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Over seventy percent of England’s secondary schools are now academies that receive funding directly from central government and operate as autonomous businesses. Academies’ impact on achievement levels has been hotly debated, but the social and cultural changes prompted by this model has received less scrutiny. My monograph,Factories for Learning: making race, class and inequality in the neoliberal academy draws on empirical research conducted at Dreamfields Academy, a celebrated secondary academy in an urban area of England. Dreamfields’ ‘structure liberates’ ethos claims to free students from a culture of poverty through hard discipline. Through pathologising the surrounding area as a zone of 'urban chaos,' Dreamfields positions itself as an 'oasis in the desert' liberating students. Teachers compensate for supposed poor parenting by acting as 'surrogate parents,' while a masculine superhero-as-head teacher wields a 'zero tolerance' approach to cultivate an uncritical respect for authority. This authoritarian approach, fuelled by anxieties over national decline and loss of empire, is positioned as the antidote to urban poverty. With its regimented routines and outstanding results, Dreamfields has been heralded as a blueprint for educational reform, yet persistent structural inequalities are concealed beneath its rhetoric of happy multiculturalism and aspirational citizenship. My lecture will examine the complex stories underlying this glossy veneer of success to show how a marketised, centralised brand of education produces new forms of raced, classed and gendered inequalities while curtailing democratic participation.
Lunch Provided.