School Leadership between Community and the State

David Lundie is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Glasgow School of Interdisciplinary Studies, UK. He is Associate Editor of the British Journal of Religious Education, and co-director of the Justice, Insecurity and Fair Decision Making interdisciplinary research team at the University of Glasgow.

This book presents changes in UK and global educational governance in the context of a radical shift in the operating logics of politics and its interaction with education. Beginning from the colonial origins of political interest in education, the author traces a fundamental shift in the patterns of governance of schools in England in the opening decades of the 21st century. Operating through the logics of public choice economics involving both real markets and quasi-markets, policy reforms have increasingly framed school values, and the value of schooling, in line with a politically determined and nostalgic discourse of 'British values'. This stands in contrast to a previous focus on 'community cohesion' which foregrounded school partnership with the parent community and wider society. Tracing the processes and mid-level actors mediating between government and school leaders, the author identifies processes of recontextualisation through which policy can be reinscribed and resisted.

Chapter 1. Individual Liberty, Mutual Respect and Tolerance.- Chapter 2. Post-Historical Institutionalism.- Chapter 3. Leadership and Community.- Chapter 4. Schools, Leadership and the Law.- Chapter 5. School Leadership and the Market.- Chapter 6. Leadership and the Political State.- Chapter 7. Conclusions.- Chapter 8. Epilogue-From the Political to the Undifferentiated./