders worry about league tables, governors obsess about all of it…

It is worth noting that fewer people, perhaps not surprisingly, are willing to become governors, and recruitment into headship is proving tougher.

The argument goes that we require wellbeing initiatives to fix these problems - rather than looking at the root causes and seeing if it is perhaps those deeper social challenges, driven by national policy, that need attention instead.

But what about another way?

A straw poll in my echo chamber of Facebook revealed a different perspective governed by practical ideas rooted in the core business of education. Given the choice of investing in a wellbeing centre or an art studio or similar, where would my friends spend the money?

Art studio almost every time - or perhaps a library as someone else suggested. That’s assuming, though, there was choice in the first place, and in the end much of this often comes down to money.

With the ISI’s new focus on measuring and managing wellbeing, which bit of your teaching and learning budget will you slash to pay for it? Schools are now routinely investing in counsellors and so-called wellbeing centres.

Shouldn’t we stop for a moment and ask why? Schools are at the mercy of widening inequality, diminished economic security and the climate crisis, which one might reasonably argue are the real sources of a great deal of unwellness.

Giving people purpose, community and agency is a good thing and lies at the heart of good schools, and it doesn’t need to be measured in such clumsy and limited ways - but that doesn’t really fit the model of managerialism that policymakers are so committed to.

Simon Larter-Evans is head of St Paul’s Cathedral School