Gunter & Thomson JEAH - 10 Life in Mars - Headteachers Before The NCSL

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Life on Mars: headteachers before the

National College
a b
Helen M. Gunter & Patricia Thomson
a
School of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
b
School of Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Available online: 02 Aug 2010
To cite this article: Helen M. Gunter & Patricia Thomson (2010): Life on Mars: headteachers before
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Journal of Educational Administration and History
Vol. 42, No. 3, August 2010, 203–222
Life on Mars: headteachers before the National College

Helen M. Guntera* and Patricia Thomsonb
aSchool of Education, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; bSchool of
Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Journal
10.1080/00220620.2010.492963
CJEH_A_492963.sgm
0022-0620
Original
Taylor
302010
42
Professor
helen.gunter@manchester.ac.uk
000002010
and
&ofArticle
Francis
HelenGunter
Educational
(print)/1478-7431
Francis Administration
(online) and History
In the hit BBC TV drama Life on Mars Sam Tyler had an accident and
woke up in 1973. Is he mad, in a coma or actually back in time? As the
Downloaded by [Fac Psicologia/Biblioteca] at 11:12 05 April 2012
drama unfolds he experiences a world without performance audits but also

one without the safeguards for arrest, detention and the interviewing of
suspects mandated by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984). The
acclaimed series has led to flights of nostalgia, not least for a world in
which police could get on with ‘real policing’ without ‘unnecessary’
paperwork. In this article, we will metaphorically go back in time to
contemporary and historical practices of headship in English schools. If a
headteacher from 2009 were to wake up in 1973 what would they
understand about their work, what would be the same, what would be
different? What taken-for-granted current practices might get them into
trouble, what might frustrate them – and what might delight them that they
would bring back to the current job if they could? Mobilising Bourdieu’s
thinking tools, we will examine these questions through an analysis of
published and unpublished texts produced by heads about their work.
Keywords: headship; leadership; education policy; Bourdieu
Introduction
We intend drawing on cultural studies to generate perspectives about the
recent history of the field of educational leadership. Specifically, we will use
the phenomena of metaphorical time travel to examine professional life and
practice in England before the National College for School Leadership from
2000,1 and indeed before site-based management from 1988. 2 Time travel is
*Corresponding author. Email: helen.gunter@manchester.ac.uk
1The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) was set up in 2000 to provide
succession planning through training and accreditation of middle and senior leaders
and headteachers. The remit now includes Children’s Services with the new title:
National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services. The term
‘National College’ is being adopted as a shorthand descriptor and so we will use this
through the paper.
2The Education Reform Act of 1988 introduced site-based management where
schools took control of their budgets, could hire and fire staff, and were funded on
the basis of open enrolment of pupils.
ISSN 0022-0620 print/ISSN 1478-7431 online
© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2010.492963
http://www.informaworld.com
204 H.M. Gunter and P. Thomson
used by fiction writers as a means of making familiar contemporary events

appear strange, and requires the audience to suspend disbelief in order to
accept what is unfolding in front of them. 3 Recently, the BBC has used time
travel to entertain audiences (particularly those who lived through the 1970s)
to revisit the past through the police drama, Life on Mars,4 where in 2006
Detective Inspector Sam Tyler from the Greater Manchester Police Service is
hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. Despite being technically only four years
old, he finds himself still an adult Detective Inspector and, unsure whether he
is dead, in a coma or actually back in time, he gets on with job. The series
generated interesting insights into policing before the 1984 Police and Crimi-
nal Evidence Act (PACE), 5 and in particular raised issues about the control of
professional practice, accountability, and the meaning of public service.
In this paper, we will use the perspectives gained from time travel to ask
what a headteacher would experience if they, like Tyler, woke up in 1973 and
had to run a school – what would they recognise, what would be different,
what might they do that causes trouble, and what might they learn about their
role that they could bring back to 2010? This speaks to this themed issue by
examining major legal and policy changes through the experiences of those
who have lived through it, and by generating perspectives on the value of
history as an essential professional resource. We will draw on data about
headship from books written by heads 6 and about heads and the field 7 in order
to construct a story and analysis. This use of metaphor is not an eccentricity
on our part,8 and we have a track record in interplaying cultural studies with
field development and practice. 9
3For example, the long-running drama Dr Who depends on time travel as did the 1980
drama The Flipside of Dominick Hide, and its 1982 sequel Another Flip for Dominick
Hide, where a time traveller from 2130 goes beyond his remit to observe and so
generates complex tensions between his life, identity, and family in two time zones.
4Details of the series can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/lifeonmars/. The BBC series has
been sold internationally, and ABC in the USA has televised an American version.
5More details about this reform can be found at http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/
operational-policing/powers-pace-codes/pace-code-intro/.
6For example, C. Harold Barry and Fred Tye, Running a School (London: Temple
Smith, 1972).
7For example, R.S. Peters, ‘Introduction: The Contemporary Problem’, in The Role
of the Head, ed. R.S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 1–8.
8
For example, Michele A. Bowring, ‘Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain
Janeway from the Masculine–Feminine Dualism of Leadership’, Gender, Work and
Organization 11, no. 4 (2004): 381–405; Sharon D. Kruse and Sandra Spickard
Prettyman, ‘Women, Leadership and Power Revisiting the Wicked Witch of the
West’, Gender and Education 20, no. 5 (2008): 451–64.
9Helen M. Gunter, Rethinking Education: The Consequences of Jurassic
Management (London: Cassell, 1997); Helen M. Gunter and Patricia Thomson, ‘The
Makeover: A New Logic in Leadership Development in England?’, Educational
Review 61, no. 4 (2009): 469–83; Patricia Thomson, School Leadership, Heads on
the Block? (London: Routledge, 2009).
Journal of Educational Administration and History 205
Waking up in the 1970s

When Sam (Samuel or Samantha) as Headteacher wakes up in 1973 she/he
would be located in a time of major changes to schooling. Raising of the
School Leaving Age to 16 had just been introduced, and long-term, structural
change to the educational system was near completion:
By 1972 a total of 1591 of all secondary schools in England and Wales were
comprehensive, and contained over 36 per cent of the pupil population of the
relevant age group. By the academic year 1974–75, according to the Times
Educational Supplement survey of comprehensive reorganization in the 104
English and Welsh education authorities that resulted from the April 1974 revi-
sion of local government, ‘the proportion of children in comprehensive schools
is now 70 per cent’. Sixty-five of these authorities have between 70 and 100 per
cent of their secondary children in comprehensives. It comes as something of a

shock to realize that the comprehensive ‘experiment’, as some writers still term
it, has been going on for a quarter of a century.10
The switch from a mainly binary system 11 of schooling to one where all chil-
dren enjoyed the same kind of education was intended to produce greater
equity in the educational system. It had been both ‘bottom up and top down’
change, the latter based on ‘guidance’ and what ministers described as ‘persua-
sion’.12 Problematically schools in some areas had faced the uncertainty of
‘stop–go situations’13 as a result of party political differences impacting on
changes in local and national government policies. Comprehensivisation also
generated larger secondary schools, and the issue of size led to concerns over
identities and relationships amongst staff and students, 14 and this in turn
produced new management imperatives:
10Cyril Poster, School Decision-making (London: Heinemann, 1976), 147–8.

11The 1944 Education Act set up a tripartite structure of secondary schools:
grammar, technical and secondary modern schools. Chitty identifies that what
emerged was six grades or levels of schools ‘serving different classes or groups
within society’. The six are: (1) public schools or independent/fee paying; (2) direct
grant grammar schools which offered free places to children in return for a central
grant; (3) grammar schools based on the 11+ examination; (4) technical or trade
schools; (5) secondary modern schools for those who did not pass the 11+ or secure a
place at grammar school; (6) elementary schools which were abolished in 1944 but
which took 20 years to disappear. Clyde Chitty, Education Policy in Britain
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 20–1. The debate about the structure
of schooling focused mainly on the state system and the binary division between
grammar and secondary modern schools based on the 11+ examination as a means of
sorting children.
12
E.L. Edmonds, The First Headship (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 2.
13Poster, School Decision-making, 148.
14Elizabeth Richardson, The Teacher, the School and the Task of Management
(London: Heinemann, 1973).
As one of the consequences of comprehensive education reform was the creation

of large schools (in excess of 1,000 pupils) and the creation of schools on split
sites, the relevance of modern management practice to the efficient operation of
these new institutions could hardly be denied. The coordination of the activities
of large numbers of pupils and teachers; the scheduling of curricula programmes
and options; the pastoral care of pupils and the maintenance of good human
relations in schooling constituted an imperative for the introduction of manage-
rial systems and a managerial discourse in English secondary schooling. This
discourse began to normalize and legitimize concepts such as ‘the senior
management team’, ‘middle management’, ‘management by objectives’, ‘the
management of human relations’, etc.15
While this change began in a period that Kogan describes as expansion and
egalitarianism,16 a change of government in 1970 (when Conservatives took
over from Labour) together with the oil crisis in 1973 (OPEC put up the price
of a barrel of oil) meant that ‘from 1970 to 1974 the favourable climate
surrounding education came to an end’. 17 The consequences for the UK were
dramatic:
Inflation rates were among the highest in the developed world. Unemployment
was at levels unknown since the Second World War. There was a decline in real
wages and standards of living. The political response to these circumstances
(which has tended to be in practice, if not in rhetoric, bipartisan) was effectively
two-fold. On the one hand, emergency measures had to be taken to prevent the
situation getting worse. On the other hand, policies had to be introduced, at all
levels, to ensure that it could not happen again. Education was not immune from
either of these thrusts. As part of the defensive strategy, it had to take its share
of the cuts along with all the other social services. Not only this, but there was
no guarantee that such cuts would ever be restored entirely, since the escape
strategy appeared to require a shift of resources from wealth-consuming to
wealth-producing sectors of society. The message for education was clear in
outline, if not in detail: it called for much more effective implementation of the
human capital policy which had been supposed to maintain the white heat of the
technological revolution. It had not … a major, and politically unwelcome,
consequence of the ‘licensed autonomy’ of the education system had been made
clear, and the political will to bring the system under closer control had been
established.18
15
Gerald Grace, School Leadership: Beyond Educational Management (London: The
Falmer Press, 1995), 35.
16Maurice Kogan, Educational Policy-making: A Study of Interest Groups and
Parliament (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975).
17Ibid., 38.
18Roger Dale, The State and Education Policy (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University
Press, 1989), 131.
Dale argues that while the economic (and political) crisis of the 1970s
produced a further change imperative for education, the way in which change
was implemented was not fixed but dependent on political choices.
A further change of government occurred in 1974 back to Labour but this
gave way to the Thatcher regime in 1979. This was a time when neoliberal
ideas and practices about the modernisation of government and the public
services took root. Within the Conservatives there were those who promoted
the market, not least through vouchers to enable parents to purchase education,
and there were those who wanted to preserve elements of the state system,
through, for example, grammar schools and the 11+. This tension remains
evident in Conservative Party policy, and is central to understanding the 1988
Education Reform Act that simultaneously decentralised budgets and staffing
to schools but simultaneously centralised the curriculum. The Labour Party

relinquished power in 1979 divided by debates between those committed to
state education through the comprehensive school reform through to more
radical neo-marxist elements. As Chitty, in drawing on Marquand’s analysis
argues, these approaches did not give the answer to the collapse of Keynesian
economics, but in the struggle over political control it was neoliberalism that
came to dominate from 1979. 19
The role of the state in public services was clearly fracturing by the early
1970s. Incremental changes were both material and symbolic – Labour cut
free milk for secondary school children in 1968, and the Conservatives,
famously ‘milk snatcher Thatcher’, removed it for primary school children in
1971, with savings of £9 million a year. Dramatic debates took place about the
purposes of education and its relationship to economic development. This was
a time of challenges to authority in public services, with the rise of student
power in the 1960s together with increased demands for more democratic
processes in how schools were organised and managed. 20 However, at the
same time there were increasing concerns over standards and performance
exemplified by the William Tyndale London primary school ‘scandal’ in 1975
where the head had famously said that he ‘didn’t give a damn about parents’.
The ‘Black Papers’21 railed against progressive education where ‘at primary
school some teachers are taking to extreme the belief that children must not be
told anything, but must find out for themselves’. 22 Jim Callaghan’s Ruskin
College Oxford Speech in October 1976 launched a Great Debate on
Education arguing that teachers ‘must satisfy the parents and industry that
19Chitty, Education Policy in Britain.

20Richardson, The Teacher, the School.
21
C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson, eds., Fight for Education (London: The Critical
Quarterly Society, 1968); C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson, eds., Black Paper Two
(London: The Critical Quarterly Society, 1969).
22
Cox and Dyson, Fight for Education, 1.
what you are doing meets their requirements and the needs of the children. 23
As Hall, Mackay, and Morgan note, government shifted from dealing with
matters of ‘provision’ and ‘access’ to the content of the curriculum with
questions about quality and performance. 24
Within this setting Sam would experience an education system not only
facing financial cuts due to economic and political crisis, but also some serious
questioning, particularly from the Right, about professional practice and
control. The emergence and dominance of neoliberalism from 1979 under both
Conservative and subsequent Labour governments is a way of thinking and
working that Sam from 2009 would understand and be familiar with. In the
remainder of the paper we focus directly on what these changes meant for
designated school leaders.
Being a headteacher and doing headship

The resources that headteachers are currently encouraged to read are mainly
from government sources, where there is an emphasis on functional delivery
and compliance.25 Our argument is that historical sources are a valuable and
necessary resource for professional thinking, practice and identity. An exami-
nation of headship in the 1970s and 1980s could take place through examin-
ing: (1) descriptive of the work of heads and the school; 26 (2) exploratory
accounts with debates about the role of and possible developments in head-
ship;27 (3) conceptual analysis with new understandings of what that role
means;28 and, (4) prescriptive texts with accounts of how to do the job 29 and
how to do it better, particularly in taking on a managerial approach. 30 Notably
all the headteacher authors we have been able to track down are male, and
while many of them identify that ‘he’ might be problematic in the writing of
texts, they continue to use it along with the title ‘Headmaster’. 31
23Jim Callaghan, ‘Towards a National Debate’ (1976), http://education.guardian.co.

uk/print/0,3858, 4277858-109002,00.html (accessed June 22, 2009).
24Valerie Hall, Hugh Mackay, and Colin Morgan, Headteachers at Work (Milton
Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986), 1.
25Carlo Raffo and Helen M. Gunter, ‘Leading Schools to Promote Social Inclusion:
Developing a Conceptual Framework for Analysing Research, Policy and Practice’,
Journal of Education Policy 23, no. 4 (2008): 363–80; Helen M. Gunter and Tanya
Fitzgerald, ‘The Future of Leadership Research’, School Leadership and
Management 28, no. 3 (2008): 263–80.
26Geoff Lyons, The Administrative Tasks of Head and Senior Teachers in Large
Secondary Schools (Bristol: University of Bristol, 1974).
27Bryan Allen, ed., Headship in the 1970s (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 88–109.
28Meredydd Hughes, ‘The Role of the Secondary School Head’ (PhD thesis,
University of Wales, 1972).
29For example, Edmonds, First Headship.
30For example, Barry and Tye, Running a School; Poster, School Decision-making.
31
See Edmonds, First Headship, ix.
The role of the headteacher is described by Edmonds in the following way:
A newly appointed Headmaster … has to create at once trust in his judgement

at all levels and in all quarters of the school and the community it serves. He
needs the power to establish and to maintain good human relationships, far
beyond the traditional context of teacher and taught. He has to have a natural
intuitiveness for walking in faith not only with staff and pupils but with a whole
hierarchy of lay committees, of which the most immediate is his Managing or
Governing Board. He must also be able to carry with him in his decisions the
parents of his children and the good wishes of the local community. He will find
he has to have the capacity too to accept frustration, to bear with necessities few
of which can be ‘turned to glorious gain’. No system of training can give a
potential Head these qualities, still less measure them; though they are qualities
incidentally that Heads have always possessed in abundance in this country.32
So primarily the job of a headteacher is both personal and political, in the

sense of building up relationships with a diverse range of people and institu-
tions. The literatures about and by headteachers show how policy changes had
impacted on the job. For example, Barry and Tye state:
Many secondary schools have become large and complex organizations. They
are subject to increasing pressures, and they operate in circumstances of contin-
uous change, which is not only rapid in itself but is constantly accelerated by the
nation’s deliberate investment in innovation. The time is past when a secondary
school could discharge its duty to children, to parents and to society by passing
on received knowledge and accepted codes and practices. In this situation, it is
essential, we suggest, for secondary schools to reassess their purposes: to
question what it is that they are trying to do, and to decide how best to do it with
the resources they have available.33
At this time and within this context the role of the headteacher became a
matter of formal academic study and debate, with former headteacher Hughes
undertaking his PhD studies generated a framework and language that still
resonates today.34 Hughes makes a distinction between the headteacher with a
‘leading professional’ role as a teacher and with the ‘chief executive’ role
serving as a link with external agencies. 35 The interplay between these two –
the head as teacher having respect for the professional community to which
they belong, and the head as an executive decision-maker – is central to the
32
Ibid., vii–viii.
33Barry and Tye, Running a School, 1.
34Hughes, Secondary School Head.
35
Meredydd Hughes, ed., Administering Education: International Challenge
(London: The Athlone Press, 1975); Meredydd Hughes, ‘The Professional-as-
administrator: The Case of the Secondary School Head’, in The Role of the Head, ed.
R.S.Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 50–62; Meredydd Hughes,
‘Leadership in Professionally Staffed Organisations’, in Managing Education, the
System and the Institution, ed. M. Hughes, P. Ribbins, and H. Thomas (London:
Cassell, 1985), 262–90.
debates at the time. The emphasis was put increasingly on the executive role
in order that the head is seen to be and is in practice a manager of both strategy
and change.36
The debate about the role of the headteacher raises a number of interesting
issues for a twenty-first-century Sam to consider.
Firstly, the role was seen by both policymakers and scholars of the time as
located in nineteenth-century assumptions and practices, which had to be
revised in the light of changed circumstances, but there was debate over
whether authority needed to be located in the single person as headteacher.
The headteacher was seen as someone who should not be directed in how to
run the school, particularly from outside the school. 37 However, Watts identi-
fies the emerging tensions between decentralisation with teachers taking over
without a head, and centralising forces in the form of the Local Authority
taking over control.38 Watts goes on to argue that heads and teachers need to
work together on issues of power-sharing otherwise they might find power
taken away. The general consensus in the literatures at the time was the need
for a system of authority in the form of the head, but the question as put by
Peters was whether the role holder was to be paternalistic or managerial or if
another conceptualisation could be developed. 39
The word and processes that dominate the literatures is management. The
case is made in a range of texts that headteachers need to be managers practis-
ing strategic thinking. The head as professional remains a prime focus of
identity, but management provides the tools to enable heads to work better in
a changing world. Interestingly, the word leadership features very little at the
time and if it does then it is dropped in as a part of headship and management,
but not as a separate or more important process. For Bernbaum historically it
is moral leadership by the headteacher in regard to boys’ character formation
or religious belief that mattered. 40 For both Poster and Edmonds leadership is
about relationships with staff, 41 with Poster noting personal styles, and in that
sense it is a ‘leadership-quality’ with connections to charisma and personal
style.42 Baron argues that leadership is delegated: ‘the Head should be
concerned with instrumental leadership; that is, with the achievement of the
purposes of the school; the Deputy Head should be concerned with group
36See Barry and Tye, Running a School.
37Edward Boyle, ‘Preface’, in Headship in the 1970s, ed. Bryan Allen (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1968), vii–xii.
38John Watts, ‘Sharing it Out: The Role of the Head in Participatory Government’, in
The Role of the Head, ed. R.S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976),
127–36.
39Peters, Role of the Head.
40G. Bernbaum, ‘The Role of the Head’, in The Role of the Head, ed. R.S. Peters
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 9–36.
41Poster, School Decision-making; Edmonds, First Headship.
42Ronald King, ‘The Head Teacher and His Authority’, in Headship in the 1970s, ed.
Bryan Allen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1968), 105.
maintenance and with ensuring stability, continuity and equilibrium’. 43 Poster

goes on to show that leadership is ‘a shared responsibility’ 44 amongst and
between staff. Perhaps Richardson best articulates what this word meant at the
time when she describes leadership as a ‘boundary function’ 45 where authority
could be exercised in regard to the individual, the group or the outside world.
Interestingly, leadership is summed up in a few sentences which suggest that
it is not only a feature of those with formal authority, but also that all those
who have professional responsibilities must also exercise leadership:
An essential part of leadership is therefore to seek understanding of the interplay

between rational and irrational forces and, through that growing understanding,
to use the authority that has been invested in the leadership role to help those to
whom one owes leadership. It is not the designated leader only who has to exer-
cise authority. All responsible persons must do so. To use authority responsibly
is inherent in the problem of being human.46
Secondly, if headteachers are to continue in their role then there ought to be

an emphasis on their professional preparation, including formal training. It was
argued47 that experience was no longer good enough to support headteacher
work. Interestingly, at this time there was a range of emerging headteacher
training provision with short courses, masters and the entry of government into
training from 1967. The investigation of the role of the headteacher and
debates about the type of provision were carried on through partnerships
between Heads, Higher Education Institutes, Local Authorities and Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate. Illustrative of this is Barry and Tye’s description of
The Manchester University Project in the Organisation and Administration of
Secondary Schools where they describe a Department of Education and
Science-funded teacher and research project (1 October 1967 to 31 December
1970) designed to consult on and construct in-service training for headteach-
ers.48 (See also Taylor who gives a brief description of a course in June and
July 1966 entitled Headship in the Secondary School. 49) Such networking
between practitioners, policymakers and researchers is illustrative of the
founding of the British Education Administration Society (BEAS) in 1971,
where the emphasis was on the field and its membership being as inclusive as
43George Baron, ‘An Overview’, in Headship in the 1970s, ed. Bryan Allen (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1968), 5.
44
Poster, School Decision-making, 6.
45Richardson, The Teacher, the School, 36.
46Ibid., 36.
47
For example, Meredydd Hughes, ed., Secondary School Administration (Oxford:
Pergamon Press. 1970); William Taylor, ‘The Head as Manager: Some Criticisms’,
in The Role of the Head, ed. R.S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976),
37–49.
48Barry and Tye, Running a School.
49William Taylor, ‘Training the Head’, in Headship in the 1970s, ed. Bryan Allen
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 150–2.
possible.50 While the idea of a college had already been mooted, 51 it was
regional initiatives that were developing such as the North West Educational
Management Centre at Padgate College of Education. 52
Thirdly, the methods used for headteacher preparation were practice-based
solutions such as simulation games and case studies. 53 Links with the wider
international educational management field had enabled access to practice-
based and participatory learning processes that encouraged headteachers to
examine their practice through scenarios, along with meeting relevant theory
and in particular insights from sociology, 54 and increasingly organisation
theory. Importantly, Baron and Taylor had enabled the field to have access to
a range of social science theories that could enrich headteacher understandings
of the theoretical base of professional practice. 55 There are clear messages in
these literatures that headteachers should not be told what to do or how to

think, but to learn about their approach to headship through the interplay
between experiential learning and access to theory. Michael Marland in his
Foreword to Poster talks about the Heinemann Organization in Schools Series
which: ‘aims to strengthen practice with theory and to enliven theory with
practice, above all to be useful’. 56 ‘Usefulness’ is grounded in how the head-
teacher has access to ideas and to opportunities to talk and think things
through. Texts emphasise that solutions cannot and should not be given: ‘there
is no single ‘“right” way, but from the experience of the growth of comprehen-
sive schools a great deal can be learnt to help on-going schools adjust and
improve their management patterns and to help newly reorganized schools set
up theirs’.57 What seemed to be emerging at this time was a view that headship
was something that could be trained for, with claims made that headteachers
could learn to develop and use management processes (e.g. management by
objectives, how to lead change). 58 But there were also those concerned that
without the social sciences an emphasis on narrow management could lead to
an illiberal education.59
50Helen M. Gunter, ‘An Intellectual History of the Field of Education Management

from 1960’ (PhD thesis, Keele University, 1999).
51Hughes, Secondary School Administration.
52
Barry and Tye, Running a School.
53William Taylor, Heading for Change (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
54Barry and Tye, Running a School, includes a bibliography on the sociology of
education.
55George Baron and William Taylor, eds., Educational Administration and the Social
Sciences (London: The Athlone Press, 1969).
56
Poster, School Decision-making, vii.
57Ibid., see Foreword by Michael Marland.
59
Taylor, ‘Head as Manager’.
Waking up to headship in 1973

So if Sam woke up in 1973 how might this situation be read? It is probably a
truism that Sam would be in agreement with Colgate who as headteacher states
that ‘perhaps the most important problem of all which faces a head is how to
arrive at school with a smile, keep it all day, still have it when he [sic] gets
home and then sleep soundly when he [sic] goes to bed at night’.60
Sam would essentially recognise the basics of the system, not least because
the buildings and classrooms could well be the same (and even if the buildings
post date 1973 the technology of schooling without ICT could be very evident
in 2010). A system of comprehensive education with the remnants of grammar
schools in some places would be very familiar and the antecedents of the
current system would be evident for Sam in ways that those at the time might
not have recognised. Reading the 1970s debates about standards and perfor-
mance, and the unease about the control over the curriculum by teachers in
ways that seemed to exclude parents and employers, is also something that
Sam would understand. The outcome of this debate in the late 1960s and into
the 1970s, in the form of site-based management from 1988 and site-based
performance leadership from the 1990s, is what has produced Sam as a local
leader of centrally determined reforms.
In 2009 Sam is part of a world where the school is a small business, with
targets, audits, and bidding, and where there is differentiation in the market
place through league tables and through the authorisation of new types of
schools, e.g. specialist schools. But in 1973 Sam would be working in an
education system rather than a quasi market, they would be working with
teachers as co-professionals who are seen as experts in their subjects rather
than as deliverers of curriculum products, and they would be working with a
diverse workforce in terms of roles (bursar, student services, site manager)
rather than with mainly teachers and some support staff (known as non-
teaching staff).61 While the 1970s headteacher largely remains a creature of the
nineteenth-century in post-war England, it is the case that debates were long
established about their relationship with other staff and certainly about the need
for heads. This is a debate that has been silenced in 2010 by the shift in head-
teacher identity as the local leader of national reforms, where the current rhet-
oric is of effective leaders and leadership rather than about heads and headship.
Sam would have had a training experience that would not be understood in
the pluralist and collaborative world of the early 1970s. And yet the claims
made about leadership in Sam’s world 62 are something that would be known
60H.A. Colgate, ‘The Role of the Secondary Head’, in The Role of the Head, ed. R.S.
Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 125.
61
These are of course contested notions today, but we refer here to dominant policy
discourses at the time.
62Ken Leithwood, Christopher Day, Pam Sammons, Alma Harris, and David Hopkins,
Seven Strong Claims about Successful Leadership (Nottingham: NCSL, 2006).
about in relation to headship and teachership in 1973. 63 The difference is that

teachers and headteachers in 1973 had access to the ‘ologies’ (sociology,
psychology) that enabled them to challenge, debate and reject the knowledge
claims generated and communicated – they could for example have engaged
in such knowledge challenges with the National College in 2010. Fellow heads
in 1973 would be interested in the idea of the National College but we suspect
that many would regard their positioning within and by it as essentially
undermining of their professional role and some would argue that in directing
teaching and learning it is essentially illiberal.
Sam from 2010 would know what it means to be positioned by New
Labour as a deliverer of national change based on a clear model of preferred
practice that is performance audited. In this sense heads are, in Bourdieu’s 64
terms, directly located within the field of power, where their professional
dispositions have been structured through national licensing and risk manage-
ment.65 As we have recently argued, twenty-first-century headteachers have
had a makeover in their professional persona, language, body and sense of
purpose.66 If Sam was relocated to 1973 where headship is equated with
professional/educational practice and dispositions, they might need to change
some of their contemporary ways of being and doing. If they chose to transfer
their 2010 responsibilities to 1973 – expectations about performance-related
pay; workforce management in regard to the role of support staff in relation to
teaching, learning and pastoral services; data generation, management and use
in student outcome management – they might find they are variously met with
excitement, bewilderment or hostility. On the other hand, Sam might quite like
having time and the mandate to focus on the curriculum, designing what
children learn and how they are taught by working with staff as a leading
professional (though we might ask if they have the knowledge and skills
necessary to do this).
Sam might like the lack of everyday interference from Whitehall, the lack
of serial initiatives, and they might like the lack of competition. But they might
find the control of the Local Authority on matters that site-based management
brought under the remit of the school and governing body very much like a
strait-jacket. (Having said this the current reconstruction of local co-ordinating
and directing structures by the back door through federations, all-through
schools, and Academy chains, has reawakened the idea that strategic direction
and administration can be a collective local or regional activity separate from
the actual site of teaching and learning.) So Sam might find life before the
demands of site-based management interesting and enabling of teaching and
64Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
65
Helen M. Gunter and Gillian Forrester, ‘Institutionalised Governance: The Case of
the National College for School Leadership’, International Journal of Public
Administration 32, no. 5 (2009), 349–69.
66
Gunter and Thomson, ‘Makeover’.
learning. They might also like the focus in the early 1970s on radical change
with the emphasis on equity issues and social justice that were evident in the
comprehensive schools. Indeed they would be able to see for themselves
comprehensive education as distinct from the images conjured up by New
Labour’s derisive ‘bog standard’ labelling. They might take with them to 1973
an emphasis on student voice that could, on the one hand, speak to the demo-
cratic issues being debated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they would
recognise the limits on this from within the profession and also from parents.
A caveat on time travel

Sam cannot of course be representative of all heads, and therefore how they
read the 1973 situation and recognise what is going on (or misrecognise how
their reading of the world is located in context 67) is related to how their
specific headship identity has been constructed. Current heads may well have
been trained before the Thatcher reforms which shifted the emphasis away
from Initial Teacher Education to Initial Teacher Training, and certainly
current heads need not have been involved in National College training
programmes. So Sam, depending on when they entered the profession and
when they became a head, may have had their headship dispositions shaped
and structured at different times. Heads’ knowledge and expertise is not homo-
geneous, as those trained before the Thatcher reforms have a higher chance of
being research literate and so may have some ethnographic skills in relation to
how to observe.
Work by Gunter and Forrester 68 shows that while current heads are posi-
tioned to deliver reforms, headteachers do examine this positioning and many
seek to position themselves differently in the ‘game in play’. 69 They identify
three main positions in relation to New Labour:
(1) the Educational Agenda Setters who have resisted the New Labour
delivery ‘habitus’.70 They would find 1973 very congenial and
enabling of their educational values and philosophies, they would
understand and relish the curriculum responsibilities as a means of
furthering their social activism;
67Bourdieu, In Other Words.

68See Gillian Forrester and Helen M. Gunter, ‘School Leaders: Meeting the
Challenge of Change’, in Radical Reforms: Public Policy and a Decade of
Educational Reform, ed. Christopher Chapman and Helen M. Gunter (London:
Routledge, 2009), 67–79; Helen M. Gunter and Gillian Forrester, ‘Education Reform
and School Leadership’, in The Public Sector Leadership Challenge, ed. Stephen
Brookes and Keith Grint (London: Palgrave, 2009).
69Bourdieu, In Other Words.
70
Ibid.
(2) the Ambivalent Implementers from today would find relief in 1973
through the removal of the presumed need to do as they are told by
government, though some might miss the sense of being officially
recognised as doing a good job; and,
(3) the Reform Agenda Deliverers who have committed to the New Labour
policy strategy would miss being involved and ‘listened to’, and may
find the opportunity to lead the school in regard to teaching and learning
(as distinct from performance leadership) rather difficult.
Thus, for example, we would expect that heads such as Clark, McNulty, and
Stubbs,71 who have been acclaimed and written about how they have turned
around failing schools, would read 1973 differently from, e.g. Winkley who
talks about the need to understand the philosophy of educational purposes. 72
While Stubbs would find the emphasis on children and their learning along
with the autocratic tradition in headship in 1973 agreeable, she would find the
respect for the professional status and expertise of teachers as colleagues
different, as her account of ‘turning round’ St Georges illustrates the New
Labour strategy of sorting teachers into who-is-in-the-tent-and-with-us, and
who-is-outside-as-the-enemies. 73
Learning from Life on Mars

Historical study is not currently a part of formal training for teachers or head-
teachers, indeed, it has a fusty, unmodern image. The contemporary rhetoric is
about the future (e.g. ‘Future Leaders’, ‘A Curriculum for the Future’ and
‘Building Schools for the Future’) where the past is a place not to visit, it is
full of mistakes, inefficient practices, and unacceptable dispositions. A future
good is posited as the binary other of a uniformly bad past. This construction
neglects the ways in which both the past and the future are always being made
in and as the present – not only the past, but all three are always with us. Our
argument is that access to accounts from both then and now – about ideas,
debates and choices about enduring issues within teaching and learning – is an
essential resource for educational professionals to draw on. Such accounts
provide resources for meaning making – knowledge, perspectives and a sense
of roots regarding what is being built on and what is a dramatic break with the
past, and why. They speak to headship as necessary intellectual work that
71Peter Clark, Back from the Brink (London: Metro Books, 1998); Phil McNulty,
Extreme Headship (Victoria, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2005); Marie Stubbs,
Ahead of the Class (London: John Murray 2003).
72David Winkley, Handsworth Revolution, The Odyssey of a School (London: Giles
de la Mare Publishers, 2002).
73For an account of how New Labour sorted people as in and outside the tent, see
Peter Hyman, 1 Out of 10: From Downing Street Vision to Classroom Reality
(London: Vintage, 2005).
provokes questions and troubles solutions, and is therefore distinctive from the
delivery and measurement imperatives. We would like to develop the case for
this by discussing learning at two levels: first, what might be learned directly
from the ‘Sam’ experience; and second, what might be learned about the
society in which education is constructed and practised.
What Sam could bring back with them from 1970s to inform the present is:
first, a sense of professional identity in regard to teachers expertise and subject
knowledge; second, a direct input by the profession into curriculum design and
development; third, the emphasis on the professional preparation of head-
teachers rather than just training; and fourth, a collaborative approach to
working on educational issues and the role of headship in a changing world.
They would in turn be able to alert the profession to some emerging issues that
those immersed in living at the time might not have recognised (though Taylor
in his 1976 writing did74), namely
● how the 1970s emphasis on management and in particular how training

in business management created a way of thinking and working that
downgraded the educational aspects of headship;
● how the attack on teachers from the Right together with the growth in
neoliberal cultures and practices created a climate in which regulation
and control was wrestled from the profession damaging the right to claim
a defendable model of professional practice; and,
● how the need to reform public services was constructed around the state
as the problem, particularly in relation to the economic crisis, and teachers
who demanded more resources to improve education were characterised
as profligate with the taxpayers’ money, and this in turn created a modern-
isation imperative involving the removal of public-sector bureaucrats who
were deemed to be self-serving and hell-bent on preserving their privi-
leges. Hence what logically followed was the construction of a ‘quality’
discourse around standards, performance, and teachers’ work, which
escalated from Thatcher onwards as the (only) means of disciplining
education, and this produced the target-driven performance culture that
heads today have to lead on, and do leadership about.
The consequences of these shifts are now deeply embedded within our modern
experience of the ongoing challenges to the status of teaching as a graduate
profession, to the removal of Qualified Teacher Status as a requirement to be
a head, to the deployment of teaching assistants into teaching, learning and
assessment work, and the emphasis on generic effective leadership (as distinct
from educational leadership, see Gunter and Forrester 75).
74Taylor, ‘Head as Manager’.

75Helen M. Gunter and Gillian Forrester, ‘New Labour and School Leadership
1997–2007’, British Journal of Educational Studies 55, no. 2 (2008): 144–62.
This links to the bigger issues of the interplay between hierarchy with rules,
roles and procedures through public institutions such as government, local
government and schools with markets requiring and espousing flexibility,
pragmatism and ‘can do’ dispositions through private interests, consultants
and companies identifying and designing products, delighting the customer,
and securing contractual negotiations and delivery. Sam’s time travel shows
how the relationship between hierarchy and markets has dominated the
imaginary and imagining of schools, society and the profession for the past
50 years. It also implicitly demonstrates that this is unlikely to be fully
resolved or even settled for a period of time, particularly because it illuminates
important strategic issues about the conduct of publicly paid employees, the
role of the professional and professionalism, and how accountability can
operate regarding the status of expertise with the wider views and demands of
the public.
Sam’s 1970s world was not, of course, one to which we could unthinkingly
return. Some of the professional practices used were those which they would
reject as discriminatory and unjust. For example, Sam Tyler’s DCI, Gene
Hunt76 introduces his rules of modern policing for 1973 as:
Sit down, shut up and pay attention. The powers that be – recognising a genius
copper when they see one – have asked me to lay down the basic rules I teach
my division to keep the soft sacks out of trouble and on the ball. Modern polic-
ing is a tricky business and it takes more than they teach you at plod school to
do the job. It’s dangerous. Being a copper these days is like brushing a lion’s
teeth with your tadger … risky and only for those with balls of steel. Like me.
So read … learn … and, if you’re lucky, some of it might brush off.77
This was a time before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE, 1984)
when the rules of arrest and detention were changed. Consequently, Hunt’s
‘rules’ are not ones that today would be accepted, not only in relation to how
members of the public identified as ‘scum’ are treated but also how women
and ethnic groups experience policing. Tyler describes Hunt as an ‘over-
weight, over-the-hill, nicotine stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a
superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding’. 78 The
arrival of Tyler, along with various plot lines that generate questions about
police methods, generates perspectives about what he sees, experiences and
understands. Tyler is from a time where police practice is described and laid
down in ways to make what happens at an arrest through to charging or release
open and transparent. The evidence base for what happens has to be completed
76Gene Hunt, The Rules of Modern Policing, 1973 Edition (London: Bantam Press,
2007); Gene Hunt, The Future of Modern Policing, 1981 Edition (London: Bantam
Press, 2008).
77Hunt, Modern Policing, 1973 Edition, 7.
78Wikipedia, ‘Sam Tyler’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Tyler (accessed
February 25, 2009).
and logged, with targets and performance management. This makes police
procedure much more open to scrutiny and challenge by its ‘clients’.
Life on Mars has generated some interesting perspectives, particularly how
we understand our modern world through the device of time travel. Nostalgia
has not only focused on dress, makeup, hair and taste in interior design, but
has enabled us to ask questions about our working lives. There are two aspects
of this that we would like to give attention to: first, that it has generated ques-
tions about teamwork and what it means. Is the anodyne process-orientated
teams that the management field promoted from the 1970s enabling educa-
tional professionals to work in ways that we like, or has Life on Mars opened
up questions about roles, job descriptions and targets: ‘In a world of short-term
contracts, job insecurity and portfolio careers, Hunt’s undying loyalty to his
squad (even while rabidly insulting them) makes us wishful for a time gone by
when you had a job (and colleagues) for life’. 79 Consequently, Sam may read
1973 as being a place without performance management, and ask if it is a
better or worse place because of that.
Second, while legislation gives rights (not least protection and redress of
grievance) this may not change attitudes and practice. While the Equal Pay
Act 1970, Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and the Race Relations Act 1976 all
brought significant legal rights and redress of grievance, there is evidence that
actual practice still falls far short of the law, not least in relation to employ-
ment,80 and where the enquiry in to police practice over the death of Stephen
Lawrence81 identified the endurance of institutionalised racism. It seems that
Life on Mars has re-generated the very attitudes that have continued to sustain
oppression, strangely that Gene Hunt is an acceptable sex symbol, where the
message is communicated by the media that women do want to be badly
treated:
our love affair with Gene Hunt is, I think, a reflection of the uneasy feelings
many thirtysomething women have about their lives. We don’t have to put up
with the narrow-minded attitudes and blatent sexism that WDC Cartwright
experienced. We have choices – and that’s the problem. Once you have choice,
you are responsible for what you do with your life – and we find ourselves
constantly wondering if we are doing the right thing? Choosing the right job?
Living in the right town? Single or married? Having children or not? Life would
be so much easier if we had Gene Hunt yelling at us go and ‘detect me’ a
garibaldi, or to stop complaining that your gun doesn’t go with your dress. There
would be no anxiety over what we were doing. You’d have no choice and you’d
79Glenda Cooper, ‘Why Women Love DCI Hunt’, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/features/3632103/Why-women-love-DCI-Hunt.html (accessed February 25,
2009).
80Olwen Namara, Andrew Fryer, Helen M. Gunter, and John Howson, Gender in
Leadership. Report to the NASUWT (Birmingham: NASUWT, 2010).
81Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death at a bus stop in Eltham, South London in
1993. Enquiries have revealed problems with the policy enquiry. For more detail see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/feb/23/lawrence.ukcrime9.
do as you were told. Perhaps that’s the real guilty secret about our love for Hunt.
It’s not the men who are unreconstructed. It’s the women watching it.82
Consequently Sam would enter a world where the law seeks to remove ineq-
uity but actual real life lags unevenly behind. More worryingly it could well
be that such a journey in time might open up for Sam issues that society might
have thought it had settled. While Samuel would wake up in a man’s world in
relation to the social and economic structures and cultural mores of the time,
he would wake up in a different man’s world to the one he inhabits today.
Samantha would wake up in a particular type of man’s world, and she would
experience the discrimination that research has continued to demonstrate
exists in the modern school as a workplace. While more women reach
headship in 2010, it remains the case that Samantha will face some of the same
types of discrimination now as she would have done in 1973. What is interest-
ing is that it seems likely that many of the Samanthas and Samuels in 2010
might accept Gene Hunt as a funny, tolerable sex symbol, so continue to
misrecognise their role in oppressive practices. So if we were to write a paper
focusing on time travel the other way round, where Gene Hunt comes to 2010,
then while we might recognise the challenges of a 1973 Sam waking up in
2010, the Life on Mars genre begs the question as to whether Gene Hunt can
survive the 1984 PACE. Certainly the sequel, Ashes to Ashes, shows that he is
increasingly a person out of his time, as he faces the pressures of performativ-
ity. However, the media responses to Gene Hunt show that his ways of
working and attitudes may no longer be covert but are alive and well in our
culture. This raises questions about social and political change, and the
interplay between legitimate lawful regulation and the actual practices that are
evident in everyday working lives.
Summary
In this paper we have used time travel as a device to present a view of educa-
tion before the National College with its formal training programmes and
mandated accreditation. The field of educational administration as it was
known then was vibrant with debates about headship, and those debates
included heads, local authorities, researchers and politicians. We have gone
back to examine what was. However, in the series Life on Mars, Sam also
wakes up and returns to the present with changed knowledge of the past. We
would argue that headteachers need this knowledge of contemporary history
in order to enable them to be in control of their professional practice and
identity development.
How we understand such issues as this can unfold through reference points
within our wider culture. Heads and other educational professionals, as well as
82
Cooper, ‘Why Women Love DCI Hunt’.
the wider public, can gain understandings and generate perspectives from
drama. We are not the first to say this, but we recognise that currently profes-
sional development has sterility about it based on the urgency reform, rather
than the imaginations and ways of learning of those involved. For example,
Thomson has shown the risky business of headship in modern times, not least
the issue of who wants to do headship and how this matter might be thought
about through contrasting Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts in the Harry
Potter books and films with Dolores Umbridge who is parachuted in to turn
the school around through ‘a new era of openness, effectiveness and account-
ability’.83 Thomson argues:
In the Dumbledore and Umbridge context lurks a familiar present-day construct

– leadership good, management/managerialism bad. The leadership mantra is
one which dominates contemporary school systems and their training provi-
sions. However, heads are not only expected to lead but also to ‘deliver’, that is
also manage, government policy. In fact, today’s headteachers must meet a
range of leadership and management expectations – their own, that of parents
and students and that of their employer. Some of those expectations are embed-
ded in job advertisements, as are shades on both Dumbledore, and Umbridge.84
What we have here is recognition that current headship is a construction based

on personal philosophies, long-established expectations and assumptions, and
requirements of the day (as a head of comprehensive school in 1973 or an
academy in 2010). The complex nature of this and how it is read by those at
the time or later, can be further understood by knowing about and knowing
why, rather than just knowing what to do to implement change.
Our final point is that this paper is open to misreading with possible claims
of too much unscholarly nostalgia, where as academics disconnected from
school practice we are merely entertaining ourselves. We recognise that histor-
ical study, as this paper has illuminated, can be problematic, it can give a false
impression that what worked before can work again. We want to emphasise
that we certainly do not want school leadership by the dead. We are not seek-
ing to celebrate or return to the past, even if we thought that were possible,
which it is not. We are using a fictional device about such a return to think
differently about now and the future. This is an illustration of what we think
needs to happen in leadership education. Rehabilitating historical and cultural
perspectives will, we suggest, provide an invaluable addition to the leadership
repertoire regarding what is known, and what is worth knowing to developing
teaching and learning. Our argument is that historical knowledge and debates
are a productive way of enriching the intellectual resources that educational
professionals can draw on. We recognise that while we have kept our
historical journey in this paper reasonably simple, there are a range of
83Thomson, School Leadership, 47.

84
Ibid., 48.
potential histories (e.g. feminist, post-colonial, post-modern) which would

further add to knowledge production about and for professional practice. We
maintain that, without systematically produced and interrogated historical
perspectives, the opportunities available for aspirant and serving leaders to
examine their purposes, identities, professional practices and readings of
contemporary reform narratives, will be diminished.
Notes on contributors
Helen M. Gunter is Professor of Education Policy in the School of Education, Univer-
sity of Manchester, UK.
Patricia Thomson is Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of

Nottingham, UK.

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Life on Mars: headteachers before the

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Life on Mars: headteachers before the National College

drama unfolds he experiences a world without performance audits but also

used by fiction writers as a means of making familiar contemporary events

Waking up in the 1970s

cent of their secondary children in comprehensives. It comes as something of a

10Cyril Poster, School Decision-making (London: Heinemann, 1976), 147–8.

As one of the consequences of comprehensive education reform was the creation

to schools but simultaneously centralised the curriculum. The Labour Party

19Chitty, Education Policy in Britain.

Being a headteacher and doing headship

23Jim Callaghan, ‘Towards a National Debate’ (1976), http://education.guardian.co.

The role of the headteacher is described by Edmonds in the following way:

A newly appointed Headmaster … has to create at once trust in his judgement

So primarily the job of a headteacher is both personal and political, in the

maintenance and with ensuring stability, continuity and equilibrium’. 43 Poster

An essential part of leadership is therefore to seek understanding of the interplay

Secondly, if headteachers are to continue in their role then there ought to be

these literatures that headteachers should not be told what to do or how to

50Helen M. Gunter, ‘An Intellectual History of the Field of Education Management

Waking up to headship in 1973

about in relation to headship and teachership in 1973. 63 The difference is that

A caveat on time travel

67Bourdieu, In Other Words.

Learning from Life on Mars

● how the 1970s emphasis on management and in particular how training

74Taylor, ‘Head as Manager’.

In the Dumbledore and Umbridge context lurks a familiar present-day construct

What we have here is recognition that current headship is a construction based

83Thomson, School Leadership, 47.

potential histories (e.g. feminist, post-colonial, post-modern) which would

Patricia Thomson is Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of

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