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In July 2021 the Chinese Government unexpectedly released what has become known colloquially as the 'Double-Reduction' policy. The policy decreed the reduction of homework pressure on students and greater control of private tutorial companies. In this paper, we set out to understand why the Chinese central government launched the 'Double-Reduction' policy in mid−2021 by using narratives to analyse the three most circulated explanations for the policy and its timing. We use data from a range of formal and informal policy texts. The three narratives, including one policy narrative dominant in the official discourse and two alternative ones, constructed the causal stories about the policy's rationale from multiple perspectives. The combination of multiple perspectives and a narrative approach helps reveal the policy event's complexity and lays a foundation for researchers interested in tracking the development trajectory of this new policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'governance' is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories and conceptual and empirical turns in the field of education. In this paper we systematically delineate the different meanings ascribed to governance within education with a focus on its polyvalence as a political project, empirical object and research analytic. Specifically, we highlight the various complementarities and tensions flowing from this rich and evolving language. We conclude by calling for more education researchers to reflect on this complicated history and attendant language as part of their framings and interpretations of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp's framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents' childcare decision-making are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department for Education (DfE) in England seeks to determine the actions of educationists in both the public and private sectors through the use of targeted instructive documents and white papers where broader policy intention is presented. Since 2010, as we will show, there has been a shift in the nature of such papers towards justification with 'evidence' and transparency through referencing in a 'scientific' style, with ramifications for both how policy is justified and the contestation of practices in education. This leads us to suggest that we are in an 'evidence era' where a dominant rationalized myth centres on the use of 'evidence' to justify practice. Meanwhile, how 'evidence' is constructed as research is undertaken, and how it is transformed as it enters a political environment, are important questions that are often overlooked. In this text, we analyse the change in 'evidence' practices before and after 2010, consider why the practices changed, and infer the effects the changes have had on the wider education environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

There is growing research interest in school inspection throughout Europe; however, there have been few comparative studies between Swedish and Norwegian school inspectorates. Such a study is necessary since little is known about how inspection policies are shaped through ‘governing modes’ in the two Nordic countries. This paper explores the similarities and differences between state school inspection policies within the two countries from 2002 to 2012. Based on a rigorous, comparative document analysis of 23 policy documents, a particular focus is given to how school inspection adheres to professional-bureaucratic control as a mode of governing and/or details national expectations through performance audit, potentially intervening into school practices. We demonstrate that even if the cases of public administration seem to be somewhat homogenous from the outside, there is substantial evidence of major differences in the inspection policies of these two countries which can be explored by comparative analysis. Specifically, this paper contributes both conceptually and comparatively to understanding how a study of purposive and evaluative modes of governing can add to the field of school inspection studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New cognitive infrastructures are emerging as digital platforms and artificial intelligence enable new forms of automated thinking that shape human decision-making. This paper (a) offers a new theoretical perspective on automated thinking in education policy and (b) illustrates how automated thinking is emerging in one specific policy context. We report on a case study of a policy analysis unit ('The Centre') in an Australian state education department that has been implementing a BI strategy since 2013. The Centre is now focused on using BI to support complex decision making and improve learning outcomes, and their strategy describes this focus as becoming 'information centric'. The theoretical framework for our analysis draws on infrastructure studies and philosophy of technology, particularly Luciana Parisi's recent work on automated thinking. We analyse technical documentation and semi-structured interview data to describe the enactment of a BI strategy in The Centre, with a focus on how new approaches to data analytics are shaping decision-making. Our analysis shows that The Centre is developing a cognitive infrastructure that is already creating new conditions for education policy making, and we conclude with a call for research designs that enable pragmatic exploration of what these infrastructures can do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Twitter microblogs over a 3-day period, during the release of the results of PISA 2015 on 6 December 2016 by the OECD. We document a methodological approach to investigating the social mediatisation of policy and its inclusive potential for enabling the participation of multiple voices. We draw on two data sets from the 3-day period: first, a large data corpus (n = 17,260) of all microblogs about PISA, and second, a smaller cluster of selected participant groups, notably academic, OECD, and teacher union actors (n = 65). Our analytic tools provide a methodological heuristic for scoping social media networks. Our research is guided by questions about 'Who participates?' in PISA debates and 'What is being said?' and considers the volume, engagement, and content of the microblogs. Of the three participant groups, the academic actors authored the largest volume of microblogs across the corpus and cluster. The content of microblogs from the OECD cluster mainly provided information about and promotion of PISA, while the academic cluster emphasised commentary and critique, with all actors using an analytic tone. The OECD had the largest number of followers and the highest rate of social recommendations and engagement with their microblogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how university staff in Denmark, Germany, and England perceived higher education (HE) policy as impacting the experience of being a student in their respective countries. While, in each nation, different policy mechanisms were identified as having triggered transformations in the experience of being a student, the transformations themselves were described in a strikingly similar manner across all three countries: staff stressed that students had become more instrumental in their approach to learning; that the student experience had become more circumscribed; and that students were under greater stress. We analyse how staff's narratives about the impact of policy on the experience of being a student were mediated by their own ideas about what constituted 'good education', which in turn were strongly rooted in national traditions. Furthermore, in each country, staff's assessment of the impact of specific policies on HE differed sharply from those of policy actors. Our findings contribute to the scholarship on the marketisation of HE, through drawing attention to how the rationality underpinning policy does not determine how it is engaged with by key stakeholders on the ground, and by demonstrating how the neoliberalisation of HE can unfold in different formats, some more explicit than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated literature to consider how eligibility to scheme participation and education services are shaped, and how education is positioned in the development and implementation of the NDIS. The analysis highlights tensions that exist for people with disabilities and their families who both access the scheme and who might draw on its provision to support their education, because of the way the policy is oriented towards pathological categorisation, standardised outcomes and service delineation rather than integrated support and informed involvement. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the policy priority across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries of increasing lifelong learning opportunities, fragmented NDIS policy in Australia prevents people with disabilities from achieving this ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on outlining, contextualising and theorising the rise of global and complementary national modes of test-based, top-down accountability in schooling systems. The effects of these infrastructures of accountability on schools, teachers' pedagogical work, on the width of curriculum and on the goals of schooling are also alluded to. These developments are theorised in terms of rescaling of the policy cycle globally, as a well as the topological turn that sees the globe reconstituted as a single space of comparative and commensurate measurement of the performance of school systems, as part of the move to new global forms of networked governance. We argue that we are seeing a new global panopticism, with national school systems variously positioned within the global market place and global educational policy field with important effects within national policy-making. The analysis and theorising provided serves as a contextual backdrop and introduction to the papers included in the special issue of the Journal of Education Policy on the theme of Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy. We argue, and the papers demonstrate, the significance for policy sociology today of recognising testing as a, perhaps the, major policy steering systems and the work of schools today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the commercialisation of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in Australian schools. Specifically, it focuses on understanding why teachers value commercial resources, and how they enact these in their classrooms. Theorising around teacher agency suggests teachers are now choosing to use a range of commercial resources and view these as important additions to their pedagogical toolbox. Teachers want high quality resources, and they prefer resources that are easy to import, scaffold and modify according to their specific needs. Teachers did not readily see the benefit of a prescriptive SEL program. Instead, they wanted multiple resources that they could pick and choose the best bits from. Our data suggests that teachers are not being seduced by commercialisation and the ‘easy fix’ it promises, but are in fact presenting as agentic professionals who care deeply about students’ social and emotional wellbeing and are working to tailor bespoke learning experiences to meet the needs of their students within their specific school contexts. We argue that it is worth nuancing the critique about commercialisation offered in the literature to date, and suggest that commercialisation is not inherently bad, rather it is the ‘intensity’ of commercialisation that needs to be regulated and further investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the findings of an in-depth genealogical study of the discourse of quality in Australian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy. Quality reform has become the foremost global policy agenda for ECEC due to assumptions about the economic potentials of quality services. In Australia, the recent National Quality Framework elevated early childhood policy in Australia from the margins as the lynchpin of a broader economic reform agenda. However, quality ECEC - what it is and does - is a complex, contestable notion that could be considered problematic for the sector to execute, particularly through market models of provision. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse as the ‘already said’, the truth assumptions that have underpinned policy uses of quality ECEC in Australia are identified and critiqued. It is shown that the discourse of quality has been tactically deployed in Australian ECEC policy to realign quality ECEC outcomes with educative outcomes, as a means for government to selectively grow and govern human capital. This positions quality as a high-stakes reform discourse for early childhood stakeholders, entwined with the expanded reach and intensification of selective, performance-related standards and incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically documents media portrayals of Australia’s performance on the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000–2014. We analyse newspaper articles from two national and eight metropolitan newspapers. This analysis demonstrates increased media coverage of PISA over the period in question. Our research data were analysed using ‘framing theory’, documenting how the media frames stories about Australia’s performance on PISA. Three frames were identified: counts and comparisons; criticisms; and contexts. Most of the media coverage (41%) was concerned with the first frame, counts and comparisons, which analysed PISA data to provide ‘evidence’ that was then used to comparatively position Australia against other countries, reference societies, which do better, with particular emphasis on Finland and also Shanghai after the 2009 PISA. The other two frames dealt with criticisms and contextual issues. This paper only focuses on the first frame. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which media coverage of Australia’s PISA performance has had policy impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial literacy education as policy has gained international political momentum in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. This paper analyses how two policy narratives operated in Canada to promote and ultimately enact financial literacy education policy: the ‘crusade’ and the ‘chicken coop’. While the dominant and counter-narratives offer different perspectives, they both maintain financial literacy’s ‘sacred cow’ status. The application of narrative policy analysis (NPA) underscores how the politics of education policy are complex and cannot be explained by rational, positivist models that would privilege evidence over metaphor. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on NPA, and sheds light on how financial literacy education is likely to be shaped and legitimized more by the values and mobilization power of special-interest coalitions in favour of it through politics, than by evidence-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where 'enactment' refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and 'translated' by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south-east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school-based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own 'take' on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the ways in which nursery workers are constructed through government discourse in England. This is done by offering a deconstruction of key policy texts. The discursive construction of 'the nursery worker' within government discourses has shifted over time but currently occupies a highly politicised position. It is argued that following a decade of unprecedented policy attention and reform, the cultivation and continued promotion of a discursive 'crisis in childcare', has laid the ground for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) to be refashioned in particular ways. Policy claims to a perpetual 'crisis in childcare' are dismantled and explored in order to better understand how nursery workers have become fabricated through texts as more or less professional at particular political moments and to what effect. Attention is drawn to the recent introduction of 'Early Years Professional Status' and claims to evidence-based policy formation are problematised. The paper concludes by considering the discursive opportunities available for alternative constructions of professionalism to take shape from within communities of ECEC practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key themes of recent UK education policy texts have been a focus on 'quality' in public sector performance, and on 'equality' in the form of New Labour's stated commitment to equality of opportunity as a key policy objective. This twin approach can be seen at its most obvious in the concept of 'excellence for all'. This paper contends that in recent policy texts the vocabularies of quality management discourse and egalitarian discourse have become conflated, serving to mask key issues relating to educational inequality, seen at its most stark in the attainment gap. The paper argues that this has led to a failure to distinguish between the goals of quality management and the ends of egalitarianism. Discursive conflation of this sort risks obscuring the significance of socio-economic context and the limited impact of within-school action. The paper also suggests that the focus on equality in terms of school provision paradoxically risks entrenching social inequalities despite the appearance of egalitarian commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing use of artificial intelligence in education extends and intensifies technologies of governing, including datafication, performativity and accountability. In this article, we outline how the use of AI and data science has the disruptive potential to create new norms in education policy and governance. We report on an ethnographic investigation into an education department initiative that involved data scientists using machine learning to identify causal links between different school-based and non-school based factors, and educational outcomes. The article proposes that machine learning is being introduced into this education department as a set of minor experiments in education governance. We focus on issues of changing expertise and evidence and differences in method between new data science approaches and established statistical expertise in this education department, in order to highlight minor but important new governance practices. We conclude that the increasing use of AI in education, as part of new cognitive infrastructures, is quietly shifting the ways in which education systems operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of international education policy frequently take issue with how it stabilises neoliberal values at the expense of the progressive aims of education. Yet the humanism underpinning these debates can work to exclude environmental concerns from the remit of educational policy. This article offers a posthuman critique of the Australian Strategy for International Education 2021–2030 that does not take for granted that international education policy should be humanistic but considers how it comes to be affirmed as such. Through a discourse analysis of the Strategy and supporting materials, this article identifies three manoeuvres that affirm the policy as humanistic. Firstly, neoliberal values and notions of wellbeing are wedded together in a shared understanding that the Strategy must be student centred. Secondly, the Strategy reinscribes divisions between humans and nature by casting land as a passive backdrop for human activities. And thirdly, the Strategy makes a claim to perpetuity by linking the acquisition of human skills with a sustainable and prosperous future. The conclusion contends that international education policy cannot ignore the impacts of human activity on the world and must nurture the vast range of interdependencies that sustain life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns of participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, as elsewhere, have been marked by social inequalities for decades. UK Governments have responded with a plethora of policies and agendas aimed at addressing this broad social issue. However, little is known about how higher education institutions (HEIs) interpret and 'enact' these policies in relation to institution-specific contexts. Drawing on concepts from policy sociology this paper examines how HEIs in one nation state, Wales, enact its Government's policy on 'widening access' to higher education. Interviews with a range of 'policy actors' along with analyses of institutional 'widening access' policy documents, reveal divergences between HEIs in how this policy agenda is interpreted and delivered. These differences reflect institution-specific contexts - not least their internal politics and assumptions about the type of students they admit, but also their interests and priorities in relation to their positions within a global, marketised, HE system. The implications of this for the reproduction of university hierarchies in the UK, as well as social inequalities more generally are brought to the fore. [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 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]

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]

Collaborative inter-professional practice (IPP) is hailed increasingly by policy-makers and a growing number of practitioners asthenew form of professional practice for those working within and across services for children and young people. Based on desk research, and drawing upon an increasingly invasive use of the term ‘collaborative’ at macro as well as micro-levels of the state, this paper interrogates the discursive and organisational forms upon which this ‘new’ advocacy rests and permeates the fields of Education, Health, Social Care, and Social Work, including standards agendas. Definitional complexity is compounded, it is argued, by relative paucity in evidence to demonstrate its benefit to and purposes for users/clients/students and professionals. Summarising evidence from case examples, conclusions draw attention to the need for more rigorous research not only about the benefits and disbenefits of inter-professional education (IPE) and collaborative IPP but also about the purported causal links between them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper documents how health is storied into existence by 'obesity discourse' to become part of the 'natural attitude' towards the health of individuals or populations. We draw attention to some of the major policy documentation influencing thinking on 'health' and school health education in the UK over recent years, especially, every child matters (ECM) and subsequent, related measures, for example the National Healthy Schools Programme (NHSP). We suggest that these measures have helped shape and make a 'totally pedagogised society' and 'totally pedagogised schools' in which 'health', reduced to an issue of weight, exercise and diet, becomes everyone's concern, everywhere. The analyses highlight the socio-political and psychological leanings of such policy documentation and its potential effect on the identities of children and young people when institutionalised and 'authorised' through state policies and the body pedagogies of schools and multiple other agencies. [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 provides a critical policy analysis ofThe Learning Curve (TLC)(2012), an initiative developed by the multinational edu-business, Pearson, in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit.TLCexemplifies the commercialising of comparison and the efforts of edu-businesses to strategically position themselves in education policy processes globally. In analysingTLC, our account seeks to proffer a critical analysis of this emerging policy genre, and the way it functions as part of the new ‘soft capitalism’. We analyseTLCin relation to Pearson’s new business strategy, which emphasises corporate social responsibility and accountability to consumers for the efficacy of its products and services. We argue that Pearson is now generating and appropriating various data to legitimise its products and services according to a ‘neo-social’ mode of accountability. Network ethnography is employed to document the global networks of both people and data associated withTLCand we reflect on the emergence of Pearson as a potential education policy actor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so ‘drenched in the past,’ the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt and dysfunctional. This is an incomplete story. While national narratives and news media tend to downplay these features, there is no local consensus on the reforms. There is mistrust on both sides of the debate, and a growing opposition movement, which arises from decades of racial and political struggles, corrupt public officials, and previous experiences with the state exerting power over locally elected school boards, which disenfranchised African-Americans in New Orleans in particular. Although the new, post-Katrina educational system significantly altered political dynamics, it has not eradicated politics altogether. In this paper, I conduct a policy history of education reforms in New Orleans, connecting the historical and political context to current reform efforts. As researchers evaluate the effectiveness of the new reforms in terms of student achievement, it is important also to examine their impacts on communities and the democratic control of schools, as well as how they reproduce or break from historical patterns of political struggle and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the privatisation of the public sector has grown rapidly in Sweden in the last decade, private companies have become an imperative part of education. Private companies sell and deliver consultancy, hardware, software, services, etc. to schools and municipalities. This study examines a growing rate of activities from companies and businesses working within public sectors. It also examines consequences of cooperation between private and public actors. Findings show that multiple actors meet in different forms and with different functions, in multiple ways and with diverse agendas. What can be discerned is strong Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), where actors and networks are linked together, directly or indirectly, in fluid and flexible relations and partnerships. Private actors on educational markets not only becomes edupreneurs but policyneurs, a new concept introduced. As private actors engage in the policy making and the public sphere, a complex and disorganised landscape with new formations of strong actors emerge, entailing a number of consequences. One implication is the establishment of lobbyism in the Swedish educational landscape, with potentially negative consequences for democracy. One conclusion is that new formations of power dissolve the roles and functions of private and public actors within education, with implications on decision-making, transparency, and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government and the media are intimately connected in many ways though each distrusts the other. This paper, based on the author's experience in government, describes the ways that governments try to deal with the media and discusses three of the main complaints about media coverage--its tendency to simplify, to assign blame, and to be primarily focused on the short term. It concludes with some suggestions for possible improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2016–2017 school year, the Liberian government launched Partnership Schools For Liberia (PSL), a pilot program in which the management of 93 primary schools was transferred to 8 private contractors. The pilot owed much to the importation of western policy models and was facilitated by the British organisation ARK and involved BIA, a private school company who receive funding from US and British sources. Despite criticism from civil society, at the end of the first year a randomised control trial (RCT) reported that the PSL program led to a 60% increase in educational attainment. However, the framework of the RCT was not followed by many of the PSL contractors, who were able to draw on greater economic support than government schools, thus invalidating any claims that private management was superior to government based management of schools. For its part, the MoE further demonstrated low regard for the RCT, by announcing expansion before the evaluation had been released, signalling that the PSL (now renamed LEAP) was a policy enacted via sweeping incrementalism, in which procedures such as the RCT were only implemented to give the appearance of accountability, and that the plan to expand PSL was always the endgame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the relationship between large-scale social discourses and local, school discourses as it plays out in conversations about gender and sexuality with and among teachers, specifically in the context of the passage of the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act in California. Grounded in feminist poststructural theories of discourse, I discuss qualitative data from a year-long study at one public middle school in Southern California where I provided professional development. I examine what happens when teachers are given opportunities to make sense of their roles in attending to topics of gender and sexual diversity, through conversations and dialogue. The following research questions guided my analyses: What themes arise in teachers’ conversations about their roles and responsibilities in the implementation of the FAIR Education Act? (How) are these themes produced in relationship with large-scale social discourses about gender and sexual diversity in schools? I argue that examining this relationship provides key insights into the ways teachers make sense of equity-focused policies that are meant to shift sociopolitical paradigms, and their roles and responsibilities in the implementation of such policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2009, the Swedish Government uses an ‘audit’ agency – the Swedish Schools Inspectorate – to monitor and assess the accuracy with which teachers grade student responses on national tests. This study explores the introduction and subsequent establishment of the Inspectorate’s regrading programme as an example of political management of the tensions between competition and equity inherent in neoliberal regulatory regimes. The programme is considered a case for examining contemporary policies and discourses on fairness and government actions undertaken to resolve issues of unfair assessment and safeguard students’ rights. Work of Carol Bacchi forms part of the theoretical background for the investigation of problem representations around and within the programme. The article demonstrates how discursive practices in the fields of government, audit and media have worked to frame teachers’ assessments as incorrect, unfair and as jeopardizing the credibility of the grading system, thus justifying increased central control and authority over teacher assessments. As such, the regrading programme contributed to increased mistrust in teacher professionalism. A legal discourse is identified, and we argue the examination system is being juridified where the abundance of control over knowledge risks turning into a deficit of that same knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 2004 to 2008, the Western Australian State Government embarked on a period of policy and legislative change to increase the compulsory school-leaving age from 15 to 17. This article adopts a governmental conceptualisation of ‘ethics’ to explore the policy discourses and practices. Drawing on interview and documental data, the research examined practices that were deployed with young people who were assessed as being at risk of early school leaving, or discontinuing from employment or other training, and consequently, were thought to be in breach of the new policy requirements. Although some of the arguments behind the move to increase the school-leaving age focused on the importance of education and learning, the ethics of the policy were more concerned with participation, and, consequently, entailed distinctive expectations that young people would work on themselves in ways that supported their employability. Specifically, young people were subjected to strategies at self-improvement and a calling to better themselves by participating within a normatively defined notion of engagement. A focus on the conduct of young people along these lines resulted in a problematic policy approach that centred narrowly on what young people were and were not doing, and what they ought to do, be, and become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Argentina, ‘inclusion’ has become a central target of national and provincial educational policy since the mid-2000s. Unlike in other countries, inclusion has been associated with the transformation of upper secondary schooling into a compulsory level of education, together with the effective integration of pupils from socio-economically deprived families. This article examines how policy on inclusion is ‘done by’ and ‘done to’ head teachers in twoEscuelas de Reingreso(Returning Schools) in the City of Buenos Aires. It scrutinises the usefulness of Ball and colleagues’ approach to policy in a very different context from their own. It argues that the head teachers are both policy actors and subjects. As policy actors, they creatively interpret and translate their schools’ policy mandates within specific contexts. In so doing, they produce antagonistic versions of ‘inclusion’: the ‘educational’ and ‘socio-educational’ approaches. As policy subjects, they are spoken by competing policy discourses (in a Foucaultian sense) on schooling: the ‘selection and homogenisation’ and the ‘inclusion and personalisation’ discourses. They demarcate the limits to which head teachers are able to imagine, think and do. In different ways, they contribute to the misrecognition of the centrality of teachers’ views and practices in pupils’ learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2002, British Columbia's education system has undergone extensive change following amendments to the BC School Act (Bill 34). This article presents a critical analysis of policy changes to the K-12 education finance system, particularly the expansion of the legal capacity of school districts to create 'school district business companies,' a phenomenon that is unique within Canada. These companies enable public school districts to establish for-profit companies that operate at arm's length from the school board, yet generate revenue from private sources to supplement government operational grants. This shift occurred in parallel with fiscal restraint measures that centralized control over the level of government funding while downloading inflationary and new costs to school boards. The result has been structural funding shortfalls for school districts across the province. Structural funding shortfalls, coupled with a push toward market-driven revenue generation, signaled to school districts that they needed to become more financially self-reliant. The authors argue that efficiency and adequacy (defined in financial terms) have eclipsed equity as priority values in BC education, and that 'creeping privatization' is undermining public support of public education. For the most part, these substantive changes have failed to stimulate a mass public outcry, and organized resistance comes from public sector unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the international debate about new forms of governance and moves towards decentralization and devolution, this article discusses the increasing interest in the concept of ‘localism’ in the UK, marked recently by the publication of the UK Coalition Government’s ‘Localism Bill’. A distinction is made between three versions – ‘centrally managed’, ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘democratic’ localism. The article draws on two research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and one by the Nuffield Foundation, as well as sources by specialists in local government, political analysts and educationalists. It explores the broad features of the three versions of localism and their implications for upper secondary education and lifelong learning. The article concludes by examining the strengths and limitations of the first two models and suggests that the third has the potential to offer a more equitable way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Engagement' is the second of six top priorities in Australia's most recent Indigenous education strategy to 'close the gap' in schooling outcomes. Drawing on findings from a three-year ethnographic analysis of school engagement issues in the north of Australia, this article situates engagement within the history of Indigenous education policy, followed by considerations of how many of the issues faced by Indigenous families both match and can be distinguished from those experienced among poor and underemployed social groups throughout the western world. We find that Indigenous people are content with the schools' engagement efforts and with their interactions with schools, accepting that how their lives are lived are not within the provenance of the school system to amend. In its homogenisation of Indigenous issues, reification of cultural distinction and foregrounding of disengagement as an issue, Australian education policy is also about non-engagement, in that it excludes key issues from policy consideration while appearing to be inclusive. The education sector does not systematically engage with the grinding issues that Indigenous families face in their everyday worlds; and since Indigenous people do not really expect schools to know how to solve their issues, the call for engagement and its resolution is perfectly irresolvable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although numerous writers have identified a different set of skills needed for employment in New Times, little analytic attention has been paid to how educational assessment policies contribute to envisioning such future citizens. This case study illustrates how Nova Scotia classroom assessment policy for Grades 7-9 English classes envisions young people as new workers who use new literacies in an knowledge economy for future employment in the province and elsewhere. The case study concludes that assessment policies must acknowledge their connections with ideal subject positions and the promotions of particular forms of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is subdivided into three closely linked parts. It initially starts with a description of the background and objectives of the Textbook Delivery Program (TDP). This is followed by an analysis of the factors of implementation on the basis of the field notes gathered during the inquiry. An analysis of the impact of these factors on policy implementation is highlighted in this section. The succeeding part explores cases of corruption and its intervening effects on TDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalisation is an emerging 'movement' within education. Its roots reside in marketing theory, not in educational theory. As a concept it admits a good deal of confusion. It can refer either to a new mode of governance for the public services, or it qualifies the noun 'learning', as in 'personalised learning'. The concern here is with its intellectual affinity to child-centred education, one which the government in England has strongly denied. On balance, the government's view of personalisation is not of a piece with what may commonly be regarded as child-centred education. But the strong semantic accord between the terms 'personalisation' and 'child-centred education' provokes a question: why does the government not provide a term which unequivocally distinguishes its current 'vision' for education from child-centred education? By retaining the term personalisation, the government purports to do two things: first, because of its focus on personalised 'tailored' needs and co-produced solutions, it adapts education even further to a consumerist society; and second, because the term personalisation strikes a chord with the discourse of child-centred education, it blurs the fact that little to do with pedagogy or with curriculum has in fact been changed. The term personalisation generates a nostalgic appeal to better times long gone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition of prior learning (RPL) has been a part of adult education policy and practice for a long time, but in different ways and in different times and places. In Sweden, RPL has been an explicit part of the policy since 1996. This policy analysis starts with the current Swedish policy concerning RPL. The figures of thought expressed in official policy texts are traced in, and compared to what is expressed in, the (discursive) practice of a case of local policy and development initiatives. The objective of the analysis is to see how the policy in official texts is reproduced and transformed at the local level. The theoretical starting point is the Foucauldian concept of 'governmentality', and RPL is seen as a technique for governing adult education, the adult learner and also adult learning. The analysis focuses particularly on the governing of adult education, expressed in the 'salvation narrative' of RPL, and in ideas of what RPL is and how it should be organised. Indirect as well as direct techniques of governing are identified in the governing of and through RPL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines education policy and the policy process in the light of two key concepts. The first is the concept of 'governmentality' from the work of Michel Foucault (1991). The second is the concept of 'political spectacle' from the work of Murray Edelman (1985, 1988). Taking note, further, of recent work by Fairclough (2000) on political 'spin' and rhetoric, the article suggests that education policy needs to be seen in the light of a more modern stress in governance which recognises that 'the conduct of the conduct of conduct' (the management and presentation of policy - the conduct3 of the title) is not only of electoral relevance but has considerable implications for education and policy. The article probes the ways in which current education policy in the UK is affected by conduct3 and attempts to place it within the Foucauldian governmentality framework. It suggests that while conduct3 can be understood as a modern variant of the Machiavellian concern with sovereignty, it is also associated with the neoliberal marketisation of democracy. On this reading, it can be considered as a mutation of liberal governmentality, serving to undermine some of its key principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Australian and English print media are actively engaged in producing reports that claim to find the 'best schools', the 'real state of education', and 'star head teachers'. This article considers the production of knights and dames, maverick heads and struggling schools. It argues that some of these stories are clearly the products of departmental press bureau activities and policy agendas. It shows, however, that even those stories intended to critique government policy support paradoxically a notion of the singular importance of the headship and the virtues of heroic leadership. It is suggested that the simulacrum of the heroic head works as a normative disciplinary device for performative and market practices and is singularly off-putting to both serving and aspirant school leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]