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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]

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]

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]

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding 'parent engagement' are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new 'governing parent-citizen' through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended, valorised and rearticulated. We examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School governing bodies in England have considerable powers and responsibilities with regard to the education of pupils. This paper draws on an analysis of policy and on qualitative research in the governing bodies of four maintained schools. It explores two policy technologies through which education and the work of school governing bodies are constituted as apolitical. Firstly, it considers the move to recruit governors with (unspecified) ‘skills’, rather than those with a representative role who might provide diverse perspectives. Secondly, it considers the technology of ‘prescribed criticality’, through which ‘effective’ governors are provided with the ‘right’ questions to ask. The paper argues that the operation of these policy technologies has significant implications for possibilities for democratic engagement in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper sets out the theoretical and methodological approach of a study of the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interest in relation to the Trust schools initiative in England. Drawing on the discourse theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe the paper argues that the politics of consensus associated with New Labour reconfigures the field of politics, closing down legitimate democratic space. Building on this approach and that of policy sociology the paper outlines how the researchers seeks to address the following questions – if the space for legitimate democratic debate is so severely constrained then how does a social democratic government deal with the kind of opposition that Labour faced in relation to Trust schools? How do governments persuade dissident citizens to support unpopular policies? How are citizens mobilised to support such policies? This also raises questions about how, in such a restricted political space, do those questioning or resisting such policies, engage in the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interests? The reconfiguration of the field of politics and what this means for the constitution of legitimate democratic debate is the object of study of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant focus in this paper is on issues of school context and, in particular, on the dimensions of context at a large English comprehensive school that enable it to thrive within the current demands of the contemporary audit culture. Featuring interview data gathered from a number of senior educators, the paper draws on Braun et al's. (Braun, A., S. Ball, M. Maguire, and K. Hoskins. 2011. "Taking Context Seriously: Towards Explaining Policy Enactments in the Secondary School." Discourse: Studies in the Politics of Education 32 (4): 585 -596) heuristic device for thinking about the 'situated', 'professional' and 'external' dimensions of context at the school. This device supports an analysis of the school's intake (in particular the high cultural and class related aspirations of parents and students) and its values (namely the school's traditional ethos of academic and behavioural excellence). The central argument of the paper is that these contextual dimensions contribute significantly to the school's capacity to forge a worthy school identity within the current hyperaccountable and competitive environment where academic achievement (along increasingly narrow and conservative lines) and maintaining standards in relation to this achievement are utmost priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling – with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper starts from the propositions that (a) pedagogy is central to the achievement of socially just education and (b) there are existing pedagogical approaches that can contribute to more socially just outcomes. Given the ostensible commitments of the current English Government to reducing educational inequality and to the importance of teaching, we set out to explore the conditions that would need to be put in place to enable these approaches to be developed and sustained consistently in disadvantaged schools in England. We start by analysing classroom observation and interview data from four primary schools with contrasting socio-economic composition, highlighting the different pedagogical practices that emerge in working- and middle-class schools and also in working-class schools in different circumstances. Interviews with pupils show the impact of these practices on learner identities. We then draw on a variety of literatures on school composition, markets, leadership and teacher identities to present an account of the ways in which these different pedagogies are consciously or unconsciously produced. We point to systemic constraints: a mismatch between student demands and organisational capacity; teachers’ attitudes and professional identities and performative pressures on school leaders. All of these suggest the need for fundamental reforms to educational purposes and system architecture, rather than the naïve reliance on teacher agency to transform educational outcomes. Nevertheless, the current policy environment in England does offer some possibilities for action and we close the paper with some suggestions about ways in which capacity for more socially just pedagogy could be built within English schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of CCTV in schools is now commonplace in the UK. It is estimated that 85% of all UK secondary schools currently have CCTV systems in operation. The introduction of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) (enacted in March 2000) meant that for the first time CCTV had direct legislation governing its use in the UK. This paper attempts to apply the decree to the widespread introduction of CCTV technology in schools and argues that the various elements of statute are impractical or inappropriate to educational institutions. The ill-defined and vague legislation presented in the DPA 1998 provides very little protection to the data subjects in schools (mainly pupils and teachers). In addition, the ubiquity of CCTV in schools in the UK far surpasses the enforcement capabilities and resources of the Information Commissioner's Office and as such any contravention of the scant provisions of the Act is likely to go unidentified and under-enforced. In consideration of the DPA, the paper elucidates numerous examples to suggest that a large number of schools are in contravention of the law. The paper outlines the need for bespoke policy to govern and regulate the use of CCTV in schools. Whilst the paper focuses on the case of the UK, it speaks to an international audience in concluding that the use of CCTV and surveillance technologies in schools requires greater scrutiny and regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an Australian study that explored the costs and benefits of the National Assessment Programme, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing, both tangible and intangible, of Year 9 students in three Queensland schools. The study commenced with a review of pertinent studies and other related material about standardised testing in Australia, the USA and UK. Information about NAPLAN testing and reporting, and the pedagogical impacts of standardised testing were identified, however little about administrative costs to schools was found. A social constructivist perspective and a multiple case study approach were used to explore the actions of school managers and teachers in three Brisbane secondary schools. The study found that the costs of NAPLAN testing to schools fell into two categories: preparation of students for the testing; and administration of the tests. Whilst many of the costs could not be quantified, they were substantial and varied according to the education sector in which the school operated. The benefits to schools of NAPLAN testing were found to be limited. The findings have implications for governments, curriculum authorities and schools, leading to the conclusion that, from a school perspective, the benefits of NAPLAN testing do not justify the costs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In contemporary times, corporate philanthropy is positioned as an effective means to 'solve' a variety of social problems. Childhood obesity is one such 'problem' that has captured the interests of schools, corporations, industry groups and a number of 'not-for-profit' players. In this paper, I critically examine how the private sector uses the notion of philanthropy to shape school-based solutions to obesity and unhealthy lifestyles. By conducting a critical ethnography in two New Zealand primary schools and drawing on Foucauldian notions of government and 'practices of assemblage', I illuminate how a number of organisations officially planned to employ philanthropy as a means to govern others, as well as what actually happened when these plans met their intended targets: children, teachers and principals. Although corporations, charities and schools were assembled together through their combined 'will to give', the notion of philanthropy helped to re-assemble and re-invent private sector organisations so that they were seen to be socially responsible, healthy, and even educational. Philanthropy also worked to mask private sector players less altruistic interests: branding, public relations strategies, avoidance of stricter regulations and legislation, and the desire to profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's concept of field offers an alternative explanation for the inevitable gap between policy initiative and implementation. While the existing literature mostly concentrated on the dichotomy of macro- and micro-politics in enacting education policies, the missing attention to meso-level, local governments as policy interpreters and implementers in some developing countries with a vast territory, China and Russia, for example, has hindered deeper exploration in policy studies. Adopting cross-field effects as the theoretical base and applying Bourdieu's conceptual triad as a whole, rather than considering habitus, practice, or field separately, this study examines Chinese transnational higher education (TNHE) policy enactment by subnational authorities, aiming to: first, contextualize Bourdieu's theoretical and empirical approaches in various political/economic systems while consider the policy practice at meso-level; second, demonstrate the essentiality of conversation rate and standard of capitals in field analysis; and third, based on these analyses, explore the formation of institutional habitus as a way of explaining the perennial inequality in the Chinese higher education (HE) system. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection that Bourdieu's ever-developing definition of habitus and the criticism of his unavoidable relapse to objectivism result from the indiscriminate use of individual and institutional habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the midst of the debate surrounding the question of whether Australia’s National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test is high-stakes, it is evident that children’s own accounts of their experiences remain sparse. This paper describes the findings of a case study which documented the experiences of 105 children across two Catholic primary schools in Queensland serving different socio-economic status (SES) communities. Analysis of the data revealed that these teachers and principals did not experience NAPLAN as high-stakes. However, the data suggested that the children experienced the tests within a confusing context of contradictions and dissonances emanating from multiple sources; receiving little, if any, clear and consistent information regarding the purpose and significance of NAPLAN. While the children’s responses were varied, many reported NAPLAN as a negative experience, with some constructing the test as high-stakes. These constructions ranged from personal judgement or sense of letting their families down, to failure, and less commonly, grade retention and school exclusion. Some Year 3 children had also constructed good results as vital to future prosperity. These constructions bring into question the assumption that because NAPLAN is designed to be a low-stakes test, that children will necessarily experience it in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the dual dependencies apparent at the intersection of the media society and the audit society by empirically exploring and discussing the relationship between Swedish local newspaper coverage and school inspection activities. The research questions pertain to the Inspectorate’s media strategy, how inspection is represented and conveyed, the messages sent, and who gets to speak. Literature on governance, and the role and function of the media in the wider audit society is applied theoretically. Four municipalities were selected to represent different demographical and economical structures and previous inspection experiences. The empirical material includes interviews with leading inspection officers and newspaper articles. The local newspapers portray the Inspectorate as a legitimate institution acting on behalf of and protecting the public, and even more so, the educational consumer. The current format used by the Inspectorate – a succinct reporting only on deviations – links with a favored format of the media, reinforcing the tight media–inspection relationship and leading to implications for education governance and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the case of a relatively low-profile policy initiative that has been successively reframed as part of larger policy ensembles within UK schools over a six-year period, and translated during this time at national and school levels. The policy examined is that of study support or out-of-hours learning. The trajectory of this policy is traced as it is first launched within an educational policy ensemble around the raising achievement agenda and then re-framed as part of the then New Labour government’s major educational and social policy agenda of Every Child Matters. Drawing on interview data from head teachers and teachers, the ways in which study support policy was translated in two contrasting schools over this period is explored, highlighting different tensions with national policy and local agendas. The ‘fate’ of study support as an initiative is questioned following a change of government in the UK and in the context of global education policy developments. This analysis of the re-framing of a low-profile policy adds to our understanding of the cycles of policy ensembles and their translation by different agents in different sites over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ideology without competence is a dangerous vice. But competence without ideology is a limited virtue. (D. Miliband, Minister of State for School Standards, DfES) Opportunistic attempts have been made by successive governments to establish--some would say impose--sets of criteria against which the effectiveness of not-for-profit organizations like schools can be gauged. Most have been subjective: the extent of staff involvement in decision-making, the appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, the percentage of inspected classes regarded as 'good', and so on. Lately, UK government rhetoric, using a lexicon borrowed from Business and Economics, suggests a willingness to move to new systems of reportage; centred on improvement rather than blame, on critical friendship more than on confrontation. There appears no longer to be the puritanical tendency among policy-makers to adopt measures that cause pain in the belief that they alone can be right, but do they constitute (as critics like Thrupp suggest) a random collection of well-intentioned but poorly theorized policies, or can they be cogently conceptualized into a whole? Previously, improvement measures judged schooling simply, in terms of external stakeholder outcomes, but failed to capture the essence of what it was to be (or what it took to become) a successful improving school. This paper suggests that current government policy, whether knowingly or not, is essentially describing improvement from a different perspective--an internal perspective of 'intellectual capital'. The paper knits together government policy statements on school improvement with a re-conceptualization of intellectual capital specifically designed for schools, offering an imposed coherence to government policy that could potentially change the way we think about inspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the flow of teachers between schools of different socio-economic statuses. New Zealand Ministry of Education data is examined with regard to teacher age and salary structures in schools from high and low socio-economic intakes. Teacher mobility data is examined and a model of the mobility life cycle of a 'typical' teacher reveals causes of the staffing discrepancies between schools with differing socio-economic intakes. The model accounts for the tendency for low socio-economic intake schools to have staff who are older and at lower salary levels than those from high socio-economic intake schools A theoretical interpretation of the situation in New Zealand is provided. It is argued that there is competition between schools for teachers' labour, and this has had the effect of exacerbating the social stratification flowing from market oriented reforms promoting consumer choice in New Zealand education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Germany and explores the possibilities of Social Network Analysis (SNA) for uncovering influential actors in educational policy innovation processes. From the theoretical perspective, an actor’s influence is inferred from its relative position within issue-specific information flows and the trust placed in its capacities and expertise, instead of relying on an actor’s openly expressed role and policy preferences. Drawing on techniques from quantitative SNA enables to analyse the social interactions as well as the frequency and type of information exchange amongst actors in a particular issue area. Empirically, I focus my attention on the educational innovation of ESD, which has been initiated at the global level, but is mainly put into practice at the national or regional level. Data for the study come from mixed mode interviews with a standardised questionnaire. The interviews were conducted and analysed using egocentric and complete SNA. I find, amongst others results, that NGOs and governmental actors occupy significantly more central, prestigious and influential network positions than schools in the course of implementing ESD in Germany. Furthermore, school representatives exhibit few and weak relations, and mostly share links with other formal education actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines ethnic segregation in schools as a field where policy inaction, or non-decision making, is rife. A theoretical framework rooted in historical institutionalism and combining critical junctures with path dependencies enables the study of non-decision making and policy inaction. Moving from non-decision making as a general phenomenon to the specific case of British education policies, the focus is on ethnoreligious segregation between White British and South Asian Muslim students, which has become a salient issue in British politics and society. After a general discussion, the article zooms in on a North English town presenting typical constellations of ethnic segregation and mixing in neighbourhoods and schools. The subsequent policy analysis shows how, from the mid-1980s until recently, non-decision making has been predominant. Given the ongoing problematization of ethnic segregation in British politics and society, a reversal from policy inaction to formal decision-making seems possible. The article offers insight into the inner workings of non-decision making that have wider application, transcending any given locality and policy sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set a target to lift Australia’s Year 12 or equivalent attainment rate from 83.5 to 90% by 2015. In the context of global financial uncertainty, the target was rationalised as a means for boosting national productivity and developing human capital to help Australia compete in the global knowledge economy. Historically, Year 12 attainment targets have been designed to pressure state and territory education systems to innovate and reform senior secondary curriculums and certificates, as retention and attainment rates depend largely on how flexible, diverse and inclusive the senior years are. In this paper, however, we argue that the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda is flawed and does very little to inspire innovation or reform in Australian senior secondary schools. Our argument comprises three parts. First, we argue that the COAG agenda is based on a weakened measure of attainment which is misleading and directs the burden for innovation away from senior secondary schools. Second, we argue that there are inherent limits in Australian secondary school systems which prevent the depth of innovation required to significantly contribute to raising Year 12 attainment. Third, we argue that the COAG agenda is further weakened by issues of equivalency, quality and comparison. Together, these arguments cast doubt over the value and meaningfulness of the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda and of target setting as a governmental strategy in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about the issue of the performance of inspection. Based on research conducted in an English secondary school in the years following its time under Special Measures, I discuss the idea that during an inspection the school becomes focussed around performing for inspection. I discuss performance theory here as well as notions of performativity. I set the scene with middle and senior managers' recollections of life under Special Measures, in effect the time in which they learnt to perform. I then use data from time spent in the school before and during the school's OfSTED inspection, and discuss inspection as performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to use an historical approach to examine the changing nature, size and diversification of education and training in New Zealand. In particular, attention will be concentrated on the impact of the introduction of competition into the New Zealand tertiary education industry since 1989. It will examine the relationship between the various tertiary education institutions as well as the relationship between these institutions and the demands of both students and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at policy discourse around ‘youth at risk’ (YAR) by asking two questions: First, how have problems and solutions related to YAR been constructed by Governments? And second, how do particular technologies of Government (differentiation of schools, programmes, and course streams, and the funding and identification of students with special needs) work to produce YAR? Interviews with educators at an alternative high school suggest that although policies to address YAR pay lip service to social justice concerns, technologies that serve to normalize and pathologize different groups of students present challenges to educators who are trying to disrupt the production of YAR within schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether the massification of higher education (HE) in the majority of developed countries over the last few decades has led to changes in the form of involvement in universities for the masses, or massive universities for the expanding middle classes. Situating our argument with the evidence of massive expansion of HE in England and Spain, and using Bourdieu's theoretical framework, we compare two studies that looked at whether these changes led to a revised structuring of educational opportunities by social class and to universities accessible to the masses or merely massive universities. The English study considered the choices, and the Spanish study, the experiences of students and how they felt about being students. Our conclusions stress the relation between the social construction of the category ‘youth’ or young people in relation to HE, and the different structures of economic rights and duties of different social classes. While upper and middle class male and female students live their university lives with a clear feeling of entitlement, lower middle class and working class students need to justify their economic dependence on the family and so their university status. Developing concepts used in the English study for ethnic minority students we distinguish an ‘embedded’ style, that is a taken for granted perspective, from a ‘contingent’ style or one where students need to justify their choices of being students. These lead to different degrees of legitimacy of higher educational investments corresponding to different ‘familial habituses’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the system in the UK as a case study, this paper begins by examining the relationship between the rise of the ‘new managerialism’ in the public services and the ideological framework that was provided for this by the convergence of key ideas emerging from the new right and new left. It looks then at the growth of the new educational bureaucracies to service this management culture and relates these to changes in the role of concepts of strategic management in the shift from the Cold War era to the present very different international configuration that has followed on from the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. It provides a critique of the pervasive, supervisory, performance management culture that has emerged in the public services by using organization theory to question the applicability of these processes to education. Most critiques of the new managerialism in education have engaged with it on sociological or political grounds without attempting to examine how these particular approaches are accounted for within organization theory. It focuses on the work of one influential theorist in the field, arguing that his work offers rich critical insights which are particularly applicable to the organizational forms of educational management. Finally it evaluates the influence of this management environment on the quality of education arguing that its obsessive focus on quantitative outcomes and the ‘measurable’ has been a key factor in the narrowing of horizons and the impoverishment of educational policy discourse under the present Government and its immediate predecessors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western governments appear increasingly dissatisfied with the rising costs and apparent static performance of their education systems. This dissatisfaction has been manifested in a critical re-examination of the near-monopoly of publicly provided schooling. Elsewhere in the public sector, privatization and competitive tendering have been frequently used to reduce costs and raise productivity. However, in education the inability to fully specify contracts with private providers has led to renewed interest in increasing the role of not-for-profit providers. In this paper we utilize economic analysis to critically examine the strengths and weaknesses of not-for-profit providers of schooling. We explore the nature of the specific context in which they may prove to be effective providers, using successful faith schools as a case study. We conclude that there are prima facie grounds for governments to prefer contracting not-for-profit rather than for-profit organizations for the provision of state funded education. Overall, whilst extending not-for-profit schooling has the potential to harness sources of social capital to the benefit of school improvement, these benefits must be weighed against the risks inherent in increasing ‘strong-ties’ social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of meso-level actors and their ongoing mediating roles in educational policy processes situated, as they are, between policy-makers and central government, on the one hand (the macro level), and teachers and schools, on the other hand (the micro level). Although the example given here is in the role of a group of meso-level actors engaged in the shaping of economics education it seeks to serve two wider purposes. First, by focusing on a particular subject it uses it as a lens through which to view the construction of the curriculum to discern the ways in which school and subject curricula are defined and the ways in which different definitions and prescriptions construct and distribute knowledge. Secondly, it explores the roles and motives of those who intervene by promoting or opposing change to illustrate the relationships and linkages between them. More broadly, it offers some insight into the relatively neglected area of the workings of micro-political processes at the meso level, that is into the workings and processes of policy-making, mediation and implementation, and how actors contributed to the conditions for dispute through the deployment of ideological and material resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to analyse the empirical and historical evidence, gathered by recent research, on the privatization process of the argentine educational system. In the 1960s, two main changes occurred: an increase in the private sector enrolment and an increasing deregulation of private schools along with a hyper-regulation of public schools. Additionally, a significant mutation of the demand profile served by the private and public sector can be observed. Such a mutation is closely related to the socio-economic characteristics of the families sending their children to either sector. The article suggests that the process of privatization of the argentine education meant a switch from a state quasi-monopoly system to a dual public/private system, where the social sectors with higher purchasing power are able to choose to 'exit' from the public sector to the private and, by doing so, consolidating an educational environment of their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pupil Premium policy was introduced in 2010 by the UK coalition government to tackle the attainment gap disproportionately affecting children from low-income families. Semi-structured interviews and policy documents are examined for the way the policy has been enacted in a single comprehensive secondary school in England. In 2014, this school had a lower population of Pupil Premium pupils (18%) compared to (29%) nationally and (25%) countywide. Despite this, the study provides evidence that the Pupil Premium has become invested within and gives rise to, a number of neoliberal techniques, technologies and practices. The study bridges insights from Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ and Ball et al.’s work on policy enactment to provide an in-depth, grounded analysis of the way the policy plays out within this school’s context. It argues that the combination of national accountability measures used to show impact for Pupil Premium, and the school’s ongoing struggle to raise overall attainment, leads school leaders and staff members to rethink the concept of disadvantage for their school population. This results in disadvantage being reconceptualised to fit a matrix of moral/pastoral obligations and efficiency/economic competitiveness, in which the tensions between these two orientations are uncomfortable and unresolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) schools have an important role to play, but precisely how policy actors and educators should best respond to extremism within their schools remains uncertain. Reporting on data from a broader study, this article draws on semi-structured interviews with three participants. The participants were working as policy intermediaries responsible for implementing a federally funded, small-scale grant to develop a program in four Australian schools intended to guard against student behaviours deemed 'at risk' of leading to violent extremism. Investigating the strategies and negotiations of these policy intermediaries, we demonstrate the politicization of policy enactment in the field of P/CVE. We draw on Beck's work to understand the discourses of risk that underpin the P/CVE space and to focus on the strategic negotiations of these policy intermediaries as responses to various forms of risk. The findings contribute to understandings of 'risk management' in a neoliberal state particularly in the development and enactment of policy in education, through a focus on how policy intermediaries operate in an 'in-between' space between federal prerogatives and local constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a context of global reform agendas that promote economic ideologies in education the discourses surrounding 'school failure' have shifted from 'individual risk' to 'a nation at-risk'. Enhancing the quality of schooling through improving educational outcomes and standards for all, and thereby reducing 'school failure,' is simultaneously constructed as enhancing both social justice and a nation's economic advantage in the global marketplace. Within this broader context, this research explores the complexity of issues related to policy for students at educational risk through an analysis of the Education Department of Western Australia's 'Making the Difference: Students at Educational Risk Policy.' This research adopted a theoretical framework of a 'policy cycle' (that allowed for an exploration of power relations within the policy process. Primarily, consideration is given to the competing social and economic discourses found within the policy text and subsequent tensions reflected and retracted throughout the policy process from macro (system), to meso (district) and finally to micro levels within the schools and classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a new dataset to consider the relative effectiveness of secondary schools in England and Wales, and of different sectors of schools within Wales. It has been suggested, and is now 'enshrined' in policy documents for the new National Assembly for Wales, that students in Wales receive poorer schooling in general than their peers in England and consequently that they underachieve, but that those schools in Wales teaching through the medium of Welsh are immune from this criticism. Once local socio-economic factors are taken into account there is no evidence for either position. Students and schools in Wales appear to do as well as those in England, while schools teaching through the medium of English appear to do as well as those teaching in Welsh. This finding has important regional policy consequences, but is also an important component of a more general argument against the current 'crisis account' of British education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that current preoccupations with 'enterprise culture' in the policy and practice of schooling deflect attention from crucially important problems such as deindustrialization and the changing nature of work, the creation of meaningful work opportunities for the young, social justice, and moral and social regeneration. It is also claimed that 'enterprise culture' draws upon a social pathology, which locates problems in individuals and whose function is to shift responsibility for economic growth and stability on to individuals and their schools. It is all part of a rush to find simple solutions to complex problems - solutions that promote the values of the business sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools in the US and across the globe are increasingly engaged in marketing practices to attract and retain students and families. This study examines why and how administrators and school board members in two public school systems in the US seek to market their schools. Using in-depth case studies, a socio-cultural approach to policy, and critical race perspectives, I trace administrators’ and school board members’ logics about marketing, and specifically their emphasis on marketing the racial ‘diversity’ of their students. I find that despite differences in economic circumstances and community orientations to racial inclusion, leaders in these two competitive, under-resourced, and demographically changing school districts target upper- and middle-class White families, draw on discourses of global cosmopolitanism, and commodify racial diversity as a competitive advantage for upper- and middle-class White families that leaders believe do not see inherent value in students of color. This attempt to use racial diversity as a ‘selling point,’ varies in its particularities in each district-one district acknowledges and emphasizes how all students may gain from interracial and intercultural interactions and knowledge while the other district leverages abstract notions of diversity, removed from actual children of color - a consequence, in part, of district leaders’ uniquely racialized marketplaces. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxieties relating to the health, safety and security of schoolchildren have been met with a variety of surveillance apparatus in schools internationally. Drawing on findings from a content analysis of newspaper reports relating to drug testing in Australian schools, this article seeks to excavate the ways in which the media shapes, informs, reflects and instructs narratives pertaining to the use and acceptability of surveillance. Finding that a ‘greater good’ discourse prevails in debates about drug testing in schools, contrary to evidence purporting its ineffectiveness, it is argued that the phenomenon can be explained by the rapidly emerging surveillance school economy whereby education is increasingly exposed to neoliberal corporate priorities and governmental imperatives. Further, finding that policy transfer goes some way to explaining the suggested introduction of random drug testing programs in Australian schools, the article provides critical analysis to understand how surveillance practices come to be activated, understood and negotiated as they cross national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The belief in the central role of the teacher has a long and comparative history. This article aims to critically analyse the discourse of the centrality of the teacher by both historicising and problematising the ideas and practices associated with this discourse. First, the article describes the discourse as it was taken up during the twenty-first century when the teacher was viewed as the linchpin to building universal education systems. The idea that the 'master makes the school' is examined and the policies that stemmed from this thinking (e.g., the establishment of formal teacher training, teacher testing and certification) are outlined. The contemporary manifestations of this discourse are then described to show how the pervasive belief in the central role of the teacher has influenced education policy reforms, which like teacher policy reforms in the nineteenth century operate to shape and regulate the profession. Further discursive effects are analysed including the de-contextualisation of educational reform and the de-professionalisation and de-politicisation of teachers and their work. The relationship between effective schools research and the centrality of the teacher discourse is also considered within the contemporary moment. This comparative study refers to the discourse of the centrality of the teacher in Australasia, Europe, Great Britain and North America, and suggests that our collective focus on the teacher has had some serious, unexpected effects on teachers and the work they do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School choice survey data from the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, a large county-wide school district, is analysed to examine the characteristics of parents who consider choosing private schools for their children and those who do not. We examine differences in background, including race, educational attainment and socioeconomic status, as well as differences in parent satisfaction with their child's previous school, parent involvement in school, parents' priorities in school choice, as well as parents' social networks. After controlling for background characteristics, we find that parent satisfaction with their child's previous school was not a predictor of considering a private school. Rather, parent involvement seems to be a more important indicator of whether or not a parent would consider sending their child to a private school. In this case, parents are not 'pushed' away from public schools, contrary to much public rhetoric that suggests private schools are somehow inherently 'better' than public schools and parents who are dissatisfied with their public schools will opt for private schools. Instead, these findings suggest a 'pull' towards private schools. Parents may perceive that parent involvement and parent communication are more easily facilitated and valued in private schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, the English government has adopted a policy of regenerating disadvantaged neighbourhoods by reconstructing them as mixed communities, in which schools appealing to higher income residents are a key feature. This creates some difficulties for those concerned with social justice, who support the notion of integrated schools and neighbourhoods, but are concerned that the re-modelling of neighbourhoods and schools in this way could further disadvantage existing populations. Mix is supported but mixing is opposed. This article interrogates this 'social justice dilemma' by analysing the origins and development of the mixed communities policy. It demonstrates the distinction between the principle of mix and the policy of mixed communities, while illuminating the political and discursive processes that conflate the two. Finally the authors indicate how research can be mobilised in support of neoliberal discourses about neighbourhoods and schools and draw some broader conclusions for education research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I use the concept of ‘re‐agenting’ to explore and explain the role of non‐state agencies, principally private companies and business entrepreneurs, as key instruments in the government’s transformation of the school system in England. Their role takes both for‐profit and not‐for‐profit forms. The outsourcing to private companies of the implementation of government education policies and the delivery of educational services to schools and local authorities has created a profitable market. Equally significant is the growing involvement of the private sector in schools through the sponsorship of specialist schools and Academies on a non‐profit basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government policy stresses partnership as a critical organizational form of the future to support the development of schooling. This article uses intergroup conflict and gaming theory to analyse data from one partnership. The views of young people and staff are explored to establish the nature and extent of conflict and its impact on the partnership. Gaming theory is used to investigate the engagement and expectations of organizations in the partnership. The article challenges Government rhetoric that suggests that as experience and trust grow, partnership will overcome the barriers which exist as a legacy from previous more competitive and isolationist cultures, to the benefit of service users. It further suggests that the availability of adequate resources alone, if ever achieved, would not in itself create the conditions for successful partnership. Far more attention is required to be given to the complex range of conditions which might support partnership and increase the possibility that the interests of learners would not be subordinated to those of organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critique of both the underlying philosophy and the subsequent implementation of the 1998 Crick Report. It is argued that the conceptual weaknesses and contradictions of the Report's model of citizenship education have contributed to the ineffective adoption of the subject into the secondary school curriculum. In particular, the Crick Report presents an abstract view of citizenship that is divorced from its institutional and structural context. The Report fails to address adequately how the following issues impact upon citizenship education: diversity in secondary school provision; social exclusion; changing conceptions of the political, and the appropriate form of delivery for the subject. The negative consequences of the failure to consider these issues in sufficient depth is demonstrated through a synthesis of a range of current research critical of the Crick Report's implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tendency in education writing on globalization has been to examine the congruence of educational policies in western societies and the international effects of global governance of education by powerful transnational institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union. The authors tend to identify massive changes in approaches to educational governance, including the establishment of a broadly common policy and management agenda that is characterized by 'new managerialism', devolution, and rigid accountability structures, entrepreneurialism, and school effectiveness, that have been imposed largely as a result of globalization. These measures are often seen as being directly related to the 'hollowing out' of the state, and the emergence of neo-liberalism as the informing ideology of both international capitalism and residual nation-states. There are few studies, however, of the dynamics of educational life and micro-political activities that enable or challenge or bring about the kinds of educational reshaping and renorming that are typically associated with globalization. This study attempts to analyse such micro-shaping, which, through reporting an ethnographic study in a site of educational practice, examines how school managers and teachers dealt with government policy intervention and, in the process, both willingly and unwillingly implemented significant educational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greater competition in schooling markets seems to promote higher levels of academic attainment, but so does increased co-operation within and between schools. School choice reforms have a tendency to reinforce local schooling hierarchies and increase differences in the mean pupils' academic attainment between schools. In England, the processes causing these effects have been strengthened by the introduction of school performance tables. Beacon Schools, Education Action Zones, and the current specialist schools initiative seek to alter the mix of competition and co-operation within local schooling markets. Co-opetition, competing in some markets and co-operating in others, is the dominant strategy in the business sector, but policy-makers have been slow to recognize the need to promote such behaviour in education. The English quasi-market processes still reward schools inappropriately and discourage mutually beneficial co-operation between schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of a weakening social consensus about the purpose of schooling, what kind of social forms and procedures enable educative action to be co-ordinated and stabilized, at least to some extent? In order to answer this question, the authors develop a two-fold approach to regulation within school systems, defining regulation as 'the process through which rules are produced and social action is oriented'. From a methodological point of view, grasping this process encompasses both an analysis of the structural framework and a comprehension of the social interactions which produce rules. On the one hand, regulation is understood as the articulation of several forms of co-ordination resulting from a particular historical process. The analysis of the structural (institutional) framework in French-speaking Belgium illustrates this first moment of the approach. On the other hand, attention is given to interactions and games between actors, particularly at a local level, in order to understand how rules are constructed and how organized action can emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Zealand Progress at School project, designed to investigate school effects, found that individual progress at school is associated with a set of non-cognitive dispositions, most importantly, aspiration, self-concept, and acceptance of the institutional regime. The few schools identified as over-and under-performing were distinguished by the favourable and unfavourable dispositions of their students. School composition – or mix – effects proved in this study to be minor and relative to the output criterion, and some implications of that, including the selective effects of within-class markets, are discussed with particular reference to another contemporary New Zealand study, the Smithfield project. It is concluded that the study of school effectiveness might usefully include in its models the relationship between the properties of systems, the level of disposition, and the forms of practice they generate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]