Theatre and Performance

Stephen Ball has been one of the most proficient critics of neo-liberal performativity and audit cultures in schools. He and his colleagues note accurately that England been one of the most advanced centres of neo-liberal policy experimentation and practice, forming a sort of laboratory for studying neo-liberalized policies, networks, enactments and effects in education (Ball 2003. Following this logic, in this paper we explore a case study of the implementation of so-called neo-liberal policy reforms in an East London primary school. We explore the development of the school’s new equalities policy, a requirement under the Education Act 2010. Our main research objective was to question how so-called neo-liberal governmental policies were filtering into schools and impacting their equalities practices. Within this we sought to broadly explore the following questions:

How are policies and cultures affecting the ways in which staff members and school policymakers approach equalities?

What are the contradictory or schizoid effects/affects of the new pressures?

To begin to think about these questions we want to discuss in some greater detail three key aspects of neo-liberal policy formation as identified in the research literature: accountability, competition and performativity.