Across Europe, education policies are exposed to the growing influence of a managerial rationale that has gradually penetrated public services since the 1970s (Gunter et al., 2016; Bezes, 2009). France is part of this movement (law of April 23, 2005), committing the “modernization” of the French school system to make better use of its autonomy in order to be more efficient and competitive in international assessments (Pons, 2010). While the new public management approach seems to have taken root in some education systems -such as those in Anglo-Saxon countries, its principles, standards and tools have only partially entered the French public education system (Frajerman, 2019). How then is the managerial condition characterized in the French system? How are French managerial logics and methods transforming the work -both prescribed and real- of those who have to run schools? How are they changing their professional identities, both ascribed and experienced?

The aim of our research is to study the management functions performed by “management staff” in French schools, more specifically headteachers and their deputies. We plan to describe and explain both the current institutional definition of headteachers' work (1) and their implementation in the field (2). The present contribution will deal with the first dimension.

If we look at the scientific literature on school management, the representation of headteachers as leaders in secondary schools is well integrated by the literature, whether from the point of view of their role in “driving change” (Attarça and Chomienne, 2014), their culture (Buisson-Fenet, 2015), their sociological profile (Cacouault and Combaz, 2007), or the day-to-day challenges of the function (Barrère, 2013; Richard, 2023). Some authors emphasise that the new public management has led to a shift in the professionalism of headteachers towards decision-making skills (Barrère, 2006, 21), which can be a source of tension, particularly with the teaching team (Attarça and Chomienne, 2014; Richard, 2023).

By contrast, the way in which headteachers are trained to run a school remains a blind spot in research. Yet the question of developing the managerial skills of these staff is the subject of particular concern on the part of the French state. In its 2022-2027 Strategic Plan, the graduate school in charge of training these staff (called in French “Institut des Hautes Études de l’Éducation et de la Formation”) emphasizes the “strategic role of managerial staff in the context of the transformation of public educational action” and their “educational leadership”. According to this graduate school, headteachers have to drive cultural change in favor of “participative management”, which implies a different organization of work, based on delegation and empowerment.

Our presentation will focus on the professionalization of headteachers, by studying how they are trained to educational leadership. On an international scale, several research groups have conducted studies on the impact and reception of New Public Management in different school contexts (like Gunter et al., 2016). Then, the study of the French case is considered as a mean of initiating collaborations with some of these teams for comparative purposes.

As a category constituted in the private sector (Peters, 2019), “leadership” refers to issues and values far from public school culture. How does it work in this particular context ? What discourses and rationales support it (participative management, work around indicators and so on) ? Which stakeholders are involved? Our aim is to identify the arguments that support the rhetoric of educational leadership and how it is disseminated in the prescribed work of management staff (heads and deputies). This study has led to a number of research initiatives: * a study of the regulatory texts governing the profession; * a study of the most recent jury reports from external recruitment competitions, to objectivize professional expectations in terms of educational leadership; * a study of their initial and continuing training: study of training models, observations of training courses; interviews with trainers and trainees.

Based on our observations and interviews, we will show to what extent and how headteachers are trained to apply neo-managerial logics, with particular emphasis on leadership training. In particular, leadership training for deputy headteachers can be considered from two points of view. -Firstly, in line with the individualistic trend of New Public Management, the aim is to train them to become school leaders (which involves learning a code of self-presentation, acquiring a language and repertoires of action, and building symbolic boundaries with other professional groups - first and foremost with the teachers from whom most of them come). -However, observations also show that, contrary to the logic of horizontal management, being a “good” deputy requires learning to recognize and to respect the professional hierarchies that help maintain institutional order. Consequently, training deputies is a way of observing the new clothes of institutional domination which, under the guise of change, actually contributes to reproducing the inequalities that are so structural in the French school system. Lastly, this field experience places the field survey itself within relations of institutional and gender domination. We will describe their force and effects on the data collected.

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