Slides for a seminar on GERM and its impact on the English system

1. Reflections on the Global Educational
Reform Movement (GERM) and its
impact at the local level
Phil Wood Masters Weekend Oct ‘19

2. From your own experience in education, what/who shapes policy and practice?

3. ‘Globalisation, simply put, denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of
transcontinental flows and patterns of social interaction. It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human
organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across the world’s regions and
continents’
(Held and McGrew, p.1, 2002)
Olssen (2004) believes there to be two inter-related elements which together combine to give us globalisation:
1 – High degree of global interconnectedness
2 – A construct discussed by, and pursued as, a policy agenda by powerful states and international capital
(usually in the form of trans-national corporations (TNCs)).
Background to GERM

4. The Neoliberal Turn in Education and Beyond – killing the imagination
- The rise in individualism and the notion that the nation-state is changed into a form of ‘market-state’
as it is argued that competition and the free market will benefit all
- Can be argued that this is seen in the academisation and free-school policy initiatives
- Part of a wider, radical socio-economic experiment
- Chandler and Reid (2016) in The Neoliberal Subject make the case that the neoliberal narrative is one
of a harsh, unforgiving world in which the individual must demonstrate ‘resilience’, ‘ability to adapt’.
- In addition, we must not spend time wasted on imagining the ‘other’
Colas has shown how the liberal was on humanity’s psychic power of imagination has effectively entailed
the will to pathologize all political utilizations of the imagination as fanatical and mad (Colas, 1997)’
(Chandler and Reid, 2016)
- Hence education and wider social policy is becoming inherently Social Darwinistic in nature
- Based on compliance, reductionism, resilience, quantification

5. Defining GERM
Characterised by Pasi Sahlberg as a new orthodoxy in education policy.
Main characteristics:
• Increased standardisation
• Narrowing of the curriculum to core subjects/knowledge
• Corporate management practices
• Growth of high stakes accountability
‘like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus.’ (Sahlberg, 2012)

6. Increased Standardisation
How does standardisation manifest itself?
- Teacher standards (an official view of the ‘teacher’, used for monitoring and promotion decisions)
- NPQH
- Ofsted

7. Narrowing of the curriculum to core subjects/knowledge
- Progress 8
- Loss of qualifications
- Examination only
- Narrowing of pedagogy (Rosenshine, direct instruction, CLT)
- Loss of breadth of subjects, e.g. D&T, music, art etc

8. Corporate management practices
- Ofsted
- New Public Management (use of corporate structures and approaches of management)
- MATs/CEOs
- Efficiency model of education
- Automated systems
- Edubusiness (e.g. Pearson)

9. Growth of high stakes accountability
- Ofsted
- League tables
- Performance Management
- Examination culture
- ‘Loss’ of difficult students

10. Underpinning Features of the Current System
- Driven by numeric data – both in terms of accountability and increasingly research (e.g. EEF)
- ‘Efficiency’ as opposed to ‘effectiveness’
- Driving out of professional autonomy whilst creating positive narratives – social acceleration
- Managerialist – overbearing and simplistic accountability structures
- Dividuation (Deleuze, 1991) – the human and their data separated
- Making the resilient positive – ‘teacher support networks’ – the ‘gilded cage ‘ of education
- Destruction of alternative voices – ‘smothering the imagination’
- Reductive ontologies – ‘best practice’, ‘outstanding lessons’ and business capital approaches (Hargreaves
and Fullan 2012)

11. Working With the Shadows
- We end up seeing the data more than the children
- We tell ourselves we can control the process through
creating lots of frameworks – a ‘Meccano’ approach to
education
- Education must become ‘efficient’ – current example
CLT – but to what end?
- Vocal denunciation of anything other than the ‘official’
narrative of education – in both formal and informal
spaces (seen Twitter lately?)
- We simplify, we describe ‘ideals’ to ourselves, we
reduce complexity in an attempt to control (and now
apparently just get rid of what we see as problems)
BUT HERE WE ARE WORKING WITH THE SHADOWS

12. Imagining Something Different
‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change.
When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend
on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our
basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to
keep them alive and available until the politically impossible
becomes the politically inevitable.’ (Milton Friedman)
- We need to voice our imaginations and create different futures
- We need to embody them where possible