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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]

Based on the ‘case’ of educational reform in India, this paper explores the emergence of both new trans-national spaces of policy and new intra-national spaces of policy and how they are related together, and how policies move across and between these spaces and the relationships that enable and facilitate such movement. The paper is an attempt to think outside and beyond the framework of the nation state to make sense of what is going on inside the nation state. In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scales at which the new policy actors, discourses, connections, agendas, resources, and solutions of governance are addressed – and the need to move beyond what Beck calls ‘methodological nationalism’ . In other words, the paper argues that thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. To address this argument, it combines the presentation and discussion of data with some more general discussion of policy networks and mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflecttransnationaltraits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The intensification of an audit culture in higher education is made no more apparent than with the growing prevalence of performance-based research funding systems like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the introduction of new measures of assessment like ‘impact’ or more specifically, the economic and societal impacts of research. Detractors of this regulatory intervention, however, question the legitimacy and credibility of such a system for, and focus within, the evaluation of research performance. Within this study, we specifically sought to understand the process of evaluating the impact of research by gaining unique access as observers of a simulated impact evaluation exercise populated by aproximately n = 90 senior academic peer reviewers and user assessors, undertaken within one UK research-intensive university prior to and in preparation of its submission to REF2014. Over an intensive two-day period, we observed how peer reviewers and user assessors grouped into four overarching disciplinary panels went about deliberating and scoring impact, presented in the form of narrative-based case studies. Among other findings, our observations revealed that in their efforts to evaluate impact, peer reviewers were indirectly promoting a kind of impact mercantilism, where case studies that best sold impact were those rewarded with the highest evaluative scores. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]