Judy L Hutchinson, University of Notre Dame (USA) & Koinonia Associate Scholar

(pdf link available at foot of the article)

Across educational systems, few concepts are invoked as frequently, or as confidently, as mission. Schools, colleges, and universities articulate their values with care, publish mission statements prominently, and speak fluently about purpose, formation and responsibility. Yet many educators sense a growing disconnect between these statements and the decisions institutions are compelled to make in practice.

This disconnect is rarely the result of cynicism or bad faith. Rather, it emerges under continuous and sustained pressure: from accountability regimes, market competition, performance metrics, reputational concerns, and the demand to demonstrate impact under increasingly narrow terms.  In England, for example, inspection frameworks, performance tables, and system-level governance structures such as multi-academy trusts increasingly shape how success is often defined and communicated.  Under such conditions, mission often survives, but as language rather than true guidance.  The institution continues to say what it values, even if those values are quietly and slowly losing their capacity to shape decisions (Grace, 2002; Sulllivan, 2019).

This article explores how that process unfolds, why it is so common, and what educational leaders might notice before purpose becomes merely rhetorical.

Mission Not as Slogan, but as Interpretive Framework

Mission is often treated as something an institution has: a statement, a heritage, or a set of commitments that can be pointed to when required. But educational scholarship suggests a more demanding understanding.  Mission functions less as a fixed identity and more as an interpretive framework: a way of making sense of priorities, trade-offs, and educational aims over time (Gallin, 2000, Gourlay, 2023).

In this view, mission does not primarily describe what an institution is; it shapes how it understands what an institution ought to do.  It influences which forms of success are recognised, which practices are protected, and which compromises are deemed unacceptable.  When mission is operating well, it provides a coherence across curriculum, culture, leadership decisions and organisational structures.  When it is weak, it remains visible but increasingly detached from institutional life and practice.

Crucially, mission is always historically situated and institutionally negotiated. It must be interpreted under changing conditions, not merely preserved.  The question then, is not whether an institution has a mission, but whether that mission still functions as a living source of meaning rather than a symbolic artefact (Melé, 2022).

How Pressure Rewrites Purpose

Contemporary education operates under intense and often conflicting pressures.  Market processes, performance culture, and external accountability frameworks increasingly influence how we define and measure success.  Competition for students, funding and prestige encourages institutions to prioritise efficiency and outcomes,

These pressures do not automatically displace mission.  More often, they tend to reframe it.  Educational aims that once centred on formation, intellectual depth, or moral responsibility are translated into safer, more generic language, leaning heavily on terms such as “employability, resilience, inclusion, or institutional excellence.” Such terms are not empty, but they are elastic enough to accommodate almost any strategic direction (Grace, 2002, Ribeiro Serra et al., 2022).

The danger lies not in adaptation itself.  Educational institutions must respond to external pressures.  The risk lies in what is gradually lost as schools adapt.  When performance measures and inspection outcomes become the primary means for judging success, educational aims that are harder to quantify, such as formation, moral purpose, and intellectual depth, receive much less attention.  Mission continues to show up in institutional language, but it no longer plays a decisive role in shaping priorities.

Leadership, Culture, and the Limits of Intentionality

Leadership is often invoked as the solution to mission drift, and rightly so.  Research consistently shows that leadership clarity, continuity, and governance structures matter deeply in sustaining institutional purpose (Morey and Piderit, 2006; Haller, 2024).  However, leadership alone cannot carry and embody mission if organisational systems pull in different directions.

Mission is enacted, or undermined, through everyday practices: hiring criteria, promotion pathways, workload models, curriculum priorities, and what is publicly rewarded or quietly ignored.  When structures cease to align with stated values, a gap emerges between aspiration and reality.  Over time, staff learn which commitments truly matter.

This is not a failure of sincerity, but rather, a structural problem.  Mission cannot survive as a purely rhetorical or inspirational project.  It requires institutional conditions that allow it to form behaviour, not merely language.

Drift Without Departure

One of the most striking features of mission drift is how rarely it involves a decisive break.  Institutions seldom abandon their stated values outright.  Instead, purpose slowly erodes, through a series of reasonable (necessary?) accommodations to external expectations (Burtchaell, 1998).

Pluralism intensifies this process.  In diverse educational communities, mission is often expressed through broad commitments to inclusion, dialogue and welcome.  These are values that are both necessary and genuine.  Yet when more specific educational or moral claims recede from view, mission risks becoming indistinguishable from institutional branding (Gourlay, 2025).

Fragmentation, however, is not always a sign of failure.  Educational institutions are complex communities, and coherence does not require uniformity.  But when mission loses its capacity to orient decisions, it no longer performs its formative role.  What remains is a language that signals identity without forming practice.

From Rhetoric Back to Responsibility

The challenge facing educational leaders is not to recover a pristine or uncontested vision of mission, but to recognise when purpose has been reduced to description rather than responsibility.  This requires attention less to what institutions say and more how decisions are justified when pressures collide.

Some questions may be more useful than solutions:

• Which decisions in this institution are understood as non-neutral?
• Where does mission genuinely inform priorities, and where does it merely accompany them?
• What forms of success are rewarded, and which are tolerated but sidelined?
• What kind of formation does our system actually produce, regardless of stated intent?

Mission survives pressures not through repetition, but because institutions are willing to let it inform real decisions, priorities and trade-offs. Without that willingness, mission can exist only as rhetoric, not as purpose.

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References

Burtchaell, J.T. (1998) The dying of the light: the disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Gallin, A. (2000) Negotiating identity: Catholic higher education since 1960. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Gourlay, T. (2023) ‘Mission, identity and Catholic universities: a relational and anthropological approach’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 88(1), pp. 25–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/00211400221142473

Gourlay, T.V. (2025) ‘Catholic education, institutional identity, and the reality of cultural pluralism’, International Studies in Catholic Education, advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19422539.2025.2518073

Grace, G. (2002) Catholic schools: mission, markets and morality. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Haller, J. (2024) ‘A tale of two private Catholic universities: internal environment factors that influence institutional differentiation’, Strategic Enrollment Management Quarterly, 12(2), pp. 27–40.

Melé, D. (2022) ‘The Catholic university: identity, mission, and responsibilities’, in Poff, D.C. (ed.) University corporate social responsibility and university governance. Cham: Springer, pp. 171–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77532-2_9

Morey, M.M. and Piderit, J.J. (2006) Catholic higher education: a culture in crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ribeiro Serra, F.A., Mazieri, M.R., Scafuto, I.C., Alisson, W.C.J. and Pinoti, F. (2022) ‘The mission statement in Catholic higher education organizations and identity challenges’, International Journal of Educational Management, 36(6), pp. 984–1001. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-02-2021-0065

Sullivan, J. (2019) ‘Catholic universities as counter-cultural to universities PLC’, International Studies in Catholic Education, 11(2), pp. 190–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/19422539.2019.1641051

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