Reculturing schools in England: how ‘cult’ values in education policy discourse influence the construction of practitioner identities and work orientations

The imperative of continuous improvement has now become normative in education policy discourse, typically framed as setting ‘aspirational’ targets for pupil performance as a prerequisite for gaining competitive advantage in the global economy. In this context, teachers, leaders, teacher assistants and other practitioners working in schools across England have been under increasing pressure to raise standards. This article focuses on how values are deployed in reculturing and regulating practitioners to develop identities and work orientations which are congruent with the policymakers’ agendas. G.H. Mead’s concept of ‘cult’ values illuminates the process of fostering homogeneity with the dominant policy discourse through an inclusion/exclusion dynamic. Interview data collected in two primary schools revealed a significant convergence of practitioner discourse with policy objectives. Delivering improvement affects how practitioners talk about their work and see themselves as educators. The ‘cult’ of continuous improvement appears to inhibit a critical approach to the implementation of education policies by school practitioners in their everyday work.     

Think Tanks, ‘policy experts’ and ‘ideas for’ education policy making in Australia

This paper provides a case study of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) in Australia with a focus on its education policy work, specifically the report, School funding on a budget (SFoB). CIS is a conservative right wing advocacy think tank, established in 1976 in the aftermath of the Whitlam government’s policy activism, framed by classical liberalism or neoliberalism with a provenance in the political economy of Hayek and Friedman. As such, it is committed to smaller government, individual responsibility and more market driven solutions to social problems. CIS gives more emphasis to academic research than other think tanks of its kind. This paper theorises think tanks as hybrid, boundary spanning organisations that work across academic, media, political and economic fields. An argument is proffered that it is the restructured state, with its loss of research capacity and fast policy making, which has strengthened opportunities for think tank influence across the policy cycle in education. With SFoB, CIS used a political moment, the first Abbott federal government budget focused on ‘budget repair’, to argue a case for reducing government educational expenditure as a percentage of GDP in the long term. That policy moment was used for recommending the abolition of the federal department of education and further dismantling of public schooling. SFoB is shown to be exemplary of the conservative advocacy think tank report genre in its usage of ‘mediatized’ language, surface accoutrements of academic research, and user focus. SFoB is a manifestation of what can be seen as the ideas for policy work of CIS, dressed up as research.     

Theorising policy and practice in refugee education: Conceptualising ‘safety’, ‘belonging’, ‘success’ and ‘participatory parity’ in England and Sweden

Across the world, children are forced to leave their homes for far-flung destinations. This global phenomenon has particular impact in Europe, where there are now more child refugees than since World War II. Education plays an important role for children with extraordinary experiences seeking to build meaningful lives in their new context. This article offers a new theoretical approach to underpin reforms to educational policy and practice for refugees in schools in resettlement contexts in Europe. The new conceptual framing is grounded in empirical work in England and Sweden, and brings two theories together: ‘participatory parity’ (Fraser) and ‘resumption of an ordinary life’ (Kohli). Kohli’s concepts of ‘safety’, ‘belonging’ and ‘success’ have resonance with practitioners from Sweden and England as they work to meet the needs of their new arrivals. Fraser’s conceptual lenses of redistribution, recognition and representation highlight the barriers to achieving the right to inclusive education for refugee children in each context. The interdependence of both theories shapes a new framework. The theoretical understandings offered in this article have been developed with practitioners and add to the field by offering a robust moral and operational approach to shaping pedagogical principles for policymakers and educators working in resettlement communities.     

Caught up in the past? Social inclusion,skills, and vocational education and training policy in England

Since the mid-1990s, governments of different political persuasion have tried to reform VET policy to address problems in skills formation and social inclusion. Despite considerable policy activism, success has been somewhat limited, and England failed to overcome the problems associated with its liberal training regime. This article assesses the failure in vocational skills formation as a political economy and a public policy problem. It challenges the determinism in the political economy literature, points to poor public policy-making, and outlines possible policy levers.     

Convergence in education policy? A quantitative analysis of policy change and stability in OECD countries

In this article, we quantitatively assess education policy change in OECD countries. While research has frequently underlined the importance of international exchange for national policy development, it is yet unclear whether resulting policies are converging. By distinguishing different kinds of education policy goals, we hypothesise that indicators related to macro-level goals are more likely to converge than those related to implementation. We then analyse the development of several education policies since the 1990s. We find strong convergence of some indicators and among some groups of countries, but no clear pattern emerges. Convergence is only partially influenced by the abstractness of education policy goals, and in particular the Scandinavian countries seem to pursue their own approaches in important education policy options.     

Managing curriculum change and ‘ontological uncertainty’ in tertiary education

Curriculum reform at institutional level is a challenging endeavour. Those charged with leading this process will encounter both enthusiasm and multiple obstacles to teacher engagement including the particularly complex issue of confronting existing teacher identities. At Unitec Institute of Technology (Unitec), the ‘Living Curriculum’ initiative focused on whole-of-institution curriculum renewal and, in the process, acknowledged and addressed teacher beliefs and practices that variously supported and contested both the initiative itself and the professional development offerings that accompanied it. The related research project identified factors and processes that unsettle teachers, rendering them ‘insecure’, and strategies that have proven effective in supporting teachers through significant change in conceptions of curriculum, teaching and learning.     

Revolution or backlash? The mediatisation of education policy in Australia

Recent scholarship has identified the emergence of a new modality of policy work: the mediatisation of policy. This paper provides an Australian case study which reports on the tactics of an Australian Federal Minister of Education and a media commentator who both engaged in public pedagogical work for the purpose of spinning education policy. In particular, we argue that this example of the mediatisation of education policy has worked to stifle pedagogical innovation as advocates of middle schooling reform struggle against what appears to be a backlash to the social-democratic reforms of the post-World War II era. Such backlash politics is understood in terms of a struggle to maintain the role of teachers as curriculum designers and not be merely technicians; to sustain critically reflective learning communities of colleagues and friends; and not succumb to pedagogies of resentment that are driven by a logic of deficit views of students and their communities.     

Is ‘gender-sensitive education’ a useful concept for educational policy?

This article responds to Astrid Sinnes and Marianne Løken’s article ‘Gendered education in a gendered world: Looking beyond cosmetic solutions to the gender gap in science’ by exploring the idea of ‘gender-sensitive’ education and its usefulness in educational policy. It draws on theoretical discussions of the concept of gender and of difference to consider ways in which ‘gender-sensitive’ education might serve the task of promoting equality and justice.     

Putting back the ‘E’ in ‘EBD’

This paper argues that recent developments in the curriculum and in administrative structures for pupils with special educational needs have fended to marginalise the term ‘emotional’ or to combine it loosely with ‘behavioural’. It looks at the influence of forty years of behavioural psychology on the UK Code of Practice for children with SEN and related government circulars and suggests an alternative model for conceptualising emotional difficulties. This is not only current with mainstream psychology but can be fraced back to pre-Christian thinking. If the term ‘emotional’ is to be used in statements and IEPs in the future, the paper suggests, then appropriate ways of defining, assessing and providing for these will have to be found.     

Is higher education in really ‘internationalising’?

It is a widely accepted maxim that, like business generally, higher education is globalising. For many countries, higher education is now an important export sector, with university campuses attracting international students from around the world. Licensing production, in the form of franchising degree provision to international partners, is beginning to mutate into foreign direct investment as many universities set up campuses in other countries. While there are clearly parallels between the globalisation of business and higher education, this paper examines the supply- and demand-side drivers within the university sector. It argues that an alignment of special factors, rather than an inexorable trend towards commercialisation, has caused the recent internationalisation of higher education and concludes that current trends are unsustainable in the medium-term.

General or vocational? The tough choice in the Chinese education policy

China has made great efforts to vocationalise its senior secondary education in the belief that vocational education better than general education can prepare young people with the skills needed for employment in industry. This runs against a large empirical literature from the last few decades arguing strongly against vocational education on employment opportunity and cost-effectiveness grounds. This paper examines the relationship between employees' educational (and other) backgrounds and their performance in the workplace, as well as their income, based on a survey of 1433 employees in two cities in China. It concludes that pre-employment education gives better work performance, but that vocational education does not lead to better performance than general education.     

The role of the ‘technical fix’ in UK lifelong education policy

The integral place of information and communications technology (ICT) in UK lifelong education has been established by a series of technology-based initiatives introduced by the New Labour government since 1997. Initiatives such as the University for Industry, learndirect, People's Network and National Grid for Learning are being implemented as part of a coherent lifelong education policy-agenda fundamentally based upon the use of ICT. Yet, beneath the political enthusiasm for technology-based education, the role of ICT in lifelong learning remains largely unexamined and unproblematized, with many policy-makers and educationalists content to view technology as providing a ‘technical fix’ for many of education's problems. From this background, the present paper provides a critical perspective on the technological foundations of the UK government's lifelong education agenda. In particular, it examines the nature and form of the policies that have been introduced and then contrasts them with the rhetorical claims that are being made by government and other official actors. In this way the paper discusses how such policies continue to be shaped within a restrictive technocratic and determinist discourse of the ‘technical fix’, thus conforming to traditional narratives of society and technology. The paper then goes on to explore how such construction juxtaposes social and economic elements of the policy-drive and threatens, ultimately, to restrict the eventual educational effectiveness of these ‘new’ lifelong learning initiatives.     

Reforming teacher education in England: ‘an economy of discourses of truth’

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a fundamental aspect of policy analysis.     

A ‘usable past’ of teacher education in England: history in JET’s anniversary issue

The recent JET Anniversary Virtual Special Issue, abbreviated here to JET@40, reproduced its very first editorial with selected articles from Britain and abroad published in subsequent decades. The journal first came into being as a response to damning criticism of the profession via government-sponsored reports and reviews but also to encourage informed debate with particular focus on notions of ‘good teaching’ and the ‘good teacher’. In this paper, we engage with selected contributions in JET@40 to tease out an historical map for teacher education. The task is to glean a sense of the past which resonates with our co-developed, research-informed teacher education programme, and gives insight to a lack of institutional and political support to encourage teacher research activity that interrogates the effects of poverty and cumulative multiple deprivation on disadvantaged students’ lives, learning and urban schooling experiences. Our argument is that JET@40 not only provides us with an indication of the best of what is known and practised but also a ‘usable past’ or history of specific professional insights to inform debate about possibilities and predicaments in our own teacher education programme.