Policy Mortality and UK Government Education Policy for Schools in England

ABSTRACT Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy mortality, or the integration of systemic and organisational ‘death’ within reform design. Our research demonstrates the interplay between the blame for the ‘wrong’ type of school, leader, teacher, pupil, parent, and the claimed ‘solutions’ in the form of new schools (e.g., between 70 and 90 different types in England), organisations (e.g., MATs), professionals (e.g., CEOs), pupils (e.g., branded access to a school place), and parents (e.g., consumer choice). Our research contribution is conceptual through the development of new thinking about policy mortality, whereby the claim is for ‘success’ but the reality is that some professionals, schools, children and parents are required to fail.


INTRODUCTION
While the language of 'success', 'effectiveness' and 'excellence' dominates UK government policy imperatives for modernising the school system in England, in fact, failure is integral to ongoing reforms. Successive governments from the 1970s onwards have focused on identifying, measuring, grading and declaring schools as failing, and hence affirming and homogenising categories of children, parents, teacher and communities as failures. We focus on failing schools as an example of policy mortality: Our argument is that failure is a policy objective rather than a consequence of risky innovation and/or problematic implementation. We give prime attention to the privatisation of inspection through the establishment of Ofsted from 1992, where we argue that identifying a failing school is weaponised in order to ensure that everyone and everything is an actual or potential failure; is calculated regarding judgements about data and the worth of a teacher, child, family and neighbourhood; and is enacted as a 'what works' practice through 'improvement' and 'effectiveness' technologies that may claim otherwise but actually require failure in order to be successful. The deployment of 'blame/acclaim' and 'shame/honour' is used within these three inter-connected approaches in order to evaluate and name what and who has failed (as a binary opposite of success).
Policy mortality is a distinctive approach for the field of education policy because failure tends to focus on the rationality of policy learning or what can be done better (Dunlop, 2020), rather than the construction and integration of failure as a policy strategy. While there is huge investment in preventing school failure (e.g., Hopkins, 2007), not least through corporate leadership (e.g., Coles and Southworth, 2005), we associate with analysis of failure as a planned policy strategy and tactic (e.g., Koyama, 2010;Tomlinson, 1997). We associate with Thrupp's (1998) identification of how blame is linked to 'school failure as the clear responsibility of schools themselves' (p196), and Lefstein's (2013) analysis that failing and blaming are enduring: 'Ofsted inspections need not be "valid" or even "fair" in order to effectively fulfil their symbolic task' (p656). Our approach is distinctive because following Gunter (2023), we characterise policy mortality as a form of policy violence, and whereas Thrupp's (1998) and Lefstein's (2013) argue that blame is used politically, we argue that it is antipolitical in regard to denying debate about the purposes of educational services.
The development of policy mortality is rooted in funded projects by the British Academy and the ESRC (e.g., Courtney, 2015a;Gunter and Mills, 2017;Gunter, 2012), where the detailed collection and analysis of primary documents and interviews with children and parents; professionals; UK government ministers, civil servants and advisors; philanthropic sponsors; and consultants, provide the evidence base for this strategic conceptualisation (see : Courtney, 2012: Courtney, , 2013: Courtney, , 2016Gunter, 2023). This enables us to make a second contribution to the public policy field through recognising the trap that we as researchers are located in. It is axiomatic that research findings and analysis enter the public domain, but independent primary education policy research is problematic for UK government policymakers because it provides data and analysis that challenge the ideological underpinning of policy, and so researchers can be vilified as 'the Blob' (Gove, 2013), and declared to be failing (Tooley and Darby, 1998).

POLICY MORTALITY AND FAILING SCHOOLS
Thatcherite reforms from the 1980s have focused on dismantling the post-war expansion of public-services education, this is based on the construction of failure. The provision of school places has been restructured through the pursuit of privatised autonomy and deregulation; access to school places has been recultured through the co-construction of consumer dispositions and practices as indicators of good parenting and social mobility aspirations; and, professional knowledge and skills have been corporatised regarding leadership, data management and the fit with brand visioning. These changes are integral to the 1988 Education Reform Act that turned schools into small businesses, and from 1992 the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) was set up to privatise the contractual inspection and reporting of data and judgements about school performance as 'outstanding ', 'good', 'requires improvement' and 'inadequate' (Ofsted, 1993). The last two categories require major changes such as new 'super' headteachers, or even school closure (e.g., Fresh Start scheme), and competition was introduced to incentivise staff through new entrants to the market, for example, City Technology Colleges, Academies, Free Schools, UTCs, Studio Schools (Courtney, 2015c). Ofsted is one of a suite of data production and judgement opportunities (e.g., league tables, performancerelated pay) that created the conditions in which failure is not only accepted, but seen as vital for securing the required indicators of success.
There are now between 70 and 90 different types of schools in England (Courtney, 2015c), where the media regularly report on failure. For example, a Daily Mail headline declares: Sack bad teachers urges Ofsted chief as 'millions of pupils are being failed by dull and uninspiring lessons' (Clark, 2010), and more recently, the Guardian reports: Ofsted chief criticises 'scandal' of schools stuck in a rut of failure (Adams, 2018). Thatcher causally linked teacher ideology and football hooliganism (Cosgrove, 2000;Hargreaves et al., 1986), and key actors including Chris Woodhead, former Chief Inspector of Schools, and David Blunkett, former Secretary of State for Education and Employment, constructed failure to characterise teachers as 'sneering cynics' who are too complacent about standards (Smithers, 1998). Claims about poor performance, too much autonomy, lack of accountability, too many excuses, and an unwillingness to change have been used to break professional knowledge and codes of conduct by both left and right ideological positions of parties in successive UK governments, where the policy of failing schools with failing teachers is described as a national and globalised 'movement' (Meyers and Murphy, 2007;Tomlinson, 1997). For example, at the 1997 General Election the Conservative manifesto (Conservative Party, 1997) stated that 'we cannot tolerate schools that fail their pupils' (unpaged). Blair as Labour leader stated in his 1997 campaign: 'I have no intention of waging war on any schools except failing schools' (TES Editorial, 1997, unpaged). In taking office in 1997 the Labour government planned to confront failure: Our aim is excellence for everyone. If this is to be more than rhetoric, then persistent failure must be eradicated. Hence our commitment to zero tolerance of underperformance. We shall seize every opportunity to recognise and celebrate success in the education service, and we shall put in place policies which seek to avoid failure. But where failure occurs, we shall tackle it head on. Schools which have been found to be failing will have to improve, make a fresh start, or close. The principle of zero tolerance will also apply to local education authorities. Our policy will be driven by our recognition that children only get one chance. We intend to create an education service in which every school is either excellent, improving or both (DfEE, 1997 Paragraph 19, p12).  (Weale, 2018). In summary, failure is more than a rhetorical campaigning device, it is both an objectified event and an ongoing process where Ofsted metrics are constructed and deployed to make claims about individualised student, teacher, and aggregated school outcomes. Such numbers are financialised regarding the relationship between student enrolment and income generation, along with personalised performance, status and contracts.
Failing schools exemplify policy mortality where data is used to proactively identify the problem, submitting pedagogic processes to 'total and conscious visibility' (Courtney, 2016, p. 627). Mortality is integral to policy through how reforms are designed to diagnose illness, with medicinal and surgical improvement and effectiveness interventions, that may or may not enable systemic, organisational and professional 'death'. For example, the Academies Programme from 2000 is based on terminal illness in local democracy and inclusive schools; Adonis (2012), reflecting on his time as an education minister, declared, 'I saw failing comprehensive schools, many hundreds of them, as a cancer at the heart of English society' (pxii). While some language is technical regarding malfunctioning and teacher sabotage, significant analogies are made about how schools are diseased, leading to 'chronic failure' (DfE, 2016, p. 105). Remedial cures include the appointment of rescue headteachers and/or through take overs (with 'orphan' schools that nobody wants, Mansell, 2017), where schools can die warranting a pathology of causes (Fink, 1999). Teachers, students and/or the whole school can be euthanised through closure with a postmortem that confirms the inevitability of death through diseased professionalism. Hence policy mortality is different from 'disasters', 'fiascos' and 'blunders' regarding implementation failures (McConnell, 2015), but is a practice where agency is structured through surveillance systems controlled by Ofsted. As Courtney (2016) argues, 'the goal is to render visible the incapacity of (certain) subjects to comply; to contribute to a discourse of subject incompetence; and to disrupt their fabrications, their identities' (p634).
Professionals who refuse actually confirm the newspaper headlines, and can be identified and disposed of through the proclaimed and assumed objectivity of judgements based on data.
Policy mortality as a practice is a product of the relationship between the state, education policy and knowledge that is a denial of political relationality: it is first, ideological through attacking the idea and reality of public services that underpin the provision of universal, shared and inclusive services, and by promoting the alternative of choice and segregated diversity in order to meet consumer needs as essential for success (Friedman, 2002); second, strategic through 'rolling back the state' by relocating decisions from public agendas into the private realm of what Tooley (2000) identifies as the '3Fs' or 'Family, Freedom, Philanthropy' (p220); and third, tactical through creating the conditions for enthusiastic compliance with new freedoms for the profession to deliver corporate educational products (Gunter and Mills, 2017). Hence knowledge production is focused on claims regarding the essential characteristics of human nature to control one's own destiny and the need to unleash parental agency to 'do the best for my child'. Empowered vitality is necessary for a quality service, where individuals and families have to enthusiastically take on choices that previously were located in public bureaucracies. What seems to be emerging is a 'depoliticisation' of educational issues, where the 'private' in privatisation means that what is identified as mattering is re-located to 'neutral' delivery agencies such as Ofsted, and to the whims and aspirations of individuals who may or may not know what is going on (Wood and Flinders, 2014). The requirement to prevent personal failure is causally linked to averting organisational and system failure, and where other people's failure is required to generate personal success (Gunter, 2018).
We examine policy mortality within education policy by recognising how success and failure are used discursively to position through: first, weaponising failure in which the public school system is considered endemically 'diseased'; second, calculated failure in which a binary, data-based 'win-lose' strategy is used to 'vaccinate' against and within the failing system; and third, enactment failure in which new types of schools may 'fail' (and be taken over or closed down), and this is necessary for system dynamics to operate in a competitive market.

WEAPONISING FAILURE
The failing school is a 'weapon' that continues to be used to attack and defeat particular ideas, people and organisations regarding the scoping and design of education policy. A school fails as an objective 'it' because of libertarian claims: first, systemic failures derive from state involvement in a service constructed as a private good, and hence the obstruction is bureaucratic 'red tape' that denies choice and the parental entitlement to pay for their own children's education (Tooley, 2000). Second, values failures happen when public-service purposes are premised on the equal educability of all children, and this denies heritable hierarchies, and so limits the freedom of parents to demand segregated provision, and of business to have access to work-ready employees (Gunter, 2018). Third, professional failures involve restrictive practices based on accredited expertise, and hence hamper parental demands to control what their children are taught, and limit the opportunities for the knowledge and skills of noneducation business experts (Gunter and Mills, 2017). What these three claims illustrate is that the failing schools policy is premised on separating the school from the socio-economic, political and cultural context in which it is located and requiring it to improve and be judged effective as if that context did not exist. To claim otherwise is to be what former Secretary of State Michael Gove (2013) has described as 'the new enemies of promise'.
Consequently, parents fail if they depend on the state and fail to operate as rational consumers (Tooley, 2000); children fail if they do not recognise their place in a segregated system (Joseph, 1974); teachers fail if they do not deliver teaching to well-behaved children that parents demand (Boyson, 1975); the organisation fails if it does not produce the right type of metrics in order to demonstrate standards (Hopkins, 2007); the system fails if it provides education rather than commissions providers (Tooley, 1995); and research fails if it does not focus on problem solving and user demands (Tooley and Darby, 1998). As Apple (2007) argues in regard to the US, 'people must be made to see anything that is public as "bad" and anything that is private as "good" . . . ' (p113).
Weaponising is discursively active where the weapons are words, numbers and deeds that are deployed within an 'argumentative strategy' (Zittoun, 2015, p. 254). Claims are made about intentions, judgment, and outcomes, and where policy actors 'build complex relationships with their object and with other actors' (p257) in ways that variously contain and suppress, alarm and warn, but also inspire collaboration and agentic investment. Failure is used 'to scare ordinary citizens' (Berliner, 2005, p. 205), and so 'education becomes the equivalent of national security' (Granger, 2008, pp. 312-313). The arguments tap into the desire to ensure that 'my' child gets the education they deserve: There is . . . nothing left to be interpreted by the public, no additional or alternative meanings to be deciphered. The evidence is right before one's eyes and unequivocal: teachers in public schools are inadequate and must be held to more rigorous standards or everyone will suffer for it (Granger, 2008, p. 215).
Credible simplifications are used to frame a crisis where a case (e.g., a lesson, a student, and a teacher) is presented as an indicator of morbidity unless empowered action by parents is galvanised and deployed. This is evident in landmark agenda settings (e.g., A Nation at Risk 1983 in the US; Better Schools 1985 in the UK), legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind Act 2001 in the US; Education Reform Act 1988 in the UK), and in debates where the past is mythologised, and notions of social mobility are enabled by think tanks, political parties, the media and consultancy businesses (Gunter and Mills, 2017;Gunter, 2018).
This weaponising process requires the use of spectacle, or what Berliner (2005) describes as 'pure theatre' recognisable 'through analysis of the slogans and policies promulgated by politicians' (p205). This happens most notably through a parade of failing schools in England such as William Tyndale Primary School in 1976, where parents protested about 'progressive teaching methods'; Hackney Downs Secondary School, which was declared to be 'the worst school in Britain' and closed by the Conservative government 1995; and the Ridings School, which in 1996 took up the mantel of the 'worst school' when staff declared that 60 pupils were 'unteachable' and, following various improvement interventions, the school was closed in 2009. Alternative accounts (e.g., O'Connor et al., 1999;Tomlinson, 1997), are marginalised and/or used totemically to further demonstrate a failing profession. Comprehensive primary and secondary schools are deemed to be the most failing, and so Mossbourne Academy, built on the site of Hackney Downs, uses the exclusivity of the school controlling access to protect the brand (Kulz, 2017); this is presented as an admirable exemplar for all (Gove, 2009).
Professionals in schools that are labelled successful, or that could be failing unless they stopped 'coasting' (Stoll and Fink, 1996), experience ordinary dramas of being told they need to sort themselves out by those who know better from outside of the school (Lightfoot, 2020). They should enthusiastically accept 'make-overs' requiring the forgetting of professional knowledge and experience, and accept new types of work as modernising corporate leaders and followers (Courtney, 2015b;Gunter and Thomson, 2009;Gunter et al., 2018). This is presented as benign (e.g., Advanced Skills Teachers 1998andBeacon schools in 1998-2005), but in reality, it is about the hollowing out of the teacher's soul (Ball, 2003). Everydayness can be brutal where headteachers as corporate leaders are actively involved in making the change work (McGinity and , notably by disposing of educational professionals who do not comply (Courtney and Gunter, 2015).

CALCULATED FAILURE
Schools are declared to be failing through an 'evidence-based-judgement' that primarily uses metrics as the basis for a descriptive, summative category using formalised language by Ofsted. This categorisation has changed over time but has included, for example, 'inadequate', 'serious weaknesses' and 'special measures'. Individual children are given a unique identifier where software can store test results and track progress; the teacher and senior staff can demonstrate value-added progress to secure pay and promotion benefits; the school can frame and promote the brand as a good (outstanding, excellence, improving, effective) school; and the UK government can scope and promote policy through numbers, where Blunkett (Secretary of State for Education 1997-2001) promised to resign if targets were not met on Key Stage 2 mathematics and English levels of achievement. The collection, manipulation and presentation of raw and adjusted public numbers (e.g., examination results) and private numbers (e.g., by OFSTED inspectors) are used to determine student progress and outcomes, and when aggregated strategic claims can be made about the quality of a teacher, a department, a whole school, a local system (e.g., Local Authority), and a national system.
The failing school is a verdict where the process of becoming a failure and the event of declaring that the school has failed is based on calculation. Achievement by students and staff is assessed in regard to a measured outcome, and this is represented by a grade that is usually a number (e.g., a percentage) and given meaning as a category (e.g., Grade A) within a hierarchised range (e.g., Grade A is a higher standard than Grade D). Categories provide benchmarks regarding what is either a 'good' pass or 'bad' or 'failure' level grades, and 'floor standards' are the minimum that a school is required to achieve. For example, Grade C was a pass at GCSE, and the benchmark was the percentage of students obtaining five A*-C grades (from 2020 there is a new grading system in place, and so grades 4-9 constitute a 'pass', with grade 4 as equivalent to a low C). The use of a 'bar' features heavily in policy interventions; in 2004, guidance was provided for schools to exceed the bar by Smoking Out Underachievement (DfES, 2004). However, the codification of the actual standard or 'goal posts' has shifted politically. For example, under New Labour, Balls named 638 secondary 'National Challenge' schools which had not reached the 30% five A*-C GCSE bar, with planned investment to improve or academise (BBC, 2008). Then, under the Conservative-led Coalition, Gove proposed to raise 'the benchmark to 40% in 2012-2013 academic year and to 50% by 2015' (BBC, 2011, unpaged). More recently, the 'Progress 8' measure was introduced from 2016 to calculate the value added to attainment between Key Stages 2 and 4, with 'Attainment 8' evaluating the school according to 8 qualifications (not just GCSE). The numbers attaining the so-called EBacc are measured as well, which is a suite of recommended subjects and not a qualification (DfE, 2020).
Consequently, parents are required to calculate the best 'choice' of school place, to invest in private tuition, or to move house, or to home school; children calculate how to achieve the top grades or face aspirational failure; teachers calculate how to produce the best value-added data or face contract termination; headteachers and other postholders calculate improvements to the data to demonstrate entrepreneurial nous (Courtney, 2020) or face contract termination; and the school and system as organisations are based on these individual and networked calculations where competition and market exchanges produce both success and failure as incentives for further calculation. Research is required to serve such calculative processes through the use of RCTs to demonstrate what works and so merits investment.
Calculating the risk of failure is part of the weaponizing process, and is integral to governing by knowledge production (Gunter, 2020) whereby what is deemed to be known and to be worth knowing is based on 'metric fixation' (Muller, 2018, p. 4). Arenas of decision-making based on intellectual work and experience, with options requiring discretion and contextual relationality, have been 'numericized', where 'numbers do not merely inscribe a pre-existing reality. They constitute it' (Rose, 1991, p. 676). Such realities determine the worth of the child, the parent, the community, the school, the system and the researcher, where what is said and done on a daily basis and in the full spectacle of weaponised failure is replete with 'rituals of expectation, speculation and prognostication' (Rose, 1991, p. 673). Rose's (1991, p. 675) thinking about numbers can be used to examine forms of calculation: • 'calculated power': how numbers provide legitimacy through what Granger (2008) calls 'reductionist choreography' (p215). Governing education through Ofsted inspections saw investment in the school as the problem (Barber, 1996), and so the failing school is 'the clear responsibility of schools themselves' (Thrupp, 1998, p. 196). Public investment was made to construct and promote the 11 factors of an effective school (Sammons et al., 1995), where the delineation of standards in the Ofsted Inspection Framework meant that children, teachers and schools were automatically positioned as deficit and having to 'measure up'. Performativity did include some temporary resuscitation by using the language of 'schools in challenging circumstances' prior to closure or take over. • 'calculating power': how numbers constitute a technology for ruling, or in Bacchi's (2009) terms, how the problem is represented and hence resolved. Governing education through the framing and use of 'standards' that can be applied to children and staff from nursery upwards and to every 'thing' that they do (e.g., TTA 1998) is a declaration of what matters, and impacts on ways of thinking, speaking and doing. Hence, a lesson can be objectified, factors applied and gradings awarded as the truth of that lesson's worth, with new language used about gains and levels of achievement. While dysfunctions and unintended consequences occur, there is evidence of speedy corrective action; in 2007, both English and mathematics were added to the five A*-C GCSE calculation of school standards to address local curriculum changes in which children were being entered for 'easier' examinations; • 'calculating about power' is about using numbers to engender an empowered sense of self-control, or in Ball's (1990) terms, 'I' am invited into benign management processes where 'I' am required to confess to failure and failings. Governing education through this failure-reality makes the process of calculation personal, where newly in post 'school-rescue' headteacher, Yvonne Bates, describes dropping into the local high street to introduce herself, where a local shopper responds to the news of her appointment at Lilian Baylis school with 'You poor cow' (Bates, 1999, p. 87). While calculation is presented as rational, the realities demonstrate that deals are made with the self, for example, the structuring of access to places in 163 grammar schools based on intelligence testing (11+ in England) means that parents are calculating on their child not being in the 80% who do not pass; and the renewal of contracts means that educational professionals are calculating on producing the right type of data to demonstrate delivery competence (Courtney and Gunter, 2015). Such examples show how there is no time to question because energies are invested into playing to win rather than redesigning the game to be inclusive.
Calculated failure is premised on what Hood (2002Hood ( , 2010 identifies as blame avoidance, where the depoliticisation of public-service decision-making into private arenas and relentless 're-disorganisation' (Pollitt, 2007) means that the government cannot be blamed for the processes or outcomes of 'governing by numbers' (Rose, 1991). As Tomlinson (1997) argues: 'for schools to be designated as failures means they have lost badly' (p83), and this provides clarity regarding who are the 'blamers and blamed' and, how 'blame-shifters and blame-shiftees' operate (Hood, 2002, p. 17). The government acts a blamer and blame-deflector due to what Hood (2002) identifies as: first, 'impression management' (p16) where metrics and the narrative that gives meaning to the numbers are selected in order to claim failure and who is responsible; second, 'policy strategies' (p16) are adopted so that the government can be seen to win and so not be blamed, and hence the removal of headteachers became de facto the best way to resolve a failing school; third are 'agency strategies' (p17), whereby activity is relocated to organisations (e.g., MATs; National College for School Leadership; Ofsted) or contracted with the private sector (e.g., consultancies), that allows credit to be taken but where the use of delivery delegation means that the government can outsource blame.
5. ENACTMENT FAILURE Weaponising the failing school, combined with 'there is no alternative to' calculative dispositions and practices, impacts on policy enactment in offices and classrooms. The creation of a marketised structure for the provision of, and access to, school places is premised on the successful school as one that meets national standards and provides a distinctive product in response to consumer demand. Hence enactment is about educational professionals delivering national policy demands and producing evidence of compliance and outcomes, interplayed with localised autonomy regarding responding to context and notably to parental needs for their child. For most schools, organisational tactical enactment by children and the workforce is effervescent with claims for success, where those schools judged to be failing have failed to enact policy or consumer demands appropriately and so either require salvaging or closing down. Rescue attempts enable access to public funds for entrepreneurs regarding academy conversion (Beckett, 2007), together with consultancy advice and the sale of packaged solutions (Gunter and Mills, 2017). However, despite this, closing a school relies on an accepted feature of market competition, that there are winners and losers (Forsdick, 2019).
The judgement that a school is failing focuses on enactment failure by educational professionals within the school. Self and organisational performance calculation cannot operate responsibly and efficiently if educational professionals do not: first, adopt new identities as leaders and followers (Gunter, 2012); second, use data to relentlessly tackle underperformance by excluding those who endanger the brand (Courtney and Gunter, 2015); third, accept the segregation of children and professionals (Gunter, 2023). Consequently, parents and children have to hold educational professionals to account through 'exit, voice and loyalty' (Hirschman, 1970), and those parents and children who fail to swap providers will face the shock of school closures (some families have experienced at least two school closures, see Gunter, 2018); teachers and post-holders as corporate leaders and followers have to implement regulatory demands and be responsive to the market regarding their 'educational offer'; the organisation within a market system must demonstrate fidelity with new regulations but also creativity in the provision of an educational private good for current and potential customers. The spectre of failure hovers over everyone within localised policymaking and private decision-making in families, where not everything can be constructed as a rational calculation, and so fear pervades. Such fears are clearly evident in 'ordinary' schools, which constitute the majority, as distinct from the extremes of 'successful' and 'failing', whereby serial changes in the Ofsted framework and inspection requirements continue to shape and determine everyday practices (Courtney, 2013), with 'headteachers using the threat of an external enemy and a looming Ofsted visit to drive through unpopular policies or embed systems into the fabric of the school which otherwise may have been resisted ' (Perryman et al., 2018, p. 160).
The antidote to enactment failure is presented through improvement and effectiveness technologies and cultural practices that are constructed as vital for successful schools to remain successful and for failing schools to be fixed (Nicolaidou and Ainscow, 2005;Sammons, 2008;Stoll and Myers, 1998). Knowledge workers from higher education and private consultancy accepted posts in government, and/or advisory and commissioned research contracts, and so have a stake in making failure work (Gunter and Mills, 2017). For example, New Labour took office in 1997 on the espoused commitment to develop improvement and effectiveness based policy: first, an 'improvement' and 'effectiveness' ontology and epistemology was integrated into policy enactment as an implementation science (see Barber, 1996); second, correlational measurements where to install the transformational leadership model as an imperative for policy enactment (see Leithwood et al., 2006); and, third, methodological turmoil over the lack of causal relationships between reforms and outcomes was glossed over by using normative advocacy for enactment change (see Gunter, 2012). Importantly, the primacy of business autonomy as a globalised reform was normalised, where recommendations could fit any school without disrupting the brand or the norm of segregating children, and could handle the dynamics of new schools opening and then closing. However, there are reports that taking schools out of local democratic control to secure improvement and effectiveness is not being realised (Adams, 2019) and new school products fail in the market (George, 2018). However, the underlying idea of the autonomous school remains resilient, where cost-effective solutions (along with new language and a feel-good factor) enables 'innovative' school products to be repeatedly brought to market (Gunter and Rayner 2021).

TROUBLING POLICY MORTALITY
The overarching strategy of failing schools assumes failure is integral to change dynamics, where in reviewing the gains made by comprehensivisation from the 1950s Benn and Chitty (1997) ask, 'what kind of society . . . spends so much time trying to undermine the education system upon which almost all of its population actually depends . . . ?' (p469). The enacted changes tend not to reverse the identified problems in the ways that were confidently predicted at the time of the reform, where investigative projects have uncovered corruption (Beckett, 2007;Thomson, 2020). Moreover, the success/failure binary has been revealed as inaccurate and dangerous for children, families and schools (see Gewirtz, 1998), not least because failure is not the sole responsibility of the education profession to resolve either at all or individually; as Tomlinson (1997) argues: 'it has become easier to blame schools than to re-structure the economy' (p95).
Policy mortality, or the design of and for failure as a policy strategy, has implications for researching policy processes: first, there are methodological and conceptualisation issues in studying the complexities of policy failure, not least that failing schools may not be failing for all the children and teachers (Howlett, 2012;McConnell, 2015); second, education policy is an arena where researchers are often joined and regularly outflanked by investigative journalists (e.g., Mansell, 2023); and third, successive UK governments have bought and brought in trusted evaluation providers, and variously ignored and denounced researchers who provide evidence that challenges policy (see Tooley with Darby 1998). Within this context it is challenging for educational researchers to not only reveal policy mortality but to also present policy security as distinctively evident in the contemporary history of the field. For example, research has provided the ideological (Simon, 1955) and practical (Fielding and Moss, 2011), strategic (Ranson, 1993(Ranson, , 1995 and tactical (Winkley, 2002), policy intentions that provide security for civil society through shared investment and pooling risk, where public-services common education has been too successful, with standards exceeding those in private provision (Lubienski and Lubienski, 2014;Sahlberg, 2015). Indeed, globalising reforms are based on a 'political fiction that good and bad schools can be identified' (Tomlinson, 1997, p. 95), where privatisation strategies are effectively a hoax (Ravitch, 2013) or even lies (Gorski and Zenkov, 2014). For example, parental choice is presented as vital for markets to work, and yet research shows that schools compete to choose children, in effect denying parental choice. Consequently, schools are required to invest huge resources into self-damage (Smyth, 2011), prompting localised resistance (Rayner and Gunter, 2020).
There is a flourishing critical education-policy research community that engages politically in policy security by designing projects that enable the voices of children, parents and professionals to be heard, and continues to draw on the social sciences in order to provide policy scholarship evidence and theorising that speaks to public policy processes (e.g., Ball, 2012;Gunter, 2023). Such work demonstrates that policy mortality has a failure logic that allows gains to be made that are ideological through the acceptance of incentivised competition; structural through the removal of public systems of accountability; cultural through embedding risk and responsibility thinking and practices; and financial through the opportunities for capital accumulation. These gains also enable privatised depoliticisation to be normalised, where children, parents and education professionals are officially required to be successful but when failure happens, they have to confront the consequences of their failure (Courtney and McGinity, 2020;Gunter, 2018). Ethnographic studies that examine the contractual relationships between those who occupy public institutions and those who live and work in civil society are vital, whereby the realities of policy mortality design are evident in Whitehall (Gunter, 2012) and in the policy enactment of those who do the job (Courtney, 2017;McGinity and Gunter, 2017). Hence research is needed to examine the relationship between vulnerability and contingency in private decisions about the provision of and access to educational services. In addition, there is a need to examine how the politics of failure is premised on a denial of political relationality both within educational services, and the wider policy processes that shape agendas and practices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the British Academy and the ESRC for their funding of the various projects underpinning this study of policy mortality. In addition, we would like to thank the many people from all parts of the education system in England for participating in our fieldwork.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.