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The study presents a bibliometric network analysis of the two most recent schools reforms in Norway. Two research questions have been pursued: First, do the government-appointed expert commission use (in Green Papers) the same type of knowledge as 'evidence' for their reviews and recommendations as the Ministry of Education and Research (as reflected in the White Papers)? How has the use of 'evidence' changed over the two reform periods? Second, which body of knowledge amassed by the expert commission has the Ministry of Education and Science actually used for policy formulation? The network analysis shows (i) distinct changes in reference patterns over the two reform periods (e.g., average number of references more than doubled and references to international texts increased significantly), and (ii) an unexpectedly low usage of the 'evidence' presented by the expert commissions. The Ministry of Education and Research only draws on 9.5 percent of the references presented by the expert commissions. Strikingly, almost all of the adopted references are from a commissioned report that locally adapted and translated OECD's Definitions and Selections of Competencies project. The authors suggest 'studying up' and paying more attention to how scientific 'evidence' is actually used, translated, and edited at the political level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The government's White Paper, Learning to Succeed: a new framework for post-16 learning, is here evaluated. The considerable strengths of the proposals – replacement of the TECs with Learning and Skills Councils, the adoption of social partnership in the membership of the new Councils, the substantial increase in resource and a large number of specific measures – are briefly welcomed. A number of serious reservations are then discussed in detail – for example, the absence of a model of change, the over-riding concern to meet the skill needs of business, the overreliance on human capital theory and the continued dependence on exhortation as a means of increasing employers' investment in training. Findings from The Learning Society Programme are then used to question some of the central assumptions underlying the official model of progress. It is argued that endless technocratic reforms are more likely to foster conformity, compliance and control rather than emancipation, empowerment and the enhancement of learning. Finally, it is concluded that the government is rightly pursuing radical, structural reform but is failing to recognize the potential of lifelong learning as a major lever on such change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the reference societies of Norway and Sweden embedded in their education policy documents. We examined 4,260 bibliographic references in 19 white papers and green papers prepared for the 2016/2020 renewal of the Knowledge Promotion Reform in Norway and the 2015/2018 Knowledge Achievement Reform in Sweden. In addition, we interviewed 10 policy experts who participated in the preparation of the analyzed policy documents. The results show that the reference societies overall reflect the existing knowledge production and dissemination mechanisms in education policy; however, they significantly differed between Norway and Sweden regarding whether and to what extent they reference knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Specifically, while Norway drew extensively on knowledge from its neighbors, particularly Sweden, Sweden seldom referenced knowledge produced in other Nordic countries. Policy actors identified similarity, relevance, accessibility, reform contexts, and institutional arrangements as reasons for (not) referencing neighbors. This study calls for further consideration of the political, social, and cultural embeddedness of the 'socio-logic' to understand implicit reference societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rich literature has argued that so-called aspiration-raising policies tend to individualize structural conditions and thereby reproduce forms of inequality through young people's aspirations. This paper explores how aspiration-raising policy discourses are lived in ways that both accentuate but that might also contest their terms. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, we theorize aspiration as ongoing performances that can be altered and remade in affective scenes of interruption. We put our theorization to work in a longitudinal study that followed a young woman, Marie, throughout her upper secondary education. Whilst Marie's performances of aspiration predominantly chimed with such individualistic policy discourses, she would also describe moments where these performances were seemingly interrupted. These were moments where Marie vividly experienced concerns related to planetary crises. The analysis carefully unpacks these moments, and we argue that they bring Marie into contact with the political stakes in her life and lead her to search for alternative, more sustainable, and collective modalities of aspiration. Hence, supplementing previous studies that have shown how inequality is reproduced through aspirations, the paper contributes with new understandings of how alternative modalities of aspiration may emerge that potentially exceed structural limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of 'biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of 'biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a 'problematic subject'; secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction; and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a quest to achieve a ‘world class’ education system through a process of identifying and adopting the practices of those systems whose pupils perform best in league tables of achievement. This is the rationale for the range of new policies proposed by the coalition government in the schools White Paper published in November 2010, which promotes whole-system reform in England. This article examines the White Paper and analyses the sources and nature of the evidence for reform and the congruence between the policy intentions and their associated policy actions. The analysis suggests that the evidence for the proposed reforms and policy actions is at best tenuous. Both the White Paper and its key sources of evidence are characterised by: a selective use of data: a propensity to mix and match the sources of comparison; and an overall tendency to employ comparisons with high-performing systems elsewhere as a façade to legitimate preferred policy options. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fair access and widening participation currently occupy a prominent position in the UK higher education agenda, but these terms remain ambiguous. In this paper we identify two prominent strands of policy in the government's approach to access and the widening of participation and contrast these with a third, more progressive perspective. The academic strand seeks to attract 'gifted and talented' young people into an unreformed higher education system. The second strand, which we term the utilitarian approach, posits a need for reform. However, this is undertaken largely to meet the requirements of employers and the economy. In contrast, a transformative approach values diversity and focuses on creating a system of higher education that does not place the burden of change upon potential entrants. This framework is used to explore some of the implications of the government's White Paper The future of higher education. First, the purpose of higher education is discussed, with particular reference to the distinction between economic and social objectives. Second, the government's view of the structure of the higher education sector is examined, by scrutinizing the notion of institutional differentiation and the role of the access regulator. We conclude that within a more differentiated higher education sector different aspects of the access discourse will become dominant in different types of institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an international policy environment of intensified high-stakes accountability, pupil assessment data are an invaluable commodity and critical indicator of both school and teacher effectiveness. Teachers' engagement with pupil data and the associated experiences of increased accountability are of great consequence, and highly contentious for perceptions and experiences of policy. In the context of the English primary school, this paper explores the progressively tactical nature of teachers' enactment of assessment policy, and the impetus to 'make the data look good'. It draws upon an empirical study of rich qualitative data from 42 interviews with 22 primary teachers employed in the South-East of England. The findings add to an evolving field about 'gaming', and particular consequences for teacher identity are discussed. The paper further advances insights about teachers' experiences of 'in-school assessment' as pertinent for understanding gaming. It locates the pupil progress meeting as an iteration of teacher accountability and performativity, and particular site of contestation, and a specific contribution to knowledge in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages, Sara Ahmed's theorising on 'the uses of use' to frame an analysis of the hidden, embedded effects of standardised testing policy that have become normative practice/s in Queensland, Australia. It (re)examines data from an ethno-case study into the datafication of assessment and learning over one school year, in primary and secondary schooling contexts, to understand the uses of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in a new, critical light. We explore schools' contemporary uses of NAPLAN – intended or otherwise – to demonstrate how the policy effects of NAPLAN have become insidiously submerged within the daily practices in schools. Drawing on interviews with 27 teachers and seven school leaders, classroom and staff meeting observations, and artefact data, we reveal the invisible yet profoundly altering presence of NAPLAN and its consequences. Specifically, we analyse the ways in which NAPLAN practices, structures and technologies are both hidden and yet manifestly altering as a) practices that disappear into their uses, becoming unidentifiable and routine; and b) practices that follow well-used pathways that further embed particular uses. We counter rhetoric of NAPLAN normativity and complacency, instead demonstrating that its current uses, while not originally intended, are insidious and profound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the article discussing the national education research strategy in Great Britain. Definition on the function of strategy in the national education research; Opposition to the proposed Education Priorities Group; Threats to the academic freedom.

In July 2021 the Chinese Government unexpectedly released what has become known colloquially as the 'Double-Reduction' policy. The policy decreed the reduction of homework pressure on students and greater control of private tutorial companies. In this paper, we set out to understand why the Chinese central government launched the 'Double-Reduction' policy in mid−2021 by using narratives to analyse the three most circulated explanations for the policy and its timing. We use data from a range of formal and informal policy texts. The three narratives, including one policy narrative dominant in the official discourse and two alternative ones, constructed the causal stories about the policy's rationale from multiple perspectives. The combination of multiple perspectives and a narrative approach helps reveal the policy event's complexity and lays a foundation for researchers interested in tracking the development trajectory of this new policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that materializes digitalized school leadership practice. The policy instrument is made available as a 'helpful tool' by a Swedish official education agency. The paper scrutinizes the policy knowledge process set to work within the instrument by the agency. Particularly, how the instrument may influence people to come to know and change schools, and how responsibility and risk of digitalization in schools seems to first be transferred to, and then between, people in schools. The paper is concluded by a discussion of how (a) three knowledge phases interact in the knowledge process of the instrument, (b) the technical – rather than social – solution that digitalized school leadership practice is found to be, and (c) implications for digitalization in schools as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon of interest to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although all young people in England are entitled to a full-time, state-funded education suitable to their needs, every year some are without a school place and must be found one through local fair access protocols. This paper uses the enactment of fair access protocols in one local authority to examine the impacts of policy shifts to increase the power of self-governing schools and reduce the role of local authorities in ensuring local educational inclusion. Drawing on observations of two fair access panel meetings and a school's preparations for these meetings, alongside Foucault's theorisation of relationships between local practices and wider policy conditions, I argue that particular tactics are produced through fair access practices, which prioritise procedural fairness to schools and serve to categorise perceived risky young people. This interpretation of fairness arises out of a policy landscape of tensions, which requires schools to balance individual performance priorities alongside collective duties for inclusive and equitable education, and turns what should be an inclusive policy into another facet of the increasingly nuanced exclusionary architecture of English education. The findings are internationally relevant given global support for self-governing schools which is creating new issues for the educational inclusion of marginalised populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD's PISA is seen as a 'global yardstick' against which countries measure the quality of their education systems. In 2018 PISA included an assessment of global competence. This paper starts with the premise that in using a single global instrument to 'measure' this phenomenon, PISA claims standardisation over contextually rich data that can then inform policy and, arguably, in turn practice. Data for this study is based on tracking 'global competence' through documentary analysis, interviews, and then 'survey encounters' where PISA global competence questionnaire items were discussed by principals and teachers in three schools in Victoria, Australia. The analysis illustrates that schools and teachers variously educate for global competence according to the specific cultural context, policy and curriculum in ways that highlight the inadequacy of a global metric. With the growing attention to educating for global citizenship and the OECD's development of global measures, this investigation of localised understandings of global competence magnifies the 'situatedness' of knowledge (and therefore assessment practices). Questions are raised about what is ignored in metrics when such a contested concept is operationalised, and points to the lack of validity of this metric because it de-contextualises how global competence is understood by teachers and enacted in curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the reasons for this failed endeavor by analyzing the complex, multilevel relations between policy and law in different national and historical contexts. With this, aspects of juridification as a process in education policy can be illuminated. In this regard, we suggest crucial aspects regarding juridification in public education: a focus on regulative failures in juridification processes, juridification's contexts, the mandate for putting it into action, the allocation of resources, and finally, its objective and subjective rights dimensions, i.e. how an individual can claim rights within the machinery of public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing move worldwide in education policy towards standardization in combination with a global trust in digital quantification and calculation. These policies cause frictions in early childhood education (ECE). Hence, this paper examines the way standards 'work' in ECE. The empirical study draws on the ideas of Actor-Network Theory to recount and examine the highly material processes of calculation and representation, in which standards become enacted and act in practice. The data was drawn from extensive interviews with early childhood teachers in the Netherlands as well as additional 'object interviews'. The analysis describes how a particular standard becomes enacted as an assemblage, which both invites and compels teachers and managers to engage in particular educational practices. Foregrounding standards and highlighting the way professionals work with, through or around them, enables educational professionals to (re)consider the doings of standards and creates a space to imagine how practices – and policies that shape these practices – might be assembled differently. We advance the argument that it is important for professionals to critically analyse their professional practices in light of increasing datafication. Enhancing sociomaterial sensibilities of teachers might support them to offset persuasive powers of sociomaterial policy assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that analyzing education policies through the lens of affect theory provides possibilities for understanding how particular concepts are associated with certain affective ideologies. To illustrate this, the paper analyzes the case of a recent publication by the Council of Europe titled Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. The analysis shows how various concepts related to 'democratic competences' are invested with affective meanings, cultural connotations and political rhetoric. The paper argues that democratic competences are effectively conflated with emotional competences, opening up an analysis of democratic education as a form of individual and psychological therapy. The conclusion addresses the implications of this argument for education policy research and practice. In particular, it highlights the importance of paying attention not only to the ways that affect shapes the production of policy text, but also how a policy seeks to invoke certain affective dispositions at the point of enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, universities have proliferated and flourished around the world, playing an important role in societal knowledge production and diffusion. However, in the past four decades, this old organizational form has been subjected to neoliberal, managerialist policy doctrines such as New Public Management. Following this, universities have tended to become more 'business-like' in their internal management and governance, with generally perceived adverse effects on the quality of academic education, research, and working conditions. These developments pose fundamental threats to academic freedom and free knowledge production and diffusion. Acknowledging various forms of academic resistance to, and coping with, these threats, the purpose of our paper is twofold. First, we adopt the concept of 'performativity' – hitherto researched mainly in primary and secondary schools in Anglo-Saxon contexts – to account for, and critique, neoliberal university policies, and practices in a variety of Global North settings. Second, through collaborative autoethnography, we add our own personal narratives to 'talk back' to managerialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4 - quality and equity in education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030) as a global education policy, this article investigates the accompanying consensus politics. It shows how political consensus among 193 UNESCO member states over the national implementation of SDG4 indicators was convened into a measurable commitment to the production, utilisation, and sharing of education data, a technical one. It argues that, the Technical Cooperation Group (TCG), a political Initiative from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), made instrumental use of indicators (thus data) to formulate and put into practice a global set of policy values dubbed collectively here as experimentality. Experimentality being inherently topological (working in spatiotemporal configurations), these values helped TCG think and act in topologically reflexive ways. That is, they enabled the formulation and putting into practice of spatiotemporal frames critical to bringing the global and the national together into collaborations for SDG4. Advancing the cross-disciplinary notion of experimentality and a topological semiotic approach to policy culture, this paper adds a value-focused perspective to the mobilities research on global education policy. A large corpus of web materials made official by TCG constitutes the empirical basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'governance' is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories and conceptual and empirical turns in the field of education. In this paper we systematically delineate the different meanings ascribed to governance within education with a focus on its polyvalence as a political project, empirical object and research analytic. Specifically, we highlight the various complementarities and tensions flowing from this rich and evolving language. We conclude by calling for more education researchers to reflect on this complicated history and attendant language as part of their framings and interpretations of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how teachers see policy and how the visibility of various aspects of policymaking are mediated by our school contexts. As a perspective from a K-12 classroom teacher conducting policy research with other classroom teachers, this paper also explores how teachers, in turn, might make our policy work visible to ourselves and the implications for teacher agency. Teachers in the study took part in a two-year participatory action research endeavour, joining school-based policy inquiry groups where we identified policies, mapped policymaking processes, and discussed the implications of our contexts. On one hand, these engagements highlight the central role a school's institutional narratives and professional culture play in constructing the ways we see policy. At the same time, they point to how our seeing exceeds and moves with and through such constraints. With reference to postcolonial interpretations of agency, I describe how as part of inquiry teachers constructed spaces for ambiguity and alternative accounts, and in doing so movement and difference, in policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interventions instated to disrupt the destructive effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on students of color were repealed as a result of the US Education Department's 2018 Federal Commission on School Safety report. Using a critical policy and critical discourse framework, this paper examines how the language used in the report facilitated the process of repeal while concealing the insidious effects that the repeal could have on students of color and especially black students. Based on this analysis, the paper argues that education policy discourse is influenced by and supports the covert operation of white supremacist ideological structures that hinder the struggle for equity and justice in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same time, funding support for EAL/D learners is substantial. The devolution of EAL/D support to individual schools through autonomous targeted funding results in policy 'everywhere', distributed across broad portfolios dedicated to ensuring schools provide quality education services for all learners, but also 'nowhere', lacking systemic support and detail on how inclusion should be enacted for EAL/D and with no accountability placed on schools to demonstrate that they are addressing EAL/D learner needs. The co-location of EAL/D policy with a broad systemic policy of inclusion, the absence of systemic professional support, combined with devolution to school sites has had real effects on the policy in practice. The analysis demonstrates there is the potential opening of EAL/D provision to market forces at school sites, where the private sector can potentially sell commercial 'solutions' directly to schools, which have greater autonomy over one-line budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp's framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents' childcare decision-making are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that best practice is a powerful form of governing practice in education policy whose distinctiveness remains conceptually neglected in comparison to the burgeoning literature on governing by numbers. Moreover, the paper identifies how the practice of generating best practice knowledge remains under-explored and under-conceptualised: we know surprisingly little about how best practices come into being in international policymaking contexts. The paper seeks to address these two gaps by examining the production of best practice in the European education policy space through the Open Method of Coordination. Drawing on in-depth observation, interview, and document data the paper uses political discourse theory to analyse the frontstage and backstage interactions involved in generating best practices for governing school systems in a Working Group coordinated by the European Commission. Analysis identifies three dominant logics which underpin the production of best practice and reveals how these logics work to confine to the backstage of meetings specific practices which threaten to call into question the credibility of best practice. The paper highlights how best practice works as a distinctive form of governing practice which deserves further consideration in debates relating to the role of knowledge in transnational education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a theoretical framework of policy assemblage, we analyse current primary mathematics teacher professional development in England, in the context of a transnational policy of mastery in mathematics influenced by East Asian practices. As well as the increased discourse of marketisation, and school and teacher autonomy, there has also been a paradoxical process of greater state influence over the content and form of professional learning. This paper maps the mathematics mastery market to show how marketisation and competition form a mirage that masks state-market assemblage. An analysis of these assemblages illuminates the state's role in fostering a market whilst also operating as an actor in this market, in this case in mastery professional development. Within the mastery market, tensions arise between the phenomena of replication and isomorphism and differentiation of 'offers' that develop affinity groups and networks. Thus, we extend previous descriptions of the hierarchy, markets, and networks, and the roles of state funded actors within teacher professional development by identifying the importance of multiplicity of logics, assemblage as a process of labour, and the dynamic nature of relationships and activity. Resources to support teacher professional learning are mobilised in competitive processes with apparent choice hiding state direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teach For All (TFAll) is global network of programs based on Teach For America. Since 2007, TFAll has spread to more than 60 countries and had a considerable impact on educational policy across educational jurisdictions. Scant research, however, has examined 'shadow' programs based on this model but unaffiliated with TFAll, such as Teach For Taiwan (TFT). This paper engages in a critical policy analysis of TFT and examines both its emergence and (mis)alignment with educational policy. Our analysis first highlights the inspiration and support TFT has drawn from TFAll and its affiliate programs, despite its unofficial status. The paper then examines how TFT is aligned strategically with recent policy shifts toward deregulation in Taiwanese education. We also find that TFT is misaligned with key educational structures, including the national salary scale for teachers and teacher education system, resulting in a new category of transient teachers who are uniquely positioned in the teaching roles they assume but largely unable to continue teaching beyond TFT. We argue that more attention within education policy studies should focus on the impacts of (un)official TFAll programs – particularly given their disproportionate power and positioning to effect global educational change – and their (mis)alignments with national systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing emphasis in education policy on 'what works for whom and in what circumstances', there is still considerable attention to decontextualised 'best practices' that emerge from cross-country comparisons of student achievement. Also, while operational and even political aspects of context are increasingly incorporated into policy research, there is relatively little attention to the relationship between sociocultural context and education policy. In this paper, I explore the extent to which national sociocultural context influences the relationship between one aspect of policy – teacher accountability – and student outcomes. I do so by using multilevel modelling to analyse international survey data on education (from PISA 2012, PISA 2015, and TIMSS 2015) matched at the country level with survey data on culture (from the World Values Survey and Hofstede's IBM study). I find that one of the sociocultural constructs significantly and consistently moderates the relationship between teacher accountability and student outcomes, suggesting that some teacher accountability approaches may be beneficial in certain sociocultural contexts but detrimental in others. This finding implies a need for caution in generating universal policy prescriptions from international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS. It also strengthens the case for viewing teacher accountability as a socioculturally embedded process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical policy analyses have hitherto largely focused on how formal institutions and agents (such as schools and ministries) formulate and enact policy. Less considered is the role and perspectives of families in mediating education policy. This paper discusses the importance of viewing families as not only policy subjects, but policy actors who play important roles in negotiating education policy reform. In the Singapore context, as in many contexts, there has been a growing policy emphasis on developing higher-order critical and innovative thinking to equip young people for the global knowledge economy. However, it is at the socioeconomic margins of society that policy ideals tend not to map out as policymakers expect. We draw on in-depth interviews with low-income families - analysed using a governmentality perspective - to understand how families navigate Singapore's policy landscape, particularly its growing emphasis on higher-order competencies within a neoliberal, performative, high-stakes education system. The paper concludes by elaborating on equity implications arising from this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With some of the propositions from the literature on 'policy enactments' as a backdrop, this paper addresses the circulation of a research policy innovation and its effects on the knowledge territory of an unlikely profession. Specifically, I show how the Research Excellence Frameworks' impact policy in the UK was an object first managed by policymakers but later released as an object of concern for professional academics, including philosophers. I follow 'impact' through texts, events and testimonies about its doings with a special interest in its creation, its polemical encounter with philosophers, its management and issues about its definition and the assessment criteria used and experienced by philosophers. I conclude with some remarks on the effects that the circulation and writing of impact case studies had on producing a social valorisation and attachment to impact, even amongst philosophers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, since the launch of its flagship study the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has become a behemoth of transnational influence on education policy making. To better understand the evolution of the OECD's perspective on education and the importance of PISA within the OECD's overall publications, I analysed over 900 OECD publications on education with a topic modelling approach. The analysis revealed that contrary to popular belief, the OECD is a multi-centric organization with various agendas in education policy making, focusing on economic changes, higher education, management, planning, and budgeting. PISA made up only 12% of the overall text corpus and was therefore far less discussed than expected. This is in sharp contrast to the general impression held, namely that the OECD's work in education mostly relates to PISA. Therefore, this study reveals that the OECD has a far broader agenda than anticipated. This paper acts as a systematic review of OECD literature to gain insights into its institutional objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the tensions between education policy's attachment to notions such as excellence and inclusion and its investments in managerial tropes of competition, continuous quality improvement, standards and accountability that are at odds with and which undermine its attachments. In order to explore these tensions, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, explained through Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes wide shut. My argument is that while the individual and society are both constituted through unavoidable division, antagonism and opacity, these notions are obscured through the operations of fantasy which holds out the promise of wholeness, harmony and redemption. In particular, education serves as a key site in which these fantasmatic ideals are promoted and pursued, a claim I substantiate via an analysis of the UK government's 2016 White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Specifically, I read the White Paper in terms of five fantasies of: control; knowledge and reason; inclusion; productivity; and victimhood. My argument is that while fantasy is an inescapable element that inevitably structures what we take to be 'reality', education policy might strive to inhabit fantasy differently, thereby finding ways of escaping its current mode of seeing education with eyes wide shut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department for Education (DfE) in England seeks to determine the actions of educationists in both the public and private sectors through the use of targeted instructive documents and white papers where broader policy intention is presented. Since 2010, as we will show, there has been a shift in the nature of such papers towards justification with 'evidence' and transparency through referencing in a 'scientific' style, with ramifications for both how policy is justified and the contestation of practices in education. This leads us to suggest that we are in an 'evidence era' where a dominant rationalized myth centres on the use of 'evidence' to justify practice. Meanwhile, how 'evidence' is constructed as research is undertaken, and how it is transformed as it enters a political environment, are important questions that are often overlooked. In this text, we analyse the change in 'evidence' practices before and after 2010, consider why the practices changed, and infer the effects the changes have had on the wider education environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issues that social researchers study and policymakers address are partly determined by how they think about the world around them. Their view of the social world often depends on their position within it. What their research reveals and their policies propose are, in part, a reflection of where they choose to look and how they interpret the world they identify. The result can be a myopic view of the social and a distorted explanation of how social relations work. In this paper, we argue the need to widen the aperture of the lens that social researchers and policymakers use to investigate and ameliorate educational disadvantage. In particular, in matters of education equity, beyond measuring opportunities and outcomes of target groups, we argue the need to consider the substantiveness of opportunities as well as the subjective conditions and objective contexts that mediate how people transform their resources into outcomes. Drawing on the work of both Bourdieu and Sen, we propose an expanded evaluative framework that outlines five spaces for assessing educational disadvantage: position and disposition, capital interaction, capability expansion, conversion ability, and conditioned choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political economy framework, in combination with a political sociology-driven approach to policy instruments. The analysis draws on two data sources: four White Papers and 37 in-depth interviews with top-level politicians, policy-makers and stakeholders, conducted between September 2017 and February 2018. The findings indicate that 'scandalisation' of Norway's below-expected PISA results and promotion of standardised testing as a neutral device contributed to the relatively abrupt adoption of national testing in the early 2000s. The increasingly dominant policy discourse equalising education quality and learning outcomes led to the institutionalisation of TBA, developed to ensure equity and quality standards in a decentralised education system. Increased visibility, benchmarking and administrative control are identified as key mechanisms in putting pressure on local actors to re-orient their behaviour. The study provides original insights into the drivers, expectations and strategies underlying TBA in a social democratic institutional regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses articles within the issue on topics including education policy, racial discourses and the use of policy analysis framework on Syrian refugee education policies in Lebanon.

Within the broad landscape of early childhood education and care politics and policies, calling quality reform into question is a political act. As numerous scholars have pointed out, policy structures that measure and identify what constitutes quality (and what does not) are not value-free and reflect neoliberal human capital economic agenda whose effects are rapidly changing early childhood work. This paper investigates how quality reform in the early childhood sector has reinvigorated historical distinctions between early education and early care to elevate early education as 'quality' via standardisation and systematisation regimes. Drawing on the Australian context as a local example relational to the global, the paper theorises that 'edu-quality' discourse and agenda problematically constructs early care work as intertwined with but also separate from early education inputs and outputs, attributing it unequal import and impact. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for sector stakeholders and advocates to challenge the ontological and epistemological distinctions and conflations that underpin edu-quality politics and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tension between broadening university capacity and maintaining quality is a global phenomenon. While numerous studies have analysed the enactments of various policies that aimed to address declining university quality, few have examined the underlying beliefs that define what is conceptualised as a 'quality problem' within the policy proposals. Utilising Carol Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' (WPR) approach, this study provides a nuanced analysis of this issue, centring on an underexplored aspect: how the 'quality' is made to be a particular kind of problem within a specific policy. Specifically, it scrutinises an uncommon policy in Taiwan – proposing the reduction of university places as a solution to declining quality – to critically analyse what quality is established as 'reality' that set limits on how higher education can be thought. A central thesis of this analysis is that higher education system comes into existence through ongoing formation as specific kind of object rather than existing as a fixed entity. Understanding the construction of quality problem and the objectification of higher education requires a critical examination of the underlying assumptions and a detailed mapping of heterogeneous practices that create forms of authority for certain perceptions of 'quality' accepted as true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of evaluation and data in education and education policy is a trend manifesting across a wide variety of policy contexts, holding in its grip national and global policies, with impacts that reach the level of individual children, teachers, and their subjectivities. Earlier research has mainly focused on the phenomenon in neoliberal contexts. This article presents a case study of Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy discourse built on a tradition of social democratic political rationality and egalitarian values. By utilizing Evert Vedung's metaphor of evaluation waves, we examine how the evaluation trend has influenced the Finnish ECEC policy, which has traditionally been skeptical toward the assessment of individual children's learning and skills and the production and use of data for accountability purposes. In the genealogical reading of ECEC curricula and policy documents from 2002–2021 as data, we identify three discursive practices – partnership, pedagogization, and evidence wave – that have socio-historically contributed to the formation of the present conception of evaluation in the Finnish ECEC policy discourse. Our genealogical reading also reveals a movement toward international trends – evaluating the individual child's skills – especially through the evidence wave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims a central role for school leaders (principals or head-teachers) in the enactment of social justice policy in schools, who act as key agents or 'gate keepers' for what counts as social justice in their contexts of practice. Social justice means different things in different contexts depending on where leaders – who use policy as an opportunity to advance what they think is achievable within the limits of available resources – are positioned in the field and how that defines their stances. Drawing on qualitative data generated through in-depth interviews with ten secondary school principals in two Australian cities, the paper analyses the engagement of school leaders with nationally prescribed equity-related policies. Our analysis shows that, depending on the institutional ethos and resources of schools and their own social justice dispositions, school leaders tend to take different stances towards nationally defined equity agendas. Their responses range from compliance to compromise to contest. The paper suggests that doing social justice in schools can never be unilateral, as policy documents suppose, but is characterised by context-informed policy translation, mediated by a range of interactive forces and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of social enterprise in relation (and in response) to the contemporary nexus between education and work. Contextualising social enterprise within the broader trend toward private influences in education, the paper explores how diffuse networks driven by both market ideals and a social conscience are shaping new sites of education and work on the margins. Drawing on in-depth research undertaken on the experiences of homeless street press sellers of the social enterprise The Big Issue, I bring focused attention to the lived experience of these transformations in policy and practice. The analysis reveals how entrepreneurialism intersects with precarious poverty to frame sellers' cultivation of their skills and techniques as enterprising workers on the margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primarily developed as an alternative to narrow measures of well-being such as utility and resources, Amartya Sen’s capability approach places strong emphasis on people’s substantive opportunities. As a broad normative framework, the capability approach has become a valuable tool for understanding and evaluating social arrangements (e.g. education policies and development programmes) in terms of individuals’ effective freedoms to achieve valuable beings and doings. This paper explores the recent emergence of ‘capability’ in Australian education policy, specifically in theAustralia in the Asian CenturyWhite Paper. We explore capability as a framing device and reveal how its various meanings are at odds with the scholarly literature, specifically Sen’s conception of capability and its implications for social justice in and through education. The analysis shows that the social justice intent of a capability approach appears to be overtaken in the White Paper by an emphasis on outcomes, performance and functionings that seek to serve the nation’s economic interests more than the interests of students, especially the disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]