Discourses of aspiration, opportunity and attainment: promoting and contesting the Academy schools programme.

The Academy schools programme was launched in England in 2000, promoted as a school reform policy to raise aspirations, broaden opportunities and improve standards in disadvantaged communities. In this study, discourse analysis is used to demonstrate the ways in which these Discourses1 have been constructed, contested and strategically reworked at a national and local level, highlighting the connections between these different spatial scales. Therefore, the paper provides an empirical example of how geographers can use discourse analysis to conduct policy relevant research and encourages education geographers to undertake multi-scalar analyses which engage with geographical literature on the politics of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]