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https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041221121477
European Educational Research Journal
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DOI: 10.1177/14749041221121477
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‘Most Likely You Go Your Way
(and I’ll Go Mine)’: School-level
enactment of an educational
innovation policy in Barcelona
Edgar Quilabert
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Mauro C Moschetti
University of Girona, Spain
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
Narratives on innovation in education are spreading fast and both national and local educational
administrations have been recently promoting innovation policies and programmes in many
different European contexts. Academic literature analysing the potential benefits of innovation
in education has expanded accordingly, with some international organizations increasingly
commissioning research aiming to study the impacts of educational innovation, especially on
learning outcomes. Interestingly, less attention has been given to analysing how these policies
and programmes are translated into different practices at the school level. Drawing on a policy
enactment framework, this paper aims to analyse the ways in which schools interpret top-down
policy text and prescription on innovation and enact innovation in education. To do so, we focus
on the case of Xarxes per al Canvi (XC), an educational innovation programme launched by the
educational administration of the city of Barcelona in 2017 that aims to create school networks
in order to stimulate knowledge sharing and innovation. Findings show how schools make sense
of the innovation policy diversely. Policy enactment outcomes appear to be context-sensitive,
with schools enacting its precepts in different ways, especially to serve their needs in increasingly
competitive local education markets.
Keywords
Education policy, innovation, enactment, educational change, Spain
Corresponding author:
Edgar Quilabert, Facultat de Ciències de l’Educació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Plaça del Coneixement,
Campus de la UAB, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Barcelona, 08193, Spain.
Email: edgar.quilabert@uab.cat
General submission
1121477EER0010.1177/14749041221121477European Educational Research JournalQuilabert and Moschetti
research-article2022
2 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
Introduction
An interest in innovation in education has experienced a surge in the last decade. Along with the
Innovation Imperative, a report commissioned by the OECD urging governments to allow new and
young firms to stimulate economic growth through experimentation (OECD, 2015b), narratives
advocating innovation in education have become increasingly popular among various international
players promoting different agendas – for example, sustainable development, economic competi-
tiveness, children’s rights, etc. – (see, for instance, Farrell and Hartwell, 2008; Hawkins et al.,
2020; Schleicher, 2015; UNICEF, 2017; World Economic Forum, 2020). In many different
European contexts, both national and local education authorities have been recently promoting
innovation programmes and initiatives (European Commission, 2018a). Academic literature ana-
lysing the potential benefits of innovation in education has increased accordingly, with the OECD
and the European Commission playing a central role in commissioning more and more research
aimed at studying the impact of innovation in education – often with a focus on measuring learning
outcomes (e.g. European Commission, 2014, 2018b; Peterson et al., 2018; Vieluf et al., 2012;
Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019).
Most of the programmes and initiatives implemented in OECD countries have tended to focus
on a particular aspect of curriculum, such as, for instance – and most frequently in recent times – ,
incorporating ICT into curricula and teaching and learning practice. Examples for this are the Open
Discovery Space initiative at the European level (Sotiriou et al., 2016), or the various efforts to
introduce computational thinking and computer science in K-12 education across OECD countries
(Heintz et al., 2016). However, some other programmes and initiatives have adopted a more gen-
eral approach to promoting innovation in schools. In such cases, innovation is expected to happen
at the school and classroom level – and especially in relation to teaching practices – , typically as
a result of a combination of school autonomy and school networking (Díaz-Gibson et al., 2019;
Martínez-Celorrio, 2020). An example of this kind of initiative can be found in the Innovative
Learning Environments programme developed by the OECD (2015a).
Interestingly, in these cases, little attention has been directed towards analysing the way in
which these programmes and initiatives are ultimately translated into different practices at the
school level. This may have to do with the fact that the reasons and narratives underpinning these
programmes frequently revolve around too general statements, such as the need for constant inno-
vation to ‘improve education’ and adapt to ‘new times’ (Baruah and Paulus, 2019; Cachia et al.,
2010), or that innovation in education is essential in the context of current societies and economies,
as these increasingly require individuals to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ (Fındıkoğlu and İlhan,
2016). As we will show, given the apparent polysemic and vague usage of the concept of innova-
tion in the context of these programmes, a practical perspective that focuses on how innovation is
ultimately produced at the school level becomes particularly necessary.
Drawing on a policy enactment framework (Ball et al., 2012; Braun et al., 2010, 2011), this
paper aims to contribute to analysing the ways in which schools interpret top-down policy text and
prescription relating to innovation and actually enact innovation in educational settings. To do so,
we focus on the case of Xarxes per al Canvi (‘Networks for Change’, hereafter XC), an educational
innovation programme, launched by the educational authorities of the city of Barcelona (Spain) in
2017, with the aim of creating school networks in order to stimulate knowledge sharing and, ulti-
mately, innovation. The programme has been under the spotlight since it was originally conceived
by a network of local think-tanks and philanthropic organizations – known as the Escola Nova 21
programme (EN21) – advocating for the need for innovation in an education system they perceived
Quilabert and Moschetti 3
as ‘outdated’.1 Before being absorbed and expanded first by the city’s educational authorities in
2017 and later by the Department of Education of Catalonia in 2020, 2 the EN21 programme was
originally small in scale, but soon managed to enrol more than 400 schools. Such a rapid expansion
gained media attention and the educational authorities felt the pressure to respond to the ‘wave of
innovation’ (Baena et al., 2022) by incorporating the programme to the official education policy.
Currently, XC targets every public school in the city and certain schools within the publicly subsi-
dized private sub-sector – although participation is not compulsory.
The paper is structured as follows. In the following two sections, we present our conceptual
positioning, briefly considering the relevant actors and discourses relating to innovation and inno-
vation policies over the last few decades and highlight the literature on education policy adoption,
paying particular attention to policy enactment/policy response dynamics (Braun et al., 2010; Ward
et al., 2016). Next, we discuss the methodology that we used in the collection and analysis of data,
followed by a presentation of the context of the case, and displaying the main characteristics of the
innovation programme – that is, XC. The findings are structured in three subsections: We first
present how school actors are expected to behave in relation to the policy – that is, as policy sub-
jects. We then present how these actors, teachers and principals, actually behave in schools in rela-
tion to innovation – that is, as policy actors. Finally, we discuss the school agents’ initial expectations
regarding the programme, and how they provide relevant, context-specific purposes for translating
and enacting the programme premises. In the discussion section, we revisit the enactment frame-
work and put forward the evidence found in relation to it; we finally discuss certain unintended
functionalities regarding the programme in the context of increasingly competitive local education
markets.
Is innovation a trend?
Innovation is not a new concept in the field of education. Despite extensive research in this field at
the end of the last century, we have witnessed a growing interest in innovation over the last decade.
This is not an isolated fact only relevant to the field of education; in the field of economic develop-
ment, it has been increasingly claimed that innovation is a key driver of economic growth, often
considered a silver bullet to overcome the current persistent economic stagnation (Vinsel and
Russel, 2020). With the project Innovation Strategy, for instance, the OECD stated the Innovation
Imperative to encourage research into innovation and an evaluation of its performance, especially
in the public sector (OECD, 2015b). Meanwhile, the European Union has encouraged innovation
to respond to social challenges and to remain competitive (Hodgson, 2012; Ord, 2022; Villalba,
2008).
In the field of education, innovation has been affirmed as the tool through which education
systems will adapt to ‘new times’ (Baruah and Paulus, 2019; Cachia et al., 2010). Similarly, Looney
(2009) identifies at least four trends behind the drive for innovation in education: ‘social and eco-
nomic pressures to raise achievement levels and to ensure greater equity of outcomes for all stu-
dents; changes in work, social and family life; rapidly advancing technologies; and the need to
motivate and engage students’ (p. 6). In this regard, innovation is seen not only as an opportunity,
but as a necessity (Ferrari et al., 2009). Interestingly, innovation has become equalled to – and has
even replaced – terms such as ‘improvement’, ‘reform’ or ‘change’, which where prevalent until
the early 2000s (Morley and Rassool, 1999; Reynolds and Teddlie, 2002). Prescriptive, practi-
tioner-targetted literatures dealing with educational change, have unquestionably embraced the
innovation discourse, and have produced innumerable variations of the same ‘action guidelines’ or
‘step-by-step models’ for educational innovation (see, e.g. Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; Lick
et al., 2014; Rikkerink et al., 2016; Serdyukov, 2017).
4 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
It seems clear that the term innovation, vaguely equated to ‘change’ and ‘improvement’, may
serve numerous, not necessarily convergent education reform agendas operating at different edu-
cational levels. In this regard, innovation may, for instance, refer to changes in the organization or
governance of educational systems (Looney, 2009) – and international organizations such as the
World Bank and the OECD have certainly used an innovation framing to promote the adoption of
decentralization reforms (Di Gropello, 2004), private-public partnerships (Verger and Moschetti,
2017; Patrinos et al., 2009) and different forms of post-bureaucratic accountability regimes
(Greany, 2018; Maroy, 2012; Ozga et al., 2011). Nevertheless, innovation has been increasingly
associated with ‘new or significantly improved approaches to classroom-based teaching, learning
and assessment’, that is, at the school level (Looney, 2009, p. 6). As Baena et al. (2022) define it,
educational innovation refers here to ‘a series of interventions, decisions, and processes, with a
certain degree of intentionality and systematisation, that seeks to modify the attitudes, ideas,
knowledge, content and, above all, pedagogical practices in schools’ (p. 4). Overall, however,
research and innovation enthusiasts have tended to associate educational innovation with a small
set of relatively stable, yet general features which include student-centred teaching, competence-
based instructional practices and cross-curricular learning (Ellis and Bond, 2016; Paniagua and
Istance, 2018; Serdyukov, 2017), as opposed to teaching practices otherwise regarded as tradi-
tional, teacher-centred and subject-based (cf. Mascolo, 2009; Young, 2010).
Along this conception of educational innovation – and frequently along other labels and catch-
phrases such as ‘learning for the 21st century’, ‘personalized teaching’, ‘collaborative learning’ or
‘education for the knowledge economy’ – , innovation has penetrated educational reform agendas
worldwide. Within this global scene, and arguably replacing the ‘learner-centred education’ theme
popular among donor agencies between the 1980s and the 2000s (Schweisfurth, 2011), there is a
growing interest in educational innovation among international organizations such as UNESCO3
(e.g. Farrell and Hartwell, 2008), the OECD (e.g. OECD, 2017) and the World Bank4 (e.g. Hawkins
et al., 2020), which have become key players in defining and advocating for educational
innovation.
Undoubtedly, however, among international organizations, the OECD has been one of, if not the
most active actor in promoting educational innovation, especially by means of mobilizing knowl-
edge based on data from PISA and TALIS, although not exclusively (e.g. Foray and Raffo, 2012;
Kärkkäinen, 2012; Vieluf et al., 2012). In fact, the OECD has a research centre dedicated to the
study of educational innovation – that is, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation
(CERI) – and has taken measures to identify and assess innovative practices in education interna-
tionally by means of the project Measuring Innovation in Education (OECD, 2014, 2021; Vincent-
Lancrin et al., 2019).
Another crucial project by the OECD is the Innovative Learning Environments (OECD, 2015a),
which developed a framework for innovation with seven ‘learning principles’ and three ‘dimen-
sions of innovative organizations’ in the search of raising performance and improving equity in
education systems. The project focused on analysing and developing actionable resources regard-
ing how students learn and under what conditions they can learn better. Also, the project studied
innovative ways of organization at the micro (i.e. schools) and meso level (i.e. networks of schools).
As stated in its website,5 the ultimate goal of the project was to engage ‘with the community of
policy reformers, innovators and learning scientists to discuss how to make better use of these find-
ings to make OECD education systems learning driven’. It should be noted, however, that despite
the OECD’s enthusiasm around the allegedly positive effects of creating innovative learning envi-
ronments, some have pointed out that the relationship might not be so straightforward. As
Schrittesser et al. (2014) contend:
Quilabert and Moschetti 5
although they [the schools studied] have attempted to install learning environments which could be classed
as innovative according to the OECD criteria, these innovations have had no clear impact on how learning
takes place, since subjectively meaningful learning processes are not encouraged, and traditional patterns
of learning continue to dominate in the lessons (p. 152).
The examples above show the growing interest in innovation across contexts and, especially, the
key role that some international organizations are playing in the diffusion of it. Whether this can be
characterized as a trend or not, there are clear signs of convergence around the growing sense of
necessity to innovate within educational systems worldwide, at least at the discursive level.
Educational innovation policy enactment and contexts
Innovation is not only difficult to track and evaluate, but its advancement across an educational
system by means of policies, is particularly challenging. Many have claimed that innovation is
rarely implemented as designed in top-down approaches, since it is embedded in the complex and
unpredictable environment of the school (Spillane, 1999; Waks, 2007). While this can be said of
most educational policies, it becomes especially true when it comes to policies aiming to change
school- and classroom-level practices. In these cases, the classical ‘de-coupling’ argument seems
to offer a relevant depiction of why schools may end up ‘strategically adopting symbolic changes
[. . .] without internalizing relevant changes into day-to-day practices’ (Pagès, 2021: 539).
De-coupling may thus be the result of conflicting and contradictory demands and coercive pres-
sures, the different actors’ subjective beliefs regarding the efficacy of certain policy paradigms and,
more broadly, school actors’ agentic dispositions and constraints (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017;
Coburn, 2005).
This is closely related to Ball’s (1993) famously known conception of ‘policy as text’ and ‘pol-
icy as discourse’. On the one hand, policies themselves, that is, the texts, ‘are not necessarily clear
or closed or complete’ and also ‘shift and change their meaning in the arenas of politics’ (Ball,
1993: 11), which provides space for action and response. Ball highlights that it is impossible to
anticipate how actors will interpret the texts, regardless of their normative weight, since actors are
embedded in specific contexts and ‘solutions to the problems posed by policy texts will be local-
ized and should be expected to display ad hocery and messiness’ (Ball, 1993: 12). On the other
hand, policies can also be thought of as discourses and ‘are about what can be said, and thought,
but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. [. . .] Thus, certain possibili-
ties for thought are constructed’ (Ball, 1993: 14). From Ball’s perspective, there are actual conflicts
in the enactment of policies ‘but these are set within a moving discursive frame which articulates
and constrains the possibilities and probabilities of interpretation and enactment’ (Ball, 1993: 15).
In a later work, Braun et al. (2010, 2011) and Ball et al. (2012) explore this distinction between
text and discourse further and demonstrate how the implementation of policies has tended to be
analysed lineally and from a decontextualized point of view, through a rational and non-conflicting
view of the phenomena. Thus, the authors consider that school agents ‘recontextualize’ policies
(Braun et al., 2011: 586), that is, they distinguish between them according to personal and profes-
sional perspectives, and in relation to their historical, socio-political and institutional context, that
is, ‘contexts of policy work’ (Ball et al., 2012: 19). They also characterize them into two distinct
areas: interpretation, ‘an engagement with the languages of policy’ (p. 45) and translation, ‘a sort
of third space between policy and practice. [. . .] an iterative process of making institutional texts
and putting those texts into action’ (p. 45). These are not lineal moments, rather they are considered
as a feedback process, in which school agents literally enact policies; there is a process of (re)crea-
tion of the policy and an individual enactment of it. In this vein, while teachers and principals can
6 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
be seen as mere ‘policy subjects’, they are also, and most importantly, ‘policy actors’ (Ball et al.,
2012).
Ultimately, this approach signals the idea that ‘policies are “contested”, mediated, and dif-
ferentially represented by different actors in different contexts [. . .], and at the same time
produced and formed by taken-for-granted and implicit knowledges and assumptions about the
world and ourselves’ (Ball, 2015: 6). Arguably so, most policies are somehow inevitably – to a
greater or lesser extent – de-coupled when it comes to implementation – and therefore the
street-level practice represents a key sphere when it comes to unpacking the uneven and con-
tingent reception and meaning-making of policy ideas (Heimans, 2012). One of the challenges
of policy research is precisely to explore and contextually explain such ‘deviations’ (Spillane
et al., 2002).
In this regard, numerous studies have aimed to unpack and explain the complexity of policy
enactment processes at schools (e.g. Dieudé and Prøitz, 2022; McCloat and Caraher, 2020; Singh
et al., 2013), especially in relation to New Public Management (NPM) and marketization reforms
in education and their impacts in schools (e.g. Gurova and Camphuijsen, 2020; Harris et al., 2020;
Lundström, 2015). Accordingly, although there is limited research on the enactment of such poli-
cies, top-down policies aimed at producing educational innovation should be understood as pre-
scriptions that penetrate schools and that ‘inevitably convey normative messages on what good
education is and why a different practice would be better’ so that these policies ‘not only contain a
normative and even moral message, but also a (micro)political one, since they aim at steering
(changing) practice’ (Vermeir et al., 2017: 117).
Nonetheless, policies differ according to whether what they prescribe is ‘mandated, strongly
recommended or suggested’ (Braun et al., 2011: 586), and so while there may be statutory man-
dates such as those governing teacher hiring requirements and procedures, there are also less bind-
ing policies such as those dealing with teaching practices or even curriculum changes. Indeed, this
has important implications when analysing the dynamics of education policy enactment. While
enactment cannot be seen as a taken for granted process – not even in the most prescriptive cases
– policy enactment repertoires – for example, resistance, negotiation, transformation – are cru-
cially shaped by the nature of the policy itself in this regard. With innovation, although it has
become an imperative for school systems in many different national and subnational settings, poli-
cies and programmes aimed at making schools more innovative are most frequently understood as
recommendations. Moreover, as noted by many authors, educational policies attempting to advance
‘student-centred’, ‘competence-based’ and ‘personalized learning’ teaching practices lack specific-
ity and clarity in their aim to steer instructional practices (Bremner, 2021; Clément, 2021; Pykett,
2009). This can lead to cases of ‘policy dissipation’ (Maguire et al., 2013), since ambiguous or
weakly-unified policies allow for more interpretative work by school actors and thus highly con-
textual ‘pre-existing knowledge and practices’ (Coburn, 2005: 477) play a key role. This poses
serious challenges when analysing the enactment of school innovation policies because, on the one
hand, there is no benchmark from which to evaluate a deviation – that is, there is no ideal student-
centred, competence-based practice, nor there is an ideal cross-curricular approach to learning – ,
and on the other hand, school actors may engage with the policy very differently, ranging from
tight to loose coupling or even refusal (Ball and Olmedo, 2013; Maguire et al., 2013; Spillane and
Burch, 2003).
As suggested previously, academic work around educational innovation has often been focused
on building, positing and evaluating ‘how-to-innovate’ models transposed from the management
studies field (e.g. Mintzberg, 1979; Senge, 1990). Such approaches have led to an overall prescrip-
tive view of the phenomena in which analyses tend to focus on the evaluation of the continuity or
deviation of innovation processes vis-à-vis a series of assumedly techno-rationally defined steps
Quilabert and Moschetti 7
and standards (see, e.g. Fullan, 1989; González and Escudero, 1987; Stoll and Fink, 1996). In ana-
lysing how schools contextually interpret top-down innovation policy text and enact innovation at
the school level, we expect to follow the seminal work of scholars who have engaged critically
with innovation processes, arguing that an ‘unconnected analysis of the generation, adoption,
implementation and evaluation of educational innovations, with little understanding of political,
social, and economic connections among them and with the socioeconomic system as a whole’
may produce misleading insights (Papagiannis et al., 1982: 276).
Data and methods
As presented above, the main objective of the study is to examine the incidence of the XC pro-
gramme in the organization of participant schools and teachers’ practices. We followed a qualita-
tive approach in order to capture the singularity and attributes of the case, addressing complexity
and rejecting the lineal causal explanations regarding agentic activity (Patton, 2014). The data
collection methods drew from ethnographic techniques and document analysis. We conducted 17
in-depth interviews and school-level observations between March and May 2019. Two interviews
were conducted with members of the steering committee (SC) – in charge of creating the concep-
tual framework for network-building, as further described below – , two interviews with pro-
gramme officers (PO) – the professionals in charge of facilitating network-building – and 13
interviews with school actors, including three headteachers and 10 teachers. School-level observa-
tions included attending five programme meetings and conducting seven classroom non-partici-
pant observations. The fieldwork was paired with document analysis carried out using official,
published documents relating to the programme (i.e. press releases, official presentations).
Specifically, a total of nine documents were analysed, both in video and text – that is, Consorci
d’Educació de Barcelona (CEB, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e, 2020f), Escola d’Administració
Pública de Catalunya (EAPC, 2020), Xarxes per al Canvi (XC, 2017a, 2017b). In the data analysis
stage, we followed an iterative process of flexible coding (Deterding and Waters, 2021) in which
we combined predefined, broad codes derived from our analytical framework on enactment and
innovation processes with codes emerging from the data. Both set of codes were confronted and
refined in the search of consistency. The process of flexible coding was applied to both the inter-
views and the documents. We did so from a discourse analysis perspective (Rapley, 2011), inas-
much as our aim was to understand how enactment comes to be in a contextualized manner, which
unfailingly needs, first, to uncover and (re)build the theory of change of the policy in question
(Pawson, 2006) – thus tracking the document production and interrogating those who generated
them – and, second, to understand the meanings that school actors create in relation to the expecta-
tions that are posited to them and to unpack their reasons and motivations of action (Small and
Cook, 2021).
In selecting the schools, a purposeful sampling exercise was carried out to choose schools that
could provide relevant information to answer the research questions (Bryman, 2016). We defined
sociodemographic criteria – that is, family income, level of studies, immigrant student rate – in
order to select one of the 22 networks of schools participating in the programme, paying attention
to heterogeneity to avoid extreme cases. The selected network is formed by nine schools, five of
which are public and four are publicly subsidized private. The schools in this network are located
in a middle-class area but have a heterogeneous student composition since the catchment area cor-
responds to a district characterized by its diversity in terms of SES, with middle-low rates of immi-
grant population, and an educational background similar to that of the city’s average. From this
network, we randomly selected two public schools (one primary and one secondary), and two
8 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
publicly subsidized private schools (one primary and one secondary) for the in-depth interviews
and observation fieldwork.
The context and formation of XC
Spain’s education system is highly decentralized, and every region (i.e. autonomous community)
has competences in education. In 2013, the Spanish government passed an education law that
advocated school autonomy, principals’ professionalization, and the introduction of external stand-
ardized tests (Parcerisa, 2016). Nevertheless, the autonomous community of Catalonia was a pio-
neer in the introduction of these measures (Verger et al., 2020). The Catalan Education Law (LEC)
passed in 2009 had already introduced certain core elements of the NPM paradigm, paying special
attention to school autonomy (for an in-depth perspective, see Verger and Curran, 2014).
Subsequently, immersed in an economic crisis, the Catalan government applied the LEC selec-
tively, fostering managerial autonomy and school choice policies, in a process that Bonal and
Verger (2017) have characterized as a ‘conservative modernization’, following Dale (1989) and
Apple (2013). After a turbulent period marked by resistance to cuts in public expenditure in educa-
tion, the Catalan education arena has been characterized by a growing relevance given to innova-
tion over the last 5 years (Verger et al, 2022 forthcoming). Still, narratives around innovation have
been in evidence in the Catalan context since the beginning of the 20th century and constitute, to a
certain extent, a leit motiv of the education sector debate (Besalú, 2019).
XC is an educational innovation programme, launched by the education department of the city
of Barcelona in 2017, and aimed at creating school networks in order to stimulate innovation and
knowledge sharing. As mentioned, the XC programme is based both theoretically and methodo-
logically on Escola Nova 21 (EN21), an earlier programme that caught the attention of the media
and was conceived by an alliance of think-tanks, philanthropic organizations, and a public-private
partnership university (Escola Nova 21, 2016) – that is, UNESCOcat,6 EduCaixa,7 Fundació Jaume
Bofill and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The intention of EN21 was to raise awareness of the
need for change and to develop autonomy within change processes in schools (Vallory, 2019) by
means of a five-step model based on Kotter’s (2012) famously known framework for organiza-
tional change. EN21 ran from 2016 to 2019 and targetted more than 400 schools within the autono-
mous community of Catalonia (Martí and Tarrasón, 2020), until the Catalan Department of
Education took the decision to implement it as a public policy in 2020. Currently, XC concerns the
city of Barcelona and targets every public school and a portion of the publicly-subsidized private
sector. XC has been formed by two public organizations – the Consortium of Education of the City
of Barcelona and the Educational Science Institute of the Autonomous University of Barcelona –
and two NGOs – the Rosa Sensat Teachers’ Association and EN21 (Xarxes per al Canvi, 2017b).
The policy of XC
XC has designed and implemented a technical-administrative structure, integrated by state and
non-state professionals, with the aim of advancing the innovative practices at the school level. This
structure is pyramidally organized and consists of three levels, each with a specific function: a
steering committee (SC), which comprises programme leaders from both a political and technical
background, who built the conceptual basis for the programme and decide upon the implementa-
tion strategy; programme officers (PO), in charge of chairing the network meetings; and leading
teams (LT) made up of school staff who voluntarily join these teams at each school and are in
charge of fostering innovative practices within the school. In practical terms, the programme aims
at generating ‘spaces for contact’ or ‘spaces of dialogue’ (SC 1A; PO 2A) where POs and the LTs
Quilabert and Moschetti 9
of each school within a network can meet and share knowledge and practices, in relation to innova-
tive approaches to teaching and learning (EAPC, 2020).
From the point of view of the SC, the programme aims to generate cooperative networks of
schools and boost innovation processes within the participating schools (SC 1A; SC 1B). As
described in documents and interviews, the programme is a relevant component of the education
strategy of the city’s educational authorities and is expected to function as a ‘reflexive tool’, capa-
ble of emphasizing – and spreading the idea of – the need for change and updating (CEB, 2020d).
This is evidenced as well in how a designer explains that ‘[the programme] is a way to shake up the
system’ [PO 2B].
We have identified two elements regarding the conceptual and methodological design of XC
that are relevant at this point: the ‘inspirational’ role of international organizations, and the pre-
scribed ‘how-to’ innovation model the programme is based on. Conceptually, as explained by one
of the interviewees (SC 1A), the programme originates primarily from two documents published
by UNESCO and the OECD – Rethinking Education (UNESCO, 2015) and The Nature of Learning
(Dumont et al., 2010) – as was the case with the EN21programme (Vallory, 2019). From a meth-
odological perspective, a member of the SC argued that innovation, as conceptualized in the con-
text of the programme, is understood as the result of a structured process:
One of the keys to the change process is knowing that change has certain dynamics that you must pursue,
and this enables you to be able to carry them forward, which is not doing things just to be doing, but doing
things in a structured way [SC 1B].
The supposedly structured nature of innovation processes as described by the SC is frequently
legitimized by references to the work of John Kotter. Two elements are worth mentioning at this
point that are relevant for our analysis. The first has to do with what appears to be an automatic
transposition of innovation narratives between different fields of practice. Kotter (2012) developed
a popular framework for innovation – ‘8-Step Process for Leading Change’ – , essentially known
for its impact in the field of business management, particularly in relation to leadership and mar-
keting. The way in which the SC members bridge the difference between the field of management
and education is roughly elaborated and the transposition of Kotter’s framework to schools is justi-
fied on the basis of its clarity. As stated by an SC member: ‘[Kotter] refers to all the organizations
in the world, he does not focus on educational institutions. . . but it is very clear anyway’ [SC 1B].
Second, and most important, regardless of its arguable unsuitability for education, Kotter’s
appraisal on innovation is perfectly functional to the XC programme in the sense that a structured,
step-by-step way of understanding innovation appears as capable of reconciling – at least in theory
– two apparently contradictory ideas that appear in most interviews and documents containing the
implicit theory of change of the programme: that innovation is closely tied to practice and neces-
sarily context-sensitive – that is, autonomous and spontaneous – , and yet that innovation can be
directed towards certain objectives, multiplied and ultimately, institutionalized – that is, controlled.
In the following sections we examine the extent to which this tension plays out at schools, espe-
cially in the way POs and LTs interact to produce innovation.
The programme in practice
Having displayed the main characteristics of both the context and the inception and design of XC,
we now present our main findings. These include, first, the tensions within the transmission chain
of POs-LTs, stressing the contradiction between the supposed guidance provided by the POs and
the responsibility imposed on LTs in schools when it comes to develop innovative practices.
10 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
Second, we pay attention to school staff and their enactment of XC, pointing out what we describe
as ‘blocking’ and ‘driving’ dynamics regarding innovation. Finally, we explore the school actors’
initial expectations regarding the programme and some unexpected translations and uses of XC
resulting from the schools’ contextual needs and constraints.
Advancing innovation: Teachers and principals as policy subjects
The innovation process promoted by XC aims at establishing a contact between two agents, one
external to the school – the PO – and one internal – the LT (EAPC, 2020). Given the premise that
innovation should occur at the school level and tied to practice, the responsibility for change rests
with the LT, as the following quote illustrates:
The leadership of change [. . .] must be formed by a team that is only in charge of leading. . . thinking
about the educational change of the school [. . .], this team is focused only on this. This team is formed by
volunteers, it is not ‘you, you and you’, but someone who has heart and wants to command using this
leadership, effecting all this change [. . .] [those who form the leading team] are the ones who have to
make decisions about the change process [. . .], the idea is that the impact depends on the leading team
itself [SC 1B].
However, if policies are understood as the formalization of a power relation, no matter how
weak this relation might be, there should always be an asymmetry that in this case would play out
between schools as account givers, and POs and the SC as account holders. Yet, in this case, the
account-holder position as embodied by the POs is presented as ‘a facilitator of dynamics, of shar-
ing knowledge, not providing solutions, but giving explanations about what is right and what is
not’ [SC 1B]. As understood by POs themselves their role in the innovation process is relegated to
a secondary position in charge of just advocating for innovation. In the words of a PO:
I would say that our job is to create a context for something to happen at the level of thought, at the level
of commitment [. . .]. Our role is to create the context for people to change and relate [PO 2A].
Thus, the proposal of XC to steer the innovation process in each school is to generate, in their
terms, a ‘space of metacognition’ (EAPC, 2020), that is, the ‘network meeting’, and to make this
available to schools (CEB, 2020e). However, neither the programme’s SC, nor the POs are expected
to be present in schools, but rather steering at a distance a process that should occur somehow
spontaneously and driven by its supposedly inherent and unanimous desirability. The objective of
the meeting space is that ‘[the schools] participate in networks [. . .], that they join and discuss
processes with other schools in their network, discuss literature on innovation, etc., and from there
on they go back to their schools and decide what to do’ [SC 1B]. Therefore, the role of the pro-
gramme officers might be thought of as one that starts and ends in these meetings, which means
that neither them nor the steering committee are responsible for the educational change that takes
place within the participating schools.
The pillar on which the programme is based is encapsulated in the role of the POs in network
meetings, the aim of which is to promote the process of change within schools. The POs are in
charge of disseminating knowledge to assist with innovation, without prescribing solutions or
strategies for doing so, as each school is responsible for its own process of change (EAPC, 2020;
PO 2A; PO 2B). At this point, one can observe the contradiction mentioned above between school-
based spontaneity and controllability regarding innovation. In this regard, the role of the POs
becomes ambiguous and powerless, since they must promote innovation in schools, without par-
ticipating in – nor being perceived as responsible for – this process. Teachers and principals become
Quilabert and Moschetti 11
thus sui generis policy subjects inasmuch as they are only loosely subjected to the programme’s
administrative oversight and receive little to no guidance.
Driving and blocking innovation: Teachers and principals as policy actors
According to schools, the main difficulties that they have faced when participating in XC have
been the creation of the LTs and the process of transmitting information related to the programme
from school leaders and the LT to the rest of the teaching staff (HT 3A; LT4C; LT 4F). In relation
to the composition of LTs, two of the schools had created their LTs in their second year participat-
ing in the programme. The other two schools had done so from the beginning. The creation of these
teams was not, in any case, voluntary, as originally stated by XC (HT 3C; HT 3B). In this regard,
a headteacher argued that the staff turnover was the main obstacle to volunteering:
Precisely because of the instability of the teaching staff—because retirements have resulted in substitute
or temporary teachers—we tried to structure the leading team to guarantee that the person who attended in
the first year would also be available the following year [HT 3B].
On the other hand, another principal considered the dissemination of activities related to the
programme within his school to be a ‘pending task’, as follows:
How to proceed more formally is a pending subject. How to formalize information sharing when not in the
teachers’ room, [. . .]; how we regularize and formalize. . . that is the pending task [HT 3A].
This aspect was also observed in the network meetings, where teachers and principals demanded
monitoring and support to be able to transfer the processes decided upon in meetings within their
schools. As no formal channels were established, one teacher claimed that, instead, ‘all we have is
grapevine information’ [NO-LT 4C]. At this point, one school, aware of these limitations, decided
to alternate the people attending the meetings, removing one member from the LT, and replacing
that person with a new member for each session (LT 4F). Arguably, despite all teaching staff is
expected to be an active part of the programme, there is widespread disinformation among the
teachers who do not participate directly in LTs (NO-LT 5A; NO-LT 5D). Thus, even though they
were usually aware that the school participated in XC, they did not have a specific understanding
of the programme, they were unsure as to which members of staff were participating in the pro-
gramme, and they frequently associated their participation with fulfilling bureaucratic require-
ments, as this quote exemplifies:
Q: Do you know what the programme is about?
A: No. . . maybe if you give me a clue I might say ‘oh, yes, this sounds familiar. . . they’ve
explained it to me’, but right now, consciously, if I had to tell you. . . I don’t know. There are
many things happening in our school, and I do not know if they come from this programme or
not, requirements we have to fulfil, which may have come from this programme you mention or
from something else. . . I don’t know if it involves more staff. . . [NO-LT 4A].
The unawareness regarding the programme can be related to a school environment with con-
stant inputs from many different programmes – focussing not only on innovation – which might
cause a ‘noisy atmosphere’.
In addition to the difficulties in establishing LTs and in transmitting information to the entire
teaching staff, it is important to highlight the role that the contextual factors play in each school
12 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
– most of which often go unnoticed. The school culture and leadership style shape how innovation
processes occur in schools, and can either drive them forward or block them, for example, by means
of superficial or merely formal engagement. For instance, the school culture as a mediating force is
evidenced by a headteacher who argues that the ‘reflection and self-evaluation’ demands posed by
POs were already there, in a school she considers ‘very reflective, very self-critical, very self-
demanding’ and thus ‘naturally innovative’ [HT 3B]. In another school, however, for some teachers
who were used to horizontal and non-hierarchical work relationships, the leadership team’s demands
for innovation had become ‘an imposition, a claim, a request to do X hours of innovative projects’
[NO-LT 5A]. As the same teacher ironizes, ‘nobody has done this [innovative projects] because they
wanted to and, most importantly, I wouldn’t say we are actually doing innovative stuff but. . . we
are an ‘innovative school’ [NO-LT 5A]’. Here, as compared with the first quote, the new principal’s
leadership style appears more like a blocking force that leads to superficial commitment rather than
profound changes.
Following the influence of (material) contextual conditions in the innovation process, as men-
tioned, the most prominent is staff turnover and the lack of funding to support innovation. Especially
in public schools, interviewees claimed they struggle with these issues, to the point that they would
prioritize the stability of the staff over any other ‘change’ that is requested:
What I would like is not so much a change, or an innovation, but rather that public schools could create
stable teams [. . .]; the system does not adapt to work on innovation because there is a lot of staff turnover.
During my three years here, out of thirty teachers, ten or twelve have left each year [NO-LT 5A].
Another teacher considers that ‘it is necessary to have permanent staff for a change to occur, but
there is no continuity, no cohesion’ [NO-LT 5B]. Yet another teacher points out to the same
problem:
The first year you are expected to acclimatize: ‘How do you do this here?’ So, if you are lucky, and you
are still here the following year, you then say: ‘Now I pick up the rhythm’. If you are not lucky, you go to
another school and start the process again. So, yes, this gives you experience, but not security, nor
continuity [NO-LT 5C].
The school culture, the leadership style, the instability of the teaching staff, the absence of spe-
cific funding and the lack of allocation of responsibilities render the programme a constant source
of tension between participating schools and the cross-cutting nature of the innovative process, as
stipulated by XC’s design.
Creating contextual meaning and purpose for enactment
When asked about the expectations in relation to participating in XC, principals and teachers in the
LTs anticipated that the programme would be a means of ‘reaching out to and staying in touch with
other schools’ (HT 3B; HT 3C; LT 4E) and, to a lesser extent, a way ‘to get new ideas for changing
teaching practices’ (HT 3A). An LT teacher described this as follows:
I expected it [the programme] to give me a little more training, share experiences with other colleagues,
right? With other primary schools, with other secondary schools, see how they work. Maybe attend training
sessions or visit schools and see how different projects work, and get some ideas, see if they work well or
not. . . [LT 4A].
Quilabert and Moschetti 13
The expectation of sharing experiences and methodologies is a recurrent theme but is also a
feature that the SC publicizes when they discuss XC publicly (CEB, 2020e; EAPC, 2020). A head-
teacher reveals the reasons why his school decided to participate in the programme in the first
place:
Above all, we wanted to be at the forefront in relation to training. ‘If there is anything regarding innovative
training, we will be very interested’—we said. And also, to have a dialogue with some schools that were
already doing things that interested us. . . find out what others were doing, to share experiences, especially
to nurture ourselves a little. . . [HT 3B].
In this regard, however, while the expectations regarding the training and socialization function
of the network meetings were initially shared by principals and promoted by the programme’s SC,
these expectations were far from being fulfilled in practice. Attendance at network meetings tended
to decline after the programme’s first year and during the observation phase of this study it was
most frequent to see some schools not sending any representative. As discussed above, the ritual-
istic nature of these meetings and the distance from the initial expectations might be accounted for
this disengagement.
In other cases, the programme initially provided an external legitimation for innovation, espe-
cially serving as a symbolic support for schools’ principals to undertake action related to innova-
tion, as argued by two principals:
The expectations were, of course, to get in contact with schools who were doing some things that could be
useful to us, but also entering a layer in which we felt supported, and which forced our staff to go down
this path [HT 3A].
[The change of the school’s leadership team] comes together with the emergence of the Escola Nova 21—
and later XC—programme [. . .] and we were interested in this movement, because we said: ‘Perhaps they
can help us in this step, as we have to renew a lot of people’ [HT 3B].
The search for external institutional legitimation through programmes like EN21 or XC may be
due to the surge in innovation discourses, particularly in the Catalan context, which concerns both
principals and teachers, who consider innovation to be a factor affecting families’ school choice
decisions. The following two quotes talk to these two overlapping phenomena:
I think there is a certain pressure to innovate that comes from all directions [. . .], I don’t know if it is
sufficiently grounded or is it that ‘I have heard that. . .’, ‘now this has to be done. . .’, [. . .] I think that it is
increasing, but you do not know to what extent it is based on deep reflection or. . .is it a trend. . .? [HT 3C].
This innovation thing is a bit. . . ‘it is what you have to do, or otherwise you won’t have students’; it’s sort
of ‘what parents ask for’. [. . .] When you prepare for the open school day events it’s the time when you
have to sell yourself, right? And you say, ‘what do I want to show?’ And I realize that what we need to
show is innovation, because it is what parents want. [NO-LT 5A].
Under these circumstances, decisions made regarding innovation are especially relevant, since
they help schools position themselves in their local education markets. A headteacher highlights,
for instance, the importance of innovation for renewing their school’s image:
14 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
We had been going around this whole paradigm of innovation for a long time, how it is changing, and well. . .
be aware of what is being done and see that we are a school that has a lot of tradition, a lot of history, but you
can’t be left behind, you cannot just have tradition and history, then you have to catch up [HT 3C].
Furthermore, a teacher within an LT mentions the importance of balancing the school pedagogi-
cally with the rest of the neighbourhood’s schools, but at the same time generating their own iden-
tity to define them:
Here in the neighbourhood, many public schools have emerged that are pioneers when it comes to
innovation, or so they say, and. . . and there was a need to go in this direction, as well as to strike a balance
on a pedagogical level. Not so much to reflect or copy, but rather to generate an identity for us as a school
[LT 5B].
It is evident that if schools are to enact the programme, they will tend to repurpose it, adapting
it to their contextual needs. As shown above, this repurposing, however, tends to assume essen-
tially symbolic functions – that is, legitimation, renewal, market projection – that can be brought
into play in each school’s internal and external micropolitical arenas in ways not anticipated by
policymakers.
Discussion and concluding remarks
Recent initiatives and policies aiming at generating innovation in education can be seen as a con-
tinuation and a rescaling of the ‘traditional’ educational change and school improvement move-
ments (Murillo and Krichesky, 2015). They both share a prescriptive view of innovation, consider
the school as a basic unit of change (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012), and propose innovation ‘reci-
pes’ with differentiated development phases (González and Escudero, 1987). At the same time,
educational innovation has been increasingly promoted by various national and subnational gov-
ernments as a way of renewing public education (Greany and Higham, 2018; Schoen and Fusarelli,
2008; Sidorkin and Warford, 2017), and has offered a new discursive frame for some international
organizations advancing global education policies (e.g. Hawkins et al., 2020; OECD, 2021;
UNESCO, 2021), while in turn offering local and national actors an opportunity for external legiti-
mation, as can be seen in the case of XC.
The central focus of the paper has been, however, on understanding the implementation of edu-
cational innovation policies from a policy enactment approach. In this regard, as explained by Ball
et al. (2012), schools’ micropolitics and context specificities cause policies to vary in each case.
This is evidenced in the case of XC: each school interprets and translates the programme according
to its own perspective, needs and institutional context. Our data indicate how these elements can
either drive – deeply or superficially – or block engagement in the programme. In addition, a
school’s material context can either limit the extent and sustainability of innovation – due to, for
instance, severe staff turnover – or otherwise enable it. Furthermore, all schools are exposed to
their external contexts and experience, for instance, the pressure and expectations of innovation
especially from families exerting choice, but also from the media, government officials and civil
society organizations. In other words, there is a clear contrast between the discursive level of the
programme designers within the context of generation and transmission of the ideas that underpin
XC, and the reality experienced by schools, with their own specific circumstances and contingen-
cies. The programme certainly does not operate in a vacuum; instead, schools as organizations that
come into contact and interact with the programme in a particular context, rebuild, adapt or reject
it accordingly.
Quilabert and Moschetti 15
There is a notable deviation from the proposed objectives in the implementation phase of XC
and much of it has to do with the specific features of school contexts. Firstly, leading teams are not
made up by volunteers, but are summoned by schools’ management teams, even though voluntary
participation is considered a prerequisite by the SC, since they consider that innovation in educa-
tion stems from personal initiative and motivation. However, it should be noted that participation
in these teams is neither a paid job, nor are teaching hours reduced to allow for participation, which
eliminates any incentive to join these teams. Secondly, no innovative practices associated with the
programme are evidenced – although some are discussed superficially by certain schools, but not
specifically. Decoupling between innovation discourse and practice may be related to schools
experiencing pressure to innovate in a context of material constraint. This tension between what
Braun et al. (2011: 588) call the material and external contexts leads to most schools’ participation
in the programme being formal, symbolic, and thus, becoming ritualized. Thirdly, network meet-
ings, originally intended as spaces for cooperative practice between schools and for innovation
training, function primarily as a means of socializing rather than as collaborative workspaces.
There is also a major difficulty in the transmission of information from the LTs who participate in
these meetings to the whole school staff, resulting in widespread ignorance in relation to XC on the
part of the staff that do not – but should – participate in it directly. Somewhat paradoxically, net-
work meetings appear to end up becoming spaces for discussion and bounded socialization that
keeps the programme ‘alive’ and yet disconnected from actual impact in practice.
Professional contexts (Braun et al., 2011) seem to play a central role as well. Teachers’ and
principals’ pre-existing ideas regarding educational innovation deeply affect the way they make
sense and engage with the programme (Coburn, 2005). In many cases, these ideas are based on
profound doubts about the actual need to innovate – and even about the pedagogical status of the
notion of innovation itself – especially when teachers’ and principals’ professional convictions
resist what they perceive as a trend based on a somewhat empty or nonspecific signifier. This
seems to be particularly relevant in the case of policies addressing pedagogical work, whose bind-
ing force is inherently weak and where the account-holder position is therefore unclear. Resistance,
refusal, and especially ritualization can be seen as the consequence of teachers perceiving these
kinds of policies as an intrusion in their professional autonomy, even when arguably these policies
can only exert power through mere persuasion.
Finally, despite the discrepancies in the implementation phase, other remarkable unforeseen
uses and repurposes of the programme have also emerged. On the one hand, it is evident that par-
ticipation in this kind of programmes can be used by some schools as an element of external legiti-
mation, that is, as a symbolic external support for leadership teams to undertake actions related to
innovation. On the other hand, the programme may be used to renew – or, most accurately, rebrand
– a school project and/or to enable a school to position itself pedagogically and differentiate itself
from other schools in the area. To be sure, these cases demonstrate an instrumental and superficial
use of educational innovation narratives and frames that serves the contextually conditioned inter-
ests of schools, with a specific purpose different from that proposed by the policymakers. In this
regard and considering that the Catalan education system contains market regulation elements
(Verger et al., 2015), it comes as no surprise that some schools use the XC platform to try to iden-
tify and copy ‘successful’ innovative practices from other schools, or that some use their participa-
tion in the programme as an ‘innovative school’ badge vis-à-vis the local education market
pressures. While XC builds territorial networks and asks schools to cooperate, these same schools
are called to compete in their local education markets. Somehow then, XC may unintendedly
update the NPM policy agenda, thus strengthening a market-oriented style of educational
governance.
16 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Edgar Quilabert https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8260-6169
Mauro C Moschetti https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0162-6860
Notes
1. Much has been written about the origins and guiding principles of Escola Nova 21; for a thorough
account of the programme’s history see, for example, Aznar (2016), Manzano (2018), Torrent and Feu
(2020) and Baena et al. (2022).
2. Barcelona is the most populous and capital city of Catalonia, one of Spain’s administrative regions – that
is, autonomous communities.
3. More recently, the Futures of Education report from UNESCO (2021) has included a section titled ‘The
Necessary Transformation of Schools’, which further exemplifies this trend.
4. The World Bank has been also involved in the organization of country-specific conferences teaming with
the OECD and addressing ‘Education innovations for the 21st century skills’ (see, for instance, World
Bank, 2015).
5. http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/innovativelearningenvironments.htm
6. Formerly known as UNESCOcat – and now named CATESCO – this organization is a private associa-
tion that has the aim of promoting the tenets and values of UNESCO within the Catalan society.
7. EduCaixa is the educational division of laCaixa Foundation, the philanthropic arm of laCaixa bank.
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Author biographies
Edgar Quilabert teaches Comparative Education and Economics of Education at the Autonomous University
of Barcelona (UAB). He is researcher at the Globalization, Education and Social Policies Research Centre. He
is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the UAB. His work
focuses on accountability policies in education and its relationship with innovation.
Mauro C Moschetti is a Serra Húnter lecturer at the Department of Theories of Education and Social Pedagogy
at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research is concerned with public-private partnerships and
market policies in education, educational inequalities, and the evaluation of educational policies from an
interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of comparative education, sociology of education and global
studies.
