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The Trade Union of Education in Finland, OAJ, is a large organisation covering early childhood education through to adult education and training. OAJ claims to have a key role in influencing education policy and often takes up progressive stances in the media. At the same time, there has been little evidence of it contesting government policy in any overt way. To explore whether OAJ really influences Finnish education policy and in what ways, this chapter looks at education policy concerning comprehensive schooling during the period of the centre-right Sipilä Government in power from 2015–19 and then at the interests and responses of the OAJ over the same period. Employing a thematic analysis of OAJ press releases and other publications, the authors argue that whereas the Sipilä Government’s education policy emphasised a more neo-liberal and individualistic approach to educational equity, the OAJ often sought to highlight a version of educational equality and its challenges associated with a democratic ideal of social justice. The OAJ also sought a longer-term perspective in Finnish education politics than was manifested in the various projects of the Sipilä Government. Overall, the chapter provides insights into Finnish education policy-making processes that involve decision-makers and working groups operating at both national and local (municipal) levels and the related positioning of the OAJ.

Over recent decades, the Finnish education system has become regarded by many as the best in the world, generating international fascination. This introductory chapter begins by explaining that while many accounts have mainly set out to explain Finland’s success, this edited book seeks to offer a ‘warts and all’ account of education in Finland. Drawing especially on sociological and education policy perspectives, it covers diverse aspects of comprehensive schooling in Finland and is intent on addressing the challenges facing education in this Nordic country in a rigorous and balanced way. The chapter goes on to provide a general background to Finnish schooling and a description of the comprehensive school system. It looks at the place of Finland in global policy debates, considers debates about schooling that go on within Finland, and notes some of the concerns of Finnish educational researchers and scholars. Finally, this introduction also provides a brief overview of the chapters in this 28 chapter book.

The Labour-led government elected in 2017 quickly decided to get rid of National Standards and set up a Curriculum, Progress, and Achievement Ministerial Advisory Group in 2018. That group reported in 2019 and a related Ministry of Education work programme has begun. This provocation from May 2020 provides some background to the MAG, considers its organisation and membership, and briefly mentions some features of the report and the early response of government. The use of data and the struggle for researchers to keep up with multiple reviews are also discussed.

This article seeks to describe a range of enablers of, and constraints on, private actors in New Zealand schooling, using scholarly, polity and mass media sources. It focuses particularly on the decades since the educational reforms of the 4th Labour Government in the 1980s. The article begins by providing a brief background on educational privatisation and governance in New Zealand and elsewhere, in order to provide some context for the concerns explored in the rest of the article. It then considers policy and practice enablers of private actors related to national ideologies and those of key demographics where long-held beliefs support private actors despite various commitments to public provision. The significance of national politics and policy shifts in formal and party-political senses are discussed next, including ways that enactment of policy has opened up new spaces for private actors with indirect and sometimes unintended effects. Overall it is apparent that the conditions and events supporting the development of private actors in New Zealand have often been intermittent, piecemeal, uncertain, and sometimes serendipitous. A further research agenda in this area is outlined.

This chapter draws on research to identify the actors and interests involved in the commercialisation of schooling in Finland. It argues that edu-business in Finnish compulsory education is significant and growing, despite Finland's historical and continuing commitments towards public provision of education. The fourth group of actors affecting edu-business in Finland are consultancy businesses that are medium or large IT service companies. The actors in edu-business we identified in this study are linked to each other and also to state actors in various ways that could be regarded as a business ecosystem. Central to edu-business in Finland is the development of new products, scaling them to wider set of customers, testing them in PISA-branded Finnish schools and at the same time passing this off as part and parcel of everyday school life. The rhetoric of partnerships with schools in the logics of business-making can benefit corporate expansion and profit-seeking.

New Zealand’s National Standards policy has been deeply controversial in the education sector, especially amongst primary teachers and principals. This article provides a view of the National Standards from their introduction up until 2016, nearly a decade after they were first mooted. The issues covered: (i) offer retrospective insights, (ii) acknowledge continuing uncertainties, or (iii) ask questions that had become newly relevant by 2016. They include processes within the Ministry of Education, the role of advisory groups, the public release of National Standards data, and the origins and impact of the National Standards. They also include whether teachers and principals have been gradually won over to the National Standards, use of the National Standards in ‘social investment’, the Progress and Consistency Tool and possible wider political purposes of headline policies like the National Standards. A theme that connects the issues is concern about policy processes. The article concludes by calling for a more genuine commitment by Government to evidence-informed policy.

School-based research has historically played an important role within the education system contributing to our understanding of the organisation and practice of formal education. Supported by relevant literature, this article reports on current challenges in conducting school-based research in Aotearoa New Zealand as experienced by one researcher. It suggests that conducting school-based research is becoming increasingly difficult, with possible explanations for this being the divergent workflows of researcher and school-based participant(s), the volume of demands on teachers and schools, and restricted roles for teachers and parents, which increase the risk of research fatigue. The article argues that although school-based research is rarely an immediate priority for school leaders, it is imperative that they support it if they want to be informed by its insights for policy and practice.

‘Investing in Educational Success’ (IES) was a policy announced in New Zealand in January 2014. It was announced by John Key, then Prime Minister of New Zealand’s National-led Coalition government, which has been in power since 2008. The clusters were intended to lift the quality of educational provision in New Zealand, would generally have a geographic focus and involved various new positions of teacher and principal leadership that would attract substantial additional salary. The IES highlights political pressures on the education sector and mixed responses amongst those in leadership positions in education. The IES has seen professional development for teachers and educational research strongly framed by the new Community of Learning in ways that are likely to increase private sector involvement in education. In education there have been various new steps towards privatisation such as public–private partnerships to build schools and the development of charter schools.

The Kiwi Standards have not only been a challenge for practitioners but have also brought political threats and opportunities related to research. This chapter discusses how New Zealand policymakers and academics sought to have influence over public and education sector opinion drawing on research. It then discusses some political setbacks the author experienced while undertaking the RAINS research and reflects on issues such as research ‘independence’, the reporting of findings from controversial research projects and the tensions between being a researcher and an activist. Challenges to the legitimacy of research and academic involvement in public debate need to be anticipated and addressed by researchers much like other aspects of their work. There is continuing academic commentary and activism around the Kiwi Standards.

This chapter has two purposes. The first is to give a description of the Kiwi Standards and Ngā Whanaketanga Rumaki Māori, the Māori assessment system that has accompanied the Kiwi Standards. It outlines the requirements and guidelines around the Kiwi Standards and Whanaketanga recognising that this has changed in various ways since first introduced. The second purpose of this chapter is to discuss the available research. The RAINS (Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards) study was undertaken by the author and provides most of the findings used in Chaps. 5 and 7 of this book. This chapter summarises the scope and methodology of RAINS and considers other relevant research also.

In this chapter, some well-known education academics bring comparisons with their home settings of Australia, England and the USA, respectively. Apart from their academic expertise, they have all been visiting academics in New Zealand over the last few years and are well positioned to comment. Prof. Bob Lingard from the University of Queensland, Australia, provides ‘An Australian, global and policy perspective’. Prof Meg Maguire of King’s College London provides ‘An English perspective’. Finally, Prof. David Hursh, University of Rochester, New York writes about ‘People or Data? Lessons from New Zealand’.

Publication of education data is common enough around the world, but what is internationally noteworthy about the Kiwi Standards data is the sloppy manner in which it was first released and the muted policy and popular role it has subsequently demonstrated. This chapter discusses the initial release of the Kiwi Standards and Whanaketanga data and how it has subsequently become published annually as part of a wider set of educational data and targets known as Public Achievement Information. The second part of this chapter discusses the online Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT) first announced in 2012. This has been a high-tech response to the Kiwi Standards moderation problem but was also highly contested. PaCT was to be mandatory but this requirement was relaxed in 2013 and the take-up is still limited.

This chapter outlines how the Kiwi Standards framework was announced in 2007 and legislated under urgency in 2008, and how the Kiwi Standards were developed and then promoted in various ways over the initial period of getting them underway and into schools. The politicians and policymakers of the National-led Government used a range of ‘carrots and sticks’ to bring the Kiwi Standards in. But since they were being introduced into a setting that had previously avoided high-stakes assessment in primary education, the stage was set for conflict. There was a feisty campaign by principals, teachers and others against the introduction of the Kiwi Standards, and this chapter also looks at the role of the media in portraying the issues and motivations of all of those involved.

This chapter reviews how the international situation has influenced the emergence of the Kiwi Standards. The Kiwi Standards may be viewed as a lagging and somewhat unusual response to the same climate of high-stakes national assessment that has long overtaken the school systems of other Anglo-American countries. Kiwi Standards could also reflect the growth of international large-scale assessments (LSAs) such as PISA run by the OECD. New Zealand has never held back on market and managerial reforms, including in education with self-managing schools. New Zealand has also always been an enthusiastic participant in LSAs. Overall, the Kiwi Standards might be as much an attempt to respond to the new wave of international testing activity as any belated alternative response to national testing.

This chapter highlights the issue of different enactments of the Kiwi Standards across schools, depending on the history and present-day context of the schools. It begins by illustrating that there is plenty of scope within the arrangements for the Kiwi Standards policy to have different interpretations in different school settings across New Zealand. Second, it shows that the RAINS schools were on different curricula, pedagogical, assessment and leadership trajectories before the Kiwi Standards policy was introduced and that their subsequent responses to the Kiwi Standards have represented incremental changes along those varying paths. The overall picture then is that the Kiwi Standards have actually been very local when enacted.

This chapter draws on the RAINS research to examine the takeup of the Kiwi Standards system and the likely changes it was bringing about. The research suggested the Kiwi Standards were having favourable impacts in areas such as teacher understanding of curriculum levels, motivation of some teachers and children and some improved targeting of interventions. Nevertheless, such gains were overshadowed by damage being done through intensification of staff workloads, curriculum narrowing and the reinforcement of a two-tier curriculum, the positioning and labelling of children and unproductive new tensions amongst school staff. The latter part of this chapter looks further into the views of parents and children and those working for the Education Review Office (ERO).

By 2016 there was compliance with the Kiwi Standards and seemingly wide acceptance, although also continued recognition in schools and policy circles that they vary widely across schools. Opposition parties would remove the Kiwi Standards. For the Government, hope for more dependable data has become invested in the online Progress and Consistency Tool (PACT) while hope for addressing educational inequalities is now increasingly given over to a ‘social investment’ approach. The Kiwi Standards and Whanaketanga have become areas of for-profit activity in education. Debates over Kiwi Standards have become overtaken by other developments that have become clearer including the wider privatisation of public services, reduced public spending and more obvious social inequalities.

Teacher education faces a big problem, or rather a series of interconnected ones. If teachers want to be of service to current and future generations, they need to understand our neo-liberal and globalising world and the positioning of educators within it.

This article discusses the everyday politics surrounding research on a controversial government policy. The research in question is the Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project on National Standards in New Zealand primary schools being undertaken by the author. This three-year study was funded by the New Zealand primary teachers' union, the NZEI, an organisation opposed to the National Standards policy. The project was quickly attacked by a cabinet minister and the media but there have also been significant accomplishments in carrying out and reporting the research and in relevant activism. As the article discusses the political setbacks and successes while undertaking the research, it reflects on issues such as research funding, research ‘independence’, the reporting of findings from controversial research projects, the tensions between being a researcher and an activist and the importance of supportive networks. The article provides a case study of how challenges to the legitimacy of research and academic involvement in public debate may need to be anticipated and addressed by researchers much like other aspects of their work.

To what extent it is best to see the market as a class strategy is a question which goes to the heart of research debates over school quasi-markets in New Zealand and elsewhere. Whereas most research suggests that school quasi-markets increase social and educational inequality, Stephen Gorard and colleagues have argued that school quasi-markets are relatively benign. From their perspective, class strategy research has generated a poorly supported and unhelpful ‘crisis account’. This article summarises the range of scholarship and research evidence which supports the class strategy account and considers some problems in the perspective which has been taken by Gorard and colleagues. It is argued that the claims of Gorard and colleagues have not unravelled the arguments of class strategy proponents but in important respects are rendered problematic by those arguments.

Inaugural lectures are all about celebrating scholarship but their content, of course, is not necessarily celebratory. Indeed if there is anything to be celebrated about my work to date, it is probably a stubborn refusal to be satisfied with education policy, practice and research while we have such an unequal society and important political pressures towards greater inequality. Instead, as a policy sociologist in education, I have long been drawn to uncomfortable questions about whose interests are really being served in and through education (Thrupp, 1999a). I have been interested in how developments in education policy and practice can lead to greater social inequalities and how seemingly worthwhile policies and practices can be undone by other developments (Thrupp, 1999b). In recent years I have also increasingly turned

Existing research demonstrates the impact of context on school organisation and management, curriculum and pedagogy and on student peer relations. New developments in English education policy will devolve more responsibility for dealing with these issues to headteachers. Headteachers' readings of their contexts and the responses that they make are thus of increasing interest. This paper draws on interviews with eight headteachers of less advantaged English primary schools to explore how they understand and articulate the contexts in which their schools operate and how this knowledge is translated into strategies for organising curriculum, pedagogy and other school processes. These headteachers observed context through the lens of the behaviour of parents and children in relation to school, contrasting it with an assumed middle-class normality. More critical perspectives on families' social and economic position or on the contribution of school practice to educational exclusion were largely absent. School responses were many and varied but, given the constraints of budgets, market and performative pressures, were unlikely to substantially transform the educational experiences and outcomes of disadvantaged students. We point to the continuing need for more contextualised funding mechanisms and policies to improve schools in disadvantaged areas and also, in the light of devolution to schools, to the need to develop mechanisms of support to headteachers to help them to develop critical understandings of context and to reflect on school process and practices in the light of these understandings.

Multiple contexts interact to position any school on a spectrum from cumulatively advantaged to cumulatively disadvantaged. This article discusses a study of the contextual advantages and disadvantages experienced by primary schools in the south east of England, concentrating especially on schools in the least deprived 5% of schools nationally. The research highlights the central influence of advantaged socioeconomic contexts on day‐to‐day school processes and on the related perspectives and beliefs of head teachers as well as variations on this theme related to other external and internal contextual variables. It illustrates that England’s most socially advantaged primary schools are likely to have much in common including a high level of parent involvement, a strong focus on student learning and progress, considerable ability to raise funds, very good reputations and only a handful of students with serious learning or behavioural problems. They also have in common middle class forms of transience and pr...

The paper examines variations in the extent of special education needs (SEN) in different socio-economic contexts, drawing on data from 46 English primary schools. It examines the implications of variations in SEN for individual pupils and for school organisation and processes. It reviews funding allocations for SEN and what they mean for the provision of support in different settings.

New Zealand has historically been a relatively egalitarian society and there important steps have been taken to redress the colonization of the Maori people. But, in the decades since 1984, socio-economic disparities have increased and there is still much to be done to translate progressive legislation into everyday reality. Thrupp argues that education for social justice and citizenship mirrors these societal contradictions. The extent to which the formal curriculum becomes enacted with a social justice orientation often falls short of aspiration and New Zealand teachers are under considerable workload pressures that cut across their good intentions. Education for citizenship and social justice is becoming marginalized by the standards agenda and a fixation on data. The promotion of citizenship and social justice through New Zealand education remains tenuous.

Although small, New Zealand is a useful comparative case for studying changing school admissions policies and their impact in urban areas. This article reviews New Zealand's admissions policies and their impact over three periods: the post-war social-democratic period, the 1990s when quasi-market policies were embraced in New Zealand; and the period since 2000 when the present Labour government reintroduced school admissions by residential zoning. The available evidence from all of these periods shows that New Zealand's urban middle classes have always sought and been successful in finding ways to educate their children in socially advantaged schools, but have done this in different ways depending on the policy of the day. The evidence from all periods also shows socially advantaged urban schools participating enthusiastically in this project.

This article argues that schools in decline in educational markets may not be as ineffective as neo-liberals assume. Rather, recent New Zealand research suggests that the fortunes of schools in the marketplace largely reflect the characteristics of their student intakes. Schools in decline typically have poor intakes. Such schools may be less attractive to parents than middle class schools. Schools with poor intakes also have to cope with often overwhelming learning and pastoral needs which constrain their ability to offer demanding academic programmes. Allowing such schools to fail and close therefore appears to be a case of punishing the victim. State intervention is required.

Research is increasingly highlighting the influence of school contexts on school processes and student achievement. This article reviews a range of social justice rationales for taking school contexts into better account, and highlights the challenges contextualisation currently poses for practice and for policy. It notes important constraints on contextualised practice and limited developments in contextualising policy. There is now increasing concern to recognise and understand context in school effectiveness and school improvement research but such research needs to consider school context much more, in order to provide a stronger underpinning for contextualised policy and practice. School composition research is potentially most insightful because it addresses the issue most directly. Nevertheless future large-scale studies in this area need to overcome a number of limitations within the existing literature.

This special issue is offered by BERA's Social Justice SIG and considers various aspects of recent education policy in relation to social justice. Although social justice is undoubtedly a central c...

While policy makers and school effectiveness researchers often insist that schools can make a substantial difference to student achievement, it is less clear whether school staff themselves really believe this. This paper draws on qualitative research in New Zealand schools where teachers, principals (heads) and trustees (governors) were asked how accountable they felt school staff could actually be for student outcomes. In contrast to official discourses about the responsibilities of teachers, the often complex responses of those interviewed illustrated relatively modest expectations of the ability of schools to affect student outcomes. The findings suggest that school staff have yet to take to heart the school effectiveness research catchcry that ‘schools can make a difference’ but that they also struggle to avoid a deficit approach without a stronger sociological understanding of the reasons for student failure.

This article is concerned with the way school leadership literature might act to prop up recent managerialist reform in education, that is the problem of 'textual apologism'. The discussion revolves around, and gives examples of, three broad categories of textual apologism: primarily problem solving, overt apologism and subtle apologism. School leadership also has a substantial critical or textually dissenting literature which is also discussed and exemplified. It is argued that this latter literature holds important potential for challenging the orthodoxy of school leadership. The article concludes by offering examples of dissenting messages school leadership texts should be providing to practitioners and considers implications for future scholarship in the area of school leadership.

Making the Difference (Connell et al., 1982 ), a sociological study of Australian families and schools, generated considerable interest and some controversy when it was published in 1982. This essay revisits the way the book was reviewed at the time and considers its contribution two decades later. In the 1980s it provided a substantial account of the relevance and limitations of reproduction theory to Australian education and it was also seen internationally as an exceptionally insightful study of the class-based and gendered relationship between families and schools. Although the research agenda signalled by Making the Difference was subsequently disrupted by the rise of the New Right, it is argued that its theoretical and empirical concerns provided a foundation for recent work on the impact of postwelfarist education policy and in this sense it remains highly relevant to the sociology of education today. The book's policy stance, although not without problems, also anticipated some of today's debates ...

A large proportion of the articles and commentaries contributed by Teddlie, Reynolds, Townsend, Scheerens, Bosker and Creemers in the recent Special Issue on “Twenty Years of School Effectiveness Research” were taken up with defending SER – school effectiveness research (Reynolds & Teddlie, 2001; Scheerens, Bosker, & Creemers, 2001; Teddlie & Reynolds, 2001; Townsend, 2001). Although I often disagreed with the defending arguments, and was left bemused by some, they generally did help to clarify SER perspectives in a way which will be very useful for future analysis. Obviously there is a lot to reply to, but in this short response I want to (i) make a few general comments; (ii) summarise a more extended discussion of Reynolds and Teddlie's arguments provided elsewhere; and (iii) also comment briefly on the contributions by Townsend and Scheerens and colleagues.