The Feel Good Factor
The Feel Good Factor
The Feel Good Factor
One of the legacies of the Coalition era of education policy will surely be the rapid growth of academy ‘chains’.
They, apparently, were the cavalry that rode in to save our schools.
Looking back, how naive we were to think that, like most other countries, every neighbourhood might want a local school and that an elected local authority might oversee it.
No, we - the enemies of promise - clearly needed to be dragged into a brave new world of market forces and frenzied competition.
And that’s what we’ve got.
You have to take your hat off to the beneficiaries. Those ‘not-for-profit’ academy ‘chains’ appear very effectively to have been able to create a myriad of roles within their companies with titles like ‘Director of Academies’, ‘Development Director’, ‘Achievement Leader’, and (ahem) ‘Transformation Director’.
For those of us of little financial brain, it’s heartening to see that a not-for-profit education system can generate, at no extra cost to us humble tax-payers, so many executive roles on high salaries, as well as all of the regional directorship roles listed on their various websites.
We salute their financial alchemy.
As someone who needed five attempts to gain GCSE Maths, I’ll leave further exploration of such arithmetic prestidigitation to the DfE experts who will no doubt be scrutinising ‘chain’ finances carefully in the interest of public probity.
Instead (once an English teacher, always an English teacher) I’ve taken a quick look at what advertisements for school leadership roles in the Times Education Supplement now look like, and, in particular, the modern fad for slogans for every school or ‘chain’*.
I’m not being snide here: I can see why a baked bean company needs a defining phrase (‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’) and why the relentlessly competitive world of sports marketing might need to use motivational language (‘Just do it’), but I wonder what might be the rationale for slogans when it comes to education.
Here’s some I’ve picked out from job advertisements in this week’s TES:
Together, we can achieve more
Creating bright futures
Onwards and upwards
Aspire – achieve – advance
Inspire. Lead. Nurture
Delivering excellence
The best in everyone
Helping knowledge grow
Learning together, achieving together
Teaching through faith, learning through spirit
Delivering excellence
A commitment to excellence
Dream, believe, aspire
For the linguists out there, you’ll notice a number of rhetorical patterns:
-Lots of abstract, feel-good nouns (‘excellence’, ‘knowledge’, ‘commitment’);
-Verbs used as participles to imply continuous action (‘Creating’, ‘Delivering’)
-Use of feel-good adjectives (‘bright’);
-Nouns and pronouns suggesting wholesome inclusiveness (‘we’, ‘everyone’);
-Adverbs doing the same thing (‘together’);
-Cliched patterns of three to build a sense of rhetorical power (‘Dream, believe, aspire’; ‘Aspire - achieve - advance’);
-Heavily emphatic punctuation to reinforce a sense of macho assertiveness (‘Inspire. Lead. Nurture’).
There’s much more to say about the vocabulary and style of these advertisements, but, hey, it’s the weekend, and maybe applicants for school leadership roles are actually enticed by such phony aspirational gobbledygook.
At our school we don’t really have a simple mission statement. But heeding the lessons from my reading this weekend, perhaps we should contemplate a platitudinous phrase or two:
‘Inspiring a new generation’
‘Learning together’
‘Think. Reflect. Learn’
‘Boldly going where no school has gone before’
Er, maybe not.
Perhaps instead we should stick with our unwritten slogan: we want every student of any background to do really well, both in the classroom and in extra-curricular activities, in order to be really successful in their lives in the future.
It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, right?
But maybe it’s saying what lots of parents really want from a good local school.
And I do wonder whether one day - like middle-aged men thinking about their dance moves at the Christmas disco - we might not feel a little embarrassed about an era when we’ve deployed such saccharine rhetoric to describe something so important as education.
Geoff Barton
Sunday 15 September
8:15
PS
I have put the word ‘chain’ between inverted commas only because I recall the outdoor toilet of my great aunt and uncle where the chain was undoubtedly useful, but also vaguely grubby.
Sunday, 15 September 2013