This paper provides contemporary analysis of England as an extreme case of neoliberal educational accountability, illustrating the tensions identified in the overview abstract. It focuses on the contradictory workings of current measures to extinguish low academic performance related to poverty. While documenting regulatory systems, it include qualitative testimonies from teachers, parents and students (eg Beckett ed. 2014) on the effects of these regimes. The policy problem is largely presented as closing ‘the attainment gap’ based on a binary indicator of poverty according to the proxy criterion of free school meal entitlement. We draw on analyses by Ladson-Billings (2006) showing cumulative opportunity gaps across generations; and examine data indicating a more appropriate sliding scale of dis/advantage rather than a simple binary, suggesting a need to measure relationally the privileges of economic and cultural capitals as well as indicators of disadvantage. Furthermore, UK data shows that socioeconomic differences, including parental qualifications and occupation, impact on their children into and beyond university (Crawford et al 2016) School “effectiveness” is measured through a combination of absolute targets i.e. a minimum permitted ‘floor’, and relative progress (‘value-added’), with severe consequences including privatisation. Schools serving poorer populations are immediately targeted, and attempts to provide fair measures of ‘value added’ have repeatedly failed (Perry 2016; Wrigley and Wormald 2016; Thomson 2017). Tensions are identified between derogatory images of benefit claimants (Jones 2011) used to delegitimise welfare spending, and expectations placed on children in poverty to aspire to the most prestigious universities (Wilshaw 2016). The contribution of neoconservative ideologies to ongoing neoliberal reform includes traditionalist curriculum reform privileging decontextualised canonical knowledge (Wrigley 2015) and increasing selection (overt and covert). This combines with curriculum standardisation and ‘datafication’ (Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury 2016) to eclipse student identity and damage relationships. Despite claims that such curriculum reform will assist social mobility, we argue that it is destructive of poorer children’s self-esteem and sets them up to fail. Within an extremely divided society, the ‘social mobility’ discourse serves as a diversion from economic realities, and the attempt to avoid referring to poverty or class serves to limit professional agency to resist. We suggest that this situation imposes a contradictory stance on critics of this policy regime, requiring that teachers should both strive to improve students’ qualifications and opportunities and reject the blame for unequal outcomes.

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