Search

The study presents a bibliometric network analysis of the two most recent schools reforms in Norway. Two research questions have been pursued: First, do the government-appointed expert commission use (in Green Papers) the same type of knowledge as 'evidence' for their reviews and recommendations as the Ministry of Education and Research (as reflected in the White Papers)? How has the use of 'evidence' changed over the two reform periods? Second, which body of knowledge amassed by the expert commission has the Ministry of Education and Science actually used for policy formulation? The network analysis shows (i) distinct changes in reference patterns over the two reform periods (e.g., average number of references more than doubled and references to international texts increased significantly), and (ii) an unexpectedly low usage of the 'evidence' presented by the expert commissions. The Ministry of Education and Research only draws on 9.5 percent of the references presented by the expert commissions. Strikingly, almost all of the adopted references are from a commissioned report that locally adapted and translated OECD's Definitions and Selections of Competencies project. The authors suggest 'studying up' and paying more attention to how scientific 'evidence' is actually used, translated, and edited at the political level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, we theorize aspiration as ongoing performances that can be altered and remade in affective scenes of interruption. We put our theorization to work in a longitudinal study that followed a young woman, Marie, throughout her upper secondary education. Whilst Marie's performances of aspiration predominantly chimed with such individualistic policy discourses, she would also describe moments where these performances were seemingly interrupted. These were moments where Marie vividly experienced concerns related to planetary crises. The analysis carefully unpacks these moments, and we argue that they bring Marie into contact with the political stakes in her life and lead her to search for alternative, more sustainable, and collective modalities of aspiration. Hence, supplementing previous studies that have shown how inequality is reproduced through aspirations, the paper contributes with new understandings of how alternative modalities of aspiration may emerge that potentially exceed structural limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the reference societies of Norway and Sweden embedded in their education policy documents. We examined 4,260 bibliographic references in 19 white papers and green papers prepared for the 2016/2020 renewal of the Knowledge Promotion Reform in Norway and the 2015/2018 Knowledge Achievement Reform in Sweden. In addition, we interviewed 10 policy experts who participated in the preparation of the analyzed policy documents. The results show that the reference societies overall reflect the existing knowledge production and dissemination mechanisms in education policy; however, they significantly differed between Norway and Sweden regarding whether and to what extent they reference knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Specifically, while Norway drew extensively on knowledge from its neighbors, particularly Sweden, Sweden seldom referenced knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Policy actors identified similarity, relevance, accessibility, reform contexts, and institutional arrangements as reasons for (not) referencing neighbors. This study calls for further consideration of the political, social, and cultural embeddedness of the 'socio-logic' to understand implicit reference societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While public consultation is a signature process of democratic policy formulation, many governments manoeuvre to refract citizen's opinions or conduct it perfunctorily. Using the case of a medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong, this article unveils the strategies that the state and citizens employ to put their opinion through to the final policy text, during a public consultation process. Recent literature has identified the mechanisms through which individual actors or organisations contribute to broad policy agenda-setting or policy programme development. However, yet to be investigated is how they – sometimes with conflicting interests – collectively negotiate a policy with the state via public consultations. This paper investigates this very phenomenon, building on previous work conducted in the public policy field, analysing 51 government-generated documents through both thematic content analysis and critical discourse analysis. The paper uncovers four strategies adopted by administrations (non-commitment, case closure, disengagement for irrelevance, and placation) to evade citizens' equity-oriented demands and stakeholders' three counter strategies (mobilising other stakeholders into a coalition, reopening the case pointing out a new problem, and appealing by affirming relevance). The state's discrete refusals and stakeholders' conjoint reengagement tactics draw our attention to the complexity and subtlety involved in negotiation via public consultations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on teachers' practices amid a national curriculum 'implementation' project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers' everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significant engagement, commitment, and work towards enacting the new curriculum—their innovations were not sustained. These cases provide a useful site of analysis of change as a practice, rather than a more common focus on change as an outcome. De Certeau's theory of everyday practice is used to discuss how work-for-change is an everyday feature of teacher practice in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. This aspect of teachers' work in these settings is seldom acknowledged because successes are easily obscured by deficit discourses. Other factors contributing to the invisibility of teachers' work-for-change in these schools include the often-intangible nature of teachers' professional successes amid more formally visibilized failures, the ephemeral nature of everyday practice, and a workforce context characterised by teacher and leadership transience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses performance-based research evaluation for the higher education sector in a postcolonial context through a Foucauldian lens. Using Hong Kong as an example, this paper examines the formulation of and receptions towards the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It is argued that Hong Kong academics, especially those working in the humanities and social sciences, associate the key concepts of 'world-leading' and 'internationally excellent' research in the RAE framework with Western knowledge that undermines local and regional research. They respond to RAE in four main ways: pragmatic compliance; refusal to conform to the demands of RAE; adoption of a dualistic strategy by publishing internationally and locally; and re-imagining of research assessment coupled with the promotion of indigenous knowledge. Two significant implications are highlighted in this article. First, the preservation of a research evaluation mechanism inherited from a colonial government perpetuates and entrenches external control and dominance in the former colony. Secondly, there is a need to re-construct the research appraisal apparatus as well as advance indigenous and hybrid knowledge in a postcolonial educational landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2021 the Chinese Government unexpectedly released what has become known colloquially as the 'Double-Reduction' policy. The policy decreed the reduction of homework pressure on students and greater control of private tutorial companies. In this paper, we set out to understand why the Chinese central government launched the 'Double-Reduction' policy in mid−2021 by using narratives to analyse the three most circulated explanations for the policy and its timing. We use data from a range of formal and informal policy texts. The three narratives, including one policy narrative dominant in the official discourse and two alternative ones, constructed the causal stories about the policy's rationale from multiple perspectives. The combination of multiple perspectives and a narrative approach helps reveal the policy event's complexity and lays a foundation for researchers interested in tracking the development trajectory of this new policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the reasons for this failed endeavor by analyzing the complex, multilevel relations between policy and law in different national and historical contexts. With this, aspects of juridification as a process in education policy can be illuminated. In this regard, we suggest crucial aspects regarding juridification in public education: a focus on regulative failures in juridification processes, juridification's contexts, the mandate for putting it into action, the allocation of resources, and finally, its objective and subjective rights dimensions, i.e. how an individual can claim rights within the machinery of public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teach for Australia was announced by the Australian Government in 2008, at a corporate dinner sponsored by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, hosting New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Conceptualising Teach for Australia as a polycentric policy network anchored in venture philanthropy, this paper examines how networks mobilise major government reform, drawing upon both market and state. As an organisation founded, staffed and registered by a major global consultancy firm (Boston Consultancy Group), the paper critiques and questions representation, divisibility and immutability. By drawing upon network ethnography, following people and policy, the paper traces the beginnings of Teach for Australia through inaugural founders, focusing upon co-affiliations. Mapping a heterarchical and polycentric network of non-state and state actors, it highlights indivisible flows of people, money and policy. Thus, this paper seeks to indicate how policy networks embedded in venture philanthropy mobilise policy, whilst being reliant upon formal bureaucracies. This is governance with government. Teach for Australia highlights the nexus between private and public, and fuses together critical connections between market and state, bolstering a major venture philanthropic network that chiefly impacts public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that materializes digitalized school leadership practice. The policy instrument is made available as a 'helpful tool' by a Swedish official education agency. The paper scrutinizes the policy knowledge process set to work within the instrument by the agency. Particularly, how the instrument may influence people to come to know and change schools, and how responsibility and risk of digitalization in schools seems to first be transferred to, and then between, people in schools. The paper is concluded by a discussion of how (a) three knowledge phases interact in the knowledge process of the instrument, (b) the technical – rather than social – solution that digitalized school leadership practice is found to be, and (c) implications for digitalization in schools as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon of interest to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The government's White Paper, Learning to Succeed: a new framework for post-16 learning, is here evaluated. The considerable strengths of the proposals – replacement of the TECs with Learning and Skills Councils, the adoption of social partnership in the membership of the new Councils, the substantial increase in resource and a large number of specific measures – are briefly welcomed. A number of serious reservations are then discussed in detail – for example, the absence of a model of change, the over-riding concern to meet the skill needs of business, the overreliance on human capital theory and the continued dependence on exhortation as a means of increasing employers' investment in training. Findings from The Learning Society Programme are then used to question some of the central assumptions underlying the official model of progress. It is argued that endless technocratic reforms are more likely to foster conformity, compliance and control rather than emancipation, empowerment and the enhancement of learning. Finally, it is concluded that the government is rightly pursuing radical, structural reform but is failing to recognize the potential of lifelong learning as a major lever on such change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) as a secondary school subject is affected by two policies, namely the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and Progress 8, which contribute to the measurement of performance in exams at age 16 (GCSEs). In this paper, I discuss the concept of performance measurement in schools and the purpose it purportedly serves, before outlining these two policies and considering how they contribute to the culture of performance measurement and a non-neutral discourse around 'standards'. I argue that the two policies act in tension in a game of tug of war with one another in such a way that the net positive effect on the subject of MFL is zero, but that the negative effect on students is substantial. I suggest that the policies act to impose middle-class notions of what it means to be educated on students, with a substantial negative effect on students from low socio-economic status backgrounds both in terms of their interest in the subject and their perceptions of their own value within the education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD's PISA is seen as a 'global yardstick' against which countries measure the quality of their education systems. In 2018 PISA included an assessment of global competence. This paper starts with the premise that in using a single global instrument to 'measure' this phenomenon, PISA claims standardisation over contextually rich data that can then inform policy and, arguably, in turn practice. Data for this study is based on tracking 'global competence' through documentary analysis, interviews, and then 'survey encounters' where PISA global competence questionnaire items were discussed by principals and teachers in three schools in Victoria, Australia. The analysis illustrates that schools and teachers variously educate for global competence according to the specific cultural context, policy and curriculum in ways that highlight the inadequacy of a global metric. With the growing attention to educating for global citizenship and the OECD's development of global measures, this investigation of localised understandings of global competence magnifies the 'situatedness' of knowledge (and therefore assessment practices). Questions are raised about what is ignored in metrics when such a contested concept is operationalised, and points to the lack of validity of this metric because it de-contextualises how global competence is understood by teachers and enacted in curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'governance' is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories and conceptual and empirical turns in the field of education. In this paper we systematically delineate the different meanings ascribed to governance within education with a focus on its polyvalence as a political project, empirical object and research analytic. Specifically, we highlight the various complementarities and tensions flowing from this rich and evolving language. We conclude by calling for more education researchers to reflect on this complicated history and attendant language as part of their framings and interpretations of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a long-term study of venture philanthropy and public schools in Australia, this paper focuses on Teach For Australia (TFA) as a major component of a venture philanthropic network, one that builds critical infrastructures and connections between non-government organisations and the state, creating a product pipeline into public schools. Utilising interviews with staff from Teach For Australia and venture philanthropic organisations, comprehensive and rigorous financial data, reviews, reports and website data, the analysis aims to identify the major philanthropic funders, individual actors and private foundations that leverage Teach For Australia, illustrating how this network develops for-profit pathways into public schools. In pushing a deficit framing of public schools, these networks incur privatisation effects, including flows of money, resources and key decision-making. They compromise the democratic principles upon which public schools are ideally based, in that the most disadvantaged public schools are opened up to 'entrepreneurial' and risk-taking corporate behaviour to test out teachers, products and services. By examining streams of revenue, partnerships and networks, we show how the purportedly non-profit Teach For Australia develops for-profit opportunities and business partnerships nested in corporate philanthropy, resulting in a privatisation effect on public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although all young people in England are entitled to a full-time, state-funded education suitable to their needs, every year some are without a school place and must be found one through local fair access protocols. This paper uses the enactment of fair access protocols in one local authority to examine the impacts of policy shifts to increase the power of self-governing schools and reduce the role of local authorities in ensuring local educational inclusion. Drawing on observations of two fair access panel meetings and a school's preparations for these meetings, alongside Foucault's theorisation of relationships between local practices and wider policy conditions, I argue that particular tactics are produced through fair access practices, which prioritise procedural fairness to schools and serve to categorise perceived risky young people. This interpretation of fairness arises out of a policy landscape of tensions, which requires schools to balance individual performance priorities alongside collective duties for inclusive and equitable education, and turns what should be an inclusive policy into another facet of the increasingly nuanced exclusionary architecture of English education. The findings are internationally relevant given global support for self-governing schools which is creating new issues for the educational inclusion of marginalised populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates and elaborates on the fabrication of teachers' subjectivity who work in school contexts governed by neoliberal policies. Theoretically, the conceptual metaphor of bonsai pedagogy is proposed to understand teachers' processes of subjectivation enacted by neoliberal discourses, policies, and practices. The article aims to understand the relationship between the processes of (de/re)-professionalisation and the subjective experience of malaise, suffering, and sickness lived by teachers in the exercise of their work. Bonsai pedagogy is offered as a complementary category of analysis and interpretation of these processes that is more sensitive to teachers' subjectivity. The research is based on 35 narrative interviews with Chilean dissident schoolteachers who are members of teachers' political organisations. I analyse three strategies used by the bonsai pedagogy: i) controlling and saturating teachers' time; ii) managing and guiding teachers' practices; and iii) obstructing teachers' creativity. I discuss how the bonsai pedagogy reduces the capacity of teachers to unfold and construct their subjectivity in alternative ways. Since Chile has implemented neoliberal reforms in education longer than any other country, understanding how neoliberalism operates through and around Chilean teachers can contribute to furthering our knowledge of how teachers worldwide can resist and deal with neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a theoretical framework of policy assemblage, we analyse current primary mathematics teacher professional development in England, in the context of a transnational policy of mastery in mathematics influenced by East Asian practices. As well as the increased discourse of marketisation, and school and teacher autonomy, there has also been a paradoxical process of greater state influence over the content and form of professional learning. This paper maps the mathematics mastery market to show how marketisation and competition form a mirage that masks state-market assemblage. An analysis of these assemblages illuminates the state's role in fostering a market whilst also operating as an actor in this market, in this case in mastery professional development. Within the mastery market, tensions arise between the phenomena of replication and isomorphism and differentiation of 'offers' that develop affinity groups and networks. Thus, we extend previous descriptions of the hierarchy, markets, and networks, and the roles of state funded actors within teacher professional development by identifying the importance of multiplicity of logics, assemblage as a process of labour, and the dynamic nature of relationships and activity. Resources to support teacher professional learning are mobilised in competitive processes with apparent choice hiding state direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of 'biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of 'biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a 'problematic subject'; secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction; and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, in that space, we are hoping to 'get lost' in some unexplored spaces of possibility. We sketch some starting points, some 'lines of flight' for such thinking. To do this, we identify a concatenation of three crises and discuss briefly their inter-relationship. But the paper focuses primarily on education. The first of these crises, COVID, offers a moment, a space, in which we might think of ourselves, others, and the world differently. The second, climate, brings to bear a pressing urgency for change in the way that we think of our relation to the world in practical, political and epistemological ways. The third, education in relation to crises, is an opening within which some thinking might be undertaken about what it means to be educated, and in which the relation between education, community and sustainability, in a variety of senses, might be pursued. In the final sections, using concepts from Foucault, Olssen, Lewis and others, we seek to find inspiration from and an accommodation between Foucault's self-formation and commoning – a practice of collaborating and sharing to meet every day needs and achieve the well-being of individuals, communities, and environments – as a new way to think education beyond modern episteme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interventions instated to disrupt the destructive effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on students of color were repealed as a result of the US Education Department's 2018 Federal Commission on School Safety report. Using a critical policy and critical discourse framework, this paper examines how the language used in the report facilitated the process of repeal while concealing the insidious effects that the repeal could have on students of color and especially black students. Based on this analysis, the paper argues that education policy discourse is influenced by and supports the covert operation of white supremacist ideological structures that hinder the struggle for equity and justice in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the experiences of English primary school leaders who perform critical roles in interpreting government policy and navigating the landscape to design relationship and sex education (RSE) for their pupils. It considers schools as sites of political contestation and educators as policy actors, the voices of whom are often absent in the literature about RSE. Drawing on Peter Morriss' theory of power, the paper considers how primary school decision makers utilise their epistemic abilities to advance their policy preferences and how structures of authority and legitimacy energize and constrain them in their policy-making work. The findings suggest a paradox in power: while the national government has delegated decision-making about RSE to individual schools, it has simultaneously failed to uniformly equip schools to make appropriate policies about RSE and enabled parents to deny schools' credibility and authority as leaders in RSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a quest to achieve a ‘world class’ education system through a process of identifying and adopting the practices of those systems whose pupils perform best in league tables of achievement. This is the rationale for the range of new policies proposed by the coalition government in the schools White Paper published in November 2010, which promotes whole-system reform in England. This article examines the White Paper and analyses the sources and nature of the evidence for reform and the congruence between the policy intentions and their associated policy actions. The analysis suggests that the evidence for the proposed reforms and policy actions is at best tenuous. Both the White Paper and its key sources of evidence are characterised by: a selective use of data: a propensity to mix and match the sources of comparison; and an overall tendency to employ comparisons with high-performing systems elsewhere as a façade to legitimate preferred policy options. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fair access and widening participation currently occupy a prominent position in the UK higher education agenda, but these terms remain ambiguous. In this paper we identify two prominent strands of policy in the government's approach to access and the widening of participation and contrast these with a third, more progressive perspective. The academic strand seeks to attract 'gifted and talented' young people into an unreformed higher education system. The second strand, which we term the utilitarian approach, posits a need for reform. However, this is undertaken largely to meet the requirements of employers and the economy. In contrast, a transformative approach values diversity and focuses on creating a system of higher education that does not place the burden of change upon potential entrants. This framework is used to explore some of the implications of the government's White Paper The future of higher education. First, the purpose of higher education is discussed, with particular reference to the distinction between economic and social objectives. Second, the government's view of the structure of the higher education sector is examined, by scrutinizing the notion of institutional differentiation and the role of the access regulator. We conclude that within a more differentiated higher education sector different aspects of the access discourse will become dominant in different types of institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticizes the National Educational Research Forum's Consultation Paper 'A National Strategy' because of its inadequate representation of educational research in Great Britain. Failure of the paper to attend to context and history; Key facets of the dominant paradigm of governance which the paper subscribes to; Simplistic assumptions made about the relation between educational research and classroom practice.

Teach For All (TFAll) is global network of programs based on Teach For America. Since 2007, TFAll has spread to more than 60 countries and had a considerable impact on educational policy across educational jurisdictions. Scant research, however, has examined 'shadow' programs based on this model but unaffiliated with TFAll, such as Teach For Taiwan (TFT). This paper engages in a critical policy analysis of TFT and examines both its emergence and (mis)alignment with educational policy. Our analysis first highlights the inspiration and support TFT has drawn from TFAll and its affiliate programs, despite its unofficial status. The paper then examines how TFT is aligned strategically with recent policy shifts toward deregulation in Taiwanese education. We also find that TFT is misaligned with key educational structures, including the national salary scale for teachers and teacher education system, resulting in a new category of transient teachers who are uniquely positioned in the teaching roles they assume but largely unable to continue teaching beyond TFT. We argue that more attention within education policy studies should focus on the impacts of (un)official TFAll programs – particularly given their disproportionate power and positioning to effect global educational change – and their (mis)alignments with national systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper picks up and elaborates on the conception of policy translators in schools – key actors in the enactment of policy. The qualitative data presented here highlight how it is often middle leaders doing high-profile policy work in schools, turning ideas into actions and bringing policy to life. As translators, they organise, manage, lead, plan, produce, inspire, persuade, and appease, and in doing so they translate policy into practice and make it a collective effort. At the same time, they are often overloaded and inundated. In focusing on middle leaders as policy translators, this research makes several important contributions to scholarship: empirical data is provided to support and expand on policy enactment theory, the limited research base on middle leadership is developed, and understandings of how school self-evaluation plays out in schools are strengthened. Thus, it is envisaged that this paper will not only be of interest and of use to researchers and policymakers concerned with policy, evaluation, and leadership but to practising teachers and school leaders attempting to make sense of their own experiences at the coalface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issues that social researchers study and policymakers address are partly determined by how they think about the world around them. Their view of the social world often depends on their position within it. What their research reveals and their policies propose are, in part, a reflection of where they choose to look and how they interpret the world they identify. The result can be a myopic view of the social and a distorted explanation of how social relations work. In this paper, we argue the need to widen the aperture of the lens that social researchers and policymakers use to investigate and ameliorate educational disadvantage. In particular, in matters of education equity, beyond measuring opportunities and outcomes of target groups, we argue the need to consider the substantiveness of opportunities as well as the subjective conditions and objective contexts that mediate how people transform their resources into outcomes. Drawing on the work of both Bourdieu and Sen, we propose an expanded evaluative framework that outlines five spaces for assessing educational disadvantage: position and disposition, capital interaction, capability expansion, conversion ability, and conditioned choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the article discussing the national education research strategy in Great Britain. Definition on the function of strategy in the national education research; Opposition to the proposed Education Priorities Group; Threats to the academic freedom.

Student voice is, of course, fundamental – who could argue against democracy? It is important that we do not return to a time where students were seen and not heard and positioned as subordinate figures but at the same time, do teachers suffer because of this democracy? Although student voice policies can represent positive developments, it would be naïve to be overly celebratory of pro-voice policies. This critical account focuses on some of the unsavoury ways that student voice can play out in schools: it can be used for surveillance; it can give rise to suspicion; and it can see dissenters stigmatised. Qualitative data generated through interviews with school staff are drawn on in this paper and researcher subjectivity is treated as a key asset as the author's student voice experiences at the coalface are first expounded in an autoethnographic account and then reflected in the interpretations and presentations of the interview data. What is coined the 'I(nterest) behind this research' means that student voice is not taken at face value or as an unquestionably positive initiative but something that can, even unintentionally, be more sinister. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing move worldwide in education policy towards standardization in combination with a global trust in digital quantification and calculation. These policies cause frictions in early childhood education (ECE). Hence, this paper examines the way standards 'work' in ECE. The empirical study draws on the ideas of Actor-Network Theory to recount and examine the highly material processes of calculation and representation, in which standards become enacted and act in practice. The data was drawn from extensive interviews with early childhood teachers in the Netherlands as well as additional 'object interviews'. The analysis describes how a particular standard becomes enacted as an assemblage, which both invites and compels teachers and managers to engage in particular educational practices. Foregrounding standards and highlighting the way professionals work with, through or around them, enables educational professionals to (re)consider the doings of standards and creates a space to imagine how practices – and policies that shape these practices – might be assembled differently. We advance the argument that it is important for professionals to critically analyse their professional practices in light of increasing datafication. Enhancing sociomaterial sensibilities of teachers might support them to offset persuasive powers of sociomaterial policy assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to growing pushback to decades of privatization and disinvestment in high-poverty communities of color, elected officials and business leaders in the United States have turned to 'community-engaged strategies' to advance education reform. This qualitative case study of a California school district, the Oakland Unified School District, from 1989 to 2019 uses a Gramscian analysis of hegemony to illuminate the shift from coercive practices of financial audits to building consent through the district's formal engagement strategies as tools to manage public dissent around divisive decisions. Findings reveal that a manufacturedscrisis facilitated the 2003 state takeover of OUSD to further advancesausterity measures and audit processes that served as racialized formssof fiscal surveillance. When local resistance to these measures intensified, district actors shifted tactics to 'engage' community members through a portfolio strategy to manage school choice options and other public-private partnerships. Oakland public schools are a prime case of how democratic mechanisms serve as the vehicle to manufacture public consent for district redesign by way of marketization. This paper contributes new insights into local and global debates on educational privatization by critically examining the role of parastatal audit agencies in shaping community support for public-privateeducation governance along with tracing the shifting tactics of elite policy actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the enactment of government policy during the Covid pandemic in primary schools in England. Based on interviews with school leaders and teachers across the period 2020–21 (n = 66), drawn from two major studies of primary schools' priorities during the crisis, we argue that school leaders' responses can be understood as a distinct form of policy enactment particular to an unprecedented crisis. Policy arrived in schools differently, and was enacted differently. Our findings suggest that enacting policy during the Covid crisis was a process dominated by the need to act at speed, informed by the prioritisation of children's basic needs and based on a knowledge of the local circumstances. Thus dimensions of context which affect policy enactment were altered during the crisis, with the material circumstances of the school and the values of the headteacher becoming highly significant. The approach we term crisis policy enactment is response to policy which is focused first on coping but is also agentic, demonstrating a commitment to children's welfare and a belief in the power of schools to make a difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same time, funding support for EAL/D learners is substantial. The devolution of EAL/D support to individual schools through autonomous targeted funding results in policy 'everywhere', distributed across broad portfolios dedicated to ensuring schools provide quality education services for all learners, but also 'nowhere', lacking systemic support and detail on how inclusion should be enacted for EAL/D and with no accountability placed on schools to demonstrate that they are addressing EAL/D learner needs. The co-location of EAL/D policy with a broad systemic policy of inclusion, the absence of systemic professional support, combined with devolution to school sites has had real effects on the policy in practice. The analysis demonstrates there is the potential opening of EAL/D provision to market forces at school sites, where the private sector can potentially sell commercial 'solutions' directly to schools, which have greater autonomy over one-line budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the emergence of venture philanthropy in public schools in Australia, focusing on policy networks and policy mobility. It seeks to analyse how policy is mobilised and leveraged via networks, focusing on the initiative of a national education charity with deductible gift recipient status, and a national research education institute. By drawing on network ethnography, and following people, things, and money, the paper studies the restructuring of traditional government and its relationship to, and with, policy networks. Policy networks, as shown in this paper, are highly diverse in shape and form, consisting of powerful human actors, but also influential non-human actors that take on lateral scope including government reports, policy documents, and parliamentary legislation. The restructuring of the state apparatus is not a hollowing out of the state, but rather the state performs a central node within a policy network, challenging the notion that non-state actors supersede the role of the state. Policy networks represent highly valuable commodities and tend to be characterised by their reproductive values. These networks are tangibly reshaping the way money and commodities are circulated, offering a transactional currency and commodity within a marketplace, and reaching into public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how teachers see policy and how the visibility of various aspects of policymaking are mediated by our school contexts. As a perspective from a K-12 classroom teacher conducting policy research with other classroom teachers, this paper also explores how teachers, in turn, might make our policy work visible to ourselves and the implications for teacher agency. Teachers in the study took part in a two-year participatory action research endeavour, joining school-based policy inquiry groups where we identified policies, mapped policymaking processes, and discussed the implications of our contexts. On one hand, these engagements highlight the central role a school's institutional narratives and professional culture play in constructing the ways we see policy. At the same time, they point to how our seeing exceeds and moves with and through such constraints. With reference to postcolonial interpretations of agency, I describe how as part of inquiry teachers constructed spaces for ambiguity and alternative accounts, and in doing so movement and difference, in policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines mechanisms in the Japanese education system that 'bring in' knowledge of practice to the process of policy translation. The paper firstly draws on the enactment of recent curriculum reforms in Japan to define a group of actors – practitioner advocates – who utilise their identity as members of the teaching community to mediate and translate policies, from a position outside the school and often outside the municipality. Their collaboration with school administrators and teachers effectuates policy transactions that make sense to teachers, developed in reference to knowledge of practice but legitimised in reference to policy, bending its meanings. Secondly, examining the work of practitioner advocates invites questions that might otherwise go unasked, and provides a fresh perspective on the particularity of the Anglo-American context. It draws attention to the possibility that the Anglo-American structural, institutional or cultural context is peculiarly susceptible to a kind of deliverological managerialism that shuts out experience of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks empirically at how the UK's policy of securitisation within education impacts on the meso-level space of cultural ethos and pedagogy within two majority non-white secondary schools and one majority non-white further education college. It does so primarily by documenting how British Values and Prevent policies enabled through the British Government's Counter-Terrorism and Security Act have impacted on institutional ethos both in terms of objective structures and staff subjectivities. It is argued here that the security-curriculum ensemble is a recognition of this meso-level space by central government and represents a development in moves made to restrict access and agency within this space, and even to circumscribe this space through symbolic violence. This paper concludes by urging school/college leaders to exercise their agency at the meso-level; to recognise this space as a place for democratisation and decolonisation as an equitable alternative to enforced cultural 'upgrading' and in(ex)clusion presented through securitisation policy that is in reality an instrument of symbolic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the 'material turn' in the social sciences, education scholars have engaged in discussions on various materialist modes of policy analysis for a long time now. This paper continues these discussions by experimenting with an agential realist re-reading of the instrumentation approach originally proposed by Lascoumes & Le Gales. Through an affirmative-diffractive methodology, the paper suggests that policy instruments can be conceptualized as socio-technical, entangled, and performative instruments that produce distinctive discursive-material effects by virtue of their particular capacities. This conceptualization continues key features of the original instrumentation approach, while contributing a concept of instrument capacities and amplifying the importance of the material and ontological character of the performative effects of policy instruments and their entanglement with policy content and wider sets of policies. By including the empirical case of higher education accreditation in the re-reading, the article offers an approach capable of analyzing how policy instruments contribute to the crafting of the ontological constitution of the university in alignment with the standards and practices produced by the accreditation instrument. The article suggests that the realities currently being invoked by instruments such as accreditation seem to reconfigure – and diminish – the very raison d'être of the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early post-apartheid policies envisaged a South African teacher who had autonomy to make professional judgements based on their school context and learners' needs. However, over the last decade, the state has increasingly monitored learner achievement and teachers' work. In this paper, we show how the professional development activities provided by the state for high school Life Sciences teachers focus primarily on measuring learner achievement and thus reflect organisational professionalism and managerial discourses which challenge the early post-apartheid vision of democratic professionalism. We present a case study of a cluster of Life Sciences teachers, generating data from interviews with eleven high school teachers and from observation of six professional development meetings. The findings show that the two main purposes of the activities in the cluster meetings are the improvement of learner results and the monitoring teachers' curriculum coverage and assessment practices. We argue that the discourse of performativity and managerial professionalism narrows the purpose of schooling, influences the nature of state-initiated professional development opportunities and also informs the way in which the state and teachers view their work. This contradicts the initial vision of the democratic state and provides insight into how neoliberal discourses have influenced education in a post-colonial country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we reveal and describe the context in which education policy networks in Israel have expanded recently, given the evolving interdependent relationships among the actors involved. We draw upon resource dependence theory, which assumes that actors' power relations within a network depends on their own and others' perceptions of the dependency relations among the different actors in the network. Policy documents and committee reports were identified and analyzed qualitatively, alongside transcripts of semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with stakeholders in Israeli education policy. We identified significant changes regarding which stakeholders take initiative for policy-making and implementation processes in Israeli education. We related these changes to the dynamics of resource dependence relationships among actors. In addition, we revealed a new stage in the evolution of educational governance in Israel – a transition from intersectoral collaboration within a top-down policy process defined and led by the Ministry of Education to a situation in which policy networks including non-governmental stakeholders initiate and subsequently lead many education policy processes. At this new stage, certain non-state actors increased their power, presence, and influence over Israeli education policy and can thus shape existing policies by leveraging their perceived control over a range of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature in skill formation systems has paid considerable attention to inter-variation between types of national skill formation systems and intra-variation among individual types as in the case of collective skill formation systems, less is known about the role of the European Union in establishing a European model of skill formation. Building on studies in educational governance and decentralised cooperation, this paper analyses the European Alliance for Apprenticeships (EAfA) and explores its relationship to national skill formation systems. We analyse the emergence of a European model of collective skill formation and offer case studies of Ireland and France to understand how this European model relates to these two contrasting skill formation systems. Through deductive qualitative content analysis of official documents, we show that (a) the EAfA, in resembling characteristics of national collective skill formation systems, promotes the emergence of a European model of collective skill formation, and (b) that Ireland and France show signs of moving further towards adopting elements of a collectivist training model centred on apprenticeship training although mediated by path-dependencies of a liberal (Ireland) and statist (France) skill formation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying current research on China's world-class university (WCU) policy approaches are analytical foci that privilege the agency of social actors and the problem-solving approach to policy analysis. Foucauldian poststructuralists draw our attention to policy document, which is seen as a discourse that organizes and administers society. Inspired by Foucault, Carol Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to Be?' approach (WPR) views policy document as a technology of governmentality. As proposed solutions to a problem, policy text produces the very problem that it seeks to address. Carol Bacchi draws our analytical attention to the rationalities, technologies of governing and subjectification effects created by particular problem representations in the WCU policy. Using WPR, this paper shows that WCU is represented as merely a technical, managerial and organizational problem. Such representations naturally reify WCU in material terms, such as research output, and in a temporal form of state planning. Genealogically, the root of WCU can be traced to the neoliberal movement of knowledge economy. However, Shanghai Ranking overturned this center-periphery landscape in disseminating the concept of WCU. China's one-party state means that WCU is pursued at the expense of sacrificing social sciences and subjecting academics and students to become 'red experts.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakeholders in public education across four Australian states of how the latest school autonomy reform policies, including Independent Public Schools, supports corporatized and seemingly depoliticised repositioning of school councils. This data indicates there is a shift from elected parental representation to principal selection of 'skill-based' community members, with the greatest implications for those schools in disadvantaged communities experiencing difficulties gaining voluntary parental participation. We offer new theoretical insights into the links between school autonomy, governance, the role and composition of school boards and social justice informed by Nancy Fraser's theorising of social justice. We identify an emerging tension between first, parent movements as counterpublics claiming participatory parity in decision-making in school councils; and secondly, principal selection of self-interested and politically influential actors onto school councils, potentially politicising school councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that analyzing education policies through the lens of affect theory provides possibilities for understanding how particular concepts are associated with certain affective ideologies. To illustrate this, the paper analyzes the case of a recent publication by the Council of Europe titled Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. The analysis shows how various concepts related to 'democratic competences' are invested with affective meanings, cultural connotations and political rhetoric. The paper argues that democratic competences are effectively conflated with emotional competences, opening up an analysis of democratic education as a form of individual and psychological therapy. The conclusion addresses the implications of this argument for education policy research and practice. In particular, it highlights the importance of paying attention not only to the ways that affect shapes the production of policy text, but also how a policy seeks to invoke certain affective dispositions at the point of enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and 'client' recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of autonomous schools. Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of decentralisation corresponds with schools' discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has devolved power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent 'agents', having a distanced relationship with its nonstate 'actors'. The paper follows Foucault's use of the metaphor of the panopticon and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of parental control and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a 'mini-public' ideology that constrains educators' autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and teacher demoralisation. Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical policy analyses have hitherto largely focused on how formal institutions and agents (such as schools and ministries) formulate and enact policy. Less considered is the role and perspectives of families in mediating education policy. This paper discusses the importance of viewing families as not only policy subjects, but policy actors who play important roles in negotiating education policy reform. In the Singapore context, as in many contexts, there has been a growing policy emphasis on developing higher-order critical and innovative thinking to equip young people for the global knowledge economy. However, it is at the socioeconomic margins of society that policy ideals tend not to map out as policymakers expect. We draw on in-depth interviews with low-income families - analysed using a governmentality perspective - to understand how families navigate Singapore's policy landscape, particularly its growing emphasis on higher-order competencies within a neoliberal, performative, high-stakes education system. The paper concludes by elaborating on equity implications arising from this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on infrastructures as heterogeneous assemblages. Our claim is that to examine something as elusive as data infrastructure calls for an epistemological and methodological approach consistent with the fluid ontology of the object of study. Moreover, we assert that there is no position of exteriority from which to critique data infrastructures. Our question is thus primarily methodological: How might we analyse the relational and heterogeneous nature of data infrastructures in a way that both problematizes and builds on the impossibility of exteriority? We examine two dispositions of data infrastructures: first comes their provisional, dispersed and entangled character, and second, the affective attachments imbued therein. Overall, this paper, first, returns to the ontological and theoretical perspectives on what data infrastructures are; second, makes a contribution to the methodological question of how to study them; and, third, develops a means of critique that do not locate the analyst outside the object of the critique, reminding us of the immanent relationality of data infrastructures and of the necessity to take these seriously in the methodological approach. The paper works with the existing literature on data infrastructures and research methods in education policy analysis, and with our own research data and first-hand experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of performative culture in education and intensifying forms of test-based accountability have subjected teachers to a ubiquitous 'field of judgment' through which they are held to account. Within this context, professional development is consistently deployed as a key solution to stagnant or declining student outcomes. In this paper, we examine how accountability might be reimagined through one approach to professional development known as Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR). We draw on Foucault's notion of panopticism and Ball's influential writings on performativity to analyse interviews with 21 educators from 14 schools in New South Wales, Australia, conducted during a 2014–2015 randomised controlled trial. Participants highlighted the pervasiveness of testing and test results in shaping their experience of teaching in a system of perpetual surveillance where numbers bite deep into practice. By contrast, participation in QTR afforded teachers rare spaces of freedom within the structure of performativity to collaboratively focus on pedagogy. We argue meaningful professional development can alter the field of judgment and enable teachers to reclaim accountability on their own terms, while maintaining a clear focus on student outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers' capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault's discipline with Connolly's pluralisation, we argue that evidence-based practice disciplines teachers to comply with a prescribed set of criteria, which constrains their capacity to respond to the evolving and emergent needs of their students and communities. Our argument is built from two projects conducted separately, but concurrently, in Australia and Denmark. The projects involved in-depth interviews with teachers, extensive observations within schools, and the collection and analysis of policy documents and artefacts. Using illustrative excerpts from both studies, we show how teacher participants expressed and embodied inclinations to do (or be) differently, but nonetheless felt the need to adhere to what the evidence established as the right way to do or be. In our view, this points to an increasingly rigid ontological space through which teachers can do, be and become, which raises questions about the extent to which an 'ethos of pluralisation' is possible within these schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]