ABSTRACT
Research in England (e.g. Ball, 2003) and internationally (e.g. Codd, 2005) over the past thirty years shows that teachers have been positioned as a ‘not to be trusted’ profession, with daily newspaper headlines presenting stories of poor standards and inappropriate conduct (e.g. Lightfoot, 1991, reports on how the government plans to improve standards). The argument has been made that teachers, like other public sector workers, have lost public confidence by operating in their own interests with a ‘professional image of infallibility’ (Bottery, 1998, p. 173) and so need to be more transparent about and accountable for the conduct and outcomes of professional practice. Drawing on data from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Distributed Leadership and the Social Practices of School Organisation (RES-000–22–3610) project (Hall et al., 2011), 1 we examine the consequences of this positioning of teachers during the New Labour governments (1997–2010)—specifically, we engage with O'Neill's (2002) arguments that technical forms of accountability and transparency in public services can generate perverse outcomes. Specifically, O'Neill (2002) argues that such managerial processes not only generate deceptions but also miss the point because ‘if we want to increase trust we need to avoid deception rather than secrecy’ (p. 72, emphasis in original). In other words, league tables, inspectors in classrooms and contextual value-added calculations are designed to open up the teaching and learning process to scrutiny, but, in reality, a data-rich school may not produce truthful truths about standards and processes and, in attempting to do so, may operate in ways that are not educational. So we begin by examining the situation in education by developing a framework for analysing the way in which teachers’ and the public's trust and confidence have developed. We then examine the issues generated through three case studies of schools and how they demonstrate the way deception works, even at a time of high accountability and transparency and in schools that are officially meeting national standards.
