Corporate schooling and decorative metrics: the iconography of academy school chains in England

The continuation of neo-liberalism requires concerted effort. Political consent is constructed through practices of enforced cultural socialisation, the mobilisations of which obfuscate other realities. David Harvey describes this process as the construction of consent. The common sense encouraged by English academy schools is the result of the mobilisation legitimated by teaching and learning practices through a hegemony of attainment metrics. These metrics construct a neo-liberal pupil habitus and contextualise schooling within technological rationalism. The capture of state schooling and its disaggregation by economic elites, it is argued, reflects a continuing project to maintain lifestyles and privilege within a political order that has served it, and the government involved, handsomely. As neo-liberal institutions, academy schools, it is argued, inculcate dispositions favouring corporate and bio-political economic productivity. Academy schools’ web sites and Freedom of Information request data about academy school meetings are utilised to support the argument of the paper.