Disciplining Dreamfields Academy: a ‘well-oiled machine’ to combat urban chaos

This chapter examines how Dreamfields’ professed return to more 'traditional' disciplinarian methods involves the deployment of surveillance, coercion, division, and audit to guarantee the consistent production of quantifiable outcomes. This complex of systems does not revert back to the imagined good old days when students respected authority and were proficient in the three R’s, but shows how multiple logics of power are at work on the body to create a narrow, dense web of disciplines. This ‘well-oiled machine’ works to both hold the body in place while also moving and structuring it via classed, raced and gendered neo-liberal norms.

Urban chaos and the imagined other: remaking middle-class hegemony

This chapter examines parental orientations to Dreamfields, as responses to the urban chaos discourse show how parents and students conceptualise their positions within this imagined Urbanderry landscape. Discourses of pathology shape the relationships developed between parents and teachers, impacting upon how students and parents are perceived and treated by the school. The urban chaos discourse powerfully reiterates the inequitable positions of the watcher and the watched, the judger and the judged. The white middle-class parent occupies an invisible, normative space, while working-class and ethnic minority parents feel the potential weight of discipline's reformative hand. Rather than students being measured as data, the continued use of types, categories and subjective judgements becomes evident as students are weeded off Dreamfields’ conveyor belt as it progresses from the compulsory lower school to sixth form college.

Cohering contradictions and manufacturing belief in Dreamfields’ ‘good empire’

This chapter shows how Dreamfields’ rigid discipline is made palatable and even welcomed by promoting a belief in the institution, its methods and its benefits to individual, aspirational futures. Repetition and morality tales are used to smooth over the various contradictions and ambiguities inherent in Dreamfields’ approach. Principal Culford assumes the combined role of saviour, hero, military commander and business executive in this rigidly hierarchical operation, leading a redemptive troupe of teachers-as-surrogate parents who assiduously labour to redeem a twenty-first century 'urban residuum'. Crafting 'appropriate' aesthetic appearances and reiterating Dreamfields’ superior position in the education market are also facets of this indoctrination process, offering powerful proof of institutional validity and providing a sweetener allowing the often unpleasant, tiring medicine of discipline to go down smoothly.

Research frameworks: historical representations and formations of race and class meet neoliberal governance

Dreamfields describes how its disciplinarian structures liberate and transform its cohort of ‘urban children’. These children are assumed to come from unstructured, unhappy homes, where working class parenting, not ethnicity, is described as the problem. However this ‘urban child’ is inherently racialised due to the majority of students coming from ethnic minority backgrounds. The chapter shows how race and class were mutually created through historical representations rooted in the development of industrial capitalism, classificatory mechanisms and empire before showing how these historical trajectories are evident within Dreamfields’ current approach. Theoretically, the chapter discusses how processes of subjectification work to cultivate docile bodies so that ‘appropriate’ capitals can be grafted on.

Students navigating and negotiating the conveyor belt: aspiration, loss, endurance and fantasy

This chapter explores how students navigate and negotiate Dreamfields’ demands from their situated positions. Unlike other research showing how masculinities are often built on displays of resistance towards school work, Dreamfields makes trying not only acceptable for both boys and girls, but a mandatory requirement. While 'liberation' may bring the benefits of good grades and future success, these benefits come at a cost. Throughout this process students are urged to regard themselves as commodities made better and more valuable through their training as market logic penetrates these young people's lives and their social relationships at an intensely personal level. There is little space for critical thinking, innovation or creativity in the neoliberal school; instead there is obedient reproduction where students, parents and teachers learn to accept that Dreamfields’ approach is the only option.

Remaking inequalities in the neoliberal institution

Firstly this chapter discusses how Dreamfields’ 'oasis in the desert' allegedly built to transform urban children is changing urban culture in unanticipated ways. Besides grafting cultural capital onto students, it actively seeks out those who already have the capitals it requires to excel in the education market. Secondly, it explores how race and class are lived out in Dreamfields’ neoliberal regime. Whiteness does not rely on the white subject to be materialised, while the racialised subject is conceptualised through the lens of class. Both pathological blackness and dirty whiteness can be 'lost' through the application of middle-class behaviours, yet this shift requires labour, loss and conformity. Thirdly, the allure of the ‘good life’ acts a powerful tool of neoliberal governance that motivates many parents, students and teachers to willingly embrace Dreamfields’ demands. Finally, the chapter reviews how recent policy developments further centralize education and curtail participation, yet suggests there are cracks appearing in this consensus.

‘Urban children’ meet the ‘buffer zone’: mapping the inequitable foundations of Dreamfields’ conveyor belt

This chapter unpicks how the inherent normality of the middle classes embedded within Dreamfields’ ethos intersects with race and is compounded by the education marketplace's demand for results. These parameters shape teacher and student negotiations, while students' social groupings are structured by institutional norms that they navigate from various positions within Dreamfields’ hierarchy. Supposedly more expressive black bodies are consistently more heavily policed in the playground, while performing 'whiter' forms of comportment is a tactic used to reduce student surveillance. Principal Culford demands a 'no excuses culture’, yet this 'no excuses' mantra divorces students from their social positioning, trivializing continued hardship, institutionalized racism and moral value judgements.

Building new narratives: academies, aspiration and the education market

This chapter introduces readers to Dreamfields Academy, a flagship secondary academy located in the English city of Goldport. It also introduces the academy program more generally and its roots within marketised education reforms of the 1980s. Academies presented an apolitical, technocratic means of overwriting narratives of educational failure in urban boroughs and securing investment. Yet through this process spaces of negotiation formerly provided by local authorities were forced out of existence as power is transferred to central government and its private sector partners. These reforms do not aim to provide practical equality, but focus on individualized aspiration while instating authoritarian methods as a means of disciplining racialised and classed populations.