Kate Hoskins

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.

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.

Policy discourses in school texts

In this paper, we focus on some of the ways in which schools are both productive of and constituted by sets of ‘discursive practices, events and texts’ that contribute to the process of policy enactment. As Colebatch (2002: 2) says, ‘policy involves the creation of order – that is, shared understandings about how the various participants will act in particular circumstances’. In schools, part of the ‘creation of order’ takes place around the production and circulation of signs, signifiers and policy symbols. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this paper details and describes some of the discursive artefacts and activities that reflect, and ‘carry’ within them, some of the key policy discourses that are currently in circulation in English secondary schools. Most policy analysis omits the artefactual and in documenting and theorising policy enactment this paper begins to consider the role that artefacts play in this process.

Raising standards 1988 to the present: a new performance policy era?

This article explores the context of the period following the Education Reform Act 1988 in terms of the efforts by successive governments to raise academic standards. These attempts are illustrated by discussion of the impact of the introduction of market forces and parental choice, a centralised National Curriculum and associated assessment regime, the increasing cultures of performativity and surveillance in schools and the resulting commercialisation of education. The article then examines the current Secretary of State for Education, Mr Goves, plans for the future standards agenda1, speculating that the current trend of raising standards and emphasising standards and performance is nearing the end of its useful life. Finally, drawing on Barkers2 advocacy of progressive community schools and the best of the progressive tradition the article suggests a counter argument to the creeping commercialisation and narrow results-based focus on standards in schools since 1988. 1Department for Education, The Importance of Teaching: Schools White Paper (Runcorn: Department for Education, 2010). 2Bernard Barker, The Pendulum Swings: Transforming School Reform (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 2010).

Researching female professors: the difficulties of representation, positionality and power in feminist research

This article draws on findings from my doctoral research to exemplify some of the difficulties I encountered when interviewing 20 female professors1 and subsequently writing about their life histories. In this article, I discuss how I addressed the issues of representing and positioning my participants, and I reflect on the power dynamics present in the research process. The article contends that by drawing on Bourdieu and Wacquants [An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] understanding of reflexivity and feminist interpretations of their work including McNay [“Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity.” Theory Culture Society 16: 95] and Adkins [“Reflexivity Freedom or Habit of Gender?” Theory Culture Society 20: 21], valuable research can be produced, despite the difficulties. A related aim of this paper is to reflect back after four years in an academic post on my position as a novice researcher, and some of the associated issues facing doctoral students, particularly the problems with researching upwards [Walford, G. 2011. “Researching the Powerful. British Educational Research Association On-line Resource.” Accessed March 17, 2014. www.bera.ac.uk/system/files/Researching%20the%20Powerful.pdfWalford 2011].

Can high-performing academies overcome family background and improve social mobility?

This article investigates whether schools that match Coalition Government criteria for excellence can enable hardworking students, regardless of background, to achieve good examination results and improved chances of social mobility. Students at two case-study academies were interviewed about family influences on their development and choice of education and employment pathways. In a ‘best case’ scenario, where prototype academies have rigorously implemented government policy, are students less reliant than before on family resources, influences and dispositions? Our data suggest that family background continues to be an important influence on participants’ attitudes, values, occupational interests and preferences. There are few signs that the new academy regime is creating improved opportunities for social mobility.

Aspirations And Young People’s Constructions Of Their Futures: Investigating Social Mobility And Social Reproduction

ABSTRACT The United Kingdom’s Coalition government has introduced an education policy that is focused on increasing the opportunities to promote and advance social mobility for all children within state education. Raising young people’s aspirations through school-based initiatives is a prominent theme within recent policy texts, which are focused on improving educational outcomes and thus advancing social mobility. This article draws on qualitative data from paired interviews with 32 students in two academies to first investigate if our participants’ aspirations indicate a desire for intragenerational social mobility and second, to explore our participants’ perceptions of the influences of their family background on their aspirations for the future. Analysis of our data highlights the mismatch between our participants’ aspirations for the future and the government’s constructions of what they should aspire to, as articulated in policy texts. By investigating aspirations, as part of a wider project to understand social mobility qualitatively, our data shows the important role of family in shaping our participants’ varied and diverse aspirations that are frequently at variance with government policy.