Centring micro-politics in system leadership in a multi-academy trust (BERA 2024)

In this conference paper we draw on data from a multi-academy trust (MAT) to argue that micro-politics is being overlooked in favour of system leadership as a key motivator of practice and legitimator of identities and purposes by school leaders in England.<br/><br/>The conceptual origins of system leadership for schools lies in the self-improving system literature (Hopkins, 2007, 2008), where system leadership was defined primarily as practice constructed as ‘leadership’ occurring across multiple sites. Cruddas (2020) writing as the chief executive of The Confederation of School Trusts (the self-appointed sector body for school trusts in England) has positioned system leadership as one of three ‘nested leadership narratives for trusts’, with system leadership specifically being ‘collective and strategic action’ not just ‘in’ but ‘on’ systems at regional and local level. System leadership is, therefore, central to MATs which are the UK governments’ organisational structure of choice for schools in England. We argue that such privileging of system leadership lays the foundations for it to become discursively hegemonic as a way for practitioners in multi-site education institutions, here, MATs to make sense of what they do and how and why they do it. We argue further that a discursively hegemonic system leadership conceals what is happening organisationally, which is better understood through the lens of micro-politics. <br/><br/>Micro-politics concerns how individuals ‘acquire, develop, and use power and other resources to obtain one's preferred outcomes’ (Pfeffer, 1981, p.7), often through the use of coalitions, bargaining and compromise for gaining, and mitigating against, power (Bacharach and Lawler, 1980). Coalitions imply factions in organisational functioning, and schools are no different. Leaders and teachers, for instance, may have competing agendas (Hoyle, 1982; 1999) and for Ball (1987), micro-politics in schools concerned ‘power; goal diversity; ideological disputation; conflict; interests; political activity; and control’ (p8). We focus specifically on what Ball (1987) termed careerist ‘strategies and ploys’ (p.168), in which school actors assert and protect their varied vested interests, including career advancement (pp.166–190). We, however, seek to update the work of Ball (1987) in the context of MATs. In doing so, we build on Blasé and Blasé’s (2000) insight that micro-politics is central to policy enactment in education. We suggest that school actors are mostly engaged in what they see as purposeful activity when they invoke system leadership. However, we argue that in MATs, this activity is often micro-politically enacting localised policy. This makes micro-politics central to system leadership, which is our main argument<br/><br/>To make this argument, we present data from a case study which involved semi-structured interviews and observation of meetings over the course of one year as school leaders developed a new literacy policy for a multi-academy trust of fifteen schools. These school leaders included assistant headteachers, executive headteachers, literacy coordinators, special educational needs coordinators, and heads of department in both primary school and secondary schools with a diverse range of contexts. The resulting data was analysed using theories of micro-politics. Our subsequent analysis suggests that a key effect of participants conflating micro-politics with system leadership is to distract themselves and others from the self-positioning evident in their accounts. So-called ‘leaders’ across the MAT at various hierarchical levels want to understand their practice as systemic and collaboratively leaderful and are encouraged by education policy framings to do so. However, their practice is often aimed at securing individual advantage within a MAT; which then motivates policy enactments. We thus provide insight into how individual competitiveness as a feature of endogenous privatisation, or corporatisation, becomes integral to how a contemporary educational institution functions, whilst its members work within a system leadership framing operationalised through shared vision, mutual influence and collaboration. <br/><br/>This conference paper makes an important contribution because proponents of system leadership such as Hargreaves (2011) have argued that system leadership, when fully distributed, has the potential to alter the nature of inter-organisational dynamics such that competition becomes ‘healthier’ and individuals strive to get better to improve the system, rather than themselves and their own organisation. Our argument and data refute such claims by revealing how individuals utilise the MAT structure micro-politically as a vehicle for self-advancement. We therefore add to the growing critical debate on system leadership, which is sceptical of its functionalist proponents’ claims regarding its key role in creating ‘self-improving systems’. Our analysis consequently resonates globally, since system leadership is privileged internationally (Pont et al., 2008) as a modern-seeming mechanism for an ageing neoliberal project that seeks to privatise public-services education.<br/><br/>