Nationally and internationally, the leadership and organisation of education have altered significantly through the provision of market technologies and rationalities in the form of competition, choice or performativity, and managerialism (Gunter et al., 2016). At an organisational level, technocracy is privileged concurrently with the hollowing out of traditional stakeholder school governance models to make way for private management takeover of public entities (Verger and Curran, 2016).  In England, these trends are illustrated by the rise of academy trusts, akin to Friskolor in Sweden (Simkins et al., 2019): publicly funded legal entities controlled by boards of trustees with discretion over strategy and finance. Furthermore, the professionalisation of school governance, perfecting technologies of rational self-management (Wilkins, 2019a), alongside the marketisation of education, promulgated by successive national Governments, have placed democratic principles, empowerment and participation, secondary to market principles.  Thus, creating a democratic deficit, with a focus on skill-over-stake (Allen, 2018). The active removal of stakeholders denigrates localism and its voice (Simkins and Woods, 2014).  These policy changes disadvantage social groups, such as parents or community members of low socioeconomic status, women and non-white Others (Hetherington and Forrester, forthcoming).  While academy trusts operate independently of local government, in England, expansion, and acquisition opportunities, for example, are determined by their performance and subsequent, position in a notional hierarchy (Hetherington and Forster, 2023). Therefore, corporatised entities, such as schools nationally and internationally, have strong incentives to model themselves in the image of businesses to maximize precision governance. This includes limiting the practice of deliberative democracy by restricting who gets to perform and engage in governance (Hetherington and Forester, 2023).  However, some schools do maintain a commitment to both technical-managerial and democratic priorities owing to their sponsorship model and develop tensions and contestation in achieving both (Wilkins, 2019b).

Those restricting access to governance, to secure brand advantage, are referred to by Puwar (2001:652) as the somatic norm.   The somatic norm is “the corporeal imagination of power as naturalised in the body of white, male, upper/middle-class bodies”; naturalised in the neoliberal inculcation of institutional leadership with power, knowledge, and capability.  With an embodied somatic norm model of educational leadership, comes expectations of civility and social norms. The standards of civility are set by the somatic norm, which also determines breaches or not, of the bounds of civility, by those who engage in practices (Calhoun, 2015), such as governance.  For powerless or excluded groups, the disenfranchised, such as women, refugees, those who are from an ethnic minority or whose first language is not English or who are from a low socio-economic group, the bounds of civility are founded on a ‘contract’ whether that be racial (Puwar, 2001) or gendered (Caravantes and Lombardo, 2024), which has demarcated spaces for those corporealities. For Puwar (2001) and others, there are choices, to remain silent with the burden of invisibility or incivility. 

In this research, complex issues are empirically and conceptually explored through an investigation of the Co-operative Academies Trust (CAT), an edu-business sponsored by the Co-op Group, with a specific focus on how democracy is performed, transformed, and translated in the power dynamic between governance and the parent body as participants in decision-making.  The CAT is legally bound by its sponsor to adhere to international values of co-operativism (ICA, 2020), including a commitment to democracy.  Conceptually, political theories demonstrate how power is configured within these relations to privilege certain positions and discourses over others.

The research is significant internationally, given the tension between the neoliberal imperative and the democratic deficit associated with governance currently (Hardin, 2014), and the concurrent tension with democratic practices associated with co-operative values (Wilkins, 2019b).

This research adopted a socially critical perspective. Significantly, challenging the power dynamics within social structures, such as governance, the role of parents in governance and the type of democracy that is evidenced in this role. Furthermore, the research challenges the distribution of power and resource (Raffo et al, 2010), through voice and the lived experiences of individuals, families and communities (Boronski and Hassan, 2015). For a socially critical paradigm, the most appropriate methodological choice is a critical ethno-case study (Parker-Jenkins, 2016; Kincheloe and McLaren, 2000). The exploration of the CAT model and the engagement and role of parent stakeholders as decision-makers, or agents of consequence, within a Co-operative Academy in an area of high deprivation in England, is an instrumental case (Punch, 2014). The generalisability of the atypical produces conceptualising generalisability (Yin, 2014): new concepts as a consequence of analysis, or by developing propositions, that allow for future research and become the output of the research (Punch 2014; Bryman, 2012; Basit, 2010). The case study known as ‘City Academy’ maintains its criticality by focusing on the power relationship between the organisation and its stakeholders. Ethnographic/case study methods were employed in the triangulation of a documentary review of the organisation’s documentation (Atkinson and Coffey, 2011), specifically; the CAT website, strategic plan, governance policy, including the scheme of delegation, the Articles of Association and funding agreement, with semi-structured interviews and a focus group (Bryman, 2012) of 5 parents from the Parent Forum. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the director of the trust, the principal, the chair of governors, and 3 parent governors. Purposive sampling of those involved in semi-structured interviews provided a “typical” insight (Flick, 2020) to capture participants’ voice. However, sampling for the focus group was opportunistic. Verbatim transcription of interviews was completed (Mauthner and Doucet, 1998). Data were coded and processed using NVivo software (Jackson and Bazeley, 2019). A priori codes were initially identified from the research questions and first data readings, for example, ‘parent’, and ‘democratic events’. Subsequent emerging analytical codes were identified from more in-depth analysis, such as ‘decision-making’ or ‘deliberation’. Staffordshire University’s ethical principles and the guidelines of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) (2018) were adhered to; ethical approval was granted for the study. Bourdieu’s social field theory was further utilised to provide a second-layer analysis of the power dynamic between governing body members and parents participating in potentially democratic opportunities, formally or informally.

Considering the Euro-prevalence of both neoliberal regimes (Grimaldi et al, 2016) and educational leadership models based on the somatic norm (Hetherington and Forrester, forthcoming), this research is of both national and international significance. Parent representatives are typically not representative of the wider community. The Local Governing Body (LGB) is raced and classed in multiple ways, (Kulz, 2021; Reay et al., 2007); policy implementation is particularly impactful on social groups such as parents or community members of low socioeconomic status, women and non-white Others. Furthermore, the perception of deliberative democracy from parent representatives tends to be overshadowed by an accepted illusion of democracy, achieved with engineered consent (Locatelli, 2020). Significantly, ‘anti-democratic’ practices emerge as a system of norms relating to structural, agentic, moral and political expectations of civil behaviour, or a ‘civilising’ process, reinforcing the somatic norms’ power and positionality. Ultimately, civilising and establishing the bounds of civility, the somatic norm renders the activities in the public space as gendered, raced and racialised; it is exclusionary in democratic terms. Furthermore, parents are ‘silenced’ when not conforming to privileged speech patterns (Curato et al., 2017) and prohibited from further deliberation. Finally, neoliberal school governance is unscathed, despite espoused commitments to values of co-operatvism and democracy, through the strategic co-option of carefully selected ‘trusted’ parent governors who privilege technocracy and upward accountability. It is contested that the revisioning of school governance to embrace a non-gendered, non- classed and non-racialised deliberative democratic system could be established, with individuals subject to proposed policy not expected to follow with blind deference but have secured access to mutual justification (Lafont, 2021). Upholding co-operative values, nationally and internationally, in deliberative democratic systems, through municipalism foundations (Caravantes and Lombardo, 2024) has the potential to challenge the control of educational leadership under new post-neoliberal sponsorship models.

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