Concepts and frameworks

In addition to the In Vivo coding, there is an additional framework used - as mentioned in The Introduction - that comes from the work of Neitzel and Welzer (2012). The idea behind utilising this framework in this doctoral research process is to enable the views of the SLTs in particular to be heard. In order to make sense of the interview material from the Senior Leadership Teams, the details of the ‘felt’ level and understanding ‘experiences’, has been explored. To be able to develop this knowledge base, the framework developed by Neitzel and Welzer (2012) of their ‘frames of reference’ have been utilised, in order to be able to contextualise the hours of transcript material, and learn from what the different SLT positions have been. Doherty et al (2009) have used a similar frame of reference idea to discuss the use of the IBDP in an Australian national context, namely ‘globalization and the social imaginary’.

The ‘frames of reference’ described by Neitzel and Welzer (2012) are used in order to make sense of the transcriptions they have from soldiers and marines during the Second World War. They describe the need and purpose for these frames as:

Even if people’s perceptions and actions are bound up with social, cultural, hierarchical, and biological or anthropological circumstances, human beings always enjoy a certain amount of freedom of interpretation and action. But the ability to interpret and decide presupposes orientation and knowledge of what one is dealing with and what consequences a decision can have. And a frame of reference is what provides orientation.

Neitzel and Welzer, 2012: 8.

These frames of reference become particularly important, as SLT members work inside their own schools and colleges often incorporating mandatory policy changes; that they have no control over (Chitty, 2009), or fending off wider policy changes and constantly dealing with changing spending criteria, and being involved in this level of the decision-making process can be all-consuming (Earley, 2013).

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Individuals belong to groups who usually see things in the same way. This means that when asked to make a decision on an area in a particular environment, they do not have to re-think the argument from the beginning. Hence, ‘shall we introduce the IBDP into our school?’ is merely that: ‘should we do it?’. It is not a long conversation about being in an already advantaged, selective, exclusive, environment and this is giving our students another advantage on top of all the other advantages they already have... it is just ‘should we do it?’, or ‘can we afford it’, not a moral retrospective of the system in which the SLT members work:

Most everyday tasks are taken care of by routines, habits, and certainties, and that saves individual human beings a colossal amount of work.

Neitzel and Welzer, 2012: 9.

Therefore, it is essential when seeking to understand the behaviour of any particular group to ‘reconstruct the frame of reference in which people operated, including the factors which structured their perception and suggested certain conclusions’ (Neitzel and Welzer, 2012:9). For this reason, the frames of reference are being utilised as a way of reconstructing the perceptions of the SLT members outside their complex organisations and into the wider structures in which they operate. The active links between education, globalization, and social change (Lauder et al, 2006), are not always obvious at an operational level. Hence the aim of reconstructing these inductively-coded interviews inside these frames of reference is ‘to understand the preconditions for psychologically normal people to do things that they would not otherwise do’ (Neitzel and Welzer, 2012:9). Whereas this thesis attempts to explain and understand the everyday, commonsense assumptions of professional practice; a form of practical understanding rooted in the quotidian life of SLTs involved in the IBDP. As such it is part of the justification of the research approach and strategy.

The different ‘frames of reference’ first needed to be established, before the inductive and theoretically-derived codes could be analyzed. Neitzel and Welzer (2012) distinguish between different orders of frames that have different levels of specificity and concreteness. These frames are important as they provide the

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socio-historical backdrop where globalization effects local school and college decision-making, regarding how Senior Leaders are influenced by their emotions concerning whether or not policy change is a ‘good thing’ for their students to be able to have the opportunity to take the IBDP. In terms of the inductively developed categories of in vivo coding this frame relates to the ‘Challenge’ of utilising the IBDP effectively.

The frames of reference are considered to be less concrete than was the case for Neitzel and Welzer (2012), as they were studying historical documents from the period that we now call The Third Reich, whereas this research process studies contemporary data, so this frame relates to late capitalist society (what Bauman, 2000, referred to as ‘liquid modernity’) where the dominance of neo- liberal influences are high on the educational agenda, concerning marketization, and performativity (Ball et al, 2012). This frame of reference is on the concrete constellation that the IBDP is uniformly prestigious, internationally recognised, and not interfered with by government. This is a vantage point that is little questioned or discussed, especially schools and colleges, (as was discussed in the first chapter’s literature review), and provide a consistent language base from which Senior Leaders operate, generating terms unquestioningly, such as ‘keeping their options open’, and ‘providing a better standard of education’, and ‘better preparation for HE than A-Levels’. This frame concerns both ‘Curriculum’ and ‘Learning Curve’, where the Learning Curve refers to the collective experiences of the SLT members inside the institutions who are adopting the policy.

The final frame of reference deployed relates to the modes of perception, interpretive paradigms and the perceived responsibilities that individual senior leaders bring, especially in the state sector, to the theoretically-derived codes for social justice, have been particularly important. Hence it is considered that these frames of reference play a significant role in the analysis of the findings related to the ‘Beliefs’ that senior leaders hold in this research process, as they add explanatory reach for explaining how taken-for granted assumptions are actually mapped into both the perceptions and actions of these decision-making staff.

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The wider contexts of ‘inequality’ have already been mentioned and these are evaluated in this thesis within an adaptation of some of Teare’s (2013) recent work.

2.13 Summary

Chapter 2 has considered the background to deciding on a Research Strategy, the ontological and epistemological positioning required by this approach, the Insider Learner stance, and the correlating Critical Realist Research Paradigm. It has detailed how the centres were chosen purposively for this research process, and it has considered the ethical considerations that are at play in such a study, and how these have been addressed throughout this doctoral research process. This chapter has detailed all phases 1 to 8 of the research process (as highlighted in Figure 1 on page 30), and has discussed how the four strands of the research process undertaken fitted into those eight phases of the overall research process, and how these were piloted beforehand.

Subsequently this chapter has discussed the belated but significantly worthwhile process surrounding the introduction of the SLT fourth strand of interviews, and how these have been coded using the Mayring (2000, 2003, 2007) method. Lastly, this chapter has evaluated both the chosen research methods and the limitations of the approaches taken, and has explained how this has been substantially beneficial in a professional learning context from undertaking this process (Blaikie, 2007). Although it should also be noted that Chapter 4 has a section on Research Assessment and Justification following from the analysis and discussion of the findings in the next chapter.

This chapter has justified the concepts and frameworks utilised in this research process, and has linked to the appropriate Literature Review in the first chapter. This second chapter was entitled ‘Towards a new future?’, and it is considered evident from the decline of the IBDP usage inside the state sector that a different future has opened up in the English education system than the future that was

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given the green light under the Blair government. It is believed that the idea of keeping the (upper) middle classes on board with state education maintains a system that drives up standards, and what has been created since the abandonment of the funding for the IBDP in the state sector is a dual system that has both old and new paradigms, as the findings below demonstrate.

This enables elite groups to be able to take advantage of the IBDP in numbers that are impossible in the state sector, as this chapter has demonstrated. This, therefore, further compounds advantage to a ‘globally mobile transnational political elite group’ (Savage et al, 2015:243), and actively increases the divisions between groups that enables elite groups to access higher status university places, as the findings in the next chapter demonstrate.