Philip A Woods
Biographic Data
| ID | 306489 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip A Woods |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip A |
| FAMILY NAME | Woods |
| SIGNATURE | WOODS P A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hertfordshire |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5705-4910 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Autonomy, leadership and leadership development in England’s school system
The policy context for schools in England places great emphasis on leadership and autonomy as drivers of educational improvement. The purpose of this article is to explore how we can better understand, in this context, the challenges of leadership and autonomy and the conditions of leadership development that support or hinder the practice of ethical autonomy. The article summarises analyses of autonomy and the conditions affecting leadership pre…
Diverging systems of educational leadership in the four nations of the United Kingdom
This special edition of School Leadership and Management is published in 2021, a year which comes with renewed optimism but also considerable leadership challenges. It is an opportune time to revie
Constructions and purposes of school leadership in the UK
This article offers a comparative analysis and interpretation of leadership in the four UK education jurisdictions (Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland), informed by the articles in this special issue and by a project report, all outcomes of an initiative, ‘Educational Leadership, Management and Administration in the United Kingdom: A Comparative Review’, funded by the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society…
Theorising the value of collage in exploring educational leadership
This article contributes to theorising the value of collage as a methodological approach. It begins with a discussion of the methodological difficulties of exploring hidden meanings and individual experience through the research process. The illuminative potential of arts‐based methodologies in qualitative research is then investigated. The article makes the case for the specific advantages of using collage to explore the experience of leadership…
What is ‘policy’ and what is ‘policy response’? An illustrative study of the implementation of the Leadership Standards for Social Justice in Scotland
This article examines ‘policy’ and ‘policy response’ through documentary analysis and an illustrative study of policy implementation. Our approach is informed by Foucault’s (2009) theory that power relations in society are conditioned by a culturally generated set of ideas, and that these relations contain the space for both coercion and resistance. Our aim is to consider the potential for policy compliance and contestation by: (1) describing pol…
Democratic roots
This chapter seeks to argue that the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective on leadership should see itself as having a root in democratic values. It introduces the notion of "multiple distributions" of leadership and put forward an analytical framework based on this to help in framing critical investigations of leadership as a distributed and democratic phenomenon. Democratic practice from this perspective involves working subjectively and i…
School leadership for equity
Responding to Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer ‘analyses which provide more critical messages about social inequality and neoliberal and managerialist policies’ we use Foucault's [2000. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Power, edite…
Futures of university learning
Democracy and spiritual awareness
This article sets out theorisations of developmental democracy and spiritual awareness formulated in previous work by the authors. These are used to explore collegial leadership in a case study Steiner school, with the aim of illuminating and illustrating the transformative demands of developmental democracy and its interconnection with spiritual awareness. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for imbuing democratised education…
Academy schools and entrepreneurialism in education
The academy schools programme in England is presented by Government as the means by which increased diversity and private participation in the provision of public education can be used to solve educational and wider social problems. The entrepreneurial features of academy schools are examined, through a study of the sponsors and the ethos, values and specialisms of academies. Data on 58 academies (open or in development), gathered from secondary …
At the hard edge of change
The work presented here follows up the authors’ paper, in the previous issue of this journal, which (i) explored modernizing leadership in a public‐private partnership, principally from the perspective of the senior managers of a private company contracted to run school support services by a local education authority (LEA), and (ii) suggested that their leadership approach resembled what was termed an adaptive public service (APS) model. This sec…
Collaboration
This paper traces the trajectory of New Labour education policy since the formation of the first New Labour government in 1997. During that time the policy discourse has moved from a position of individualized school improvement through competition, to one where there is an emphasis on ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ as key mechanisms for improvement. We note, however, that ‘specialism’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are still key components of poli…
Modernizing leadership through private participation
What distinctive leadership changes does the private sector bring to the running of public sector educational services? This paper contributes to an understanding of the issues raised by this question by studying the senior management of a private company running services for an English local education authority. The paper explores evidence of modernizing leadership, as well as the extent to which a traditional public ethos is sustained or re‐int…
Building on Weber to Understand Governance
The paper builds up a conceptual picture of two types of governance - network and organic. In this process it highlights the legitimacies of co-ordination (interior authority and democracy) that lie outside Weber's typology of domination and are relatively neglected in governance literature. The exploration of interior authority, through discussion of identity and substantive liberty, reflects a perspective on human agency that acknowledges the i…
Raising School Performance in the League Tables (Part 2)
This is the second of two articles drawing from the Economic and Social Research Council‐funded Impact of Competition on Secondary Schools study. The first article reported quantitative data concerning the relationship between the rate of school improvement and degree of social disadvantage amongst school student communities. This article examines qualitative data from three case‐study schools in order to illuminate the barriers to responsiveness…
Raising School Performance in the League Tables (Part 1)
The article uses data from a longitudinal study of over 300 secondary schools to investigate differences in the rate at which schools improved General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination results over the period 1991‐98 and the reasons for such differences. Two variables found to have the most impact on examination improvement were a low concentration of social disadvantage relative to other local schools and starting from a low …
Policy on School Diversity
This paper develops a 'conceptual map' by which to chart contemporary developments in policy on school diversity. In part this has been prompted by the prospect in England of (private) Steiner schools becoming more closely involved in mainstream state-funded education. Whilst generated principally by policy developments within the UK, the conceptual thinking may also have wider applicability. We conceptualise diversity in the context of a differe…
Implementation of School Choice Policy
In England a restructured school system has been functioning throughout the 1990s. An integral aspect of this restructuring is the creation of a more competitive public‐market school system aimed at enhancing parental opportunities for choice amongst publicly‐funded schools. What has been the experience of the restructured system by one particular group of parents with specific needs and preferences, namely parents of students with special educat…
Values-intuitive rational action
This paper is concerned with the implications for conceptualizing social action which arise from a consideration of whether human beings are capable of knowing ultimate (universal, unconditionally valid) values. This issue is framed within the view that the validity of our understanding of social action is inextricably linked with the validity of our conception of humankind: the scope and variety of social action has potentialities and limitation…
Varieties and Themes in Producer Engagement
This paper analyses producer agency in the structural setting of the schools public-market. The initial focus for this analysis was the nature of competition, but, it is argued, the character of engagement with the public-market is better represented by inter-connecting and mutually influential modes of engagement (competitive, professional, bureaucratic, cultural) elaborated in the paper. These have been developed through analyses of headteacher…
School Choice, Markets and Special Educational Needs
Locating the debate within a policy framework of school choice and special educational needs (SEN) in England and Wales, the article investigates the ways in which schools competing within the educational marketplace perceive and respond to the needs of parents of SEN students, and considers the perspectives, experiences and values of these parents relating to school choice. In focusing in-depth on one case study area the article draws on the qua…
Spiritual Values in Education
This paper undertakes what might be described as an exploratory consideration of Steiner Waldorf education to see what light such an examination might throw upon and contribute to policy debates on spiritual education 1 1 This article is revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago, March 1997. . The paper seeks, through this, to further dialogue between Steiner Waldorf edu…
Market elements in a public service
In studying market‐orientated reforms in education, there is a need to explain and account for their impact.1 In this paper, we aim to provide a conceptual framework (the public‐market) applicable to educational policies that incorporate parental choice and school autonomy as important components of the provision of schooling. This offers, we suggest, a sociologically informed framework within which theorising about market‐orientated reforms can …
A strategic view of parent participation
Partnership and parental participation are terms which have featured frequently in discussions of educational matters in recent years. Their exact meaning and implications, however, are problematic. This paper seeks to move towards a strategic understanding of parental participation and in doing this addresses several themes: the concept of participation; contrasting perspectives on parental participation; the development of ‘welfare state’ ratio…
Academy schools and entrepreneurialism in education
The academy schools programme in England is presented by Government as the means by which increased diversity and private participation in the provision of public education can be used to solve educational and wider social problems. The entrepreneurial features of academy schools are examined, through a study of the sponsors and the ethos, values and specialisms of academies. Data on 58 academies (open or in development), gathered from secondary …
Raising School Performance in the League Tables (Part 1)
The article uses data from a longitudinal study of over 300 secondary schools to investigate differences in the rate at which schools improved General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination results over the period 1991‐98 and the reasons for such differences. Two variables found to have the most impact on examination improvement were a low concentration of social disadvantage relative to other local schools and starting from a low …
School Choice, Markets and Special Educational Needs
Locating the debate within a policy framework of school choice and special educational needs (SEN) in England and Wales, the article investigates the ways in which schools competing within the educational marketplace perceive and respond to the needs of parents of SEN students, and considers the perspectives, experiences and values of these parents relating to school choice. In focusing in-depth on one case study area the article draws on the qua…
Varieties and Themes in Producer Engagement
This paper analyses producer agency in the structural setting of the schools public-market. The initial focus for this analysis was the nature of competition, but, it is argued, the character of engagement with the public-market is better represented by inter-connecting and mutually influential modes of engagement (competitive, professional, bureaucratic, cultural) elaborated in the paper. These have been developed through analyses of headteacher…
A strategic view of parent participation
Partnership and parental participation are terms which have featured frequently in discussions of educational matters in recent years. Their exact meaning and implications, however, are problematic. This paper seeks to move towards a strategic understanding of parental participation and in doing this addresses several themes: the concept of participation; contrasting perspectives on parental participation; the development of ‘welfare state’ ratio…
Building on Weber to Understand Governance
The paper builds up a conceptual picture of two types of governance - network and organic. In this process it highlights the legitimacies of co-ordination (interior authority and democracy) that lie outside Weber's typology of domination and are relatively neglected in governance literature. The exploration of interior authority, through discussion of identity and substantive liberty, reflects a perspective on human agency that acknowledges the i…
Raising School Performance in the League Tables (Part 2)
This is the second of two articles drawing from the Economic and Social Research Council‐funded Impact of Competition on Secondary Schools study. The first article reported quantitative data concerning the relationship between the rate of school improvement and degree of social disadvantage amongst school student communities. This article examines qualitative data from three case‐study schools in order to illuminate the barriers to responsiveness…
School leadership for equity
Responding to Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer ‘analyses which provide more critical messages about social inequality and neoliberal and managerialist policies’ we use Foucault's [2000. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Power, edite…
Modernizing leadership through private participation
What distinctive leadership changes does the private sector bring to the running of public sector educational services? This paper contributes to an understanding of the issues raised by this question by studying the senior management of a private company running services for an English local education authority. The paper explores evidence of modernizing leadership, as well as the extent to which a traditional public ethos is sustained or re‐int…
Implementation of School Choice Policy
In England a restructured school system has been functioning throughout the 1990s. An integral aspect of this restructuring is the creation of a more competitive public‐market school system aimed at enhancing parental opportunities for choice amongst publicly‐funded schools. What has been the experience of the restructured system by one particular group of parents with specific needs and preferences, namely parents of students with special educat…
Theorising the value of collage in exploring educational leadership
This article contributes to theorising the value of collage as a methodological approach. It begins with a discussion of the methodological difficulties of exploring hidden meanings and individual experience through the research process. The illuminative potential of arts‐based methodologies in qualitative research is then investigated. The article makes the case for the specific advantages of using collage to explore the experience of leadership…
Futures of university learning
Values-intuitive rational action
This paper is concerned with the implications for conceptualizing social action which arise from a consideration of whether human beings are capable of knowing ultimate (universal, unconditionally valid) values. This issue is framed within the view that the validity of our understanding of social action is inextricably linked with the validity of our conception of humankind: the scope and variety of social action has potentialities and limitation…
At the hard edge of change
The work presented here follows up the authors’ paper, in the previous issue of this journal, which (i) explored modernizing leadership in a public‐private partnership, principally from the perspective of the senior managers of a private company contracted to run school support services by a local education authority (LEA), and (ii) suggested that their leadership approach resembled what was termed an adaptive public service (APS) model. This sec…
Collaboration
This paper traces the trajectory of New Labour education policy since the formation of the first New Labour government in 1997. During that time the policy discourse has moved from a position of individualized school improvement through competition, to one where there is an emphasis on ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ as key mechanisms for improvement. We note, however, that ‘specialism’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are still key components of poli…
Policy on School Diversity
This paper develops a 'conceptual map' by which to chart contemporary developments in policy on school diversity. In part this has been prompted by the prospect in England of (private) Steiner schools becoming more closely involved in mainstream state-funded education. Whilst generated principally by policy developments within the UK, the conceptual thinking may also have wider applicability. We conceptualise diversity in the context of a differe…
Market elements in a public service
In studying market‐orientated reforms in education, there is a need to explain and account for their impact.1 In this paper, we aim to provide a conceptual framework (the public‐market) applicable to educational policies that incorporate parental choice and school autonomy as important components of the provision of schooling. This offers, we suggest, a sociologically informed framework within which theorising about market‐orientated reforms can …
A strategic view of parent participation
Partnership and parental participation are terms which have featured frequently in discussions of educational matters in recent years. Their exact meaning and implications, however, are problematic. This paper seeks to move towards a strategic understanding of parental participation and in doing this addresses several themes: the concept of participation; contrasting perspectives on parental participation; the development of ‘welfare state’ ratio…
Market elements in a public service
In studying market‐orientated reforms in education, there is a need to explain and account for their impact.1 In this paper, we aim to provide a conceptual framework (the public‐market) applicable to educational policies that incorporate parental choice and school autonomy as important components of the provision of schooling. This offers, we suggest, a sociologically informed framework within which theorising about market‐orientated reforms can …
Spiritual Values in Education
This paper undertakes what might be described as an exploratory consideration of Steiner Waldorf education to see what light such an examination might throw upon and contribute to policy debates on spiritual education 1 1 This article is revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago, March 1997. . The paper seeks, through this, to further dialogue between Steiner Waldorf edu…
School Choice, Markets and Special Educational Needs
Locating the debate within a policy framework of school choice and special educational needs (SEN) in England and Wales, the article investigates the ways in which schools competing within the educational marketplace perceive and respond to the needs of parents of SEN students, and considers the perspectives, experiences and values of these parents relating to school choice. In focusing in-depth on one case study area the article draws on the qua…
Varieties and Themes in Producer Engagement
This paper analyses producer agency in the structural setting of the schools public-market. The initial focus for this analysis was the nature of competition, but, it is argued, the character of engagement with the public-market is better represented by inter-connecting and mutually influential modes of engagement (competitive, professional, bureaucratic, cultural) elaborated in the paper. These have been developed through analyses of headteacher…
Implementation of School Choice Policy
In England a restructured school system has been functioning throughout the 1990s. An integral aspect of this restructuring is the creation of a more competitive public‐market school system aimed at enhancing parental opportunities for choice amongst publicly‐funded schools. What has been the experience of the restructured system by one particular group of parents with specific needs and preferences, namely parents of students with special educat…
Values-intuitive rational action
This paper is concerned with the implications for conceptualizing social action which arise from a consideration of whether human beings are capable of knowing ultimate (universal, unconditionally valid) values. This issue is framed within the view that the validity of our understanding of social action is inextricably linked with the validity of our conception of humankind: the scope and variety of social action has potentialities and limitation…
Raising School Performance in the League Tables (Part 2)
This is the second of two articles drawing from the Economic and Social Research Council‐funded Impact of Competition on Secondary Schools study. The first article reported quantitative data concerning the relationship between the rate of school improvement and degree of social disadvantage amongst school student communities. This article examines qualitative data from three case‐study schools in order to illuminate the barriers to responsiveness…
Raising School Performance in the League Tables (Part 1)
The article uses data from a longitudinal study of over 300 secondary schools to investigate differences in the rate at which schools improved General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination results over the period 1991‐98 and the reasons for such differences. Two variables found to have the most impact on examination improvement were a low concentration of social disadvantage relative to other local schools and starting from a low …
Policy on School Diversity
This paper develops a 'conceptual map' by which to chart contemporary developments in policy on school diversity. In part this has been prompted by the prospect in England of (private) Steiner schools becoming more closely involved in mainstream state-funded education. Whilst generated principally by policy developments within the UK, the conceptual thinking may also have wider applicability. We conceptualise diversity in the context of a differe…
Building on Weber to Understand Governance
The paper builds up a conceptual picture of two types of governance - network and organic. In this process it highlights the legitimacies of co-ordination (interior authority and democracy) that lie outside Weber's typology of domination and are relatively neglected in governance literature. The exploration of interior authority, through discussion of identity and substantive liberty, reflects a perspective on human agency that acknowledges the i…
Modernizing leadership through private participation
What distinctive leadership changes does the private sector bring to the running of public sector educational services? This paper contributes to an understanding of the issues raised by this question by studying the senior management of a private company running services for an English local education authority. The paper explores evidence of modernizing leadership, as well as the extent to which a traditional public ethos is sustained or re‐int…
At the hard edge of change
The work presented here follows up the authors’ paper, in the previous issue of this journal, which (i) explored modernizing leadership in a public‐private partnership, principally from the perspective of the senior managers of a private company contracted to run school support services by a local education authority (LEA), and (ii) suggested that their leadership approach resembled what was termed an adaptive public service (APS) model. This sec…
Collaboration
This paper traces the trajectory of New Labour education policy since the formation of the first New Labour government in 1997. During that time the policy discourse has moved from a position of individualized school improvement through competition, to one where there is an emphasis on ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ as key mechanisms for improvement. We note, however, that ‘specialism’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are still key components of poli…
Academy schools and entrepreneurialism in education
The academy schools programme in England is presented by Government as the means by which increased diversity and private participation in the provision of public education can be used to solve educational and wider social problems. The entrepreneurial features of academy schools are examined, through a study of the sponsors and the ethos, values and specialisms of academies. Data on 58 academies (open or in development), gathered from secondary …
Democracy and spiritual awareness
This article sets out theorisations of developmental democracy and spiritual awareness formulated in previous work by the authors. These are used to explore collegial leadership in a case study Steiner school, with the aim of illuminating and illustrating the transformative demands of developmental democracy and its interconnection with spiritual awareness. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for imbuing democratised education…
Futures of university learning
School leadership for equity
Responding to Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer ‘analyses which provide more critical messages about social inequality and neoliberal and managerialist policies’ we use Foucault's [2000. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Power, edite…
What is ‘policy’ and what is ‘policy response’? An illustrative study of the implementation of the Leadership Standards for Social Justice in Scotland
This article examines ‘policy’ and ‘policy response’ through documentary analysis and an illustrative study of policy implementation. Our approach is informed by Foucault’s (2009) theory that power relations in society are conditioned by a culturally generated set of ideas, and that these relations contain the space for both coercion and resistance. Our aim is to consider the potential for policy compliance and contestation by: (1) describing pol…
Democratic roots
This chapter seeks to argue that the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective on leadership should see itself as having a root in democratic values. It introduces the notion of "multiple distributions" of leadership and put forward an analytical framework based on this to help in framing critical investigations of leadership as a distributed and democratic phenomenon. Democratic practice from this perspective involves working subjectively and i…
Theorising the value of collage in exploring educational leadership
This article contributes to theorising the value of collage as a methodological approach. It begins with a discussion of the methodological difficulties of exploring hidden meanings and individual experience through the research process. The illuminative potential of arts‐based methodologies in qualitative research is then investigated. The article makes the case for the specific advantages of using collage to explore the experience of leadership…
Autonomy, leadership and leadership development in England’s school system
The policy context for schools in England places great emphasis on leadership and autonomy as drivers of educational improvement. The purpose of this article is to explore how we can better understand, in this context, the challenges of leadership and autonomy and the conditions of leadership development that support or hinder the practice of ethical autonomy. The article summarises analyses of autonomy and the conditions affecting leadership pre…
Diverging systems of educational leadership in the four nations of the United Kingdom
This special edition of School Leadership and Management is published in 2021, a year which comes with renewed optimism but also considerable leadership challenges. It is an opportune time to revie
Constructions and purposes of school leadership in the UK
This article offers a comparative analysis and interpretation of leadership in the four UK education jurisdictions (Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland), informed by the articles in this special issue and by a project report, all outcomes of an initiative, ‘Educational Leadership, Management and Administration in the United Kingdom: A Comparative Review’, funded by the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Public relations (15 works) · Law (12 works) · Public Administration (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Pedagogy (8 works) · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works)