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Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and 'client' recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of "autonomous schools." Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of "decentralisation" corresponds with schools' discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has "devolved" power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent 'agents', having a distanced relationship with its non-state 'actors'. The paper follows Foucault's use of the metaphor of the "panopticon" and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of "parental control" and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a "'mini-public' ideology" that constrains educators' autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and "teacher demoralisation." Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control.

Digital technology is an expanding area of education policy. There is growing interest, therefore, in how networks of corporate and state policy actors implicit in the formation of (inter)national education technology agendas intersect with local school systems and teachers. In particular, this paper explores the significant policy work that takes place outside schools and classrooms through education trade shows. Based on an in-depth 'event ethnography' of one large Scandinavian educational technology show, the paper details how these events function as sites of policy interpretation--'sharing' (or more accurately 'selling') global ideas and imperatives to local schools and teachers. These findings highlight the role of trade shows in consolidating policy networks, subsuming public education interests into corporate concerns, and differentiating teacher subjectivities and encouraging teacher entrepreneurship. The paper problematizes the ways in which teacher agency is shaped and controlled by the discursive, material and affective dimensions of such events.

"Resilience" has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperiness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interventions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being. Drawing on a case study of a popular behavioural programme used widely in British and American primary schools, this paper uses a critical social understanding that combines bio-scientific and social constructionist ideas in order to evaluate key challenges for policy, research and practice framed around resilience. The paper argues that although critical social perspectives illuminate important contemporary manifestations of old problems with behavioural interventions, and challenge narrow, moralising definitions of "risk" and "vulnerability", they coalesce with behavioural perspectives in a search for better state-sponsored responses to the shared question of how to build resilience amongst "vulnerable" groups and individuals. Instead, we argue that critical sociologists need to resist responses that offer more sophisticated behavioural interventions and generate new forms of governance and subjectivity.

All over the globe, educational technology (EdTech) is being sold to schools as a central mechanism for improving access to quality learning for high poverty populations. There is a growing scholarship that interrogates the institutional drivers of the 'EdTech craze'. Building on this work, this paper examines how technocentrism as a specific strain of neoliberalism is reflected at both the organizational and institutional levels, both by private and public sectors in the case of school education in India. We argue that using institutional theory to explain complex multi-layered reforms means looking in tandem at macro principles defined through interactions in the organizational field and the re-experiencing and transformation of those processes at the micro level.

Focusing on teachers' practices amid a national curriculum 'implementation' project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers' everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significant engagement, commitment, and work towards enacting the new curriculum—their innovations were not sustained. These cases provide a useful site of analysis of change as a practice, rather than a more common focus on change as an outcome. De Certeau's theory of everyday practice is used to discuss how work-for-change is an everyday feature of teacher practice in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. This aspect of teachers' work in these settings is seldom acknowledged because successes are easily obscured by deficit discourses. Other factors contributing to the invisibility of teachers' work-for-change in these schools include the often-intangible nature of teachers' professional successes amid more formally visibilized failures, the ephemeral nature of everyday practice, and a workforce context characterised by teacher and leadership transience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how teachers see policy and how the visibility of various aspects of policymaking are mediated by our school contexts. As a perspective from a K-12 classroom teacher conducting policy research with other classroom teachers, this paper also explores how teachers, in turn, might make our policy work visible to ourselves and the implications for teacher agency. Teachers in the study took part in a two-year participatory action research endeavour, joining school-based policy inquiry groups where we identified policies, mapped policymaking processes, and discussed the implications of our contexts. On one hand, these engagements highlight the central role a school's institutional narratives and professional culture play in constructing the ways we see policy. At the same time, they point to how our seeing exceeds and moves with and through such constraints. With reference to postcolonial interpretations of agency, I describe how as part of inquiry teachers constructed spaces for ambiguity and alternative accounts, and in doing so movement and difference, in policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates and elaborates on the fabrication of teachers' subjectivity who work in school contexts governed by neoliberal policies. Theoretically, the conceptual metaphor of bonsai pedagogy is proposed to understand teachers' processes of subjectivation enacted by neoliberal discourses, policies, and practices. The article aims to understand the relationship between the processes of (de/re)-professionalisation and the subjective experience of malaise, suffering, and sickness lived by teachers in the exercise of their work. Bonsai pedagogy is offered as a complementary category of analysis and interpretation of these processes that is more sensitive to teachers' subjectivity. The research is based on 35 narrative interviews with Chilean dissident schoolteachers who are members of teachers' political organisations. I analyse three strategies used by the bonsai pedagogy: i) controlling and saturating teachers' time; ii) managing and guiding teachers' practices; and iii) obstructing teachers' creativity. I discuss how the bonsai pedagogy reduces the capacity of teachers to unfold and construct their subjectivity in alternative ways. Since Chile has implemented neoliberal reforms in education longer than any other country, understanding how neoliberalism operates through and around Chilean teachers can contribute to furthering our knowledge of how teachers worldwide can resist and deal with neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teach For All (TFAll) is global network of programs based on Teach For America. Since 2007, TFAll has spread to more than 60 countries and had a considerable impact on educational policy across educational jurisdictions. Scant research, however, has examined 'shadow' programs based on this model but unaffiliated with TFAll, such as Teach For Taiwan (TFT). This paper engages in a critical policy analysis of TFT and examines both its emergence and (mis)alignment with educational policy. Our analysis first highlights the inspiration and support TFT has drawn from TFAll and its affiliate programs, despite its unofficial status. The paper then examines how TFT is aligned strategically with recent policy shifts toward deregulation in Taiwanese education. We also find that TFT is misaligned with key educational structures, including the national salary scale for teachers and teacher education system, resulting in a new category of transient teachers who are uniquely positioned in the teaching roles they assume but largely unable to continue teaching beyond TFT. We argue that more attention within education policy studies should focus on the impacts of (un)official TFAll programs – particularly given their disproportionate power and positioning to effect global educational change – and their (mis)alignments with national systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA's key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies.

Using the case of the Flemish policy on educational quality and based on a series of case studies, the author argues that the impact of central policy measures on educational practices in schools is never simply straightforward. Policy measures are always interpreted by and translated to the particular context of a school. In these processes of interpretation the teachers' and principal's agenda of professional interests plays a crucial role. Taking up the micropolitical perspective on schools as a descriptive and analytical theoretical lens, the author argues that these interests reflect different types of working conditions that are considered valuable or necessary by the teachers and principal to do a good job. If these conditions are absent, threatened or lost, people will engage in micropolitical actions in order to establish, safeguard or restore the desirable working conditions. Five different categories of professional interests were identified in the analysis of the case study data. Describing these categories, the author shows how the macropolitical agenda gets caught up in the micropolitics of the local schools during the policy implementation. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)

Examines how the concept of trust is being reformulated within the context of teacher professionalism in England. (Contains 67 references.)(PKP)

This paper looks at the flexibilisation of teachers' employment relations in England in the context of an accelerated deregulation of work and employment conditions and of educational provision. It brings to light a contrasted picture, where external flexibilisation, through the recruitment of unqualified teachers, seems to be contained by a mixture of diverse but convergent interests and norms from the State, teacher unions and employers. Meanwhile, forms of internal flexibilisation (regarding working time, pay, and job boundaries and workplaces) appear to be more pervasive. This raises fundamental questions about the meaning of 'standard' employment relations in the teaching sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers' capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault's discipline with Connolly's pluralisation, we argue that evidence-based practice disciplines teachers to comply with a prescribed set of criteria, which constrains their capacity to respond to the evolving and emergent needs of their students and communities. Our argument is built from two projects conducted separately, but concurrently, in Australia and Denmark. The projects involved in-depth interviews with teachers, extensive observations within schools, and the collection and analysis of policy documents and artefacts. Using illustrative excerpts from both studies, we show how teacher participants expressed and embodied inclinations to do (or be) differently, but nonetheless felt the need to adhere to what the evidence established as the right way to do or be. In our view, this points to an increasingly rigid ontological space through which teachers can do, be and become, which raises questions about the extent to which an 'ethos of pluralisation' is possible within these schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses constructions and redefinitions of teacher professionalism by focusing on the discursive negotiations between the government and the teachers’ union in Norway. Based on an examination of three white papers on teacher education from the past 15 years and policy documents put forth by the Union of Education Norway during the past decade, the authors argue that new constructions of teacher professionalism are produced both by the government and from within the teachers’ union. However, there are differences between the government and the teachers’ union concerning what the main aspects of teacher professionalism are. The government emphasises teacher accountability, research-based practice and specialisation. By contrast, the teachers’ union highlights research-informed practice, responsibility for educational quality and professional ethics. There are three main areas of discursive struggle focused by the teachers’ union: the resistance to accountability policies, the redefining of research-based practice and the lengthening of teacher education. The authors argue that the teachers’ union is adopting an increasingly more active approach, thereby also challenging the idea that the teachers’ union is less interested in developing and taking responsibility for the quality of school education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay serves as a reflexive account of a multifocal approach to policy analysis that employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative study examined the relationship between principals' perceived levels of instructional influence and teachers' perceptions of their working conditions using a nationally generalizable sample. The qualitative study employed critical ethnographic methods to study the subjectivity of teachers and leaders and their relationship to one another as they work within a neoliberal policy regime. Theories of subjectivity employed in the qualitative study reveal that policies are contextually and individually dependent, which was particularly useful for making sense of both studies. In this paper, I reflect on my multifocal policy project and draw on queer and critical theory to argue for the re-appropriation of traditional methods of policy analysis in an effort to challenge marginalization of critical voices in scholarship, and to enhance the critical, multifocal approach to policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently the job of teaching is being reconstructed through a technicist and managerial account which bleaches out the 'authentic' voice of the teacher. This paper is an attempt to recover the commitments which a particular group of teachers (urban teachers) bring to their work and explore the way their perspectives are infused with their class histories, class consciousness and their teaching experiences. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first part briefly examines the contested classed position of teachers and argues that there is a need to distinguish between economic and subjective class identities. The second part draws on a small data set of interviews conducted with seven experienced and long-stay inner-city teachers and argues that (these) teachers do what they do because of their classed identities and subjectivities. While these sorts of teachers may always have been in a minority (Grace 1978), nevertheless they are still out there teaching in the city. Through their perceptions, values and sometimes their actions, they are contesting normalizing discourses of what it is to be a teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, teachers' enactment of assessment policy within demands for accountability and consistency of teacher judgements is considered. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study involving 50 middle school teachers from Queensland, Australia, who participated in online social moderation meetings with teachers located in dispersed areas around the state. The study presents how travelling policy is embedded in local histories and cultures, in particular within systems of accountability; and the different layers of what may be considered 'local'. The paper examines the intersections of travelling and embedded policy, and global and local contexts as these are enacted through online moderation meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of 'global forms' with the dual concepts of 'political rationality' and 'political technology' from governmentality studies, we consider SBRs as a global techno-scientific form that coheres at the level of political rationality and which can be abstracted across contexts, but which also manifests in unique place-specific assemblages of political technologies. The global form of SBRs thus represents the logics by which policymakers may attempt to align and create commonality across systems in the search for standardisation, even if this can never be fully realised in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This policy chronology traces the institution of globalised school curriculum and assessment discourses, as a vernacular and specific form of public rationalisation and educational governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Without functional national standards or national testing, official discourses constructed an assessment-driven framework as a public measurement and performance regime. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘toolkit’, this genealogy traces attempts by the government’s review and audit agency (the ERO), to lift achievement through establishing national standards, normalising assessment and strengthening market-managerial accountabilities. Therapeutic technologies of personal re/development supplemented the above through managed literacy partnerships. This was the basis for the managed reprofessionalisation of techno-entrepreneurial teachers around stipulated, data-driven and measured performances. The paper examines the centrality of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework to the reconstruction of an Enterprise Culture and the psycho-cognitive re/making and re/moralisation of individuals as responsibilised, self-managing and calculative. It posits that within a busnocratic rationality (merging business, entrepreneurial and technical-management), a calculative governmentality required educational data-systems for future population knowledge and control. The genealogy demonstrates the inextricable connection between ‘public’ rationalities, technologies of control and the re/construction of ‘private’ identity, subjectivity and ethics, under neoliberal governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is almost two decades since a concept of inclusion as selective segregation was proposed as an alternative to the concept of full inclusion and inclusive education was reconfigured as providing children with varied educational settings in order to meet their needs. A version of this model of inclusive education subsequently gained political traction in England where the issue of segregated or mainstream provision is now constructed as a matter of parental choice and child voice. Meanwhile, the implications of this latest model of inclusive education for teachers and schools in a rapidly changing wider educational landscape have largely been ignored or reduced to a question of training. This paper explores how the inclusive education landscape has changed in England in recent years, charting recent key developments in areas such as policy, statutory guidance and teacher training, with particular reference to teacher workload and the positioning of teachers within political and polemical educational discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work presented here follows up the authors' paper, in the previous issue of this journal, which (i) explored modernizing leadership in a public-private partnership, principally from the perspective of the senior managers of a private company contracted to run school support services by a local education authority (LEA), and (ii) suggested that their leadership approach resembled what was termed an adaptive public service (APS) model. This second, companion paper analyses data from secondary school head teachers to see if their perceptions and experience confirm or challenge the APS model as an interpretation of the leadership approach of the private company's senior managers. It was concluded that the model, with its basic commitment to a public service ethos, is largely affirmed as a way of reflecting the latter's leadership, particularly in its early stages. However, by the end of the period of study, a change in strategy and leadership approach was creating a more target-driven culture. With regard to the impact of outsourcing, although some improvements in services were identified by head teachers, it was also evident that other core support services for schools had continuing deficiencies. This is consistent with experience of private participation in public sector education which has generally not lived up to the expectations placed on it. Tensions were found between the practical power relationships within this public-private partnership, and the idea of partnership that is built into the policy discourse that labels it as a partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetoric and presumed rewards of an expanded conception of teachers' work and the work demands and strains introduced by such a conception. Based on data collected in the United States, this paper draws on multi-day, 24-hour time and task diaries recorded by case-study teachers, together with ethnographic interviews and observations, to illuminate the disjuncture between reform rhetoric and workplace demands. I use these data to assess the usefulness of existing theories of overwork as they may apply to teachers and teaching. This paper suggests that teacher overwork is, in part, a result of the expansion of teacher work roles. The argument unfolds in three parts. First, teachers' work roles have been expanded but structural supports for the expansion have been uneven. Second, the nature and extent of organizational support influences teacher experience of role expansion and, finally, teachers who embrace the expanded role conception strive to sustain it even in the absence of organizational supports. This results in overwork: here overwork is taken to mean working beyond the contractual day, week and year. Teachers' contracts specify their working day; when they work beyond this time without pay, then they are overworking. Current explanations of overwork do not adequately account for the case of teachers' overwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on issues of the professional identity of teachers in Australia under conditions of significant change in government policy and educational restructuring. Two discourses, democratic and managerial professionalism are identified which are shaping the professional identity of teachers. Democratic professionalism is emerging from the profession itself while managerialist professionalism is being reinforced by employing authorities through their policies on teacher professional development with their emphasis on accountability and effectiveness. The second part of the paper examines the types of professional identity emerging from these discourses. The two identities identified are the entrepreneurial and the activist identity. While these identities are not fixed, nevertheless at various times and in various contexts teachers may move between these two professional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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 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]

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]

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

This paper 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 (CT) 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 CT 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper considers two examples of recent policies affecting teachers' work, Performance Threshold Assessment in England and Chartered Teacher status in Scotland. Through tracing their origins and motivations, a comparative analysis is offered, which seeks to explore the extent of the influence of national contexts on developments in the restructuring process. Both policies purport to meet the professional needs of teachers who are a few years into their careers, yet the Scottish example is strongly oriented towards professional development, while the English example is oriented towards performativity and teacher assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the way in which the notion of trust is being reformulated within teacher professionalism in England. It does this by setting the discussion within the economic context in which education is placed and examines the competitiveness settlement and its construction of a high skills economy marked by high trust relations. It is argued that this model of the English economy does not sit well with existing relations. The paper then draws upon material from the Learning and Skills Council, which sets the framework within which postcompulsory education and training is placed. It relates this discussion to the recent history of managerialism as well as performance management exploring the implications for trust relations. The paper then examines the nature of teacher professionalism and argues that current interventions work within a truncated model of trust, which is contrasted with a dialogic understanding of professionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little is known about how teachers are affected by reforms that have moved schools increasingly in the direction of becoming self-managing schools. While there has been much hype about the alleged benefits that flow from more flexible decision making processes shifted closer to the point of learning, the cutting of bureaucratic red tape, and the notion that schools are made more accountable to parents and students - relatively little is known about how this impacts on the way teachers think or act in relation to their work. This paper takes a particular instance of an Australian primary school and examines how teachers' subjectivities are worked on and how teachers' pedagogical selves are being disrupted and fundamentally recast as a consequence of local school management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competence as a measure of 'fitness to practice' and its evaluation through mechanisms of personal performance review, has led to the introduction of systems in a number of professions which link appraisal to the maintenance of professional registration (variously referred to as re-validation, re-certification, re-accreditation, etc.). This shift towards the requirement to actively maintain registration is becoming increasingly common in the teaching profession in many countries too. This paper presents an examination of the enactment of this global policy trend towards teacher re-accreditation at a national level. Here, we analyse the policy discourse and rhetoric around the introduction of professional re-accreditation of teachers in Scotland, where it is referred to as 'Professional Update', and track this through to the preparation of those carrying out interviews for re-accreditation in one of the three local authorities involved in piloting the initiative. In doing this we aim to show the ways in which policy serves to construct teacher subjectivities though processes of appraisal and how policy actors positions themselves and are positioned within these policy-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government introduced a national testing scheme, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), in which all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are required to participate, and a national website, MySchool, was established in 2010 to publish the results of all schools. This paper reports on the first national study of educators' views on the impact of NAPLAN on Australian schools and students. Over 8000 educators from all states and territories participated in the study, and the findings indicate that the testing regime is leading to a reduction in time spent on other curriculum areas and adjustment of pedagogical practice and curriculum content to mirror the tests. The findings suggest that the modification of teaching and curricular practices is in response to concerns regarding the use and reporting of NAPLAN data and the potential impact on schools. This confirms findings of researchers in other countries on the capacity of high-stakes regimes to distort teaching practices, constrain the curriculum and narrow students' educational experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores policy enactment processes in relation to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), particularly its emphasis upon ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. Specifically, as part of SDG4 in Laos, the research reveals how medium-of-instruction policy was enacted in relation to ethnic minorities, focusing upon three groups of policy actors in the Lao context – policymakers involved in developing education language policy; donor agencies that provided funds to support education reform in Laos, and; school teachers in an ethnic minority boarding school who were charged with enacting the policy. The findings, informed by relevant theorising about imagined communities and secrecy, including in the Lao context, revealed the central role of secrecy in this enactment process. The findings showed three types of secrecy at play which influenced policy actors' imaginations and enactments of ethnic minority education in response to SDG4 in Laos: secrecy to create the image of national unity; secrecy arising from fear of reprisal, and; secrecy to safely resist dominant policy discourses. The research has implications for how global policy reforms, such as SDG4, are actually made sense of in low-income country contexts where such reforms are enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The increasing role of private sector agencies in the provision of supply teachers across Britain's schools raises three inter-related issues that need to be addressed during the current process of re-assessing the medium and long-term viability of this policy option. First, there is a danger that educational concerns and equity of teaching provision across schools conflict with the private sector concern to maximize agency revenue. Secondly, the legal definition of the agency as 'employer' and supply teacher as 'self employed' leaves many unanswered questions regarding how the employment relationship is defined and managed in practice; ambiguities over whether the school or the agency bears the risk and the extent to which the supply teacher is free to bargain individual terms and conditions, raise problems regarding quality of supply teaching and equity of status of supply teachers compared to permanently employed teachers. Thirdly, increased use of the contract as a means of delivering teaching potentially conflicts with longstanding notions of what constitutes professional duties and obligations among teachers - factors that are difficult to write into a contract. This paper explores these issues drawing on 60 interviews with a mix of supply teachers, school teachers, and employees from two branches of a large teacher agency. It concludes that new models of providing temporary teaching cover are needed both to address problems of escalating costs and quality standards and to enshrine common notions of professionalism and equity of terms and conditions among all teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the latest in a short series on the origins, processes and effects of performativity in the public sector. Performativity, it is argued, is a ne,v mode of state regulation which makes it possible to govern in an 'advanced liberal' way. It requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation. The new performative worker is a promiscuous self, an enterprising self, with a passion for excellence. For some, this is an opportunity to make a success of themselves, for others it portends inner conflicts, inauthenticity and resistance. It is also suggested that performativity produces opacity rather than transparency as individuals and organizations take ever greater care in the construction and maintenance of fabrications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines a global, national and local perspective to study the effects if educational changes over the last 20 years on the relationship between head teachers, teachers and parents in France. Five kinds of transformations – decentralization, marketization, accountability, managerialism and professionalization – are examined in terms of their impact on definitions of the social and professional identities of educational agents and on the redistribution of power among them. The first section of the paper examines main shifts in policy and practice that these transformations were designed to produce from the perspective of policy-makers. The second section analyses the interaction between these global discourses and transformations of French educational models and realities at the level of the nation state. The third section shows how reform projects interact in very different ways with school realities in two contrasting local settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the emergence of teacher employment agencies and the increased volume of employment agency business in teaching. It examines the role of agencies in quasi-educational markets, and the relationship between agency teaching and understandings about teachers' work. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted at the University of Warwick, the author analyses documents and interviews with agency representatives from a range of agencies of differing size and complexity. Agencies are seen as part of a wider agenda that includes the marketization and privatization of schooling that begins to mirror what is already occurring within the FE sector. This includes emerging local markets for agencies and supply teachers, and agencies' relations with schools and unions are considered. Paradoxically, agency teachers are shown to underpin aspects of educational policy and practice in which they, and for the most part, the agencies who supply them, have, until recently, remained either implicit or invisible. By raising basic issues about whose interests are being served by agencies, the paper takes initial steps in reducing that invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early childhood education (ECE) sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of preschools. It is well documented that instruments of governance change teachers' priorities and practices. Changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing instrument. Empirical studies concerning governance in children's everyday lives have been rarer. Understanding the mechanisms of governance in the everyday lives of teachers and children requires theoretical tools which allow researchers to notice heterogeneous and situational elements that play a role in the act of governance. We explore governance in the contexts of ECE in two countries, Finland and Australia, with the help of ethnographic data and the concept of 'assemblage'. We propose an ontological foundation for governance research in ECE. We argue that taking socio-materiality as an ontological foundation of the research inquiry helps to see how the density of the socio-material elements of the situation may intensify the possibility of governing instruments interrupting meaningful interaction between children and adults. [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]

Scholars of the global phenomenon of international student assessments (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) have paid little attention to the ways in which student users of these material objects are configured in nations that are located at the periphery of knowledge production. Our analysis takes the United Arab Emirates as its case study to capture the social construction processes and relations of PISA and TIMSS users, agents and test objects within global educational accountability infrastructures. Drawing on evidence collected from interviews with principals, vice principals and teachers in nine schools as well as with government officials, we reveal how the state plays a role in the re/configuration of the user in this process. We also trace the discursive and emotional narratives that delineate usage and the institutional practices deployed to solidify user re/configurations. We argue that user configurations induce institutional reforms, cognitive remappings, and affective reactions which reflect adaptations being made by 'real' users to misconfigured material objects. We suggest that rather than blaming students for their poor performance on global tests, it is more appropriate to point to a failure in the material object's obdurate design and monocultural user configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies aimed at both reducing the costs associated with schooling (particularly through fee-free education) and decentralising responsibility for education delivery have become a central part of international education doctrine. This article draws on the 'politics of scale' literature to highlight how these education reforms are contested at different scales, in turn leading to uneven administrative and material outcomes. It examines education policy reforms in Papua New Guinea, which have - contra international trends - sidelined non-state actors and strengthened the state's role in managing education services. National fee-free education policy has been contested at different administrative scales. Church administrators have rallied (without much success) at national directives; subnational administrators and politicians have had greater success, rolling back some aspects of national policy; while local-level schools have employed their own tactics to resist national fee-free education policy. In turn, this case study highlights how fee-free educational policy shapes and is shaped by conflict at multiple administrative scales. The article's findings have implications for debates about the relationship between fee-free education and decentralisation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educationalists have been concerned with the labelling and treatment of children with mental health difficulties in the education system in England for some time. These concerns have centred on the role of policy in 'othering' such students as deviant learners. The unprecedented number of children suffering from mental illnesses, has forced policymakers to address children's mental health difficulties. This has involved the identification of a sub-set of the school population experiencing 'less-severe' mental health issues, to be addressed through a suite of policy interventions delivered by whole-school approaches, but targeted towards children situated as mentally 'weak'. Drawing upon a Foucauldian theory of governmentality that addresses children's behavioural motivations, an in-depth analysis of a number of educational policy initiatives related to mental health is conducted, that it is argued are fundamentally flawed. This analysis is followed by a discussion of the performative culture of High Stakes Testing in contributing to children's mental health difficulties. Here it is argued that a narrative of mental weakness serves to justify a neoliberal rationality towards the treatment of children for whom the performative logic assumed to motivate all learners, fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we seek to illuminate teachers’ constructions of US teacher evaluation policies through close analysis of the way teachers in one district describe these policies. We conducted a thematic discursive analysis of 60 teachers’ speeches, recorded during local school board meetings in a Tennessee school district. Using discursive psychology as a lens, analysis focuses on the teachers’ constructions of teacher accountability policies and their own positioning within the policies. We also attend to the linguistic resources teachers used in justifying their decision to speak during the meetings. Findings showed that while drawing upon repertoires of human capital and one-size-fits-all education, the teachers’ patterned participation involved the contestation of status quo practices of teacher evaluation and effectiveness by contrasting them with imagined possibilities of what evaluation could be instead. Implications for developing teacher evaluation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devolution of public sector schooling systems has been a feature of education reform since the 1980s. In Western Australia, the Independent Public School (IPS) initiative has recently been installed, announced by the state government in 2009. Now over 80% of the state’s public school students attend IP schools. Drawing on interview data from a broader study of devolution and the conditions of teachers’ work, this article explores the cases of two schools - one IPS and one non-IPS. While both schools were ostensibly disadvantaged, they proved to be highly contrasting schooling sites, responding to the school marketplace in markedly different ways. We consider the ways in which the IPS initiative is contributing to the operation of market dynamics within the public school sector in WA, and argue that it has created new mechanisms for the residualisation of particular, and specifically non-IP, schools. Furthermore, while one school was apparently more of a ‘winner’ within the school marketplace, as it was attracting increasing student enrolments, we query what it might actually mean to ‘win’ in such a policy settlement, with staff at both schools reporting significant dissatisfaction in their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how after 43 years of unsatisfactory outcomes, the Ministry of Education of Peru (MoE) suddenly ranked at the top of governmental performance tables. To do so, this study relies on implementation and major discussions of policy instrument theories to provide a comprehensive explanation of the reasons underlying the MoE’s improvements. Methodologically, this research employs the mixed research methods paradigm. It combines process-tracing and regression analysis. The analyses show that the MoE underwent three major events in its route to achieve policy success. First, the approval of a long-term policy plan (National Educative Plan to 2021); second, the contentious legitimisation of governmental policies against Peru’s teachers’ union and its eventual defeat; and, third, the recentralisation of historically dispersed control functions in the MoE. The results indicate that upon the occurrence of these reforms, MoE’s bureaucrats could gain teachers’ legitimacy and eventually achieve complementarity of policy tools. In fact, the multiple regression analysis suggests positive and significant interdependence between the set of tools employed by MoE officers: parents’ voluntary monetary contribution to schools (sermon), economic incentives to outperform schools (carrots) and trimestral oversight of schools’ performance (sticks). Results also show that MoE’s tools are positively associated with satisfactory student-learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]