Testing Times in English Primary Schools 1992-2012 (ePub)

This book draws upon research by the author and colleagues over the past twenty years into how primary schools, teachers and pupils manage their educational lives in a performative culture, exemplified by a continuous increase in inspections, testing and target setting. It is a collection of articles published by the author from 2004 to 2013 which identify the day to day life of teachers and pupils engaged in managing performative imperatives. (We also researched the intricacies of creative teaching and learning and the effect of performativity on this form of pedagogy but that material is published elsewhere). Through our ethnographic methodology we bring out the ways in which performativity affects teachers and pupils management of their educational practice and the effects on their educational identities. We include analysis of the way performativity shapes curriculum practice and learning experiences; the effect on careers, professsionality and relations; school policy and self-identities.

The collection shows that after twenty years since the first Ofsted inspections and annual national Standard Assessment Tasks in the early 1990s performativity imperatives have been unrelenting. However, the collection is also able to chart the ways in which schools and teachers have adapted the situation to suit themselves but also how hegemony works to reproduce this particular power. The problematic nature of agency is also seen through this twenty year collection of continuous research.

It includes details on how Foucault's governmentality works, the kinds of educational identities developed, the story of one four day inspection from researcher fieldnotes and the way schools today manage and embrace policy to ensure success. This collection will be useful as a way to review and interpret a major new educational curriculum and policy approach commencing in schools in 2014.