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The Literacy Policy Project examines the trends in UK government policy interventions into literacy curriculum and pedagogies in schools in England. We undertake a policy scholarship methodology to read policy texts through a conceptual framework that frames policy interventions with functional, realist or socially critical purposes. We identify how successive UK governments have primarily adopted functional policies and research relating to literacy in schools in England. We argue that policy is dictated by, and serves, a growing marketplace for educational solutions, making the case that more prominence should be given to facilitating socially critical approaches to literacy policy.

Much research into structural reform in education has reported on the success or failure of individual projects. Less attention has been paid to how the discourses associated with reform are normalized in teachers' and head teachers' thinking, and realized in their actions. In this article, we engage with resistance at the interface of legal policy positioning and position-taking by educational professionals. Drawing on empirical data from an ethnographic study of structural change in a school in England, we deploy the metaphor of 'the Borg' to develop new insights into the different stances that educational professionals can take to avoid assimilation into a hive mind.

An education reform claimocracy is rule by assertion, and in this article we examine the claims made for the academisation and MATification of the provision of and access to school places in England. We examine the claimocracy at work in regard to the Conservative government white paper, "Opportunity for All. Strong Schools with Great Teachers for Your Child." We explain the knowledge production processes involved through deploying Arendtian scholarship regarding her work on "Lying in Politics," with specific attention to how concealment operates in the public realm.

Research and practice regarding politics within and for the educational management administration and leadership community are well established. The 50th anniversary issue of the journal educational management, administration and leadership is an opportunity to examine knowledge production where I have developed a new conceptual framework based on three approaches to ontology and epistemology in the social sciences. This framework presents positivist, interpretive and critical approaches to political relationality, and I deploy this conceptualisation in order to read and analyse field outputs. I present an account of each of these three approaches where I show the main authors, projects and knowledge claims that have raised awareness and established a conceptual and empirical database. I identify the resilience and dominance of positivist politics, but recognise the ongoing validity of interpretive and critical politics.

In 2008 Michael Fielding published an article 'Personalisation, Education and the Market' where he identified that New Labour (1997-2010) had adopted a neoliberal form of personalised education that generated both concerns and a new agenda for revitalising the public realm through personhood. In this article I present an appreciative reconsideration of Fielding's analysis where I argue that his ten concerns remain valid but need to be developed through an understanding of the resilience of eugenicist ideology. New Labour took office in 1997 where their policies were enacted in a segregated education system that was and still is structured according to embedded beliefs about bodies. By the time they left office in 2010 they had not only designed policy that accepted eugenicist assumptions but, as a result, they also emboldened eugenicists who built on legacy of 'needs', 'diversity', 'choice' and the vitality of the private based on who does and does not deserve an education.

Education reform under the modernisation agenda both in England and internationally has signified the restoration of the 'private' and the decline of 'public' education. Deploying Arendtian thinking on assimilation and identity, we argue that these ongoing reforms are indeed dark times for education professionals. We examine what 'new dark times' mean for those in leader roles in schools and organisations that are contracted to deliver, such as a multi-academy trust (MAT). Based on a year-long research project which focussed on a multi-academy trust in England, the article reports on the position and practice of the CEO, KT Edwards in these new dark times. We conclude that the emerging CEO position is being defined through individual positioning, a repudiation of the past and the assimilation into the private realm of non-education dark times.

Privatisation of public services education is a key feature of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), where policy convictions, ideas, and strategies are integral to the "spreading and mutating" of reforms. While there are important projects that seek to describe and explain major changes to restructuring, ownership and funding, what has not been given sufficient attention is the role of the private in privatisation. By private, we mean the decisions and choices regarding educational services of (a) individuals and families and (b) school providers, and how issues that have traditionally been in the public domain (e.g. through government systems, on the agendas of local community/municipal schools) are no longer there (e.g. government systems have been dismantled and replaced with new providers, and local community/municipal schools either no longer exist or provide "safety nets" for those who fail in the market). What we intend focusing on is "depoliticised privatism", where the role of the private in the supply and demand for school places illuminates a shift in the identification and addressing of educational matters from the politicised public to the depoliticised private domain. We report specifically on intellectual and empirical work regarding how supply and demand works in the provision of education services in Chile, particularly by looking at how those who own and work in schools view current reforms.

The research reported in this article contributes new understandings of systemic change by studying the form of system redesign known in England as "academisation." The data illuminate tensions within the neoliberal policy complex that are surfaced in a single secondary school. Although several studies have described academy conversions retrospectively, there has been little research that both analyses the complex month-by-month realities of decision-making and investigates the changing views of policy actors. Drawing on data from documents, observations and interviews, we argue for "academisation" to be understood, not as a policy or a complex of policies, but as system redesign. "Academisation" is not simply a legal process: a school can be "academised" without officially becoming an academy. The new knowledge from this research speaks to a global audience, because the political, economic and cultural processes on which it reports are under scrutiny in other systems with experiments in school autonomy as a form of publicly funded but "independent" schooling.

We examine the contemporary relationship between headship and leadership in England. This speaks to the current globalizing agenda promoting generic leadership within a modernizing agenda of restructuring and reculturing in public education. Thinking based on several research studies is used to stimulate perspectives on a range of complex tensions between: first, labeling and the realities of work; second, training/credentialing as a leader; third, public accountability and the professional ethic of distributed leadership; and, fourth, centralized reforms and the realities of context. We construct an argument that the labeling of Headteachers as managing directors, chief executives, and more recently as school leaders, combined with training and a requirement to implement reforms, is central to a form of modernization that is reworking professionality as generic and business orientated. This current phase of reform is revealed as a centralized remodeling drive toward de-regulating qualified teacher status as a credential for school leaders. An educative ethic is identified as a counter-weight value-system providing evidence of lost stories and testimony to the relationship between professionality, leadership as a pedagogic process, and learning.

Educational professionals are not ordinary everyday critics using experiential expertise to comment on practice. Instead, they are critical researchers who are concerned with debates about the purposes of education, social justice and equity, and how research is vital to understanding and explaining change. Using the reflexive views of six educational professionals interplayed with my own research career I examine what this means in reality, and I consider how and why such critical research is subject to criticism, but how doctoral studies not only confront this but also develop significant ways of thinking and doing as professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]