Corporate features and faith-based Academies

This article forms an introductory exploration into the relationship between corporate features and religious values in Academies sponsored by a Christian foundation. This is a theme which arose from research comprising the ethnography of a City Technology College (CTC) with a Christian ethos. The Christian foundation which sponsors the CTC also sponsors three Academies. In 2007 the author was invited to visit the two Academies which were then open. The CTC was one of the first to open in 1990 under a Conservative government. The CTC policy invited business and industry to sponsor schools with a specialist business and technology curriculum, in areas of urban deprivation (Department of Education and Science (DES), 1986). The CTC policy was acknowledged by the Labour government to be the model for the Academies programme (Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2005). Similarly the CTC as the forerunner in the Christian foundation was the model for the two Academies visited. These policies can be seen as evidence of the creation of a quasi-market in education and thus the normalisation of corporate business models and the practice of entrepreneurialism in specialist schools like CTCs and Academies. The attendant features of this policy orientation towards the market, performance, efficiency and managerialism, can be conceptualised as corporate aims. In this article the author has conceptualised as corporate features those assumptions, values and practices which appeared in the data to have been directly imported from the CTC in order to replicate its success in these specific areas (performance, efficiency, managerialism). The author's aim is to explore further the conflation of corporate features and religious values in these institutions. This is viewed as particularly pertinent given that 38 of the 133 Academies open at the time of writing are sponsored by faith-based organisations, and a further 13 are co-sponsored by faith-based organisations. (Contains 1 note.)