Promising: school diversity and competition

This chapter discusses the deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity, which shows how the state has adopted a form of depoliticisation by contract as a form of risk-management-promising, where the trend is towards proactive private as distinct from public contractualism based on the binary risk of failure–success designed to secure and extend segregation. Underpinned by globally networked corporate ideas regarding education as a site for investment, the identification of success and the eradication of failure has become policy in school reform. Importantly, the pursuit of child and school failure as public policy is integral to this process, where schools and children do and, indeed, have to fail in order for segregation to be effective.

Thinking politically: challenging public education

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book presents a new conceptualisation, so-called Knowledgeable Polities, and identifies and deploys the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity as the methodological means of examining the dynamics of the state, people, practices, ideologies and networks. Such an approach allows the study to consider the conditions for rethinking politically ongoing ‘reforms’ of education. The book provides access to ideas, evidence, and practices vital for the re-politicisation of public services education. By engaging with Hannah Arendt as a ‘discussion partner’, it explores a range of ideas and arguments.

Natality: the opportunity to do new things

For Hannah Arendt, education ‘turns children toward the world’, and so ‘it is care for the world, not technical skills or moral development, that is its hallmark’. However, this chapter shows how the trend in this ‘turn to the world’ is usually the first rather than the second case as a form of regulated natality within a segregated education system, where biopolitical distinctiveness means that ‘elite’ children know their entitlements while the majority of children know their place. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the reforms of school restructuring in England enables an examination of direct interventions by the state as a form of depoliticisation by personalisation.

Plurality: the idea and reality of choice

This chapter considers the continued dominance of the private over the common purposes of education. It focuses on access to a school and examines what this means for plurality. Notably, through the deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity, it gives prime attention to the demand side and how deregulation by the state means that parents have been offered ‘choice’ in the public system through schemes such as vouchers. The practices involved in offering and responding to the exercise of a preference for a ‘good’ school place is enabled through a form of depoliticisation by colonisation of globally networked market ideologies. Instinctively it seems that vouchers are enabling of plurality, but the chapter show how parental choice mechanisms are primarily rhetorical, by facilitating and strengthening segregation as a form of biopolitical distinctiveness.

Action: professionals learning to labour

This chapter suggests that the combination of the ‘uncommon’ knowledges for and about the curriculum and teacher readies both for schools as businesses, where data on pupil outcomes has come to dominate the design and delivery of the curriculum and pedagogy for a segregated marketplace. Core to this has been a shift in accountability away from collegiality and peer review towards data-determined performance measurement as competent teaching. Teachers and teaching are now directly implicated in the construction and maintenance of sectarian divides based on uncommon knowledges. The chapter explores these trends using Hannah Arendt's identification of labour, work, and action. It first outlines her ideas before critically engaging with the notion and realities of performance accountability.

Forgiving: the end of public education

This chapter suggests that complex forms of discrimination are developing within and external to schools: within-school segregation is happening through the use of data to determine particular curriculum pathways and ability grouping of children; between-schools segregation through the use of data to determine high-status academic schools in comparison with ‘sink’ schools; and beyond schools, where children are separating themselves from school through absence and parents are making proactive decisions to home school. The chapter examines the construction of this fragmented and chaotic ‘system’ by considering the possibilities for reconciliation through examining Hannah Arendt's work on forgiving. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the reforms to public services commons education puts the focus on a form of depoliticisation by privatism where the opportunity and capacity for forgiveness is in peril.

Thinking politically again: the conditions for public education

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The chapter recaps that the book used Hannah Arendt's thinking to explore the catastrophe that is unfolding in plain sight in public services education and the wider political culture in which it is located. The investigation into education policy reveals the ‘new modes of negating the human’ through the disposability of children and the professionals committed to educating them. The chapter begins by summarising what is unfolding and testing it against the conditions for totalitarianism that Arendt identifies. It notes the trends in the crystallisation of those conditions, and the dangers evident in the death of political thinking, talking, and action. A study of public services education is a site where this can be recognised, but it is also where politics is in evidence in regard to both resistance and the resilience of a commons approach.

Responsibility and judging: producing and using numbers

In the high stakes context of biopolitical distinctiveness, what matters appears to be selecting data and using it to make performance claims by smoothing a narrative. This chapter examines how this is integral to segregating the system using Hannah Arendt's (2003) thinking about responsibility and judgement, where she identifies what happens when people are rendered thoughtless, particularly in how a situation is framed and understood through fabricated myth-making. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the creation of ‘data-rich’ schools in England enables an examination of a form of depoliticisation by calculation where the interplay between standards, numbers, and school leadership is deployed to change identities and practices. The state has been able to make contractual alliances with elite individuals, companies, and networked knowledge producers who have used particular ideologies in order to present a seductive, trainable, and measurable model for the modern professional.