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This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy-making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in search for the right problem – that is, they appear to be used as tools to legitimize educational reforms. The survey results pointed to a growing perception among stakeholders that ILSAs are having an effect on national educational policies, with 38% of respondents stating that ILSAs were generally misused in national policy contexts. However, while the ILSA literature indicates that these assessments are having some influence, there is little evidence that any positive or negative causal relationship exists between ILSA participation and the implementation of education reforms. Perhaps the most significant change associated with the use of ILSAs in the literature reviewed is the way in which new conditions for educational comparison have been made possible at the national, regional, and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the role of PISA in the globalisation of education policies. It approaches the question by assessing the effects of PISA on the ways in which new legislation was debated in national contexts in the period 1994–2013. The study asks: Has there been an increase in the number of references to the international community in debates on education policy due to PISA, and, if so, is this change confined to debates on education policy? Our analysis shows that education policy debates feature an increasingly global discourse in which organisations such as the OECD have an authoritative role. Yet, our findings do not support the claim that PISA is the cause of a change in this respect. Debating national policies in a global context and utilising the same transnational discourses regardless of the policy issue area in question has long been with us, yet there is a global trend in which national policies are increasingly often debated through appeals to models and policy advice promulgated by international organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy initiatives that seek to account for ethno-cultural differences in education and schooling have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. These include affirmative action measures and bilingual education models. The rationale for the implementation of these policies focuses on their potential to rectify historical discrimination by both levelling horizontal inequalities and granting equal value to different cultures and languages in the schooling process. In this framework, however, ethnic communities are often treated as discrete and static social aggregates, and social heterogeneity and spillover effects between groups are disregarded. This paper draws on empirical case studies from Colombia and Peru to show how identity policies of education can increase inter-ethnic competition, leading to protracted social conflicts. These outcomes, beyond negatively impacting local communities, raise important dilemmas surrounding the theoretical and operational foundations of these popular policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalised and globalising processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public–private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global–national policy translation and enactment in local school contexts. Scholars have emphasised firstly, the economic turn in education reform policies, a shift from a social democratic education orientation and secondly, policy convergence towards a dominant neoliberal political agenda. This paper suggests that Bernstein’s concepts of the totally pedagogised society (TPS) and the pedagogic device, as the ensemble of rules for the production, recontextualisation and evaluation of pedagogic discourses may add to this corpus of critical policy scholarship. It does this by firstly reviewing the take up of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS in the critical policy sociology literature, arguing that this interpretation presents a largely dystopian account of globalising educational policies. In contrast, the paper argues for and presents an alternative open-ended reading and projection of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS and pedagogic device for thinking about globalised processes and devices of the pedagogic communication of knowledge(s). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding how teachers make sense of education policy is important. We argue that an exploration of teacher reactions to policy requires an engagement with theory focused on the formation of ‘the subject’ since this form of theorisation addresses the creation of a seemingly coherent identity and attitude while acknowledging variation across different places and people. In this paper, we propose the utility of Butlerian ideas because of the focus on subjectivity that her work entails and the account she gives for social norms regulating people’s actions and attitudes. We use Butler’s stance on how ‘cultural intelligibility’ is formed to account for the complex, messy and sometimes contradictory ‘take up’ of curriculum policy by 10 teachers at a secondary school case study in Queensland, Australia. We use the phrase ‘policy reception’ to signify a particular theoretical line of thought we are forming with our application of Butlerian theory to the analysis of teacher attitudes toward curriculum policy, and to distinguish it from ‘policy interpretation’, ‘policy translation’ and ‘policy enactment’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational policy depends on assumptions about fairness in education, whether they are made explicit or kept implicit. Without a view of fairness, one would be in the dark as to what should be done about the reproduction of social inequality through education, or whether or not anything should be done at all. The aim of this paper is to uncover the view of fairness in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) education policy. It is based on an analysis of the normative argumentation concerning educational fairness in a set of policy documents from the last seven years, with special emphasis on the association between social background and educational achievement. The main result of the analysis is that the OECD explicitly operate with a loose idea of equal opportunity, compatible with even a merely formal equality, but implicitly with a meritocratic variant of fair equality of opportunity. In the final section, I argue that the OECD approach to fairness suffers from a limitation in that it considers educational justice in isolation from social justice in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the global policy convergence toward high-stakes testing in schools and the use of test results to 'steer at a distance', particularly as it applies to policy-makers' promise to improve teacher quality. Using Deleuze's three syntheses of time in the context of the Australian policy blueprint Quality Education, this paper argues that using test scores to discipline teaching repeats the past habit of policy-making as continuing the problem of the unaccountable teacher. This results in local policy-making enfolding test scores in a pure past where the teacher-as-problem is resolved through the use of data from testing to deliver accountability and transparency. This use of the database returns a digitised form of inspection that is a repetition of the habit of teacher-as-problem. While dystopian possibilities are available through the database, in what Deleuze refers to as a control society, for us the challenge is to consider policy-making as a step into an unknown future, to engage with producing policy that is not grounded on the unconscious interiority of solving the teacher problem, but of imagining new ways of conceiving the relationship between policy-making and teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role of networks in the policy-making process in education and discusses the potential of network analysis as an analytical tool for education policy research. Drawing on publically available data from personal or institutional websites, this paper reports the findings from research carried out between 2005 and 2011. Through document analysis, we investigated the composition, activities and strategies adopted by an important policy network in Latin America and traced its developments in Brazil. We adopted the categories - texts, technical artefacts, human beings and money - proposed by Callon to identify the links between the main actors and organizations in that network and drew our conceptual framework from the work of Gramsci in order to analyse the struggle for hegemony and the role of business interests in education policy-making. The findings show that the expansion of networks does not replace the State in education, but rather the State constitutes a strategic node in these networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the World Bank published a policy study on early child education (ECE) developments in Brazil, entitled Early Child Education: Making Programs Work for Brazil's Most Important Generation. Development. This paper analyses the report's assessment of ECE policy in Brazil as well as the recommendations it provides. A critical analysis of ECE shows that the report's insistence that finan-cial constraints necessitate a trade-off between coverage and quality privileges the influence and position of the private sector and urges public-private partnerships as a cost-saving strategy. While it commends the Brazilian Government for its commitment to universal access to preschool, it argues for more targeted invest-ment in quality rather than access. This paper argues that the quality-coverage debate should be set aside and overall investment in ECE should be increased. It also argues that issues excluded from the report such as disability, race and rural access to ECE must be considered in the development of sound social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines teacher accountability and authority in early childhood policy. It reports on data from a study that investigated the influences affecting early childhood teacher decision-making at the preschool level in Victoria, Australia. Using a question raised by Ball 'Where are the teachers in all this [policy]?' provided a starting point for the critical discourse analysis into how forms of control, teacher authority, obligation and constraint within policies potentially influenced teachers' curriculum decisions. The study found that despite no government-mandated curriculum framework at the time, teachers were held accountable for their curricular practice. Yet as professionals, early childhood teachers were denied public acknowledgement of their expertise as they were almost invisible in policy. In the four policies analysed, proprietors of early childhood settings and preschool agencies held authority over curriculum. Subsequently, teachers' authority as professionals with curricular knowledge was diminished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising education policy and also begins to develop a new method of policy analysis. In both instances, it draws on the theoretical and conceptual tools of Foucault, and in particular his concept dispositif. It posits an historical and ontological formation - a policy dispositif -with formative roots in historical reflections on 'how to govern". This contingent policy formation is comprised of a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements, including material objects, discourses, practices and subjectivities. Although it is argued that hegemonic discourses and rationalities have an ontological effect on the dispositif, as an amorphous polymorphic formation it is not so much deter-mined by these, but is rather engendered by strategic struggles over the meaning and governing of education. In developing a new method of policy analysis, three analytical trajectories are identified for investigating the performative and dispositional ontology of micro-dispositifs - power, truth and subjectivation -and are put to work through an empirical case. Although the paper focuses mainly on the education state in England, this new conceptual and analytical framework has wide applicability for policy research in a range of national and local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we undertake a particular policy critique and analysis of the gender achievement gap discourse in Ontario and Canada, and situate it within the context of what has been termed the governance turn in educational policy with its focus on policy as numbers and its multi-scalar manifestations. We show how this 'gap talk' is inextricably tied to a neoliberal system of accountability, marketization, comparative performance measures and competition within the context of a globalized education policy field. The focus initially is on how the gender achievement gap has emerged in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OCED) publication of the 2009 Program For International Student Assessment Results, but attention is drawn to questions and categories of equity that are used to define and measure socioeconomic disadvantage. We illustrate that such measures and categories in use function to eschew important aspects of maldistribution, with important consequences for understanding the significance of the interlocking influences of race, social class, gender and geographical location, where there is evidence of spatial concentrations of poverty and histories of cumulative oppression. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the Canadian data to illustrate the multi-scalar dimensions of global/national/provincial 'policyscapes' through a politics of numbers. Contrary to the ways in which Canada and specifically Ontario have been marketed and celebrated by OECD and other stakeholders for their high performing, high quality education system in terms of achieving equitable outcomes for diverse student populations, we illustrate how the 'failing boys' discourse and achieving 'gap talk' have actually functioned to produce a misrecognition of the gender achievement gap, with boys emerging as a disadvantaged category in the articulation of equity policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the 'integral state' as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) cannibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban disposability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses about problems of education policy in Hong Kong. In year 1991, the Education and Manpower Branch and the Education department jointly issued a document entitled "The School Management Initiative," which is a framework for future reforms in education. These reforms brought about confusion and a sense of unsettledness among school principals and teachers, as the intensification of surveillance over the education process led to increased dehumanization and alienation. One of the major problem with educational system of Hong Kong was medium of teaching. This problem still persist. Neglect of the reality in classrooms and the experience and views of practitioners, is unfortunately, also evident in the development of continuous teacher education which Ho Ming Ng discusses in his paper.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is noted in school reform policy circles as the gold standard of academic excellence. While the presence of IB as a sought-after education vendor has grown in the past decade, the organization has attempted to shake off its image as an elite agency serving only private international schools with its longstanding liberal arts curriculum. As such its turn toward the public sector in the United States with a credential for vocational students appears perplexing and out of step with its product brand, but the newer Career Programme (CP) is marketed as meeting the needs of applied learners in secondary schools. This paper offers a case study of two schools in one US state that adopted the CP, generating IB school enrollments from among talented vocational students while elevating its ranking on the college and career readiness (CCR) score, an annual assessment of postsecondary success. The CCR policy reformers advocate curricular improvements so that all students receive the academic foundations and employability skills needed to thrive in the new economy. Yet the egalitarian discourse of CCR could not be attended to using the CP. In this case study only high-achieving students were advised to participate and enroll in the program. [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]

This paper examines how policy pressure for increased performance on standardised measures of student achievement influenced the teacher learning practices that arose in a school setting in Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon research and theorising of governing by numbers, and applications to the governance of education, and particularly teachers’ learning, the research analyses how a group of Year 3 teachers collaborated to better inform themselves about the nature of their students’ learning. The research reveals that the governance of teachers’ learning under current policy conditions was manifest through both teachers’ compliance with and critique of a strong focus upon school, regional, state and national data – specifically, students’ attainment in ‘leveled’ readers and other school-based standardised measures of reading and mathematics, and school, state and regional results on national literacy and numeracy tests. There is little research that highlights the tensions around these numbers as governing technologies in relation to specific formal, ongoing instances of teacher professional development practices. The research cautions against the influence of such governing processes for how they potentially narrow teachers’ attention to more standardized measures of students’ learning, even as teachers may critique these more reductive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on theBuilding Colleges for the Future(BCF) initiative (2008) which saw a wave of new-build Further Education (FE) colleges spring up across England in the final years of the New Labour government. It draws on qualitative data from a research study focusing on four new-build colleges in the West Midlands of England to theorise the BCF initiative. Using theory derived primarily from Lefebvre, the paper contextualises BCF within a frame of neoliberalisation and discusses the impact of the ‘production of space’ represented by the initiative with a research focus on two areas: pedagogy and ideology. The main findings are that these new-build colleges can be interpreted as spatial expressions of policy-makers and others’ perceptions of teaching and learning; in ideological terms, they also trumpet a ‘new lifestyle’ and a ‘new art of living’ for FE staff and students that is however, in tension with residual pedagogical practices and values. The article concludes that despite being an expression of neoliberal abstract space, these new-builds can still be seen as providing a frame for alternative individual and collective encounters with education which may subvert and outlast the processes of neoliberalisation that they appear to embody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidianpracticesof policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to themoralityof policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power orgovernmentand how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research has contributed to the body of literature in education for democracy by addressing deficits in policies in equalizing students' life chances, less attention has been paid to how accomplishing a democratic mandate in education is constructed and legitimized by educational authorities in national policy documents. In this article, we report findings from a project that examined this issue. The aim is to provide insight into how professionalism is constructed and legitimized within and across key education policy documents in the wake of a major national educational reform in Norway. We identify possible discursive shifts and examine what tensions are at play via textual analysis of selected policy documents, with a methodology inspired by a critical approach to discourse analysis. Theories on professionalism and democratic leadership serve as an overarching framework. The findings suggest (1) there are tensions between the use of performance data and education for democracy; (2) little attention is given to professionalism as a deliberative activity; and (3) there is increased emphasis on fulfilling students' individual rights. We argue that introducing a language of performance expectations has permitted the reinterpretation of what it means to be a professional educator in a social democratic welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the sub-networks involved in education policy in Israel in recent years, using Mixed Methods Social Networks Analysis – drawn from combined analysis of qualitative and quantitative data. Our objective was to comprehensively explore the Israeli education policy network to deliver an understanding of its structure, actors, and relationships. Our research offers a descriptive, analytical, and interpretive account of the contemporary Israeli education policy sector, including the actors involved, central policy sub-networks and organizations, and their relationships. We analyze dependence relations within the sub-networks using Resource Dependency Theory and Policy Networks Typology. Our findings contribute to understanding the dynamics of Israeli education policy networks and their perceived influence on policy-making and enactment processes. To the international field of educational policy-related research, we introduce a novel category of policy network actors, previously unaddressed as a distinct type. We have termed this category 'Ethos networks' to characterize this group of actors and elaborate on its significance within the field. Additionally, we underline the importance of considering external societal and political factors in education policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the countries that receive aid from donor agencies, the educational policymaking process is not straightforward because the power and interest of donors contradict with national contexts. This qualitative study aims to investigate how educational policy decisions in Nepal, a country that receives foreign aid for its educational projects, are made. Drawing on the Habermasian conceptualisation of deliberative democracy, I theorise that educational policy decisions are made either through deliberation or decisionism. An analysis of interviews conducted with educational policymakers of Nepal found that policymaking in Nepal follows decisionism in which the representatives of foreign aid agencies are more dominant than national bureaucrats. Even though Nepali bureaucrats and political leaders are involved in the decision-making process, rational interactions do not happen because they want to fulfil their personal interests by endorsing the decisions determined by the donors. This study concludes that because of decisionism, neocolonialism, and dysfunctional policy sphere, teachers, students, parents, and community people are excluded in the decision-making process. The findings are significant not only for understanding the lack of deliberation in the policymaking process but also for improving the educational praxis of aid-recipient countries like Nepal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucauldian critical studies are cornucopian in illustrating how policy as discourse normalizes and yields human beings into made subjects in modern societies. However, Foucault's own slide from the 'terminal stage of discourse' pays little attention to the linguistic elements, and thus weakens the theory's potency in explaining the reality. Specifically, when the production of desirable subjects implicates clear target/norm-setting, ambiguous expressions are persistent in policy documents. To explicate this contradiction, this article firstly traces back to the foundation of Foucault's critical approach to policy analysis – socio-linguistic studies, to demonstrate the inevitable existence of ambiguity in language. It then continues such interdisciplinary efforts by combining research in public administration, politics and international relationship, to explore the positive effects of equivocalness in policy texts. Empirically based on China's regulation over transnational higher education, this study argues ambiguous expressions facilitate modern states, especially those fraught with conflicting discourses to mask the discursive conflict and leave negotiation room for innovative policy enactment. The vague norms of subject production are thus both inevitable and intentionally employed in policy developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University institutional policy is poorly understood. While policy is required by law for universities to accept funding and is revered for articulating values, mitigating risk, and guiding practice, policy is frequently considered absurd and resisted in practice. This is the policy-practice divide. To gain a better understanding of this divide and the nature of the resistance, we asked policy actors to describe their experiences with policy development, implementation, enactment, and review. We asked: If policy is absurd, what is the nature of the relationship between policy and university management, and how do those who enact policy deal with this absurdity? We discovered that university management has an infinitely regressive self-fulfilling relationship with policy because they intentionally exclude the workforce from policy-making and see themselves as solely responsible for policy interpretation and implementation. However, when Kierkegaard's concepts of absurdity, faith, hope, and doubt are applied to policy actors' experiences, we see that resistance can be characterised positively as a 'leap of faith', where those who enact policy overcome their doubts and reinterpret it to achieve some semblance of good. This is an unintended consequence for managerialism, as deliberately creating a policy-practice divide solicits resistive 'good' practices from policy actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of teacher shortages in Anglophone nation states can no longer be ignored as this long-term issue has been compounded by the pandemic. Growing evidence of the challenges of attracting and retaining a teaching workforce is now foregrounded in education policy internationally. This issue provides increased impetus for studying teacher motivations and principal dispositions particularly in relation to roles in hard-to-staff schools that tend to be in disadvantaged or rural communities in terms of how policies are received and enacted. This mixed methods study examined a teacher financial incentive (TFI) scheme aimed at facilitating the appointment of qualified teachers in hard-to-staff government schools in Victoria, Australia. Although evidence of TFI scheme's effects and effectiveness as a policy solution to teacher shortages is limited, TFI schemes are widespread internationally. Our study shows that while the Victorian TFI scheme resulted in successful appointments for most participating schools, a financial incentive was only one among many other policy settings, personal and professional factors and other motivations informing teachers' decisions to apply for a TFI position and the recruitment practices of principals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on historical and policy analyses as well as interviews with government representatives and other key actors, this research paper argues that intergovernmental relations in Australian education are predominantly driven by concurrent federalism, but with the reverse effect creating a coordinate model in education. It discusses implications for school funding and the successful implementation of a recently released Australian Government review of funding for schooling, the so called the Gonski Review. The Gonski report makes a case for a radical restructuring of school education funding and accountability across the federal framework. If implemented, the changes would involve a major shift from the current coordinate model to a cooperative federalism. The paper provides an opportunity for a critical discussion of how educational policy is negotiated, contested and determined, within an array of competing, cooperating and coercive political power interests between various levels of government in a contemporary Australian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is generally acknowledged that being ‘historically informed’ lies at the heart of critical accounts of education policy-making, the use of historically focused retrospective research methods within the field is rare. This paper makes the case for retrospective research at a time when some of the most significant episodes of post-war educational policy-making are fast passing into the realms of not-so-recent history. In particular, it is argued that current policy scholars now have an opportunity to revisit the issues and concerns regarding the formation of the ‘New Right’ education policy reforms 30 years ago. Drawing on the experiences of a recently completed study of educational policy-making during the 1979–1983 Thatcher administration, it is argued that retrospective methods offer a surprisingly rich opportunity to collect primary data from the policy elites of the 1980s. It is concluded that the time is right for the production of a useful addendum to the founding studies of educational policy sociology that were conducted at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically examines the ways in which inclusion and equity are constituted through education development policies in India. Programmes implemented under global and national Education for All (EFA) policies have largely involved the quantification of ‘equity’ whereby schooling processes are measured against broad targets for school outcomes – focused mainly on student attendance, retention and academic achievement. Drawing on perspectives from Actor Network Theory, the paper puts forward the view of development reforms as ‘networks of translation’ in order to trace the shifts and vicissitudes of educational ideals. Reporting on ethnographic data of two reforms in the south Indian state of Karnataka, we show how narrow understandings of equity are produced through target-driven approaches to EFA. In doing so, the paper highlights the performative effects of education development policy and its potentially counterproductive consequences in contexts of poverty and marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International tests of achievement narrowly measure specific academic subjects, but have larger educational policy implications. These tests come to summarize national education systems and are used in national and international discourse. However, students with disabilities are being entirely excluded from participation in the discourse of achievement. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, and Programme for International Student Assessment all actively exclude students with disabilities from being measured when the testing agencies set up ‘desired target populations’ and report out on testing participation. This exclusionary discourse establishes that students with disabilities do not belong in a culture of achievement and educational evaluation, which has an impact on policies concerning educational equity and maintains the oppression of low expectations. US policy requires that 95% of all students take achievement tests and be given reasonable accommodations. This paper concludes that international achievement tests should follow the same standard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses issues concerning the implementation of quasi-market dynamics, the introduction of private interests and market rules in the provision of formal education at compulsory levels in the Spanish educational system. It aims to discuss current neoliberal discourses and practices in Spain, suggesting new spaces to be considered in future education policy studies. In the paper, I discuss first the ideological sources on which the political action rests and sketch some basic principles developed by the market advocates in the Spanish case. Secondly, I analyse specific mechanisms implemented to guarantee a fertile ground for the establishment of market dynamics in the education system, which has facilitated a significant growth in the private provision in compulsory education levels throughout the last 30 years. The examples presented in this section refer to two specific regions, the autonomous communities of Andalusia and Madrid, traditionally governed by the socialist and conservative party, respectively. I finally offer some data of the changing nature of the private sector in Spain and present a preliminary analysis of a rising set of new for-profit ventures in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new schooling-leaving age policy in New South Wales, a state in Australia, requires all students to stay at school until they are 17 years old. The policy was introduced in January 2010, with little warning and, it appears, little consideration of its impact in complex contexts. In south-western Sydney, the most diverse region in the city, the impact is just being felt. In this paper, we draw on Ball’s approach to policy, maintaining ‘the complexity and scope of policy analysis – from an interest in the workings of the state to a concern with contexts of practice and the distributional outcomes of policy’. The paper explores the impact of the increase in school-leaving age on the curriculum, and the implications for ethnically diverse schools, and for students with learning and behavioural issues. Interviews with principals, teachers, parents and students suggest that there are dimensions of gender, ethnicity and ability to consider when responding to the new policy. Many schools find a lack of opportunity or too much competition for opportunities, and limited pathways. Whole school change is restricted by inadequate resourcing in some schools and by insufficient social networks in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper first draws on the political philosophy of R.H. Tawney to outline some universal principles for the provision of socially just education. It then moves onto a more pragmatic approach, analysing where the injustices lie in contemporary British education and outlining policies and practices that are socially just, not in an instrumental neoliberal sense but in terms of more egalitarian social democratic and socialist traditions. The final section of the paper focuses on Finland as the closest example of a socially just education system, before arguing for a rethinking and reworking of Tawney’s educational thinking for the twenty-first century. [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]

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The swift nature of school reform enacted by the new Conservative-led coalition government has sparked debate over the future of state education in Britain. While the government rhetoric suggests a decisive break with past policies, there is evidence to suggest that these reforms constitute the next stage of a long revolution in education reform, centred around neoliberal market discourse. In the following paper, I examine the current government’s education policy discourse and, by employing techniques of post-structuralist discourse analysis, reveal the government’s attempts to rearticulate education around the logics of market, responsibilisation and self-esteem, which act to shift responsibility for social problems from the state to the individual. Furthermore, I shall argue that such rearticulation has been coupled with an ideological fantasy of ‘empowerment’, which conceals the subordination of actors to these neoliberal logics by constituting the parent and, more recently, the teacher as powerful actors who have been freed from legal and bureaucratic constraints forced upon them by central government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2009, the South African Department of Education extended tuition fee abolition to schools serving the poorest 60% of students, increased from 40% in 2007. This policy intends to increase access to and longevity in school for the poorest households by removing fees as a barrier and replacing private revenue with increased state funds. Despite this progressive expansion of fee-free schooling, the reported frequency of non-attendance attributable to school fees increased from 2008 to 2009, particularly among poor females and primary-aged children. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon by presenting three constraints that hamper the potential benefits of fee abolition: (1) the rationalization of educational expenditures; (2) perverse incentives for schools to exclude non-paying children; and (3) the poor targeting mechanisms of fee abolition and government spending. As a result, we find significant lags in the implementation of fee elimination and that many poor households are still required to pay user fees. Several finance policy options are recommended for the South African schooling system. Data originate from South Africa’s National Treasury and General Household Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to 'be a good citizen'. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Through the example of what is now known in a large part of the Anglo-saxon world as the boys' underachievement debate, this paper explores the construction of gender issues, which underpins educational policies in England and France. It argues that the formation of particular questions as 'policy issues' bears limited relation to what happens on the ground, yet is contingent on societal contexts. For example, while England and France share similar patterns in terms of the differential achievement of boys and girls, in the former the boys' underachievement debate is prominent, but in the latter it is non-existent. This supports the view that the emergence of the boys' underachievement debate is not related to a 'grounded reality'. Rather, the debate appears embedded in the discursive construction of gender and education and, more generally, of notions of citizenship and equality/difference. These findings provide a strong case in favour of a reflexive approach to equality matters in educational policy making. They also suggest that the analysis of what is constructed as a key issue in policy circles represents a rich terrain for feminist analysis, and they highlight that national frameworks continue to structure the thinking on equality issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy sociologists typically research at large scale. This paper presents an example of a policy analysis which illuminates how policy is embedded in single incidents, lives and places. The case in point concerns the policy fetish for 'closing the gap and raising the bar'. This rhetoric is taken to mean improving the learning of all students, while at the same time producing a more equitable, quality education system. In the case in point, we mobilise an ethnographic fragment and the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre in order to examine the ways in which the policy technology of transforming students into measurable data plays out in the life of one group of Year 10 girls in a struggling English comprehensive school. We argue that our analysis demonstrates that in this very particular case, the pedagogies intended to promote attainment actually accomplished the reverse. We suggest that, following this example, policy sociologists might gain from further research at the micro/vernacular levels of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian youth income support and educational policies have focused on increasing participation and retention in schools. The assumptions and rationales underpinning these policies assert a positive relationship between educational engagement, employment and social inclusion. This paper examines these assumptions and rationales and, drawing upon Australian and international research (particularly the UK) over the past decade, questions the efficacy of these policies in achieving their stated goals. Furthermore, the paper argues that the neo-liberal philosophical underpinnings of these policies, particularly the emphasis on responsibilisation, can undermine disadvantaged young people's engagement with school and does little to create positive pathways to employment. Moreover, it is clear that disadvantaged young people are not assisted by these policies to make empowered social transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) policy and activities in mandatory schooling at national level in Sweden. Two studies are reported: a textual analysis of national policy documents concerning QAE, and an interview study conducted with national policy brokers. Questions addressed are: What are the characteristics of Swedish QAE activities? What European and international ideas on QAE are considered relevant to Swedish national policy? To what degree is international QAE policy disseminated across the Swedish school system? And, does Sweden influence international QAE policy in any way? QAE activities are analysed in relation to the European Union's and international organisations' efforts to influence national education policy. Results show that Sweden was historically early equipped with means to control quality in schooling. By the end of the 1990s, there was a marked increase in national regulations, increasing the number of QAE activities directed at Swedish schooling. The development of QAE in Sweden, therefore, has been related to a shift in governing policies and practices towards governing by objectives and results; and national QAE policies have successively strengthened this governing doctrine. Finally, Swedish national brokers maintain an image of doing quite well on QAE policy and practice compared to other European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon an earlier analysis presented in this journal. Using official figures for school compositions and for outcomes at KS4 from 1997 to 2007, this paper considers each of the annual cohorts of new Academies in England, from 2002 to 2006. It shows that their level of success in comparison to their predecessors, national averages, their changing compositions and their changing exam entry practices are insubstantial. Of course some schools are gaining higher scores since Academisation, but others are gaining lower scores. Using the most recent results available there is no clear evidence that Academies produce better results than local authority schools with equivalent intakes. The Academies programme therefore presents an opportunity cost for no apparent gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some particular aspects of the privatisation of public sector education, mapping and analysing the participation of education businesses in a whole range of public sector education services both in the UK and overseas. It addresses some of the types of privatisation(s) which are taking place 'of', 'in' and 'through' education and education policy, 'in' and 'through' the work of education businesses. This entails a traversal of some of the multi-level and multi-layered fields of policy: institutional, national and international. Such an approach is important in demonstrating the increasing diversity and reach of some of the education businesses and their different kinds of involvements with different institutions and sectors of education. It also makes it possible to set local rhetorics, such as 'partnership', within the context of corporate logics of expansion, diversification, integration and profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the recent introduction of Citizenship Education in England from a governmental perspective, drawing on the later work of Foucault to offer a detailed account of the political rationalities, technologies and subjectivities implicated in contemporary education policy in the formation and governance of citizen-subjects. This is understood in terms of making citizens 'governable', but importantly not unproblematically 'governed'. I illustrate my account with interviews with members of the Crick Advisory Group and an analysis of the Crick Report, in order to explore the discourses and practices of educational policy-making. Trends are identified in education policy research which serve to de-politicise the policy realm and narrow the scope of ethical and political consideration. I therefore make use of Derrida's post-structuralism to argue for an expanded conceptualisation of education and politics, and for further interrogation of the purpose, scope and temporal imperatives of education, in a theoretical-empirical approach which takes seriously the geography of power in education policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates aspects of policy implementation that relate to 'Excellence in Cities', a UK government initiative. Local Education Authority (LEA) personnel and school teachers, responsible for implementing the Gifted and Talented (G&T) strand of that initiative, were interviewed. These co-ordinators were involved in the selection of school students to participate in an interventionist programme, the Urban Scholars programme at Brunel University. The Urban Scholars programme has nine participating LEAs in the London region. The LEA co-ordinator and one school co-ordinator from each authority were interviewed through a semi-structured interview schedule. They were asked the question: 'What influenced your choice of school student for the Urban Scholars programme?' This generated data on their definitions of gifted and talented and the way the register of pupils, selected as gifted and talented, was socially constructed. The analysis of the responses to this question suggests that the social construction of the G&T register is an example of what had been described in policy sociology literature as performativity and fabrication. Further, we found that the LEA and school co-ordinators were struggling to align their educational philosophy with a selection process that offers particular children extra resources. The dissonance between policy and practice highlights the concept of meritocracy as problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at Ofsted and particularly special measures regimes as part of a disciplinary mechanism. It examines issues such as school effectiveness theories, the increasing powers of Ofsted, and life under special measures and links it to performativity, discipline and surveillance using the metaphor of the panopticon. The change in teachers’ accountability is traced, along with the rise in the audit culture in teaching, and the increase in the power of Ofsted. The research context is a case study of a school over the period 1999–2003. During this time the school was placed into special measures and provided an opportunity to examine the effects of a key Government policy. The issues researched were Ofsted, special measures and the effects that these had on schools and teachers. The paper argues that a special measures regime is an example of panoptic discipline which I call panoptic performativity. The primary research is echoed by much of the existing research and first hand accounts of Ofsted inspections. I also locate special measures regimes in the context of Lyotard’s ‘performativity’, Foucault’s ‘normalization’, and the school effectiveness literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly there is interest in development studies and specifically in the field of education in taking up Amartya Sen’s capability approach as a framework for theorizing, implementing and evaluating education policy as a matter of social justice. This paper sets out to contribute to the emerging debate and to show how the capability approach offers an assertive alternative discourse to dominant human capital ideas in education. It considers core ideas of capability and functioning, and the emphasis in Sen’s approach on each person’s freedom and opportunities to develop valued beings and doings. The article then shows more concretely how the ideas might be operationalized by producing a provisional, situated list of education capabilities, with specific attention to gender equity in contemporary South African schools. It closes by presenting and emphasizing the importance of public debate and discussion around the policy potential of the theoretical and empirical ideas raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]