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Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the way social partnerships tend to be represented as either horizontal localised networks or neo-liberal policy instruments. Building on two empirical studies of partnerships, we argue that partnerships cannot be understood in either/or ways but are negotiated at the interface between central agencies and local networks. They are mediated by networks operating through the partnership and through government and community, and by the different organisational logics of agencies. These complexities challenge our ways of analysing and representing partnerships, and justify further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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