Meg Maguire

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.

Collaborative solutions or new policy problems: exploring multi-agency partnerships in education and health work

Since coming to power in 1997, two successive Labour Governments in the UK have actively attempted to tackle the problem of what they have called ‘social exclusion’. Their argument has been that social problems, which are overlapping and inter-related, need ‘joined-up’ policy solutions. For example, poor housing and low income can contribute towards and exacerbate lack of success in schooling and need to be tackled simultaneously. The Labour Government has argued that what is needed is a multi-agency partnership response which harnesses the strengths and expertise of a variety of welfare perspectives. This ‘partnership’ approach currently, characterizes social welfare policy-making in the UK. This paper critically explores the perceptions and experiences of those involved in one such multi-agency partnership which has been established to challenge an aspect of social exclusion: the exclusion of children from primary schools. At the same time, the paper examines the ways in which policy is constructed and enacted by those charged with its implementation. Initially, current policies are considered in respect of social exclusion focusing on some problems and dilemmas of multi-agency partnerships, as highlighted in other research. Drawing on data from one study, this paper goes on to examine partnership in one specific context, which combines health, education and social work in an inner-city primary school setting. Finally, it is argued that, if multi-agency partnerships are to achieve their potential, greater understanding of the difficulties involved in implementing new policies in such contexts needs to be considered at the outset.

Young lives, diverse choices and imagined futures in an education and training market

In the UK, policy developments in vocational and further education have created a market in post-16 education and training. This paper reports on an Economic and Social Research Council study and one small cohort of young people entering and moving through one such urban market. They enter with very different learning identities, aspirations and motivations, and their ‘educational inheritances’ prepare them differently for participation. Some young people simply want ajob and awage and ‘nomore learning’, others come with alongterm commitment to gaining higher qualifications. The authors both describe and explore a number of ways of conceptualizing these differences. Both despite and because of the changes in the local labour market ‘deep sub-structures of inequality’ re-emerge. The differentiation of routes and ‘spaces’ of opportunity confronting these young people are reproductive of social class divisions.

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.

Whose ‘learning’ society? A tentative deconstruction

In this paper we want to examine the construct of the Learning Society in its economic and social context in the UK. We will argue that the policy rhetoric which makes up the current discourse of the ‘learning’ society is both powerfully normative and unhelpfully reductionist and that it displaces and masks issues of inequality. The discourse of the Learning Society has conflated the achievement of increased levels of participation for 16‐ to 19‐year‐olds with the insertion of market mechanisms and relations and the assertion of self‐interest. This has meant that issues of exclusion, polarization and social justice have been systematically neglected. The Learning Society provides, we suggest, for a redrawing and relegitimation of patterns of exclusion. In particular, in a time of social crisis, middle‐class retrenchment (masked as familial duty) has re‐asserted itself, in part, through a specific, particular engagement with the Learning Society in order to ensure advantage and distinction. As Connell (199...

Social exclusion: exclusion from school

This paper explores recent policy approaches aimed at addressing school exclusions. It begins by exploring some of the ways in which social exclusion is interpreted. The limitations of ‘weak’ versions that work indirectly to ‘blame’ the excluded and work ‘on’ this constituency rather than taking a broader view which encompasses those who exclude are critically evaluated. This is done through locating the debate in two UK settings: the context of exclusions from school and the policy context of multi-agency interventions that have been set up to redress this form of exclusion. The paper argues for a stronger version of exclusion that incorporates a challenge to those who exclude. The paper is divided into three sections: a discussion of what is meant by social exclusion, an account of exclusion from schools in the UK and an exploration of the potential for change which resides in multi-agency or ‘joined-up’ policy work.