Andrew W Wilkins
Andrew W. Wilkins PhD, FHEA is Reader in Education, UoA Lead for REF 2029, Department Ethics Lead and Head of BA Education in the Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Research interests in policy, technology and governance with a focus on education and governmentality perspectives.
Invited speaker at major events in Europe, Asia and Australasia.
Co-Editor in Chief of Journal of Education Policy.
Assessor for Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), Australian Research Council (ARC) and UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Member of the Sub-Panel of Education in the 2026 Periodic Assessment of Research, Development, Artistic and other Creative Activities, Slovakia.
Fellow of Advance HE, UK.
Convenor of Education Policy Futures (EPF) webinar series.
Research interests in policy, technology and governance with a focus on education and governmentality perspectives.
Invited speaker at major events in Europe, Asia and Australasia.
Co-Editor in Chief of Journal of Education Policy.
Assessor for Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), Australian Research Council (ARC) and UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Member of the Sub-Panel of Education in the 2026 Periodic Assessment of Research, Development, Artistic and other Creative Activities, Slovakia.
Fellow of Advance HE, UK.
Convenor of Education Policy Futures (EPF) webinar series.
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Books by Andrew W Wilkins
Wilkins, A. and Olmedo, A. (eds). 2018. Education governance and social theory: Interdisciplinary approaches to research. Bloomsbury: London
Available to buy in paperback: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/education-governance-and-social-theory-9781350159723/
The study of 'education governance' is a significant area of research in the twenty-first century concerned with the changing organisation of education systems, relations and processes against the background of wider political and economic developments occurring nationally and globally. In Education Governance and Social Theory these important issues are critically examined through a range of innovative theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to assist in guiding those interested in better understanding and engaging with education governance as an object of critical inquiry and a tool or method of research.
With contributions from an international line-up of academics, the book judiciously combines theory and methodologies with case study material taken from diverse geo-political settings to help frame and enrich our understanding of education governance. This is a theoretically and empirically rich resource for those who wish to research education governance and its multifarious operations, conditions and effects, but are not sure how to do so. It will therefore appeal to readers who have a strong interest in the practical application of social theory to making sense of the complex changes underway in education across the globe.
Wilkins, A. 2016. Modernising school governance: Corporate planning and expert handling in state education. Routledge: London and New York
Available to buy in paperback: https://www.routledge.com/Modernising-School-Governance-Corporate-planning-and-expert-handling-in/Wilkins/p/book/9781138787476
Awarded joint-second prize by the Society for Educational Studies (SES) for books published in 2016.
Modernising School Governance examines the impact of recent market-based reforms on the role of governors in the English state education system. A focus of the book concerns how government and non-government demands for ‘strong governance’ have been translated to mean improved performance management of senior school leaders and greater monitoring and disciplining of governors. This book addresses fundamental questions about the neoliberal logic underpinning these reforms and how governors are being trained and responsibilised in new ways to enhance the integrity of these developments.
Drawing on large-scale research conducted over three years, the book examines the impact of these reforms on the day to day practices of governors and the diminished role of democracy in these contexts. Wilkins also captures the economic and political rationalities shaping the conduct of governors at this time and traces these expressions to wider structural developments linked to depoliticisation, decentralisation and disintermediation.
This book addresses timely and original issues concerning the role of corporate planning and expert handling to state education at a time of increased school autonomy, shrinking local government support/oversight, and tight, centralised accountability. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in disciplines of education, sociology, political science, public policy and management. It will also be of interest to researchers and policy makers from countries with similar or emerging quasi-market education systems.
Journal Articles by Andrew W Wilkins
Keddie, A., MacDonald, K., Blackmore, J., Boyask, R., Fitzgerald, S., Gavin, M., Heffernan, A., Hursh, D., McGrath-Champ, S., Møller, J., O’Neill, J., Parding, K., Salokangas, M., Skerritt, C., Stacey, M., Thomson, P., Wilkins, A., Wilson, R., Wylie, C., & Yoon, E-S. 2022. What needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education. Australian Education Researcher. iFirst
The series of responses in this article were gathered as part of an online mini conference held in September 2021 that sought to explore different ideas and articulations of school autonomy reform across the world (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the USA, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand). It centred upon an important question: what needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education? There was consensus across the group that school autonomy reform creates further inequities at school and system levels when driven by the logics of marketisation, competition, economic efficiency and public accountability. Against the backdrop of these themes, the conference generated discussion and debate where provocations and points of agreement and disagreement about issues of social justice and the mobilisation of school autonomy reform were raised. As an important output of this discussion, we asked participants to write a short response to the guiding conference question. The following are these responses which range from philosophical considerations, systems and governance perspectives, national particularities and teacher and principal perspectives.
Wilkins, A. & Gobby, B. 2022. Objects and subjects of risk: A governmentality approach to education governance. Globalisation, Societies and Education.
Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic feature of the conditions made possible by these reforms, namely ‘depoliticisation’, ‘corporatisation’, ‘endogenous privatisation’, and ‘disintermediation’. In response international organisations and national governments have called for improved accountability amid fears of corruption and governance failure. In this paper we take a fresh look at the existing literature on school autonomy through a unique focus on risk as a rationality of government. Specifically, we adopt a governmentality perspective of school autonomy reforms in England and Australia to capture the significance of risk to recalibrations of education governance.
Wilkins, A., Collet-Sabé, J., Gobby, B. & Hangartner, J. 2019. Translations of New Public Management: A decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17 (1), 147-160
The influence of New Public Management (NPM) on public sector organisation is nowhere more evident or pervasive than in the field of school governance where political actors, school leaders and governors are called upon to make the internal operation of the school more transparent and accountable to others through the explicitness of performance indicators and output measurements. Yet despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of NPM that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule in the context of changing political-administrative structures. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir 2010), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices. The result is a nuanced account of the complex terrain on which NPM is grafted onto and translated to reflect inherited institutional landscapes and political settlements and dilemmas.
Wilkins, A. 2019. The processual life of neoliberalisation: Permutations of value systems and normative commitments in a co-operative trust setting. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23 (11), 1180-1195
Since 2010 the government in England has committed to accelerating the expansion of academies (‘state-funded independent schools’) through displacing the role of local government as principal manager and overseer of schools. In response increasing numbers of schools are embracing the co-operative trust model to improve economies of scale, facilitate stakeholding and community resilience, and fend off the monopolising tendencies of some large multi-academy trusts seeking wholesale takeover of certain underperforming schools. Yet there are concerns that co-operative schools do not represent a radical departure from routines of neoliberalism – defined by managerial deference, technocratic efficiency, upward accountability, and performativity – despite clear signs that co-operative schools promote themselves as jointly-owned, democratically-controlled enterprises. In this paper I adopt a ‘processual view of neoliberalisation’ (Peck and Tickell 2002) to complicate the idea that co-operative schools can be judged in binary terms of ‘either/or’ – neoliberal or democratic, exclusionary or participatory – and instead point to the variegated organisational life of co-operative schools and their messy actualities as they straddle competing and sometimes conflicting sets of interests, motives and demands in their practice of school governance.
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185
For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management. On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.
Olmedo, A. & Wilkins, A. 2017. Governing through parents: a genealogical enquiry of education policy and the construction of neoliberal subjectivities in England. Discourse: Studies in Cultural Politics of Education, 38 (4), 573-589
In this paper we explore the various spaces and sites through which the figure of the parent is summoned and activated to inhabit and perform market norms and practices in the field of education in England. Since the late 1970s successive governments have called on parents to enact certain duties and obligations in relation to the state. These duties include adopting and internalizing responsibility for all kinds of risks, liabilities and inequities formerly managed by the Keynesian welfare state. Rather than characterize this situation in terms of the ‘hollowing of the state’, we argue that the role of the state includes enabling the functioning of the parent as a neoliberal subject so that they may successfully harness the power of the market to their own advantage and (hopefully) minimize the kinds of risk and inequity generated through a market-based, deregulated education system. In this paper we examine how parents in England are differently, yet similarly, compelled to embody certain market norms and practices as they navigate the field of education. Adopting genealogical enquiry and policy discourse analysis as our methodology, we explore how parents across three policy sites or spaces are constructed as objects and purveyors of utility and ancillaries to marketisation. This includes a focus on how parents are summoned as 1) consumers or choosers of education services; 2) governors and overseers of schools; and 3) producers and founders of schools.
Olmedo, A. & Wilkins, A. 2014. Gobernar la educación a través de los padres: política educativa y construcción de subjetividades neoliberales en Inglaterra. Revista Profesorado, 18 (2), 99-116
Este art ículo se cent ra en la relación ent re las normas y práct icas de mercado y la const rucción de la figura del “padre/madre” en la polít ica educat iva británica. Desde la década de los setenta, las familias han sido llamadas a desempeñar ciertos deberes y obligaciones en relación con el estado. Éstos incluyen internalizar responsabilidades frente a los riesgos, asumir obligaciones, desigualdades y un espect ro de crisis de las que anteriormente se encargaba el estado. En lugar de categorizar esta situación como "vaciamiento del estado", sostenemos que el rol del estado se ha modificado para permit ir que los padres y madres asuman un nuevo papel como sujetos neoliberal, mediante el cual se espera que aprovechen el potencial del mercado en su propio beneficio de forma sat isfactoria y (con la esperanza de) llegar a minimizar los t ipos de riesgo que se generan en un sistema educat ivo no regulado. En este texto analizamos algunos aspectos de este proceso de metamorfosis mediante el que se obliga a los padres a asumir algunas normas y práct icas del mercado en el ámbito de la educación. En concreto, nos centramos en como a los padres se les insta a ser 1) consumidores o selectores de servicios educat ivos, con lo que se les anima a asumir un comportamiento compet it ivo; 2) gobernantes y guardianes de las escuelas, cent rados en evaluar el rendimiento económico y educat ivo de las mismas; y, finamente, 3) productores y fundadores de escuelas, con un énfasis en act ividades empresariales y emprendedoras.
Wilkins, A. 2015. Professionalising school governance: The disciplinary effects of school autonomy and inspection on the changing role of school governors. Journal of Education Policy, 30 (2), 182-200
Since the 1980s state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of 'good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools ('state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools, in particular school governors – those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy therefore is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the 'control of control’ (Power 1994). To explain these trends I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance.
Wilkins, A. 2013. Libertarian paternalism: Policy and everyday translations of the rational and the affective. Critical Policy Studies, 7 (4), 395-406
Following the financial collapse in 2008-09 many commentators went onto pronounce the end of neoliberalism as a credible system for managing welfare state capitalism. The narrow economic belief in individuals as rational utility maximizers (the linchpin of neoliberal governance) was proved to be uncomfortably inaccurate. Instead human behaviour needs to be properly understood as ‘predictably irrational’, according to behavioural psychologists. In light of these claims, British governments and think tanks have published various research and policy documents promoting the dispersal of soft forms of state power to ‘nudge’ citizens into behaving responsibly and rationally. Through an analysis of key policy documents and academic texts, I examine the repertoires and formulations informing this emerging governmental rationality (‘libertarian paternalism’) and draw together these perspectives to explore their effects in terms of framing policy understandings of the rational and the affective. I conclude the paper by utilizing a discursive psychology approach in the context of a discussion of school choice as a vantage point through which to problematize conventional policy translations of emotion. Against the now popular view of emotion as something automated and unreflexive, I demonstrate instead that emotion can be conceptualised as a form of rhetoric used in the practice of affirming or validating particular constructions of reality, thereby highlighting the kind of indexical work emotive discourse aims to achieve.
Wilkins, A. 2012. Push and pull in the classroom: Gender, competition and the neoliberal subject. Gender and Education, 24 (7), 765-768
In this paper I explore how learning strategies based on competition and zero-sum thinking are inscribed into the dynamics of classroom interaction shaping relations between high-achieving pupils, and link elements of these practices to market trends in British education policy discourse. A detour through the politico-historical negotiations shaping relations between neo-liberal governance and education is initially sketched out, bringing into focus how the proliferation of policy discourses of consumerism and marketization aim to facilitate and shape the conduct of persons in classroom settings. Drawing on ethnographic observation data taken from a study of two London comprehensive secondary schools, I then outline how pupils are incited to behave as competitive strategists in the classroom and reflect on the gender constructions underpinning these performances and their slippery dynamics.
Wilkins, A. 2012. School choice and the commodification of education: A visual approach to school brochures and websites. Critical Social Policy, 32 (1), 70-87
As subjects of the parental right to choose (DES, 1988), parents are called upon to fulfill certain duties and responsibilities when choosing a secondary school for their child, with the expectation that they might navigate the school system ‘successfully’ and become ‘better informed consumers’ (DCSF, 2008). To comply with these rules of citizenship parents are encouraged to make use of a variety of information on schools as part of a realistic and informed choice, one that is consummate with their role as consumer-spectator. Such ‘cognitive mapping’ is evident in school brochures and websites where choice is assembled on the basis of visual iconography and narrative terrains. This leads to a consideration of how choice is visually mediated and communicated through the circulation of symbols and the structure of narratives. To explain these phenomena, I analyze and compare the ways in which two all-girls faith secondary schools attempt to (further) define themselves, culturally, historically and pedagogically, in a crowded field of choice. I conclude the paper with a discussion of the benefits and insights generated through a visually orientated approach to the study of school choice.
Wilkins, A. 2011. School choice, consumerism and the ethical strand in talk. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32 (3), 357-370
Research on school choice highlights the extent to which a communitarian impulse informs the way some parents engage with their role as chooser. This suggests that the responsibilities of parents as consumers are often negotiated in collective as well as individualising terms. Drawing on data from a group of mothers of diverse social class and racial backgrounds, this paper builds on some of these perspectives through deploying elements of a critical discursive analytic approach. Its aim is to explore how some mothers engage with the meaning and practice of school choice. Focusing on the emotional labouring that often underpins mothers’ rationalisations of choice, this paper examines the discursive role of emotion in these contexts as a form of social action geared towards achieving certain ends. In turn I discuss the implications of this for thinking through choice as a framing, function and discourse inhabited and performed by mothers.
Wilkins, A. & Burke, PJ. 2015. Widening participation in higher education: The role of professional and social class identities and commitments. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36 (3), 434-452
Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and ‘massification’ of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour’s programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse – of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive – can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in higher education institutions.