Across Europe, rural schooling and its varied bundles of practices, are recognised as an educational irritant for contemporary governments and policymakers focussed on national education administration (Hargreaves et al. 2020).  The longstanding assumption that there are many advantages to be gained from enrolling children in standardised school systems continues to justify ‘the imposition of urban models on rural education’ (Hargreaves 2020:7). This perpetuates the rejection of ways to conceive of schooling that offer alternatives to the monograde, standardised one-style fits all system. Schools in remote locations with sparce populations have invariably fallen short of the metrocentric ideal and are subject to policy interventions. This most likely means closure, causing losses to pupils, families and local communities.  For clarification, in the UK, the small school as an organisational term remains under defined: with sources generally identifying them as having fewer than 100 students.

Through documentary analysis we examine the case of small primary schools in rural England with the aim of drawing parallels with other European small schools. We adopt a thematic framing for our documentary analyses when we explore the two focal documents published by the Department for Education in 2019 on small schools.  Our frame builds on the dimensions outlined by Harrison and Busher who proposed that debates concerning small schools, specifically those in England, are summed up under three dimensions: ‘curriculum, culture and cost’ (1995:386). The first addresses teaching and learning while the second, culture, relates to contributions to communities and values added, in-place. The third considers longstanding challenges of financial and management viability for maintaining small schools.

Curriculum is evident in ongoing debates surrounding teaching and learning in small schools. It is recognised that today there are challenges with regard to staffing and leadership and maintaining levels of professional development for staff so as to meet performance metrics. The curriculum content itself has been extensively debated in respect of the capacities of small schools that are invariably staffed with limited numbers of teachers, but, nonetheless, are required to deliver curricula to nationally established school standards that ignore in-place circumstances. That is, an absence of multigrade teaching from initial teacher education programmes, as well as insufficient continuing professional training, invariably mean staff face difficult situations when they encounter small schools, specifically early in their careers (Fargas-Malet and Bagley 2022). Turning to culture, the small school is invariably located in a village and might contribute to community cohesion (Hillyard, 2020). For example, the Church of England continues to oversee many very small schools and their ethos helps sustain the community.

Financial cost relates closely to the ongoing restructuring of regional government (local authority) involvement in small schools and central government asserting control of education. with policy determining this through the formation of, for example, academies dating back to the 1980s.  Solstad and Andrews (2020) reflecting on such changes have noted the ubiquitous impacts on small schools of neoliberalism and new public managerialism, along with the strong influence of supra-national organisations.

All three dimensions are key considerations for shedding light on how small schools have been treated by central government, namely, how this ‘problematic’ sector has been managed by policymakers (Kučerová et al, 2020). In England this started with the formalising of education in 1944 and can be traced through the extensive neo-liberal reforms over the last 40 years. Whether, and if so, how small schools continue to operate has been shaped through interventions by different governments since the taken for granted notion of provision in large, centrally located schools was deemed the favoured approach to quality schooling  (Sigsworth and Solstad, 2005).

The practices of effectively running small schools, specified in the focal documents for this study, relates to the practical and interpretive processes impacting upon this specific sector of schools, namely, how the range of stakeholders ( individuals and organizations) make sense of the policy world for education. The situated knowledges, subjectivities, context-based ideas about ‘effectiveness’ in education, as well as the historical policy trajectory for small schools, encourage our adoption of critical analyses of selected texts. We deploy a structural discourse-analytic framework approach (Jones and McBeth, 2010) for text-based examination of narrative: context, characters and storyline. This elicits perspectives regarding the problem of weak/ineffective running of small schools and the solutions that are promoted by the Department of Education. We surface some potential alternative solutions that are sidelined or downplayed (Gee and Handford, 2013), specifically those absent in the shorter document i.e. the Research Brief. We engage with the documentary evidence i.e. the two papers outlined below in order to develop a robust account, initially describing what is presented using the three themes identified in the extant literatures: curriculum, culture and cost. Subsequently, we show how everyday realities for small schools are the effects of structures and embedded agendas within the education sector in England. Two of the few public facing papers published the Department for Education (DfE) directly concerning small schools are analysed. The first of the two related documents is the Brief issued under the title ‘Running small rural primary schools efficiently’ Research Brief, March 2019. This Brief draws out sections of the much more comprehensive Report on the fieldwork carried out in a selection of small schools by commissioned consultants: ’Running rural primary schools efficiently’, Research Report by Aldaba, March 2019. Both documents share the same headline title and are branded by the DfE. It is the extraction from the extensive Report, to compose the Brief, that motivates this analysis: what has been included/excluded, how is the Brief orientated, what is revealed about the dispositions towards dimensions of curriculum, community and cost. While these texts have many apparent similarities and are at first glance, about securing small school efficiency, our analyses reveal substantial differences. Through juxtaposing the two papers, we explore contemporary policy agendas regarding what is deemed appropriate interventions to address the perennial policy problem of small schools.

Analyses so far confirm that, as expected, the Research Brief is short while the full Research Report has 96 pages. The schools in the study are listed, with nine described as standalone (local authority maintained schools and single academy trusts) and twelve as members of multi-academy trusts (MATs) (Male, 2022). The Research Report outlines the fieldwork findings under four sections. The considerations of managing budgets to cover expenditures and accounting for finances are placed foremost in ‘Section 1’. This responds to the high level of financial strain under which some smaller sized schools operate. The remaining sections often refer back to the financial challenges and potential limitations this can have regarding the thematic strands of curriculum: staff recruitment, training/ retention and quality teaching and learning. Each of the four sections concludes with suggestions for improving practice based on the evidence gathered. Turning to the Research Brief, the condensed findings are presented as an overview. Subsequently, the two Brief sections are entitled: ‘Benefits for small rural primary schools of joining a MAT’ (pages 5 -7) and ‘Challenges facing MATs’ (page 8). The promotion of the multi-academy trust (MAT) as beneficial to small schools that are not already members of a MAT is the clear message emerging from our first readings of the Brief. Ongoing consideration of the two papers will shed light on the negative stance taken towards those primary schools that remain local authority maintained or in single academy trusts. We aim to critique the enthusiastic promotion of the MAT as the only present-day solution. The era of closing down village schools without consultation may have waned, but questions remain as to whether membership of a MAT is the way to avoid the loss of the small local primary school. .

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