‘Brief encounters’: Researching education policy-making in elite settings

Abstract

Ethnographers have traditionally encountered problems in conducting qualitative research in elite settings. The powerful, in this case, the administrative and political elite in the United Kingdom, have considerable constitutional, legal, and cultural resources that enable them to deflect or -hannel any research in which they are the objects of inquiry. Th( United Kingdom, unlike the United States, has no framework of rights that compels the state to disclose information to its citizens. This paper presents findings of a study that examined the policymaking process for grant-maintained (GM) schools in the United Kingdom, which a focus on the obstacles encountered in interviewing the policymaking elite. Interviews were conducted with two groups that had considerable influence on the GM schools' policy: (1) six civil servants who were directly involved in drafting policy details; and (2) two male Conservative education ministers. One obvious danger to researchers is that they will simply reproduce the discourse of the powerful. However, narrative accounts can be analyzed to illustrate the rules they create and reproduce, and the context within which they were generated. (LMI) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************