Relationality tested? Neoliberal accountability in the Nursery

As a pervasive cultural orthodoxy, the neoliberal project exerts its power in early childhood education through intensified accountability. Such responsibility, or culpability, is borne not out of transparency for public funds but of ‘value for money’ economic determinism. Ranson (2003) argues that accountability is no longer an instrument of the system but ‘constitutes the system itself’ (p.459). This increased external accountability to regulators for young children’s progress has been, and continues to be, normalised through assessment policies. As a result, accountability via summative assessment (as well as through associated policies such as surveillance via inspection regimes) is presented, in policy, as a natural corollary of parental choice.

Institutional and therefore educator accountability is now an explicit policy driver. Policy technologies (for example assessment tools) are unequivocally motivated by holding schools and teachers to account for predetermined curricular outcomes. An example of this is the recent Baseline Assessment policy for Reception-aged children in England, justified in a broader accountability framework as having ‘two aims — to provide standard information to parents and to give a picture of school performance’ (DfE 2014).

Constructed, presented and naturalised as inevitable and desirable, such accountability creates tensions and dilemmas for educators. My research has focussed on one specific manifestation of neoliberalism in the form of accountability via baseline assessment policy and its impact on relationships in early childhood education spaces. As Moss (2014) contends,

In this totalising story [neoliberalism], private relationships do not escape the neoliberal gaze…These private relationships, too, are conceptualised in predominantly economic terms, foregrounding rational calculation and optimal returns. (p.64)

Whilst this scenario appears bleak, interview data from my research lead me to conclude that despite this increasing accountability which strains relationality, educators reconcile neoliberal policy expectations with relational pedagogy. The study drew on theories of care ethics (Noddings 2003) and relational pedagogy, which is defined in terms of a ‘relation, an obligation and the infinite attention which we owe to each other’ (Papatherodou and Moyles 2008 p.5). Participants from my study expressed cynical compliance with the baseline policy whilst also demonstrating motivational displacement and engrossment in their work with young children. Participants also articulated a desire to be more accountable to children and families rather than regulators.

Following a pause in the policy trajectory, a recent Government announcement (DfE 2017) has heralded the return of a limited and limiting baseline assessment regime. This proposal has been met with renewed consternation and a resistance movement is gathering from a number of quarters. As spaces for educator agency and autonomy appear to be threatened again in the name of external accountability, I am keen to explore whether the nurturing and articulation of relational pedagogy might provide an important counter-narrative.

Nathan Archer — University of Sheffield

References

Department for Education (2014) Reforming assessment and accountability for primary schools: Government response to consultation on primary school assessment and accountability. London, Department for Education

Department for Education (2017) Primary assessment in England Government consultation response London, Department for Education