Framing academies

: an investigation into the cultural framing of academisation in the public imagination through the lens of popular media representations

Abstract

In September 2010 Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, introduced the Academies Act. This was part of the Conservative educational manifesto to extend the powers of City Academies programme to ‘free’ more local authority schools. Academisation disrupted the British educational landscape by creating a new hybrid model of education, positioned in the blurred boundaries of traditional local authority maintained schools, and private fee paying schools. Thus began a new language and common sense way of thinking about a culture of academisation and the disarticulation of educational governance. Research into academisation has generated interest in recent years with many studies focussing on the impact of academies policies. This thesis offers a new perspective and insight of academies and academisation as well as contributing an analysis and new understanding into the cultural framing of academisation in the public imagination. Grounded in the theoretical and conceptional works of Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson, and Raymond Williams, I mobilised their understanding and approaches to representation, culture, and ideology as a mean to study the framing which has existed in popular media since 2010. Methodologically, I situated this thesis in a qualitative post-structuralist paradigm, employing thematic analysis as the means to study media representations. The data was collected across from print, online, broadcast, and social media over a ten-year period. Findings suggest that popular media have contributed to the development of political and ideological narratives and mobilised representations of academisation which have support an educational commonsense. These educational commonsenses also mobilised moral panics and played into the imagined fear of audiences in an attempt to reinforce dominant hegemonic narratives. Over the last decade, there have been four distinct periods that political representations of academisation have fed into a wider common sense way of thinking the role of the academies programme in society. In the culture of everyday life, popular media have presented different ways of thinking about what academisation means. Narratives and representations have been normalised as part of the cultural framing which exists.

Date of Award	11 Jan 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Sponsors	University of Roehampton Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship
Supervisor	Lorella Terzi (Director of Studies), Sarah O'Flynn (Co-Supervisor) & Debbie Epstein (Co-Supervisor)