Last month, Ms. Ruth Perry, a headteacher in Reading, England, took her own life after her school was rated “inadequate” in the latest round of inspection conducted by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills—better known as its acronym Ofsted. Before this shocking tragedy, many surveys already noted an alarming number of teachers in England suffering substantial accountability-related stress, to the extent that many were considering quitting the profession.
This sorry state is not exclusive to England, as the same kind of stress and demoralisation was reported across the globe both before and during the trying times of the COVID-19 pandemic. To rectify what has become a global fault line of school accountability, a fundamental rethinking is urgently needed regarding the purposes of accountability in school education and the appropriate means to achieving them.
The term “accountability” is typically used to depict a relationship between “accountors” and “accountees” that involves the delivery of certain types of information (or “account”), to which feedback is given in return. Beyond this basic definition, accountability relationships can take various forms depending on who is accountable to whom and for what—a landscape that can also change over time.
For long, it was primarily about the hierarchical relationship between lower and higher levels of bureaucracies over inputs and regulation compliance. In the background, bureaucratic accountability was expected to be supported by political or democratic accountability. Popularised by New Public Management (NPM) reforms since 1990s, a pervasive emphasis on performance, outcome and business-like efficiency started to engender a proliferation of relationships beyond the hierarchical one.
