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In this paper we examine the objectives and meanings of the career guidance provided in comprehensive education as set out in discussions in the Parliament of Finland. We approach the topic through an exploration of parliamentary sessions concerning three major legislative proposals for reforming compulsory education in Finland. The premise is that the parliamentary discussions concerning guidance provided in comprehensive education reflect the rationalities that underpin guidance in different eras in Finland and elsewhere. Examining these rationalities provides a way to explore the principles which frame career guidance policy in Finland. Using the actantial model as a methodological tool, the analysis aims to discover the actantial positions in the parliamentary discussions and the interactions that emerge between these. The various actantial narratives demonstrate the way in which guidance is influenced by wider ideological trends. The actantial analysis portrays a shift from the more structural corporatist approaches of the 1960s when the object of guidance was to fulfil the needs of society, towards more third way individualism in 1990s. The current reform of 2020 to extend compulsory education and reinforce guidance may represent some return to more structural approaches. In this paper we examine the objectives and meanings of the career guidance provided in comprehensive education as set out in discussions in the Parliament of Finland. We approach the topic through an exploration of parliamentary sessions concerning three major legislative proposals for reforming compulsory education in Finland. The premise is that the parliamentary discussions concerning guidance provided in comprehensive education reflect the rationalities that underpin guidance in different eras in Finland and elsewhere. Examining these rationalities provides a way to explore the principles which frame career guidance policy in Finland. Using the actantial model as a methodological tool, the analysis aims to discover the actantial positions in the parliamentary discussions and the interactions that emerge between these. The various actantial narratives demonstrate the way in which guidance is influenced by wider ideological trends. The actantial analysis portrays a shift from the more structural corporatist approaches of the 1960s when the object of guidance was to fulfil the needs of society, towards more third way individualism in 1990s. The current reform of 2020 to extend compulsory education and reinforce guidance may represent some return to more structural approaches.

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political economy framework, in combination with a political sociology-driven approach to policy instruments. The analysis draws on two data sources: four White Papers and 37 in-depth interviews with top-level politicians, policy-makers and stakeholders, conducted between September 2017 and February 2018. The findings indicate that ‘scandalisation’ of Norway’s below-expected PISA results and promotion of standardised testing as a neutral device contributed to the relatively abrupt adoption of national testing in the early 2000s. The increasingly dominant policy discourse equalising education quality and learning outcomes led to the institutionalisation of TBA, developed to ensure equity and quality standards in a decentralised education system. Increased visibility, benchmarking and administrative control are identified as key mechanisms in putting pressure on local actors to re-orient their behaviour. The study provides original insights into the drivers, expectations and strategies underlying TBA in a social democratic institutional regime.

This paper examines the tensions between education policy’s attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, explained through Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes wide shut. My argument is that while the individual and society are both constituted through unavoidable division, antagonism and opacity, these notions are obscured through the operations of fantasy which holds out the promise of wholeness, harmony and redemption. In particular, education serves as a key site in which these fantasmatic ideals are promoted and pursued, a claim I substantiate via an analysis of the UK government’s 2016 white paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Specifically, I read the white paper in terms of five fantasies of: control; knowledge and reason; inclusion; productivity; and victimhood. My argument is that while fantasy is an inescapable element that inevitably structures what we take to be ‘reality’, education policy might strive to inhabit fantasy differently, thereby finding ways of escaping its current mode of seeing education with eyes wide shut.

The attainment gap associated with socio-economic status is an international problem that is highly resistant to change. This conceptual paper critiques the drive by the Scottish Government to address the attainment gap through the Scottish Attainment Challenge and the National Improvement Framework. It draws upon a range of theoretical perspectives but principally examines the problem through the lens of Steiner- Khamsi’s (2014) concepts of ‘reception’ and ‘translation’ of policy and through examination of the international and national (Scottish) policy contexts. The paper argues that, rather than focussing narrowly upon attainment outcomes, an holistic approach should be adopted which takes account of the economic, social and relational constraints which impact upon families in poverty, calling for a systems-level approach. ‘Schools cannot go it alone’: there is a need to focus upon a wide range of public policy to redress inequalities in society. Whilst the Scottish Government has looked to the London/City/National Challenge as a potential solution to the problem, the complexities and limitations of policy borrowing need to be understood. Higher Education Institutions, government agencies, local authorities and schools need to work in partnership to develop research informed practice which will impact upon learning outcomes for all children and young people.

This paper explores, from a Foucauldian perspective, the emergence and nature of the current EU education policy priority issue of ‘early school leaving’. The paper suggests that a number of problematisations developing from the failure to secure Lisbon Strategy objectives have served to create a much stronger focus on the issue of young people deemed to be leaving education and training early in EU states. In examining how EU policy discourse positions such young people (subjectivation), the paper highlights how this has narrowed to a concern with young people as economic problems and principally positioned as economic units which are required to be more productive. Education and training are understood as investments in human capital and as the principal means to secure the dominant global economic position desired by the EU. The paper suggests, however, that human capital theory has been modified within this approach so that merely being retained in an educational setting is seen as proxy for t...

Crude and dangerous ideas about the genetic heritability of intelligence, and a supposed biological basis for the Black/White achievement gap, are alive and well inside the education policy process but taking new and more subtle forms. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the paper analyses recent hereditarian writing, in the UK and the USA, and highlight a strategy that I term racial inexplicitness; this allows hereditarian advocates to adopt a colorblind facade that presents their work as new, exciting and full of promise for all of society. The paper is in two parts: the first exposes the racism that lies hidden in the small print of the new geneism, where wildly misleading assertions about genetic influences on education are proclaimed as scientific fact while race-conscious critics are dismissed as ignorant ideologues. The second part of the paper sets out critical facts about the relevant science, including the difference between the mythic and real meaning of heritability; fundamental problems ...

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

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider the way in which we are produced both by discourse and the language of the 'moment' in discursive acts. Using the work of Gee, the paper contends that policy texts and policy Discourse 'themselves form policy, that is, they position policy explanation and policy framing within the bounds of the institution and so give policy form'. Problematically, such mechanisms may succumb to the 'death of subject' and accordingly I offer a third method by which we might conceive of education policy: the discursively produced position call. Subsequently, I propose a tri-partite theory for the examination and understanding of policy: policy explaining, the production of policy texts; policy framing, the ways in which all can be positioned by texts and Discourse to produce the meanings imbued upon policy; and, policy forming, the impact of moment-by-moment conversational acts for their production of the policy text itself, that is, the ways in which policy is locally formed rather than locally mediated.

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.

The paper aims to contribute to the sociological analysis of power through the study of the structuration and retrieval of information on the internet. The main argument of the paper is that, paradoxically, in an age when the availability of information has increased exponentially, there is a risk that diversity in the use of sources for the construction of knowledge becomes more restricted than in the past and that information search moves towards greater objectification and centralisation. Knowledge management systems increasingly shape the ways in which we think about the questions we ask and how we try to answer them, which raises fundamental and largely neglected questions for education policy. The paper illustrates these trends with particular reference to the use of Google and Google Scholar.

This paper offers a new way of exploring some of the complexities inherent in attempts by policy makers and others to promote educational change. The focus of this study is on the current drive in education policy to alter the basis of teacher professionalism through the application of principles of lifelong learning to teachers’ professional development. Drawing upon data from two studies of the Chartered Teacher initiative in Scotland the paper examines the formation of successive transmission points as material relays of relations during the process of implementing this policy objective. It explores how three key discursive elements of a professional standard for accomplished teaching: collaborative action, critical reflection and enquiry, and teacher leadership, were progressively recontextualised during the introduction of Chartered Teacher status in schools. The findings indicate some of the conceptual and political struggles involved at the critical junctures where policy implementation requires the movement of a discourse from one social context to another. The paper suggests that a discursive analysis of how a centrally mandated initiative is transmitted can help to promote an understanding of the complexities of this process and increase critical awareness of the issues at stake for those involved.

Environmental and climate change education remains on the margins of education and climate change policy. This paper draws on Foucauldian theoretical resources to examine England’s climate change e...

Recent analyses of education policy have used the concept of the assemblage to explain how the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s education work contributes to global policy convergence and new forms of policy mobility. These analyses often use Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage to designate relations between things (as actors) and people (as actors). In this paper, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking offers promising analytical insights that education policy studies have not fully explored. We propose that revisiting the problematics which animated Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory can broaden the conceptual apparatus at our disposal for analysing global education policy and the work of international policy actors. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Educational reforms and legislative initiatives in Australia and internationally during the late 1980s imposed new political solutions on to the problems experienced in educational settings. This paper aims to explore the significance of education to politics, through a brief history and reference to comparative studies. While schools in western democracies have always operated within a political context, the paper argues that the radical conservatism of the 1990s makes it even more important that educators take on an assertive policy role. One possibility is identified through reference to a research‐based procedure identified as ‘pragmatic policy development’.

Test-based accountability or ‘TBA,’ as a core element of the pervasive Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), has become a central characteristic of education systems around the world. TBA often comes in conjunction with greater school autonomy, enabling governments to assess ‘school quality’ (i.e. test results) from a distance. Often, quality improvement is further encouraged through the publication of these results. Research has investigated this phenomenon and its effects, much of it focusing on Anglo-Saxon cases. This paper, drawing on expert interviews and key policy documents, couples a policy borrowing with a policy instruments approach to critically examine how and why TBA has developed in the highly autonomous Dutch system. It finds that TBA evolved incrementally, advancing towards higher stakes for schools and boards. Further, it argues that school autonomy has been central to the development of TBA in two ways. Firstly, following a period of decentralisation that increased school(board) autonomy, the Dutch government saw a need to strengthen accountability to ensure education quality. This was influenced by international discourse and accelerated by a (politically exploited) national ‘quality crisis’ in education. Secondly, the traditionally autonomous Dutch system, shaped by ‘Freedom of Education’, has at times conflicted with TBA, and has played a significant role in (re)shaping global policy and in mitigating the GERM.

This paper is a response to an earlier article in the Journal of Education Policy, which calls for ‘new ideas and constructive principles and practices for the provision of socially-just education’...

This paper challenges the notion that quantitative data – as a numeric truth – exist independent of a nation’s political and racial landscape. Utilising large-scale national attainment data...

The papers in this special issue of the Journal of Education Policy address a set of neoliberal doubles that rest on a mutually ‘beneficial’ relation of education reform to profit for business. Tha...

This paper explores the repositioning of state curriculum agencies in response to the establishment of the Australian Curriculum and the key national policy organisation responsible for its development: the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). I begin with an analysis of the federal Labor government’s role in the early years of the Australian Curriculum reform, arguing that Labor was afforded a rare window of political opportunity that enabled the fundamental restructuring of curriculum policy at the national level, and which has significantly altered intergovernmental and inter-agency relationships. Following this, I engage with research literature that has sought to theorise the changing nature of Australian federalism in relation to schooling reform. I then present an empirical analysis based on interviews with policy-makers in ACARA and curriculum agencies in four Australian states (Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria). My analysis draws at...

There are various configurations for the analysis of education policy; the case; a history; comparison between (e.g. countries); comparison within; etc. In this issue, we have a set of papers from ...

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 ...

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. publishedVersion

The paper presents an argument that the usual account of social justice in formal education is too narrow. That account concerns itself only with the outcomes of education or only with general ethical precepts, such as 'recognition'. I argue that it should also concern itself with living educational experiences as part of what makes a good life. I begin by noting that people find value in education for three linked but analytically separable reasons which I label: instrumental, inherent and integral. The last of these focuses on the value of education as part of what it is to live a good life. I point out how the usual accounts of social justice in education are seldom concerned with specifically educational experiences within formal education and that there is little clarity about the contribution of such experiences to living a good life. I offer a provisional account of specifically educational goods in experiences of education, and compare this to research and policy on enjoyment and engagement concluding that the significance of joy in education should be recognised within education policy.

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 poststructuralism to argue for an expanded conceptualisation of education and politics, and for further interrogation of the purpose, scope and temporal imperatives of education, ...

Youth ‘at risk’ is the currently favoured label used in Australian policy for youth whose educational outcomes are considered too low, with an emphasis on the risk of not completing senior secondary education. Although some research has identified factors contributing to this risk as stemming from complex interactions between individual and family circumstances as well as characteristics of schools and society, policy identification of youth ‘at risk’ has tended to simplistically focus on personal attributes of young people. Moreover, this identification has set up a false distinction between a supposed problematic minority versus a ‘normal’ majority. Thus, the dominant conceptualization of youth ‘at risk’ draws attention to what is wrong with these youth, rather than to what may be wrong with schooling. This paper examines both empirical observations and discursive conceptualizations to critique the ‘youth at risk’ label, and proposes use of the concept of ‘marginalized students’ instead, which identifies individuals not through their personal characteristics but through their relationship with schooling. This approach allows recognition that marginalization is at least in part a product of schools and society, and requires action in those arenas.

This paper reports on an interview‐based study which explored the implementation of a major policy initiative in Queensland, Australia, with particular attention to social justice issues. Interviews were conducted with key policy actors in three sections of the bureaucracy: strategic directions, performance and measurement; curriculum and assessment; workforce and professional development. We were interested in the ways in which the tensions between redistributive and recognitive approaches to social justice were being managed in the bureaucracy. We drew on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, logic of practice, political discourse, habitus, capital, and symbolic power struggles to theorize the politics of discourse associated with such policy implementation processes within bureaucracies. The interview data revealed differences in approach to equity issues and in the language used in the three sections of the bureaucracy. We argue that these differences, associated with the different priorities of the three sec...

This paper uses Bourdieu to develop theorizing about policy processes in education and to extend the policy cycle approach in a time of globalization. Use is made of Bourdieu's concept of social field and the argument is sustained that in the context of globalization the field of educational policy has reduced autonomy, with enhanced cross-field effects in educational policy production, particularly from the fields of the economy and journalism. Given the social rather than geographical character of Bourdieu's concept of social fields, it is also argued that the concept can be, and indeed has to be, stretched beyond the nation to take account of the emergent global policy field in education. Utilizing Bourdieu's late work on the globalization of the economy through neo-liberal politics, we argue that a non-reified account of the emergent global educational policy field can be provided.