ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that schools and teachers internalise the performativity discourse in two separate but connected ways, resulting in its evolution into a revised institutional culture. It is easy to be critical of some of the internal performativity practices, especially when one is not facing the pressures of performativity personally or in quite the same way. Furthermore, the deployment of professionalism in support of neoliberal policy and of its performativity discourse involves not just promoting a particular version of professionalism, but setting up in opposition – either explicitly or implicitly – an alternative to professionalism. Neoliberalism thus understood presents itself as a rational choice – for some, indeed, a rational inevitability. In practical terms, neoliberalism attaches a market value to performance and product – a process and set of practices sometimes referred to as 'performativity' embracing or introducing numerical and often summative measures of the 'quality' of production, such as test and examination scores, inter-institutional 'league tables' or Ofsted grades.
