Annette Braun

How Schools do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools

Foreword or Introduction 1. Beyond implementation -Towards a Theory of Policy Enactment 2. Taking Context Seriously 3. Doing Enactment: People, Culture and Policy Work 4. Policy into Practice 5. Whatever happened to... 6. Policy Enactments - In Theory and Practice

Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: examining policy, practice and school positioning

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where ‘enactment’ refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south‐east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school‐based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own ‘take’ on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities.

Taking context seriously: towards explaining policy enactments in the secondary school

This first paper in the series concentrates on school context and outlines a framework which identifies and relates a variety of factors that influence differences in policy enactments between similar schools. In taking context seriously in our four case-study schools we argue that policies are intimately shaped and influenced by school-specific factors, even though in much central policy making, these sorts of constraints, pressures and enablers of policy enactments tend to be neglected. This paper considers aspects such as school intake, history, staffing, school ethos and culture, ‘material’ elements like buildings, resources and budgets, as well as external environments. These factors are conceptualised as situated, material, professional and external dimensions and we aim to present a grounded exploration of the localised nature of policy actions that is more ‘real’ and realistic than that often assumed by policy making.

Policy actors : doing policy work in schools

This paper considers the ‘policy work’ of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the ‘problem of meaning’ and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get ‘enacted’. It argues that ‘policy work’ is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of enactment. The teachers and other adults here are not naïve actors, they are creative and sophisticated and they manage, but they are also tired and overloaded much of the time. They are engaged, coping with the meaningful and the meaningless, often self-mobilised around patterns of focus and neglect and torn between discomfort and pragmatism, but most are also very firmly embedded in the prevailing policies discourses.

Policy Subjects and Policy Actors in Schools: Some Necessary but Insufficient Analyses.

This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects – as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the hermeneutics of policy, that is the ways in which policies in schools are subject to complex processes of interpretation and translation. We suggest that both views are necessary to understand the work of policy and ‘policy work’ in schools but that neither view is sufficient on its own.

Life in the pressure cooker — school League tables and English and mathematics teachers' responses to accountability in a results-driven era

Abstract This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achieve brings and the possibility of resistance.

Between the estate and the state: struggling to be a ‘good’ mother

The paper draws on an ESRC‐funded study of 70 families in two London locations. It focuses on a set of contemporary and contradictory political discourses that work on and through the lives of working‐class mothers and thereby create tensions and impossibilities within their lives. We illustrate the ways in which these women are positioned by and within these discourses in ways that leave them vulnerable to political and media criticisms.

Behaviour, classroom management and student 'control': enacting policy in the English secondary school

This paper draws on an ESRC‐funded study of policy enactments in English secondary schools (RES‐062‐23‐1484) based on case‐study work in four similar ‘ordinary’ schools. The study has two main objectives; to develop a theory of policy enactment and to explore empirically the differences in the enactment of policy in similar contexts. Taking these objectives as drivers for analysis, this paper explores the way that managing behaviour is translated and enacted in institutional policy and practice. This paper argues that behaviour, classroom management and student ‘control’ continue to be significant aspects of education policy and practice in schools. It examines what is involved in policy enactment from a policy sociology perspective. Some examples of ‘doing’ discipline policy work are then considered. The paper argues that policy, even when it is centrally mandated, is translated, adjusted and worked on differently by diverse sets of policy actors. Thus, variability and distinctiveness characterise policy enactments at the different levels of practice within and between individual, but similar, schools.

Assessment technologies in schools: 'deliverology' and the 'play of dominations'

This paper, based on ESRC‐funded research work in four case study schools, explores the ‘pressures’ to ‘deliver’ which bear upon English secondary schools in relation to GCSE performance. It further illustrates the ways in which pressure is transformed into tactics which focus on particular students, with the effect of ‘rationing’ education in the schools. Foucault’s analysis from Discipline and Punish is deployed to examine these tactics and to relate them to more general changes in the regime of techniques and ‘play of dominations’ operating in English schools.

Disciplinary texts: a policy analysis of national and local behaviour policies

Drawing on ESRC-funded research this paper considers some characteristics of the policy process in schools using the construction of behaviour policy in four English secondary schools as a case in point. It argues that behavior policy, like other policies, is enacted in particular and distinct institutional contexts with their own histories; that behaviour policy at the school level is an ensemble of issues/fragments, principles, directives/imperatives and procedures/practices which are messy and complex; and that behaviour policy is very much a collective enterprise. This process of construction and enactment of policy draws upon a range of resources developed within contexts of recontextualisation and involves sophisticated interpretations and translations of policy texts into action.