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This paper examines emerging discourses and practices of quality assurance in English Further Education (FE), a sector currently undergoing significant change. Using a broadly ethnographic approach and Foucauldian theories of power, we discuss how 'documentisation' contributes to governance techniques in a specific institutional context. Documentisation, the transformation of concrete practice into discourse, reverses a common-sense view of the role of policy documentation and exemplifies a wide range of practices in both FE and the wider post-16 sector and includes the gamification of quality systems. Our analysis of the conditions and practices out of which the phenomenon appears identifies processes that are shaping present-day experiences and redefining the discourse of quality itself. Moreover, rather than situating compliance and/or resistance in practice "per se," we argue that it is within the conditions of possibility expressed by such processes that the intertwining of compliance and resistance can best be appreciated.

This paper performs a critical examination of the Ofsted Education Inspection Framework (EIF), which was accompanied by an Inspection Handbook for Further Education and Skills, and argues that this policy document reinforces the neoliberal project in education. Drawing on concepts from Michel Foucault's analysis of the nature and effects of marketisation and surveillance in education, this analysis reveals how these mechanics influence the ultimate meaning of teaching and learning in Further Education (FE). I use Foucault's analytical tools, archaeology and genealogy to critique the Framework as a neoliberal form of disciplinary power, particularly the methods used to scrutinise pedagogical operations in FE colleges, and the particular types of knowledge considered beneficial vis-à-vis meeting the regulatory demands of the agency, as well as providing a means for understanding the discourses of standardisation and accountability. The Ofsted inspection paradigm, I argue, could be viewed as a specific technology of power pertaining to an economic rationality that seeks disciplined institutions that produce disciplined and responsible consumers for a cost-transaction society. My thesis is that the new EIF intensifies the significance of business-like standardisation that fails to adopt a relational perspective in terms of valuing education for the sake of cultivating intellectual participation.

This paper analyses how teacher identity is shaped by professional standardisation and regulatory apparatuses in the context of English Further Education from a specifically spatial perspective. We focus on how these apparatuses erode teachers' sense of identity and, paradoxically, quality by establishing what anthropologist Marc Augé (1935–2023) calls 'non-places'. Drawing on interview data and Augé's spatial anthropology, we discuss how places can define, foster and erode identity and, thus, practice. Our data shows how teachers' accounts of their changing spatial experiences reflects the transient nature of their own interpretations of how identities are shaped in these shifting contexts of 'dis/placement' wherein the process of identity construction frequently places individuals in contact with another side of themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]