Sociology Of Education Policy Research Articles

Teachers’ work under responsibilising policies: an analysis of educators’ views on China’s 2021 educational reforms

ABSTRACT This article offers unique insights into the relationship between education policy and teachers’ work. It considers how globally pervasive responsibilising regimes make teachers’ work more burdensome. Drawing on interviews with 15 school teachers, this article shows how China’s 2021 Double Burden Reduction Policy has reconfigured educators’ (class)work practices and pedagogical approaches. Specifically, it unpacks the policy mechanisms that: 1) condense school time and make teachers’ work more methodical and 2) prolong teachers' working hours that are dedicated to offering students after-school educational support, thus reducing the demand for shadow education. This article argues that this policy shifts the education burden away from tutorial enterprises and parents and onto the teachers, which illustrates a case of the impact of policy regimes on teachers’ work within the broader context of neoliberal globalisation. Moreover, this article produces a novel typological spectrum – submission, substantiation, and scepticism – to capture and understand the diverse ways in which teachers may respond to policy-led changes to their professional work globally. Overall, it generates new knowledge on the impact of homogenising education policies on teachers’ work and the heterogeneity of teachers’ responses to these policies, thus contributing conceptually to the wider field of policy sociology in education.

Taming the time zone: National large-scale assessments as instruments of time in the Russian Federation

Nationwide large-scale assessments (NLSA)—an example of cross-border policy mobility—manifest a proliferating means of governing formal schooling. In the Russian context, NLSA takes the form of a compulsory graduation examination called the Unified State Examinations (USE). In this article, we explore how a mobile policy instrument of the NLSA participates in the relational processes of time- and space-making in a particular federated context of Russia, and how this process intertwines with and is shaped by the presence of multiple time zones. We argue that NLSA is an instrument of time that attempts to achieve centralization of the complex federated structure of the Russian Federation. Yet, the work of the NLSA is not a smooth process in a country characterized by territorial vastness, a complex federated structure, and the existence of multiple time zones. Guided by the theory of logistical power and sociological perspectives on time, as well as empirical insights, we show how the time zones need to be tamed in order for the NLSA to exercise its centralizing role. Discursively, the time zone is introduced and publicly discussed to symbolically characterize Russia and justify political actions or their outcomes. Bureaucratically, the desire for simultaneity and synchronicity takes the form of a meticulous ordering of a sequence of actions through prescriptive documentation that regulates the NLSA. Technologically, synchronicity, simultaneity, and instantaneousness rely on and engender an expanding national infrastructure that mediates social relations and the processes of conducting the NLSA, cutting across the time zones and federal units. Based on this analysis, we propose that scholarship on policy mobility and education policy sociology at large could benefit from examining the relationship between time and education policy and governance in four intertwined ways: the time of policy, context as time, policy instruments as instruments of time, and time in policy instruments.

The relationship between disability and inclusion policy and sports coaches’ perceptions of practice

ABSTRACT The present study explored how disability-inclusive policies (e.g., the 7 Pillars of Inclusion and the Inclusive Swimming Framework) were enacted in practice by eight swimming coaches in Australia. The purpose of this study was to explore how these individual coaches experienced including disabled athletes within their practice and how they balanced elite- and mass-participation objectives. Coaches in this study worked in a variety of settings as either full-time employees of a swimming club, independent contractors, or employees of private schools that ran school and community swimming programmes. Theoretical concepts of policy enactment, drawn from policy sociology in education, guided the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with coaches. Participants reported coaching individuals competing at the state, national, and international level. Findings showed that coaches in this study ignored, adjusted, and re-worked official policies so they would fit with the contextual and cultural constraints of their organisations. Coaches were generally ambivalent towards people with disabilities; however, all were ‘willing and able’ to work with disabled athletes. Furthermore, findings indicated that the disconnect between coach development and inclusion policy development at Australian Swimming is effecting coaches, as these coaches did not see the promotion of inclusion as part of their coaching role. Therefore, it is posited that disability education should be included within broader coach education and development curriculum in line with broader governmental and Australian Swimming inclusion policy agendas aimed at improving participation of people with disabilities in sport. Implications for research, educators, and policy are discussed.

Multiple temporalities in critical policy sociology in education

ABSTRACT This paper argues that more focus on the temporal is needed in critical policy sociology in education. In so asserting, the paper extends the concept of ‘historically informed’ as included in the foundational definition of policy sociology in education proffered by Jenny Ozga. There are four foci to this extension to encompass the temporal, taken to refer to the complex relationships between past, present and future, namely: the changing historical concept/definition of policy; policy histories; the temporal construction work of policies; and changing spatio-temporalities and timespaces of policy in the context of globalization. To a considerable extent these have been neglected in policy sociology in education research and theorising and as such demand new research and theoretical work in the field. Looking back in time will help us understand the present and possible futures.

The turn towards policy mobilities and the theoretical-methodological implications for policy sociology

ABSTRACT This paper reflects critically upon how the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences, and its subsequent contribution towards ‘policy mobilities’, offers theoretical and methodological resources that can be usefully harnessed in education policy sociology. Just as there are new ways in which policy is being made and moved, there are equally new ways to be a researcher of education policy who seeks to understand these processes. My purpose here is to help crystallise and make explicit these new mobilities-informed approaches, not only for the purpose of considering how mobility can help reconsider how to think and practise policy sociology, but also to better reflect and accommodate the empirical changes inherent in contemporary policymaking and enactment. I first survey the literature around the mobilities turn and emphasise its implications for social science research, before turning to how policy mobilities theories and methodologies can be employed within policy sociology. Finally, I close the paper by reflecting on the implications of conducting policy sociology with a policy mobility lens and outline the issues that come from foregrounding movement in the research of education policy.

Sport coaches as policy actors: an investigation of the interpretation and enactment of disability and inclusion policy in swimming in Victoria Australia

ABSTRACTThis paper draws upon education policy sociology, and sport coaching literature, in critically examining sport coaches as policy actors. Stephen Ball and colleagues’ conceptualisation of different policy actor positions and roles provided the framework for research that investigated how eight professional swimming coaches in Victoria, Australia, interpreted and enacted disability and inclusion policy. A discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews with the eight coaches reveals the complexities associated with how and why different coaches interpret and enact disability and inclusion policy imperatives in different ways in their specific club contexts. Data are presented that shows coaches adopting multiple and hybrid policy actor positions and roles as disability and inclusion policy was interpreted, translated and ultimately, expressed as pedagogic rules and practices. Our discussion brings to the fore questions about power, agency and control in coaching, while highlighting both limits and possibilities for the enactment of inclusive disability sport policies by swimming coaches working in Victoria, Australia. In conclusion we suggest that this research illustrates that coaches are capable of enacting social change, and have some agency to do so, but at the same time appear constrained by established discourses that shape policy and give important direction to pedagogic practice. We advocate that further in-depth research is required into the coaching policy-practice nexus, particularly as it relates to the advancement of equity and inclusion.

Curriculum interpretation and policy enactment in health and physical education: researching teacher educators as policy actors

ABSTRACTPast research in Health and Physical Education has repeatedly highlighted that curriculum development is an ongoing, complex and contested process, and that the realisation of progressive intentions embedded in official curriculum texts is far from assured. Drawing on concepts from education policy sociology this paper positions teacher educators as key policy actors in the interpretation and enactment of new official curriculum texts. More specifically, it reports research that has explored four teacher educators’ engagement with a specific feature of the new Australian Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (AC HPE); five interrelated propositions or ‘key ideas’ that underpinned the new curriculum and openly sought to provide direction for progressive pedagogy in Health and Physical Education. The paper provides conceptual and empirical insight into teacher educators consciously positioning themselves as policy actors, motivated to play a role in shaping policy directions and future curriculum practices. As such, the teacher educators in this project are identified as policy entrepreneurs and provocateurs. The paper details a dialogic research process between the researchers that was designed to make curriculum interpretation a more transparent, collaborative and generative process. The data reported illustrates the research process supporting teacher educators to engage in productive debate about the possible meanings and enactment of the five propositions. Analysis reveals differing perspectives on the propositions and a shared investment in efforts to support their progressive intent. Empirically, the paper highlights the critical role that teacher educators will play in the ongoing enactment of a new curriculum that is overtly identified as ‘futures oriented’. Conceptually, the paper adds depth and sophistication to understandings of teacher educators as policy actors. Methodologically, we propose that the research process described can be usefully adopted by other teacher educators and teachers engaged in similar processes of curriculum development, interpretation and enactment.

Big policies and a small world: an analysis of policy problems and solutions in physical education

This paper uses Ball’s [1998. Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130] policy analysis and Bernstein’s [1990. The structuring of pedagogic discourse. Volume IV class, codes and control. London: Routledge; 2000, Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, research, critique (Revised ed.). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield] conceptualisation of boundaries as a basis for critically examining the notion of policy ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ in contemporary physical education. The paper introduces the notions of policyscape and policy magic to explain ways in which thinking about both policy problems and solutions in education is discursively constrained. Analysis of boundaries is presented as a means of revealing and prospectively challenging such constraint. Research findings from projects spanning different international contexts and phases of education are analysed to illustrate complex inter-relationships between a series of knowledge boundaries that variously define the policy and pedagogical directions that can legitimately be pursued in physical education. The paper presents a case for further critical research and policy action in physical education that draws insight from education policy sociology and that examines ways in which equity in physical education is being (re-) framed by broader policy processes and contexts.

Trading places: The impact and outcomes of market reform in vocational education and training

In 1990, Australian governments embarked upon a radical policy experiment to create an ‘open training market’, comprising public Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and private providers. The idea that vocational education and training could be traded in a marketplace, with provision subject to market forces and competition between public and private providers, was unthinkable for most at the time. Underwritten by government, TAFE had been the dominant post-school provider of trade and technical training, and ‘second chance’ education for disadvantaged groups since the early 1970s. From the early 1990s, however, vocational education and training was progressively redesigned within a market framework, and TAFE institutes have since been required to compete with private providers for government funding on a more ‘level playing field’. Justified by policy makers solely on the basis of economic theory, the construction of an ‘open training market’ has proceeded in the absence of any evidential support, and on the untested assumption that market-based competition produces better outcomes than government planning and coordination. Despite the unprecedented nature and potential implications of marketisation, ‘So far the great change in education has been undertheorised and under-investigated’ (Marginson 1999, p.229), not least in relation to vocational education and training. To rectify the knowledge deficit and promote informed policy debate, this thesis investigates and evaluates the impact and outcomes of market reforms in vocational education and training from a national perspective. The conceptual and evaluation framework for the thesis integrates the theory of ‘quasi-markets’ (Le Grand and Bartlett 1993) with insights and resources from the fields of political economy and the sociology of education policy. The thesis comprises a review of local and international literature on market reform in the public sector, particularly vocational education and training; an examination of the Australian policy, financial and regulatory framework for vocational education and training markets; an analysis of national data on student participation and finances; an investigation of the structure, composition and dynamics of the quasi-market for vocational education and training; and an evaluation of the operation and effects of market reform, with special emphasis on the two main market mechanisms of competitive tendering and ‘user choice’. The thesis employs a quantitative research methodology, and the main data collection instrument is a survey administered to a stratified sample of 2,581 public and private providers across Australia. The findings indicate that market reform in vocational education and training has produced mixed outcomes. Client choice, provider flexibility, and responsiveness to employers and private fee-paying clients have increased. But efficiency gains are questionable and the quality of educational provision, responsiveness to publicly subsidised students, and access and equity for disadvantaged groups appear to have declined. On balance, the costs appear to outweigh the benefits of market reform. The research also finds that, as a result of marketisation, TAFE and private providers are trading places with respect to organisational identity, values, priorities and income sources, with private providers becoming more dependent on government funds and TAFE institutes less so. Overall, the research casts doubt on the efficacy and desirability of markets in vocational education and training, and raises questions about their potentially adverse consequences from a public interest perspective. Policy alternatives are discussed, and areas for further research are proposed. The thesis concludes by arguing the need for a more creative and judicious mix of state planning and market forces; one that serves the needs and interests of all stakeholders and preserves the distinctive character and mission of the public TAFE sector. However in the wake of more recent market reforms, as discussed in the epilogue to the thesis, TAFE’s market share and financial base have shrunk to the point where its future viability is now in question.

Network ethnography and the cyberflâneur: evolving policy sociology in education

This paper makes the argument that new global spatialities and new governance structures in education have important implications for how we think about education policy and do education policy analysis. This context necessitates that researchers engage in new methodologies to ensure that there is a suitable link between their research problem and the methods utilised for its investigation. To this end, I suggest that network ethnography can be conceived as a ‘threshold’ methodology; a new way of looking at social relations in changing times with attendant methodological benefits and shortcomings. Here I constitute the network ethnographer as cyberflâneur, who, like the nineteenth-century flâneur is lured by and attentive to the ‘new’, where they embrace the convergence of space and new technologies to become a well-positioned observer of contemporary policy processes. In focusing on the cyberflâneur, this paper aims to provoke debate amongst policy sociology researchers about how we can reflect on and modify our practice to ensure we are contributing to meaningful research in the twenty-first century.

From policy to pedagogy: prudence and precariousness; actors and artefacts

This paper draws on concepts from contemporary education policy sociology to explore the prospective interpretation, contextualisation and enactment of Health and Physical Education in the Australian Curriculum. Analysis examines the dynamic between characteristics of official texts and the contexts in which responses will be made. The paper identifies the consultation draft curriculum as highly flexible, such that multiple aspects of past and current policy contexts can be expected to strongly frame its reading and enactment. Exploration of contexts points to the critical role that policy actors, agencies and artefacts will all play in determining the ways in which the new curriculum will be expressed and experienced in schools across Australia. Discussion raises issues for Health and Physical Education teachers, teacher educators and members of professional associations to consider in looking forward.

Revising rationality: the use of ‘Nudge’ approaches in neoliberal education policy

This article argues that the concept of rationality is undergoing significant revision in UK education policy-making, influenced by developments in several academic fields. This article focuses on the take up of behavioural economics in policy as one aspect of this revision of the concept of rationality, discussing how this has happened and its implications. Framed by a wider debate regarding the significance of a ‘crisis’ in neoliberal approaches to social change, behavioural economics suggests that a reliance on rational choice is insufficient and individuals need to be ‘nudged’ to make good choices. This revision and its impact on the subject of policy, the policy-maker and policy technologies are examined, and the discussion is supported by two illustrations from school choice and youth service policy texts from the 2000s. The potential use of ‘nudge’ theory in education is also considered with respect to the Conservative–Liberal Democrat government’s use of behavioural economics. In conclusion, we argue that the use of these ideas in policy, alongside others, marks a revision of the neoliberal idea of a rational chooser as the aim of policy-making, of which education policy sociology should take account.

The educational imagination and the sociology of education in Australia

A remarkable feature of the sociology of education is its proliferation under a broad gamut of research themes and topics. Understanding the relationship of education to social reproduction and social change are pivotal to the sociology of education, and have fruitfully informed research in fields such as gender and education, vocational education and lifelong learning, policy sociology in education, cultural sociology of education, literacy, social justice and education, globalisation and education. Tracking the historical trajectory of the sociology of education in Australia, this article underlines the productivity of educational research and methodological advances in the fields of gender, literacy, and policy. It also points to the failure of the sociology of education and educational research to engage with the education system’s complicity in reproducing Indigenous and ethnic disadvantage. I argue for an sociology of education along lines envisaged by Emile Durkheim who recognised the importance of understanding education systems past and present, so that educators might comprehend the relationship of education to social change. New theories, methodologies and fields of education play an important role in informing understandings of contemporary education. However, if education and educational research are to inform social futures, they require an educational imagination able to account for achievements and deficiencies; an educational imagination able to undertake theoretical deliberations about the social and material conditions, struggles and occlusions that have and continue to constitute the purpose and practice of education.

The Sociology of Education in Australia: A Political and Intellectual Trajectory

The sociology of education is fundamentally concerned with the role of education in social reproduction and change. In Australia such a focus informs fields like gender and education, vocational education and lifelong learning, policy sociology in education, cultural sociology of education, literacy, social justice and education, globalisation and education.This article examines the political and intellectual trajectory of Australian sociology of education. It points to the productivity of educational research in areas such as gender, literacy, and policy and to the failure of sociology of education to address the reproduction of Indigenous and ethnic disadvantage. The paper argues that the theoretical and methodological innovations that characterise sociology are a disciplinary strength, but that it is necessary for the sociology of education to fully grapple with issues of Indigenous and minority education and more recently issues of environmental sustainability.

Revisiting School Knowledge: some sociological perspectives on new school curricula

This article focuses on attempts to understand how the curriculum and pedagogy can help to reduce inequalities in the outcomes of schooling between those from higher and lower socio‐economic backgrounds. In the 1970s, the author was involved with Michael F.D. Young and others in the development of the so‐called ‘new’ sociology of education. Much of this work entailed laying bare the assumptions underlying the school curriculum and demonstrating how the selection of school knowledge was implicated in the reproduction of social inequalities. During the 1980s in England the curriculum was overtly politicised by the Thatcher government but the interests of sociologists of education moved increasingly away from the sociology of school knowledge to focus instead on the sociology of education policy. This paper identifies a recent tendency on the part of sociologists of education to return to the ‘knowledge question’. In particular, it examines Young's own role in this and his attempts to revisit and revise of his earlier position. Contemporary developments in curricular policy in England and Northern Ireland are then outlined and discussed. Finally, the paper considers whether the work of Basil Bernstein, particularly his concepts of classification/framing and recognition/realisation rules, might help us to address one of the prevailing political problems of many modern education systems — the systematic failure of socially disadvantaged pupils to perform well at school.

Educational research, governmentality and the construction of the cosmopolitan citizen

The turn to cosmopolitanism in educational research on citizenship education is indicative of a wider discourse of cosmopolitanism evident throughout social and cultural policy. This discourse represents a more ‘light-hearted’ use of the term than the philosophical tradition offers. This discourse should not be dismissed, however, but, instead, attention should be paid to who the citizen is that is addressed by such language. An analysis informed by Foucault's concept of governmentality draws attention to the way in which the discourse of cosmopolitanism relates to the entrepreneurial self and the form of accountability demanded of the knowledge economy. A particular understanding of citizenship and of our relations to others becomes apparent. In educational research on citizenship education, cosmopolitanism is afforded a problem-solving role in relation to globalisation and, more specifically, diversity. Attention is drawn to a meta-level, of the role of particular forms of research in answering to the demand for accountability. Research practice in educational research, or more specifically, education policy sociology concerned with citizenship education, is conducted in terms of the policy language it seeks to critique. Rather than seeking the openness associated with cosmopolitanism, therefore, such research is itself accountable to the demands for particular knowledge of the citizenry. This treatment is also evident in contemporary urban planning policy, similarly concerned with cosmopolitanism as a response to diversity and inclusion. In the current discourse of cosmopolitanism, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and indeed ‘citizenship’ operate in particular ways through social and educational policy that rather than being dismissed should be addressed due to their role in the construction of contemporary citizenship.

CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION, POLICY, AND THE EDUCATIONALIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract In this essay, Naomi Hodgson reconsiders the value of Michel Foucault’s normalization thesis to the study of educationalization in relation to contemporary educational policy and research. Hodgson begins by analyzing educational researchers’ response to the recent introduction of citizenship education in England, focusing specifically on a review of research, policy, and practice in this area commissioned by the British Educational Research Association (BERA). She argues that the BERA review exemplifies the field of education policy sociology in that it is conducted according to the concepts of its parent discipline of sociology but lacks critical theoretical engagement with them. Instead, such work operationalizes sociological concepts in service of educational policy solutions. Hodgson identifies three dominant discourses of citizenship education within the BERA review— the academic discourse of education policy sociology, contemporary political discourse, and the discourse of inclusive education — and draws attention to the relation of citizenship education to policy initiatives, and thus to educationalization. She then discusses Foucault’s concept of normalization in terms of the demand on the contemporary subject to orient the self in a certain relation toward learning informed by the need for competitiveness in the European and global context. Ultimately, Hodgson concludes that the language and rhetoric of education policy sociology implicate such research in the process of educationalization itself.

A White Veneer: Education policy, space and “race” in the inner city

This paper explores how neo-liberal education policy change and urban renewal in inner Sydney and London has interacted with “raced” and classed educational identities. I draw on two examples of policy change, the Building the Future policy development in the inner city area of Sydney and the “Excellence in Cities” partnership programme in East London. The paper outlines, and applies, a spatial education policy sociology framework to explore the interplay of space, place, “race” and education policy. This paper suggests that in inner Sydney and London “whiteness” as a racial construct is present but noticeably absent and that this absent presence creates a “white veneer” around educational policy change and urban renewal.

Globalizing policy sociology in education: working with Bourdieu

This paper uses Bourdieu to develop theorizing about policy processes in education and to extend the policy cycle approach in a time of globalization. Use is made of Bourdieu’s concept of social field and the argument is sustained that in the context of globalization the field of educational policy has reduced autonomy, with enhanced cross‐field effects in educational policy production, particularly from the fields of the economy and journalism. Given the social rather than geographical character of Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, it is also argued that the concept can be, and indeed has to be, stretched beyond the nation to take account of the emergent global policy field in education. Utilizing Bourdieu’s late work on the globalization of the economy through neo‐liberal politics, we argue that a non‐reified account of the emergent global educational policy field can be provided.

Intellectual histories in the field of education management in the UK

The field of education management has grown rapidly in the UK in the last 40 years, and central to this has been the location of members within higher education institutions. Field members have been able to develop a research agenda, validate award‐bearing courses, publish books and articles, and network at home and internationally. The field has located itself within the academy through staking claims for particular territory. The field has positioned itself around the practitioner, mainly within the school, as manager and leader, and there is an ongoing debate regarding the interplay between theory and practice. Field members have networked extensively abroad, and it is argued that the field's existence owes much to the encouragement and research base of the fields in North America and Australia. The project reported on in this paper is about developing intellectual histories of the field. I use Bourdieu's theory of practice to study how the habitus of field members is revealed through positioning, and how they have sought to distinguish their work from, but at times networked with, those located in school effectiveness, school improvement, and policy studies. In this paper I focus on the boundary between the field of education management and education policy sociology, and use Bourdieu to think through the positioning and repositioning that has taken place regarding macro and micro policy studies.