Mairi Ann Cullen (University of Warwick), Gillean McCluskey (University of Edinburgh), Gale Macleod (University of Edinburgh), and Anne Pirrie (University of the West of Scotland) were recently invited to give a talk about their paper ‘Parents of excluded pupils: customers, partners, problems?’, for which they were awarded Educational Review’s Article of the Year Award 2013.
In this introduction to the seminar, the authors reflect on the importance of human relationships and emotions, and how these are undermined by a culture of accountability in higher education, schools and social work.
Following the completion of the research project (Outcomes for Excluded Pupils) on which Macleod et al (2012) draws, members of the research team have moved on to different projects, although we all continue to work in university education departments. In considering the topic for this invited seminar we realized that despite different directions of travel since the OEP project, the same core themes continue to arise in our research and in our practice as Higher Education professionals. As with the experiences of excluded pupils and their parents we find that human relationships are at the centre of work in education, in schools and in universities. We recognise the personal and particular as fundamental to being a teacher or lecturer, but we also identify that an accountability culture, (resulting from the demands of the ‘market’ to be able to make judgments about ‘quality’), actively undermines the possibility of those personal human relationships.
In the OEP project we found social workers spending more time writing up reports than dealing directly with the people who were the subject of those reports. Parents who did not go along with professional plans were seen as problems, arguably because they were demanding more from the service than the system could deliver. In Higher Education administration around QA processes has grown exponentially, and this seems unlikely to diminish given the recent Green paper. Academics find themselves in a straightjacket of administration rather than spending time in conversation and in community with students. We argue that these accountability systems, in Higher Education just as in social work and school education significantly alter the kinds of human relationships that are possible. How people are construed (partners, clients, customers, problems) shapes the nature and the quality of the work that we do.