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Who can I be now? The complexity of students in policy enactment
Journal of Education Policy
Increased international attention paid to research-based education has resulted in various national initiatives to exploit research in education. However, this poses challenges for school professionals. Based on an ethnographic single case study in a Swedish educational setting, this article investigates how national policy on research-based education is realized at local school level from the perspective of principals. Theoretically, the study applies a policy enactment understanding, arguing that policy is put into action in original ways in various local settings. Through thematic analysis four interrelated main strategies deployed by the principals were identified: strategies facilitating durable structures, developing learning cultures, developing teachers' competencies, and strengthening leadership. The strategies demonstrate the complexities in policy enactment as it involves multiple embedded local processes and settings. Additionally, the study contributes to an understanding of how different interrelated national policies and initiatives intersect when enacted at school level.
This paper provides insight into secondary Physical Education (PE) teachers’ experiences of beginning to re-imagine secondary physical education provision in light of the new Curriculum for Wales, 2022 (CfW). Data were generated through analysis of semi-structured interviews (n = 5) with secondary PE teachers who participated in three workshops which uses a design-thinking methodology. Informed by Ball and colleagues’ conceptualisation of policy work, findings draw attention towards how engagement in the workshops provided a foundation for the participants to begin interpretation and translation of the new CfW and consider re-imagining existing PE provision within the school context. Participants’ interpretations of the new CfW centred around health and physical activity provision which were shaped by a connection with a range of health and physical activity stakeholders. This enabled participants to translate their ideas from the workshops into pedagogical practices within the school context. The paper concludes by suggesting secondary PE teacher’s realisation of the new CfW would be enhanced through opportunities to further integrate disciplinary ideas from health, sport, physical activity, and education across national and global contexts.
Mixed‐ability grouping is widespread in primary schools and in several subject areas in secondary schools in England. Notwithstanding, there is scant research on mixed‐ability grouping in the education literature, particularly in terms of its impact on students’ experiences. The research reported in this paper employs enactment theory to provide original insights into the diverse practices and complex contextual factors that shape students’ perceptions and experiences of mixed‐ability grouping in physical education (PE). Enactment theory acknowledges that school decisions about grouping policy are impacted by wider education policy and other contextual influences, and that the expression of grouping policies in specific subjects and classrooms is navigated and negotiated by students as well as teachers. The paper draws on data from in‐depth, semi‐structured focus groups with 41 Year 10 (aged 14–15) students in a mixed‐gender secondary school in England to explore the different ways in which students are positioned and position themselves in the enactment of mixed‐ability grouping in PE. Findings reveal many contextual factors, including ability and gender discourses, school and subject cultures, and the broader policy context, influencing students’ positioning and learning experiences in mixed‐ability PE. The discussion explores distinct differences in the enactment of mixed‐ability grouping in PE in Key Stage 3 (aged 11–14) and Key Stage 4 (aged 14–16) and identifies students as enthusiasts, critics, entrepreneurs and copers in grouping policy enactment. The study affirms the need for educators and professionals to critically engage with the construct of ability, and in turn mixed‐ability grouping policies and pedagogic practices in PE.
Sweden possesses a highly deregulated school system in which students in the compulsory school system are free to choose almost any school they prefer. This study focuses on the long-term difference in educational level twelve years after finishing elementary school for students who made a school choice compared to those who did not. The study uses the Voronoi method of estimating school choice and is based on detailed register-based data for all students that finished elementary school in Sweden in the years 2000-2002. The results confirm previous findings that the most resourceful families more often make active choices. However, those who made an active school choice seem to have lower future educational achievement. The exception are those who have foreign-born parents, and those living in low-resource areas, who made an active school choice. They have a more positive educational achievement compared to those who stayed in the closest school.
In 2010, Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce a legal requirement that education should be research-based, placing huge demands on schools. The study’s aim is to explore how, through sensemaking, teachers and principals enact this policy in schools. In total, 272 teachers and 23 principals from pre-schools, leisure-time centers, compulsory schools, and upper secondary schools completed a questionnaire.
The findings show the need for understanding central policy concepts, alignment with previous experiences, and a social context within which the policy can be understood, negotiated, and enacted. Policy enactment was dependent on the support given – professional development, time, and financial resources. Teachers and principals have so far experienced challenges and opportunities – a rewarding if complex process.
The aim is to analyse how policy decisions about assessment practices influence what it means to be a student in a performative system. We examine an occasion where a previously mandatory national test became optional, and how students took the opportunity to try to change the school’s decision about this. The study is based on student group interviews in year 6, and uses Conversation Analysis to examine how they use discursive resources to co-construct fabrications of the ideal student. The findings show how neoliberal rhetoric has worked its way into the students’ everyday lives, and how they display a deep knowledge about how to use arguments that work inside the system. We argue that there is a need for more knowledge about contemporary education policies from a student perspective.
The curriculum is often the target of reform and governments use a range of accountability measures to ensure compliance. This paper examines the decisions schools in England make regarding history provision, in a period of curriculum change, and the potential consequences of these decisions. Drawing on a large, longitudinal data set, of primary and secondary material, the study examines the relationship between the number of students entered for public examination in history in England and a range of situated and material factors. The data suggest that particular measures of accountability are effective in shaping school decision-making, but the type of school, socio-economic nature of the school intake, and students’ prior attainment are also important factors in understanding the decisions made. This does result in an inequitable access to history education; this inequity exists between different types of schools and socio-economic areas, and is also evident within schools where students with low prior attainment are less likely to be allowed to study history.
Private supplementary tutoring (PST) is a worldwide enterprise that comes in a variety of forms and with a growing number of students. Sweden, together with the other Nordic countries, has a relatively short history of large-scale organised supplementary education, which can be explained by its confidence in regular mainstream education. In recent years though, this picture has partly changed, and today families in Sweden are offered different kinds of education services outside the ordinary school system. This paper targets how PST is legitimized and justified through marketing as a solution to problems related to the education of children. Through a positioning analysis of three consumer narratives published online by a PST company, this paper aims to further our understanding of which functions PST fills within the Swedish education system. Results show that private tutors appear in the consumer narratives as compensating for shortcomings in schools and families as well as complementing the support that parents and teachers can offer children. These findings signal that PST marketing creates demands for different kinds of support which may, in the long run, rewrite the map of the Swedish education landscape.
This article revolves around the educational policy introduced in Swedish schools that has extended national testing to younger pupils. The policy is intended to support equal assessment and grading. With the exception of short-term preparations for the tests focused on here, the testing routines are regulated by the state. The paper aims to examine how the policy of national testing in grade six is enacted in different school contexts from a pupil's point of view, and how this affects equivalence in school. A narrative analysis was conducted of pupils' (n = 150) stories about preparing for national tests in 11 schools. Three forms of enactments were distinguished according to how responsibility for test preparations was allocated in each school. In some schools, teachers invited the pupils systematically to the translation process. In other schools, pupils were given most of the responsibility for preparation and were left alone as actors visa -vis the policy. Finally, in schools that applied ad hoc preparations, the pupils' position as actors became less secure and more multifaceted. This variety regarding the pupils' test preparations in school stress that the different enactments of this policy of national testing have implications for the interpretation of equivalence in school.
This paper considers the policy ‘roles’ adopted by teachers enacting policy in a department. It draws on a longitudinal study of two secondary mathematics departments endeavouring to make deep change aligned with a demanding curriculum policy. The study validates aspects of an existing typology, demonstrates the existence of a variety of policy ‘critics’ and adds a category of ‘survivor’ teacher, showing the role can have considerable impact on enactment. The paper argues for an extension to a group construct of ‘policy role’, here at a department level, and shows that as teachers struggle to marry the constraints of the range of policies to which they are subject with the time and effort needed to maintain deeply espoused professional values, an adopted group role can serve either to support or constrain individual teacher efforts.
Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to be ‘implemented’ by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attention has been given to evaluating ‘how well’ policies are realised in practice – implemented! Less attention has been paid to understanding how schools actually deal with these multiple, and sometimes contradictory, policy demands; creatively working to interpret policy texts and translate these into practices, in real material conditions and varying resources – how they are enacted! Based on a long-term qualitative study of four ‘ordinary’ secondary schools, and working on the interface of theory with data, this book explores how schools enact, rather than implement, policy. It focuses on
Taking inspection into one’s own hands: local enactments of swedish national school inspection. Inspectees are the focus of this paper, which reports findings on the local functions of Swedish national inspection – how head teachers, teachers, students and officers from responsible authorities utilise inspection as a resource. The paper draws on a particular perspective of implementation to analyse data from qualitative case study data from twelve Swedish compulsory schools by drawing on the concept of policy enactment (Ball et al. 2012). Even if inspection is a political tool that is largely intended to govern from the top down, this paper highlights the power of local agency and some of the ways in which the enactments of inspection are simultaneously in line with and extend beyond the politically anticipated functions, all pointing to the importance of inspection as a mobilising resource. It shows the multiplicity of activities that take place in schools and responsible authorities in the course of inspection.
Drawing on a study of education policy enactments in four English secondary schools, this paper argues that different ‘types’ of policies call-up different forms of enactments, and that teachers and others who work in schools will have different orientations towards some of these possible ways of ‘doing’ school. Through exploring the ways in which two main policies are being enacted, ‘Behaviour Management’ and ‘Standards and Attainment’, we argue that policy type, power and positionality, space and time constraints, as well as different subjectivities, render policy enactment a more fragile and unstable process than is sometimes documented in policy analysis and implementation studies. Thus, in policy enactment terms, ‘where you stand depends on where you sit’.
Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific practices. This set of theoretical tools are usually deployed to analyse interview data collected from a single school or cluster of schools to draw findings or conclusions about the complex processes of policy enactment. We aim to build on this critical policy studies work by, firstly, highlighting key aspects of these theoretical/methodological constructs, secondly, exploring the performative role of research in the materiality of specific contexts and, thirdly, theorising education policy research in terms of ontological politics. We ground this work in a recent collaborative enquiry research project undertaken in Queensland, Australia. This research project emerged in the Australian policy context of National Partnership Agreement policies which were designed to reform public or government-funded schools servicing low socio-economic communities, in order to improve student learning outcomes, specifically in literacy and numeracy as measured by high-stakes national testing.
The current debate on political participation is bound to a discussion about whether citizens are active or passive. This dichotomous notion is nurtured by an extensive normative debate concerning whether passivity is an asset or a threat to democracy; and it is especially manifest in studies of young people's political orientations. Drawing on this discussion, the present study goes beyond the dichotomy by keeping political interest conceptually separate from participation in order to improve our understanding of political passivity. Multivariate cluster analysis of empirical data on Swedish youth suggests that we need to consider three distinctive forms of ‘political passivity’. In the paper we present empirical evidence not only of the existence of a particular ‘standby citizen’, but also of two kinds of genuinely passive young people: unengaged and disillusioned citizens. Alongside active citizens, these people are in distinctly different categories with regard to their political behavior. This entails a new analytical framework that may be used to analyze an empirical phenomenon that has received surprisingly little attention in the literature on political participation and civic engagement.
Thematic analysis is a poorly demarcated, rarely acknowledged, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within psychology. In this paper, we argue that it offers an accessible and theoretically flexible approach to analysing qualitative data. We outline what thematic analysis is, locating it in relation to other qualitative analytic methods that search for themes or patterns, and in relation to different epistemological and ontological positions. We then provide clear guidelines to those wanting to start thematic analysis, or conduct it in a more deliberate and rigorous way, and consider potential pitfalls in conducting thematic analysis. Finally, we outline the disadvantages and advantages of thematic analysis. We conclude by advocating thematic analysis as a useful and flexible method for qualitative research in and beyond psychology.
This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects – as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the hermeneutics of policy, that is the ways in which policies in schools are subject to complex processes of interpretation and translation. We suggest that both views are necessary to understand the work of policy and ‘policy work’ in schools but that neither view is sufficient on its own.
This paper considers the ‘policy work’ of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the ‘problem of meaning’ and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get ‘enacted’. It argues that ‘policy work’ is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of enactment. The teachers and other adults here are not naïve actors, they are creative and sophisticated and they manage, but they are also tired and overloaded much of the time. They are engaged, coping with the meaningful and the meaningless, often self-mobilised around patterns of focus and neglect and torn between discomfort and pragmatism, but most are also very firmly embedded in the prevailing policies discourses.
The aim of this article is to describe and analyse how policy changes in the three latest Swedish compulsory school, preschool class, and school-age educare curricula affect the political goal of pupil influence. This is done with an interest in implications for utterances of power relations and for didactical considerations for living and learning democracy in school. This article analyses pupil influence by using theories of democracy, power, and didactics. The method used is content analysis. The empirical results show that pupil influence in the curricula is linked to seven concepts: democracy, value, norm, rights, responsibility, influence, participation. Our conclusion is that only small differences exist in terms of the central concepts mentioned in the curricula linked to pupil influence. Secondly, we found a policy shift with respect to the pupils, i.e., viewing pupils as subjects or objects. Thirdly, we found a shift in how learning is viewed in the curricula and the type of didactical questions that are in focus, which illuminates a change in utterances of power relations that challenges possibilities for living and learning democracy in Swedish school education.
The education field favors innovations, but innovative schools tend to fade after an initial ‘golden age.’ According to the new institutional theory, this happens due to the innovative school’s need to achieve institutional legitimacy, which encounters several difficulties. This study aims to explore the journey to attaining legitimacy in one entrepreneurial school that gained legitimacy from some actors, but not from other relevant ones, and did not survive. Using a case study method, 30 interviews were conducted, and over 200 documents, including media articles, school protocols, and court protocols, were analyzed. The findings reveal that the concept of legitimacy is not dichotomous, but a continuum ranging from legitimacy to neutral and de-legitimacy, and stakeholders differ in their positions, resources, and type of legitimacy. Additional theoretical and practical implications are presented in the discussion.
In turning a spotlight on students in physical education, this paper seeks to extend applications of policy enactment theory, and particularly, the policy actor framework. Following the lead of Stephen Ball and colleagues, the research that this paper draws on examined the various dimensions of context shaping policy enactment in different schools. The focus of the research was policy associated with ability grouping, and setting particularly, in physical education. The research involved case study work in three mixed-gender secondary schools in England, with 15 physical education teachers participating in semi-structured interviews and 63 students participating in semi-structured focus groups. This paper reports on the data arising from focus groups with students. The actor framework is used to bring to the fore differences in student responses to policy, their capacities to proactively engage with policy, and explore what shapes the differences observed. Notably, the data signalled that students were by no means passive recipients of policy. There were clear instances of students exercising agency in physical education, sometimes questioning and challenging how they were positioned within and by setting policies, and at other times, responding in ways that demonstrated their capacity to navigate and mediate policy and its impact on them as learners. This paper therefore explores some of the ways in which students are both positioned by and position themselves in relation to policy.
Past research in Health and Physical Education has repeatedly highlighted that curriculum development is an ongoing, complex and contested process, and that the realisation of progressive intentions embedded in official curriculum texts is far from assured. Drawing on concepts from education policy sociology this paper positions teacher educators as key policy actors in the interpretation and enactment of new official curriculum texts. More specifically, it reports research that has explored four teacher educators’ engagement with a specific feature of the new Australian Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (AC HPE); five interrelated propositions or ‘key ideas’ that underpinned the new curriculum and openly sought to provide direction for progressive pedagogy in Health and Physical Education. The paper provides conceptual and empirical insight into teacher educators consciously positioning themselves as policy actors, motivated to play a role in shaping policy directions and future curriculum practices. As such, the teacher educators in this project are identified as policy entrepreneurs and provocateurs. The paper details a dialogic research process between the researchers that was designed to make curriculum interpretation a more transparent, collaborative and generative process. The data reported illustrates the research process supporting teacher educators to engage in productive debate about the possible meanings and enactment of the five propositions. Analysis reveals differing perspectives on the propositions and a shared investment in efforts to support their progressive intent. Empirically, the paper highlights the critical role that teacher educators will play in the ongoing enactment of a new curriculum that is overtly identified as ‘futures oriented’. Conceptually, the paper adds depth and sophistication to understandings of teacher educators as policy actors. Methodologically, we propose that the research process described can be usefully adopted by other teacher educators and teachers engaged in similar processes of curriculum development, interpretation and enactment.
This self-study documents two teacher educators’ professional inquiry into the notions of critical friendship. Specifically, we asked: How does our interactive inquiry on the topic of critical friendship lead us to new understandings of critical friends? Three theoretical perspectives framed this study – More Knowledgeable Others, Thought Collective, and reflection. Data sources included (a) artifacts from the self-study scholarship/literature, (b) written and real-time (audio recorded) dialogue, and (c) critical friend response memos. We systematically analyzed our data, linking the initial themes to our theoretical frame. These themes led to three findings about critical friendship: flexible definitions, complex characteristics, and multiple learning phases. Based on these findings, we created two research tools useful for researchers enacting critical friendship – the Critical Friend Definition Continuum and the Critical Friend Guide for Quality Assurance. Ultimately, we assert that we, along with our colleagues, must be responsible brokers of critical friendship by explicitly explaining our purposes, definitions and uses of critical friendship within our work as self-study researchers.
This article describes a study that documents the attempts of administrators of a new school to introduce and sustain inclusive leadership and program arrange-ments over the course of the first 3 years of the school’s life. The data illustrate that while they were able to succeed on a number of levels, they also encountered a number of challenges. Principal among these were the departure of the first principal after the second year, a rapid increase in the school population, as well as the challenges that accompany most schools when they attempt to implement inclusive practices.
An exploration is presented of how urban spaces, polarized by class and ethnicity, structure the basic conditions of emerging local school markets. The authors investigate how the distribution of symbolic capital, or ‘hot knowledge’ of the market, affects schools, the market, and the urban spaces themselves. The study is guided by theoretical notions involving lived local school markets, competitive spaces and symbolic capital. Methodologically, the study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at three compulsory schools in Stockholm. Analytically, the ways in which relations among urban spaces and school choice, and actors’ perceptions of these relations, affect the actors’ subsequent positioning in the local market, are illustrated. The authors’ main conclusion is that despite nationally defining principles mandating fairness, transparency and integration, school choice policy is being implemented on an uneven playing field, aggravating current patterns of segregation in education and even housing. Consequently, a call is made for an urgent reframing of some of the policy’s nationally defining principles.
Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the 17th century? This discourse gathered momentum in the Victorian age which, Foucault argues, was not repressive in the way we commonly imagine. Now, with sexuality continually under scrutiny, many people suppose that we are becoming more liberated, less repressed. Is this really so? This controversial account, by one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, explores the evolving social, economic and political forces that have shaped our attitudes to sex and shows we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.
In this paper, we focus on some of the ways in which schools are both productive of and constituted by sets of ‘discursive practices, events and texts’ that contribute to the process of policy enactment. As Colebatch (2002: 2) says, ‘policy involves the creation of order – that is, shared understandings about how the various participants will act in particular circumstances’. In schools, part of the ‘creation of order’ takes place around the production and circulation of signs, signifiers and policy symbols. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this paper details and describes some of the discursive artefacts and activities that reflect, and ‘carry’ within them, some of the key policy discourses that are currently in circulation in English secondary schools. Most policy analysis omits the artefactual and in documenting and theorising policy enactment this paper begins to consider the role that artefacts play in this process.
Purpose – The paper aims to explore the stages involved in the school establishment phase and detect differences between new and innovative schools startup. Design/methodology/approach – The exploratory study was conducted on the creation phase of two Israeli elementary schools: one new and one innovative. The data were collected through interviews with central figures in each school, school visits, and documentations analysis. Findings – Four stages were found in the establishment phase: building construction and resource achievement, goal prioritization, staff development, and vision formulation, but these stages were found to be in reverse order in the new and innovative schools. Research limitations/implications – Although the study is limited by the specific context from which data were drawn, it offers a useful conceptual framework for the establishment process of new and innovative schools. Practical implications – Implications for practice and policy include useful suggestions for the stages and order necessary in the startup of each kind of school, identification of weak spots in the process and apposite remediation, and directions for policy and decision makers. Originality/value – The study provides a conceptual framework which points to the differences in the startup phase in new and innovative schools, and suggests their different functions for the educational system.
This first paper in the series concentrates on school context and outlines a framework which identifies and relates a variety of factors that influence differences in policy enactments between similar schools. In taking context seriously in our four case-study schools we argue that policies are intimately shaped and influenced by school-specific factors, even though in much central policy making, these sorts of constraints, pressures and enablers of policy enactments tend to be neglected. This paper considers aspects such as school intake, history, staffing, school ethos and culture, ‘material’ elements like buildings, resources and budgets, as well as external environments. These factors are conceptualised as situated, material, professional and external dimensions and we aim to present a grounded exploration of the localised nature of policy actions that is more ‘real’ and realistic than that often assumed by policy making.
Ethos, the fundamental character of a culture that underlies its beliefs and customs, can create strong emotional attachments if it is thoughtfully conceived and carefully nurtured. Adrianna Kezar describes how several institutions tend this fundamental character, with positive results for student engagement.
Att förstå skolan: En teori om skolan som institution och skolor som organisationer [Understanding School: A Theory on School as an Institution and as Schools as Organisations
- G Berg
- Berg G.
Students as Policy Actors: The Student Perspective in the Establishment Process of a New School
- K Blennow
- I Bosseldal
- M Malmström
- Blennow K.
Solving the Challenges of the Future Now: Aspects of Time in the Realization of the Vision of a New School
- K Blennow
- I Bosseldal
- M Malmström
- Blennow K.
Ungdomars politiska utveckling. Slutrapport från ett forskningsprogram
- E Amnå
- M Ekström
- H Stattin
- Amnå E.
Skolsociologi: Studier av social interaktion i skolan [School Sociology: Studies of Social Interaction in Schools
- I Bosseldal
- A Persson
- Bosseldal I.
Gründungsprozess von allgemeinbildenden Privatschulen
- F G Grote
- Grote F. G.
Project Vision: A New Upper Secondary School
- Municipal Council
Marknadsreglering och dess effekter på regionala och lokala gymnasiemarknaders funktion [Market regulation and its effects on regional and local functions of upper secondary school markets
- S.-B Olsson
Att visa vad man kan. Elever som medspelare i förändrade policypraktiker om bedömning i år sex. [Displaying your knowledge
- M Tanner
- Tanner M.