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Media reportage often act as interpretations of accountability policies thereby making the news media a part of the policy enactment process. Within such a process, their role is that of policy reinforcement rather than policy construction or contestation. This paper draws on the experiences of school leaders in regional Queensland, Australia, and their perceptions of the media frames that are used to report on accountability using school performance. The notion of accountability is theorised in terms of media understandings of ‘holding power to account’, and forms the theoretical framework for this study. The methodological considerations both contextualise aspects of the schools involved in the study, and outline how ‘framing theory’ was used to analyse the data. The paper draws on a number of participant experiences and newspaper accounts of schools to identify the frames that are used by the press when reporting on school performance. Three frames referring to school performance are discussed in this paper: those that rank performance such as league tables; frames that decontextualise performance isolating it from school circumstances and levels of funding; and frames that residualise government schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of further education in 1993, when colleges of further education were removed from local authority control and placed under aegis of the Further Education Funding Council. This is followed by an examination of changes to the management regime following incorporation. It considers suggestions that bullying forms of management have been superseded and that there has been some feminization of senior management. This discussion is set alongside one addressing the socio-economic context as well as hegemonic understandings of the economy. The final part of the paper examines claims made for the development of an ‘activist’ or transformative professionalism. However the key difficulty with these potentially progressive arguments is that analyses operate at the level of ideology accepting the way in which the knowledge economy is constructed thereby failing to seriously consider and work through the patterns of antagonistic relations that exist within capitalism. In a similar manner they play down education as site of struggle. Whilst the paper is orientated towards English further education the argument has a wider purchase, applying to education in particular and the welfare state in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly mediatised policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media. This paper analyses the responses to media scrutiny of six principals whose schools’ national test results were reported in the Australian press following the release of the federal Labour Government’s MySchool website in 2010. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, the concept of cross-field effects, and associated research on mediatisation, the evidence suggests that the relationships between the press, education policy and schools are highly contested, and that principals have some agency in talking back regarding their school’s reported ‘performance’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex ways in which the marketisation of education and the associated publication of performance data have contributed to the emergence of a new politics of recognition which has paradoxically served further to naturalise educational inequalities. Of all the reforms associated with subjecting education to market forces, it is the publication of 'league tables' of raw performance data which has sparked the most controversy. These tables have provoked a range of criticisms from educational professionals and practitioners concerning their reductionist nature, their misleading attribution of outcomes to institutional processes rather than intake variables and their potentially damaging side-effects. These league tables can be said to constitute a form of cultural injustice. In order to counter this injustice, a new politics of recognition has emerged which seeks to valorise the performance of disadvantaged schools and which can be seen in the development of alternative and 'value-added' league tables. This paper argues that there are a number of difficulties and dangers inherent within this new politics of recognition. These relate to the impossibility of separating a school from its context, the displacement of a politics of redistribution and the increasing naturalisation of inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education in Europe has been one more aspect of social policy, traditionally held to exist within the sovereignty' of member states, which has been encroached upon by supranational institutions. This paper explores the legitimacy of the partial control over education matters that has been gained by the European Union since the 1970s, examining in particular the role of the European Court of Justice and also the European Commission, in reshaping and altering definitions of legal competence in the fields of education and training. Special emphasis is placed on the method by which an original competence in training has been reconstituted to incorporate some aspects of education policy. Implications for democratic legitimacy and accountability at the European level are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the UK government's performance management initiative for teachers in England and Wales as set out in the Green Paper, Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change and subsequent technical amplification documents. This new initiative aims to 'modernize' the teaching profession, raise standards and provide financial rewards for individuals, teams and whole-school performance. The article draws upon the first detailed analysis of the 4,064 document archive held at the Department for Education & Employment (DfEE) and on the wide body of social science research into performance-related pay and performance management. It finds that when considered as a whole package, the initiative represents a relatively sophisticated set of proposals which reflects a great deal of the most recent thinking in reward management. Critiques, which dismiss the initiative in terms of traditional arguments against performance-related pay could be accused of ignoring some important features of the proposed change. Nonetheless, even when considered in its own, wider terms, the initiative is found to be flawed since even this 'sophisticated' package neglects some of the important realities of schools as complex organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a Foucauldian analysis of the political rationalities of national testing and accountability practices in Australia, and their inconsistencies for students for whom English is a second or additional language. It focuses on a problem associated with the statistical data category ‘Language Background Other Than English’ (LBOTE) in the Australian national testing system. There is large variation in the performance of LBOTE students, but the average score of the group serves to homogenise the category and silence the association between language and test performance. Using Foucault’s ideas about governmentality and disciplinary power, this article examines the technologies of power evident in the Australian education reforms, in order to challenge a particular version of reality, created by the LBOTE category. The impact of disciplinary power on English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers is signalled, as they navigate the dual demands of meeting education accountabilities whilst supporting high needs ESL learners. This article challenges the idea that current accountabilities are able to address the goal of equity for all Australian students, rather suggesting that a focus on test performance, represented by statistical categories like LBOTE, undermines implementation of specialist pedagogy, and demands that teachers transform their practice to satisfy systemic need rather than student need. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]