This concluding chapter charts how the goal of total system academisation remains the Conservative government’s goal in the face of scant party-political opposition; however, grassroots opposition to these social and cultural interventions continues. The chapter explores how the privatisation of education structures and the narrowing of democratic participation ties to authoritarianism by reflecting on ethnographic exchanges at the Academies Show. It continues by examining the relationship between academisation and the increasing institution of detailed, rigid uniforms and punitive behaviour policies including isolation booth and practices of off-rolling and exclusion. The chapter concludes by analysing the connection between nationalism, racialisation and authoritarian educational forms through recent and well-publicised staff and student protests at Pimlico Academy in London that critically interrogate the norms promoted through these structures.

This chapter presents the intertwining of ethnography and Foucault’s thinking tools as a methodology for studying the academies policy. Drawing on ethnographic research in an underperforming school that had recently become an academy (Eastbank Academy), the chapter explores relationship(s) between Foucault’s work and ethnographic approaches in order to make three arguments about how the academies policy is produced. First, this methodology facilitates analysis of the complex, multi-level and multi-modal nature of policy, enabling an account of the linguistic, material, spatial and pedagogical shaping of the academy school. Second, this methodological pairing shapes an analysis that moves beyond the binaries of compliance and resistance to explicate the different and contradictory ways school stakeholders engage with the academies policy. Third, the chapter discusses the importance of situated study for understanding oppressive arrangements, drawing on data extracts to illustrate the unjust potential of the production of academy status for some young people. Through the chapter this methodological combination is presented as capable of capturing the complexity of policy production, demonstrating how it informed the analysis of the contradictory ways that ‘change’ was present and presented in Eastbank Academy, why these contradictions existed, and their effects. Meanwhile, the potential incongruences of this methodological pairing – for example, the historically different positionings of power and the subject in ethnographic approaches and Foucault’s work – are ventured not as issues to be resolved but as points to be interrogated as a source of new possibilities for policy analysis.

This chapter considers the impact ‘diversification’ of education through academisation has on the school as a field within which particular formations of self are produced and reproduced. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on an English council estate and in the primary school located on the estate, this chapter explores the transformation of education within neoliberal logics, where dominant discourses of responsibilisation and choice are mediated through localised constructions of community provision. It aims to foreground the processes through which the school reifies an estate culture as defined by ‘lack’ through accounts of ‘what these kids need’. The chapter argues that the narrowing conceptualisation of education within processes of academisation socially produce the body through processes of (mis)recognition. It also explores the ways in which difference is read onto the body within a social context. Through analysis of the disciplining of embodied practice within Estate Primary, the chapter considers the processes by which the bodies of the structurally de-valued carry the weight of their disadvantage. The chapter argues that the naturalisation of bodily difference within dominant accounts of ‘these kids’, results in the misrecognition of action as inaction. The chapter is located within contemporary debates thinking with and against Bourdieusian theorisations of education (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Reay 2015; Thatcher et al, 2015). Building upon conceptualisations of social formations of the body (Bourdieu, 2004; Hall,1997; Skeggs, 2004) the chapter explores the social production of docile bodies (Foucault,1977) through the pedagogic practices of the primary school which construct The Estate as deficit.

This chapter, consisting of ethnographic fieldwork, explores a newly converted academy having replaced a former ‘failing’ school situated in a marginalised town in the Midlands. Through its ethnographic methodological approach, the study mobilises Bourdieu’s conceptual tools to examine the everyday lived experiences of the academy’s staff and its working-class students. While claims have been made that the academy programme is indeed ‘working miracles’ (Cameron, 2012) in regard to facilitating ‘successful’ outcomes in marginalised locales, findings from this academy identify that the relatively unchanged social milieu in which the academy is situated remains formative in the imagined futures of its students. Thus, when the academy and policy expectations come up against the localised material and economic realities, the transformative impact of the academy, while offering beneficial forms of capital, remains limited. The research therefore underscores the necessity that when questioning whether the academy agenda can and does act as a generative force in terms of social justice one must explore each academy individually through a unique contextual lens. The chapter continues by arguing that the more meritocratic discourses and authoritarian modes of governance found within the academies programme, including at this academy, can be said to have preceded much of the more explicitly authoritarian turn we are currently witnessing in broader politics.

This chapter draws on research in Milltown Community Academy, a Northern secondary school that houses an ‘entrepreneurship specialism’. Overall, the chapter makes two contributions; firstly, it presents data that evidences retrenched inequality at Milltown Academy, and secondly it makes a methodological case for critical ethnography. Empirically, the chapter examines Milltown Academy’s entrepreneurial agenda in practice. In the academy ‘entrepreneurship education’ is formally embedded in the school’s ethos and curriculum. It is also realised through a ‘real-world’ initiative that allows local and student start-up businesses to operate from within the school building. Throughout, the chapter highlights processes by which ‘race’ and class inequalities are (re)produced in and through these entrepreneurship education practices. Methodologically, data in the chapter are drawn from critical ethnographic research collected at the institution over a year-long period. Bringing together methods and theory, the chapter draws on critical traditions in theories of sociology and education that centre inequality and ‘contradiction’. Specifically, the chapter devises and operationalises a series of ‘contradictions’ it names as ‘keyoxymorons’ to think, research and write through complex, and simultaneous struggles with inequality in the academy school and beyond. For example, the keyoxymoron ‘successful-failure’ is deployed to explore and unpack socio-historic discourses of ‘success’ attached to the academy, while simultaneously illustrating how some of these narratives of ‘success’ work to encompass, distort and ignore ‘failure’.

Since the introduction of the academies policy and the growth of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) in England, there has been a shift away from public to private agendas as part of an increasing neoliberal, market-driven education system. Various studies have looked at this in terms of the large-scale implications for the culture of school governance (e.g. Wilkins, 2015), local democratic accountability (e.g. Gunter, 2011) and the impact of a centrally controlled system (e.g. Ball, 2017), but there has been limited exploration about what this means for governors and local governing boards at the local level. This chapter makes an empirical contribution to the existing literature by showing how national policy is being translated within one MAT at different levels of management and governance. It shows how fears about the blurring of boundaries between public/private bodies and practices are transpiring in two main ways. The first main finding from the ethnographic study of one MAT shows how the increased professionalisation of governance appears to be leading to a preference for a trust board which is weighted towards business skills, at the expense of educational expertise. Second, but related to the first, is the marginalisation of local figures, with their insider knowledge, and the implications for localised democratic oversight. The chapter concludes by arguing that there is an urgent need for university teacher educators/researchers with ‘insider’ expertise to work with schools to challenge the growing narrative of business-led education.