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Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the 'policy mobilities,' 'fast policy' processes and distributed 'policy assemblages' that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture capital firms, think tanks and philanthropic foundations, non-profit organizations and commercial companies alike have promoted computer programming in schools according to a variety of purposes, aspirations, and commitments. This paper maps and traces the evolution of the organizational networks in each country in order to provide a comparative analysis of computing in schools as an exemplar of accelerated, transnationalizing policy mobility. The analysis demonstrates how computing in schools policy has been assembled through considerable effort to create alignments between diverse actors, the production and circulation of material objects, significant cross-border movement of ideas, people and devices, and the creation of strategic partnerships between government centres and commercial vendors. Computing in schools exemplifies how modern education policy and governance is accomplished through sprawling assemblages of actors, events, materials, money and technologies that move across social, governmental and geographical boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed as being in response to terrorist attacks and concerns about religious bias in some English schools, 'British Values' (BV) curriculum policy forms part of the British Government's Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015. This includes a Duty on teachers in England to actively promote British Values to deter students from radicalisation. This paper, first, traces the history of Britishness in the curriculum to reveal a prevalence of nationalistic, colonial values. Next, an ensemble of recent policies and speeches focusing on British Values is analysed, using a psycho-political approach informed by anti-colonial scholarship. Finally, we interrogate two key critiques of the British Values curriculum discourse: the universality of British Values globally, and concerns over the securitisation of education. Findings indicate that the constitution of white British supremacist subjectivities operate through curriculum as a defence mechanism against perceived threats to white privilege, by normalising a racialised state-controlled social order. The focus is on 'British' values, but the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent education policy analysis has revealed the standardisation of education systems and an intensified focus on learners and learning to meet the requirements of the global economy and neo-liberalism. In this paper we analyse the way that early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand has become increasingly entangled with school sector priorities and international discourses of lifelong learning as it has encountered these requirements. We trace the shift from an explict rejecting and countering of school sector pedagogy to the promoting of increasing continuity with school sector priorities. We draw attention to dynamic, contrasting and competing interests and entities that have shaped the construction of learning and learners and curriculum and assessment priorities. We argue the need to attend to the complex mix of constitutive forces at work in the formulation and enactment of early childhood sector priorities, in particular to these crucial entanglements with school sector priorities, international discourses of lifelong learning and neo-liberal economic rationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns of participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, as elsewhere, have been marked by social inequalities for decades. UK Governments have responded with a plethora of policies and agendas aimed at addressing this broad social issue. However, little is known about how higher education institutions (HEIs) interpret and 'enact' these policies in relation to institution-specific contexts. Drawing on concepts from policy sociology this paper examines how HEIs in one nation state, Wales, enact its Government's policy on 'widening access' to higher education. Interviews with a range of 'policy actors' along with analyses of institutional 'widening access' policy documents, reveal divergences between HEIs in how this policy agenda is interpreted and delivered. These differences reflect institution-specific contexts - not least their internal politics and assumptions about the type of students they admit, but also their interests and priorities in relation to their positions within a global, marketised, HE system. The implications of this for the reproduction of university hierarchies in the UK, as well as social inequalities more generally are brought to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the commercialisation of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in Australian schools. Specifically, it focuses on understanding why teachers value commercial resources, and how they enact these in their classrooms. Theorising around teacher agency suggests teachers are now choosing to use a range of commercial resources and view these as important additions to their pedagogical toolbox. Teachers want high quality resources, and they prefer resources that are easy to import, scaffold and modify according to their specific needs. Teachers did not readily see the benefit of a prescriptive SEL program. Instead, they wanted multiple resources that they could pick and choose the best bits from. Our data suggests that teachers are not being seduced by commercialisation and the ‘easy fix’ it promises, but are in fact presenting as agentic professionals who care deeply about students’ social and emotional wellbeing and are working to tailor bespoke learning experiences to meet the needs of their students within their specific school contexts. We argue that it is worth nuancing the critique about commercialisation offered in the literature to date, and suggest that commercialisation is not inherently bad, rather it is the ‘intensity’ of commercialisation that needs to be regulated and further investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comparative analysis of national curriculum reforms in Australia and the USA, set against the backdrop of global trends since the 1980s. The analysis is driven by an interest in the reconstitution of national policy spaces in global times, and draws particularly upon Stephen Carney’s notion ofglobal policy-scapesas a way of understanding the complex and disjunctive flows of transnational policy ideas and practices. The paper begins by arguing that reforms since the early 1980s have been driven by global panics about globalisation, equity and market competitiveness. These global influences have underpinned parallel reform attempts in each country, including the development of national goals in the late 1980s, failed attempts at national standards in the early 1990s and rejuvenated attempts towards national consistency in the 2000s. Building on this, we argue that despite shared global drivers and broad historical similarities, reforms in each country remain distinct in scope and form, due to several unique features that inform the national policy space of each country. These distinctive national policy spaces provide differentconditions of possibilityfor reform, reminding us that despite global commonalities, policy reforms are relational and locally negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on outlining, contextualising and theorising the rise of global and complementary national modes of test-based, top-down accountability in schooling systems. The effects of these infrastructures of accountability on schools, teachers' pedagogical work, on the width of curriculum and on the goals of schooling are also alluded to. These developments are theorised in terms of rescaling of the policy cycle globally, as a well as the topological turn that sees the globe reconstituted as a single space of comparative and commensurate measurement of the performance of school systems, as part of the move to new global forms of networked governance. We argue that we are seeing a new global panopticism, with national school systems variously positioned within the global market place and global educational policy field with important effects within national policy-making. The analysis and theorising provided serves as a contextual backdrop and introduction to the papers included in the special issue of the Journal of Education Policy on the theme of Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy. We argue, and the papers demonstrate, the significance for policy sociology today of recognising testing as a, perhaps the, major policy steering systems and the work of schools today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial literacy education as policy has gained international political momentum in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. This paper analyses how two policy narratives operated in Canada to promote and ultimately enact financial literacy education policy: the ‘crusade’ and the ‘chicken coop’. While the dominant and counter-narratives offer different perspectives, they both maintain financial literacy’s ‘sacred cow’ status. The application of narrative policy analysis (NPA) underscores how the politics of education policy are complex and cannot be explained by rational, positivist models that would privilege evidence over metaphor. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on NPA, and sheds light on how financial literacy education is likely to be shaped and legitimized more by the values and mobilization power of special-interest coalitions in favour of it through politics, than by evidence-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith’s development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for research that has at its centre a concern to understand the social and institutional processes that enable, support and discursively prepare for significant educational reform. Working with and between these two eminent contributions to sociological enquiry, our paper explores the ways in which research can trace educational governance through the production, reproduction and subsequent enactment of generations of policy texts even before they are officially released for use in schools. In particular, we suggest that examination of the day-to-day processes involved in policy production shows how policy texts are progressively invested with institutional meanings and come to instantiate and govern institutional relations. The methodology we are developing foregrounds the creation and dissemination of discourses that support specific orientations to educational practice and governance, as well as the institutional practices that embed the logics of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the influence of cultural and historical factors on educational policy transfer, drawing on an analysis of the curricular reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation of the two Koreas. In South Korea, curricular changes were made, such as the introduction of the subject of social studies, in order to teach democratic procedures and concepts. In North Korea, a socialist–communist ideology was extensively promoted, along with an attraction to the Soviet Union as a model state to follow. In both contexts, the localization of the reforms was influenced by the authoritarian legacy of Confucianism and Japanese colonization, and the nationalism that had been fostered for the purpose of state formation. The Korean case indicates that while investigating the influence of culture on educational policy transfer, it is important to identify the unique characteristics of educational traditions and nationalism of a country, and to analyze how the newly transferred policies and ideas are received by local actors in their searches for meaning and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the repositioning of state curriculum agencies in response to the establishment of the Australian Curriculum and the key national policy organisation responsible for its development: the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). I begin with an analysis of the federal Labor government's role in the early years of the Australian Curriculum reform, arguing that Labor was afforded a rare window of political opportunity that enabled the fundamental restructuring of curriculum policy at the national level, and which has significantly altered intergovernmental and inter-agency relationships. Following this, I engage with research literature that has sought to theorise the changing nature of Australian federalism in relation to schooling reform. I then present an empirical analysis based on interviews with policy-makers in ACARA and curriculum agencies in four Australian states (Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria). My analysis draws attention to three dominant trends: powerful new roles for ACARA in driving national reform and inter-agency collaboration; increased policy overlap and blurred lines of responsibility; and an uneven playing field of intergovernmental and interagency relationships and powers. I conclude by considering the implications of emerging reform trends for conceptualising the shifting dynamics of federalism in Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To varying degrees, education policy reforms around the world are driven by educational discourses relating to globalisation. At the same time, national and local histories, cultures and politics mediate the effects of globalisation discourses. This paper employs methods of analysis that draw on the concepts of ‘vernacular globalization’ and ‘policy archaeology’ in order to examine the ways in which the effects of globalisation on National Curriculum policy reform are mediated by conditions and priorities that are specific to national contexts. The enquiry focuses on three curriculum policy problems that are associated with the English school curriculum and have recently been identified as requiring reform: inappropriate curriculum knowledge, the skills deficit and the one-size-fits-all curriculum. The paper concludes by summarising the results of the analysis, identifying some curriculum issues arising from it and offering reflections on the methodological approach it has employed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the implications of policy fracture and arms length governance within the decision-making processes currently shaping curriculum design within the English education system. In particular, it argues that an unresolved 'ideological fracture' at the government level has been passed down to school leaders whose response to the dilemma is distorted by the target-driven agenda of arms length agencies. Drawing upon the findings of a large-scale online survey of history teaching in English secondary schools, this paper illustrates the problems that occur when policy-making is divorced from curriculum theory, and in particular from any consideration of the nature of knowledge. Drawing on the social realist theory of knowledge, we argue that the rapid spread of alternative curricular arrangements, implemented in the absence of an understanding of curriculum theory, undermines the value of disciplined thinking to the detriment of many young people, particularly those in areas of social and economic deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational policy-making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post-communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses - coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses - produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy-making (with its disparities between 'democratised' discourses and 'Sovietised' practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality-in-the-making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy-making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post-independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999-2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post-communist Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to link the structural and the institutional to learning outcomes in order to articulate a research agenda capable of evaluating the impact of consumerism on learning and teaching in higher education. Consumerist mechanisms are situated in the context of quasi-market and new managerial regulatory frameworks and concepts developed by Pierre Bourdieu are drawn on to establish a theoretical model of the uneven impact of consumerism across different types of universities. Empirical studies, conducted in a variety of national settings, are outlined to confirm the plausibility of the model. The possible interactions between first, changes in academic identity, teaching and the curriculum; and secondly, on student identities and their impact on teaching and assessment and their consequent learning outcomes, are outlined. Some important questions about the consequences for the labour market are also raised. The paper hypothesizes that attempts to restructure pedagogical cultures and identities to comply with consumerist frameworks may unintentionally deter innovation, promote passive and instrumental attitudes to learning, threaten academic standards and further entrench academic privilege. The paper concludes by outlining key areas that require investigation in order to address some of the problems posed by consumerism in a mass higher education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changing roles and purposes of vocational education for young people in what has been called a 'knowledge' society, using the General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) as an example. This qualification dominated the broad, vocationally-related route within the English qualifications system throughout the 1990s. The paper considers how lecturers in a college of further education understood the role and purpose of GNVQs, and explores the ways in which they engaged in mediating national qualifications policy in practice, through their engagement with students and constructions of students' learning identities. The paper draws on data from a case study of one college of further education in the English Midlands, which involved interviews with lecturers and students across three vocational areas of the GNVQ. The focus in this paper is on the ways in which lecturers constructed GNVQs around what they perceived to be students' needs. They encouraged students to use GNVQs to shape a future, which involved progression to further and higher education. The paper argues that, whilst such attempts to create a constructive and meaningful role for vocational education are important, they do not overcome the hierarchical structure of participation in formal learning which remains inherent in the education system. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this study for the future role of vocational education for young people within a wider system of education and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government introduced a national testing scheme, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), in which all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are required to participate, and a national website, MySchool, was established in 2010 to publish the results of all schools. This paper reports on the first national study of educators' views on the impact of NAPLAN on Australian schools and students. Over 8000 educators from all states and territories participated in the study, and the findings indicate that the testing regime is leading to a reduction in time spent on other curriculum areas and adjustment of pedagogical practice and curriculum content to mirror the tests. The findings suggest that the modification of teaching and curricular practices is in response to concerns regarding the use and reporting of NAPLAN data and the potential impact on schools. This confirms findings of researchers in other countries on the capacity of high-stakes regimes to distort teaching practices, constrain the curriculum and narrow students' educational experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how economics imperialism (the increasing colonization of other disciplines by neoclassical economics) has affected contemporary education policies. I suggest that an increasing preoccupation with education meeting the needs of the economy, together with the prevalence of economic concepts outside of economics, have contributed to the development of education policies which mimic economic ideas. The specific policies which it considers are outcomes-based qualifications frameworks, which are becoming increasingly prevalent internationally. I argue that in the main, outcomes-based qualifications frameworks can be seen as tools for creating or regulating education markets, and that their underpinning logic is the logic of neoclassical economics. I further argue that the educational ideas that are invoked in association with outcomes-based qualifications frameworks, and which have often been seen as progressive, or empowering, or anti-elitist, have commonalities with the tools of analysis of neoclassical economics. Specifically, ideas about knowledge and the curriculum which have traditionally been seen as progressive have an overemphasis on individuals, and underemphasis on structures. These underlying similarities have facilitated the process whereby education policy has been rewritten using the tools of neoclassical economics, enabling the description of neo-liberal policies in progressive terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, the UK Labour government unveiled plans to abolish the Learning and Skills Council and transfer funding for the education and training of 16-19-year-olds in England to local authorities (LAs). The transfer of 16-19 funding complements the responsibilities that LAs have already acquired in relation to the raising of the education and training 'participation age' and ensuring that all young people have access to a full 14-19 curriculum entitlement in their area. Such a move might be read as part of the 'new localism' that has gained currency under the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, as well as an opportunity to rein back from an English education and training system that has become increasingly centralised and 'top-down'. Indeed, some commentators have argued for a new model of governance based on 'devolved social partnership', with input from a wider range of stakeholders and the space for policy levers to be shaped more at local level. Drawing upon interviews with key personnel in LAs and other stakeholders, this paper examines the opportunities and challenges that LAs face in their new role, whether this amounts to a genuine devolution of power, and the prospects for 'devolved social partnership'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What constitutes graduate employability is discursively framed. In this paper we argue that whilst universities in the UK have long had an involvement in producing useful and productive citizens, the ongoing neoliberalisation of higher education has engendered a discursive shift in definitions of employability. Traditionally, universities regarded graduate employment as an aspect of institutions' relationship with the labour market, and one where they enjoyed a significant degree of discretion. Now, employability is a performative function of universities, shaped and directed by the state, which is seeking to supplant labour markets. We argue that this has three profound implications. First, state intervention in labour markets adjusts power balances in favour of employers. Second, contrary to the legitimising rationale of enhancing social justice, pursuit of employability agendas may well be creating two tiers of universities - those that produce docile employees and those that produce employers/leaders. And third, employability discourses may be adversely affecting pedagogies and curricula, to the disbenefit of students, institutions, employers, social justice and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on school commercialism, despite a number of successes in battling advertising and marketing in schools, has often seemed to only scratch the surface of corporatization of K-12 education. While condemning corporations who seek to sell brand-name products to kids in schools is a relatively straightforward matter, critiquing corporate efforts to promote ideologies, identities, values and agendas to children and youth is far more complicated and yet, essential. In this paper, we take the example of Junior Achievement Worldwide, one of the world's oldest, largest, and fastest growing organizations promoting corporate interests in schools in the USA and beyond to illustrate the need to address school commercialism in a broad historical, curricular, and global context. We review the long history of Junior Achievement in the USA, its vast set of curriculum offerings in enterprise, financial literacy, economics, work readiness and life skills, and its dramatic expansion, since the late 1980s, to now reach more than eight million students every year in over 100 countries around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major innovations in the recent wave of education reform in Hong Kong is the target-oriented curriculum. An interesting feature of this new curriculum initiative was its amoebic characteristics - changing shape and focus in its course of development. It was reshaped from an assessment system for accountability purposes to a centrally developed curriculum initiative for improving teaching and learning, and finally to a school-based curriculum development. In this paper, this course of development and the reasons behind it will be described and analysed. The study suggests that the two-tier educational policy and implementation system in Hong Kong is a major cause leading to such a phenomenon. If this system were not improved, the possibility of achieving real changes at the school and classroom level would be low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]