Sonia Exley

Making Policy with "Good Ideas": Policy Networks and the "Intellectuals" of New Labour.

The proliferation of policy think tanks and more broadly the rise of ‘policy networks’ can be viewed as indicative of important global transformations in the nature of the state. That is, the emergence of new state modalities, with a shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance, where policy is produced through multiple agencies and multiple sites of discourse generation. This paper addresses some particular aspects of this shift by focusing on a set of relationships and sites which have had some kind of influence upon the social and educational policies of UK New Labour governments. It has two main concerns. First, focusing on the generation and circulation of some of the key policy ‘ideas’ of New Labour, it maps out a related and overlapping set of policy networks which join‐up government, think tanks and some individual interlockers, who ‘straddle sectors and policy fields and settings’. Second, it highlights some of the main discursive elements that flow through these networks, in particular those of innovation and enterprise. They give particular emphasis on the role of ‘social enterprise’ and social entrepreneurs in the modernisation of public service provision and in providing solutions to intractable social problems.

Making working-class parents think more like middle-class parents: Choice Advisers in English education

In this paper, one policy response to the problem of classed school choice experiences in England is examined. ‘Choice Advisers’ are employed by government to provide advice and information to working class and disadvantaged parents with the aim of ‘empowering’ them to exercise school choice and aspire to ‘better’ schools for their children. However, Advisers have been subjectified by contradictions inherent in policy, expected to solve the problems of school choice in a context of significant structural limits to choice for working-class parents. Interviews with choice Advisers show that difficulties of the job in addition to insecure working conditions within local authorities have led to depoliticised, contradictory advice and Advisers bearing the brunt of policy both in terms of overwork and the venting of parental frustrations. Agency, both for parents and for Advisers themselves, is described as being something possessed by individuals rather than collectives, so there is little sense overall that underlying inequalities within the education system might be challenged.

Global education policy: networks and flows

Literature on the globalisation of education policy has been prolific in recent years. Discussion, both in academic and policy circles, about the spread and ‘borrowing’ of ideas and policies between countries has been extensive, though it has tended to be preoccupied with Anglo Saxon contexts and exchanges between countries such as England, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In this special issue we consider the spread of a possible ‘global education policy’ beyond these countries, looking – somewhat eclectically – at the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America. Apart from its geo-political biases and limitations, this literature has so far often focused on and critiqued the content of neo-liberal policies and discourses in circulation – notions such as ‘effectiveness’, ‘standards’, ‘new public management’, ‘school improvement’, ‘choice’ and ‘privatisation’. However, there are additional interesting questions to be asked about the mechanisms by which policies travel. Going beyond a focus purely on policy content, for this special issue we have invited ‘policy sociology’ contributions which examine how policy becomes globalised: grounded accounts and analyses of the existence of policy networks, both cross-national and those that span across the boundaries of the state, private and voluntary sectors; as well as tracing and mapping the flows of ideas from dominant ‘exporting’ countries to those ‘importing’ education policy. We have asked authors to explore questions about how ‘global education policy’ has been ‘received’ within individual countries; how far has it been embraced, imposed, reproduced, mediated or interrupted by national contexts, political and cultural histories, local education belief systems and by local policy networks/communities? Are there countries, parts of countries or policy areas within countries that remain untouched by or resistant to the ‘global’ discourses of education? If there are, can we say that policy is (yet) truly globalised? Within these broad questions, we were interested in and wanted to read about what forms cross-national policy networks take within authors’ countries of expertise. Who are the critical policy actors and what new policy communities, connections and relationships are being established? Do these relate to or circumvent traditional policy communities within individual countries, and if so, how? Having written about policy networks in a UK context (see Ball, 2008; Ball & Exley, 2010), we asked contributors to consider the existence of global ‘heterarchies’ within policy making – complex networks of transnational relationships blurring the lines between state and non-state actors. Such heterarchical actors may include particular individuals as well as institutions and businesses. By paying attention to these agents of neo-liberalism it becomes possible to think about how power and ‘expertise’ flow between nations and how policy entrepreneurs, NGOs, think tanks and commercial providers of education ‘do’ globalisation. To explore these issues, we have assembled a set of five empirical articles, each addressing relevant questions in relation to a particular country context, plus two book reviews of relevance to the theme and concerns of the issue.

Exploring pupil segregation between specialist and non‐specialist schools

One of the most significant developments within English education over the last decade has been the expansion of specialist schools as a means by which to promote diversity and drive improvement. While much research has examined the impact of specialist schools on outcomes such as attainment, little attention has been paid to the schools’ demographic compositions or their potential for exacerbating segregation. Gorard and Taylor (2001) reported that specialist schools admitted proportionally fewer children from deprived backgrounds over time. Building on their work, this paper uses data from the Pupil Level Annual School Census and the Index of Multiple Deprivation to examine changing intakes of specialist and non‐specialist schools between 2001/2 and 2004/5. Trends in segregation were not significantly associated with the presence or otherwise of specialist status in a school. However, they were significantly associated with foundation status and the presence of strong and/ or improving examination results. Such schools drew more ‘privileged’ intakes over time.

The influence of overseas examples on DES policy making for the school system in England, 1985-1995

Claims are often made in British education about the extent to which policy reforms have been ‘borrowed’ from overseas. Based on interviews with senior civil servants and HMI, this paper addresses the extent to which such claims apply to central government educational policy‐making at school level in England between 1985 and 1995. This was a period which saw the collapse of traditional ‘partnership’ modes of educational reform (central and local government, schools, teachers, educationists), which was replaced by major centrally directed legislation from Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act onwards. It was also a period in which the OECD promoted the use of educational ‘performance indicators’ to facilitate cross‐national comparisons of educational quality. The paper finds that, while overseas developments were frequently cited during this period of radical legislative change, these were largely convenient examples from countries with particular ideological closeness to the English climate, promoted by ‘New Right’ think tanks, to lend legitimacy to what were primarily ‘home grown’ policy solutions. Overall, their effect was marginal. Reforms in England took place both prior to and in parallel with similar reforms elsewhere; hence examples from overseas were more often used to confirm developments in England rather than to initiate them.

Private Schools, Choice And The Ethical Environment

Abstract In this paper, we consider the relationship between the existence of private schools and public attitudes towards questions about educational provision. Data from the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey suggest that parents who choose to send children to private schools may become more entrenched in their support for more extensive forms of parental partiality, with potential ramifications for the future supporting of progressive education policy. We suggest that addressing questions about the existence of certain forms of education and school choice policies requires consideration of the broader ethical environment.

Emerging discourses within the English ‘choice advice’ policy network

This paper examines regulating discourses ‘spoken’ within the complex multi‐sector network of educational policy and provision that has grown from a recent introduction of choice advisers in England. Choice advice documentation from across the network is examined and four discursive themes are identified: equity; parental responsibility; independence/impartiality; and realism. The paper suggests that choice advice – as an English policy case illustrating broader social and political trends – superficially promotes empowerment for disadvantaged parents with a depoliticised, managerial approach while disempowering them by diverting attention away from wider stratification and shifting responsibility for educational quality away from the state.

A Country on Its Way to Full Privatisation? Private Schools and School Choice in England

The history of private education and school choice in England is a long one. England is a country known historically for its centuries-old private school traditions embodied in institutions such as Eton College, Winchester College, Harrow and Westminster schools. Moreover, ever since the 1980s, it has been an international pioneer in promoting national education policy reforms that have sought increasingly to marketise and privatise state school education.

Research and Policy in Education

entrepreneurship and the neoliberal game of academic ‘excellence’ – undercuts any general claims about the totalising effects of neoliberalisation. We are also told that universities are largely ‘selfgoverning institutions’ whose professional interests are guided by the ‘imagined judgement of those whose opinions they [academics] care about’ (74). The take-home message being that it is dangerous and misguided to collapse academic work and the life of the university to an effect of the market or managerial deference. Doing so only impoverishes theorisations of the messiness and slippery dynamics of actually existing higher education. A core strength of the book is its nuanced approach to the question ‘what is the neoliberal university’. It challenges us to avoid reducing all our grievances and discontents to some over-determinate, neoliberal bogeyman, and to resist the ‘politics of pessimism and nostalgia’ (271) that often pervades water-cooler discourse among academics on campus. Instead the authors urge us to remain optimistic about the future of higher education and point to evidence of resistance and hope taking hold and gaining traction despite the onslaught on neoliberal common sense.

‘Critical friends’: exploring arm’s length actor relationships to local government in education

Abstract Discussions charting the changing role of local government in education have often focused extensively on ‘concrete’ policy changes over time, but have provided less detail on the contribution to changing power relations of less tangible shifts. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, in this paper, detailed rationalities of local third-sector and other ‘arm’s length’ actors in English education are explored, with a focus on their relationship to local authority (LA) school admissions teams. The paper aims to provide deeper understanding of tactical struggles for authority which happen within competitive local sociopolitical spaces. Data is utilised from a study of ‘Choice Advice’ (CA) in 10 LAs, within a background context where arm’s length agents deployed to deliver CA have been co-opted into central government marketisation regimes, but local state planning of schooling is arguably more equitable for vulnerable families than are logics advancing a marketisation of education. The research reveals: (1) discourses valourising ‘independence’ and ‘distance’ from local state ‘agendas’; (2) discourses separating the interests of ‘parents’ and ‘schools’, with LAs positioned as representing the latter; (3) dehumanising representations of LA officers as ‘faceless’, obstructive and requiring regulation from ‘critical friends’.