ABSTRACT
For several decades successive governments in the West have set about reforming public services through establishing and elaborating new forms of governance. In education the goal of these reforms has been to make schools more effective by increasing the accountability of those who work in the sector using frameworks of standards and targets. In the UK, Australia and the US these developments, which emphasize compliance with centrally determined directives, are seen by many commentators as counterproductive in terms of student learning (e.g. Smyth and Shacklock 1998; Apple and Beane 1999; Mahony and Hextall 2000; Gewirtz 2002). For example, Harris and Lambert (2003) have argued that school improvement is neither feasible nor sustainable without the full and active participation of teachers in the change process, an argument that has been extended to reassert the case for professional autonomy in the form of distributed, or shared, leadership where problems of learning are solved locally by teachers and their school communities (Watkins et al. 2007). The institutionalization of values of ‘reflective practice, collegiality and critical pedagogy’ (Sachs 2003: 21) is linked in this discourse to establishing a commitment to the collaborative creation of knowledge about student learning by teachers and their managers (Street and Temperley 2005). Professional trust, it is claimed, can be re-established if educational practice is built on an evidence-informed approach to pedagogy on the part of all teachers (Hargreaves 1999) – although this too can be based on a reductionist view of teaching and learning (Pressley et al. 2004; Hammersley 2007).
