How Schools Do Policy

Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools

Stephen J Ball, Meg Maguire, Annette Braun

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136520945
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to beimplemented by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attentio

1 Doing Enactments Research

Where to Begin?

This book is one version of our research. In writing collectively and collaboratively about a project that we have researched together, argued about, disagreed over and yet have become passionately attached to over the last three years or so, there are many things we could have done differently and there are many things of interest and importance that we have no room to include here. There certainly could have been different points of emphasis in the text, we could have deployed and discussed different data – we have plenty – and we could have used some different analytic devices. For these and other reasons, we do not regard this writing as closed or finished – this is a set of starting points and openings. This is not the book we imagined we might write when we began the research. To quote Michel Foucault, whose writing will appear at many points in this book: what we have to offer is a set of ‘unfinished abutments and lines of dots’ (1996: 275).

It is also important to say that our writing has been a process of avoidance and compromise, an exercise of writing around and beyond existing work on policy in schools – sometimes called implementation research. We do not want to reject or obliterate this work in toto but we have become profoundly aware of its limitations and omissions. We want to over-write it, to give it greater texture, fuller scope and more theoretical sophistication and in order to do so we draw on sociological theory to ‘fill out’ the interpretation of ‘policy work’ in schools.

This first chapter is where we want to lay out the background to the book and to the empirical school-based project from which it emanates. However, we need to be clear that this is not a straightforward empirical research report. It aims to say some useful things about the everyday world of policy in contemporary English schools but we will not be offering you a chapter on the current policy landscape in England or a blow-by-blow account of the relationships between specific policies and specific practices – although this is what happens to some extent in Chapters 4 and 5. This is a book about how schools ‘do’ policy, specifically about how policies become ‘live’ and get enacted (or not) in schools. We hope it will have a general relevance and usefulness beyond the specifics of the cases we explore and the data we present and discuss. We are attempting to outline a grounded theory of policy enactments in school, or at least to identify a set of tools and concepts which will provide the elements of such a theory. We also want to present an account of policy enactments in secondary schools that makes sense to practitioners and to people who ‘know’ schools, that feels as if this is how it is in ‘real’ schools, while simultaneously adding to and challenging the existing theorising of this complex process. Having said that, while it may seem like it at times, this is not a book about teaching – in the sense that we are not intending to reduce teaching to policy or schools to teaching and learning. Teaching consists of much more than these aspects we address here – a point we return to in the final chapter – and schools are complex and sometimes incoherent social assemblages. Enough preamble, ‘This introduction is becoming lengthy: let us begin. Not that we know the beginning, but that a time comes when we have to begin – somewhere’ (Sarup 1978: 9). We begin with policy implementation and policy enactment and some of the existing thinking about how schools ‘do policy’ as a basis for our argument for a different kind of understanding.

Beyond Implementation!

In much writing on education policy, the meaning of policy itself is frequently just taken for granted and/or defined superficially as an attempt to ‘solve a problem’. Generally, this problem solving is done through the production of policy texts such as legislation or other locally or nationally driven prescriptions and insertions into practice. This kind of ‘normative’ policy analysis generally ‘takes’ policy as a ‘closed preserve of the formal government apparatus of policy making’ (Ozga 2000: 42), or what Taylor et al. (1997: 5) describe as the state’s ‘only plausible response to [the] social and economic changes’. The problem is that if policy is only seen in these terms, then all the other moments in processes of policy and policy enactments that go on in and around schools are marginalised or go unrecognised. The jumbled, messy, contested creative and mundane social interactions, what Colebatch (2002) calls the ‘policy activity’ of negotiations and coalition building that somehow link texts to practice are erased. Teachers, and an increasingly diverse cast of ‘other adults’ working in and around schools, not to mention students, are written out of the policy process or rendered simply as ciphers who ‘implement’. While many policies ‘done’ in schools are ‘written’ by government, their agencies or other influential stakeholders, policy making at all its levels and in all its sites also involves ‘negotiation, contestation or struggle between different groups who may lie outside the formal machinery of official policymaking’ (Ozga 2000: 113).

Thus, we want to ‘make’ policy into a process, as diversely and repeatedly contested and/or subject to different ‘interpretations’ as it is enacted (rather than implemented) in original and creative ways within institutions and classrooms (see also Ball 1997, 2008) but in ways that are limited by the possibilities of discourse. In this book, what is meant by policy will be taken as texts and ‘things’ (legislation and national strategies) but also as discursive processes that are complexly configured, contextually mediated and institutionally rendered. Policy is done by and done to teachers; they are actors and subjects, subject to and objects of policy. Policy is written onto bodies and produces particular subject positions.

Policy is complexly encoded in texts and artefacts and it is decoded (and recoded) in equally complex ways. To talk of decoding and recoding suggests that policy ‘making’ is a process of understanding and translating – which of course it is. Nonetheless, policy making, or rather, enactment is far more subtle and sometimes inchoate than the neat binary of decoding and recoding indicates. As Taylor et al. (1997: 20) say of policy work in education, ‘we need to observe politics in action, tracing how economic and social forces, institutions, people, interests, events and chance interact. Issues of power and interests need to be investigated.’ Thus, policy enactment involves creative processes of interpretation and recontextualisation – that is, the translation of texts into action and the abstractions of policy ideas into contextualised practices – and this process involves ‘interpretations of interpretations’ (Rizvi and Kemmis 1987), although the degree of play or freedom for ‘interpretation’ varies from policy to policy in relation to the apparatuses of power within which they are set (see Chapter 4) and within the constraints and possibilities of context. Policies are not simply ideational or ideological, they are also very material. Policies rarely tell you exactly what to do, they rarely dictate or determine practice, but some more than others narrow the range of creative responses. This is in part because policy texts are typically written in relation to the best of all possible schools, schools that only exist in the fevered imaginations of politicians, civil servants and advisers and in relation to fantastical contexts. These texts cannot simply be implemented! They have to be translated from text to action – put ‘into’ practice – in relation to history and to context, with the resources available. ‘Practice is sophisticated, contingent, complex and unstable’ so that ‘policy will be open to erosion and undercutting by action, the embodied agency of those people who are its object’ (Ball 1994: 10–11).

It is with the diverse and complex ways in which sets of education policies are ‘made sense of’,¹ mediated and struggled over, and sometimes ignored, or, in another word, enacted in schools that this book and our research work is centrally concerned. Enactments are collective and collaborative, but not just simply in the warm fuzzy sense of teamwork, although that is there, but also in the interaction and inter-connection between diverse actors, texts, talk, technology and objects (artefacts) which constitute ongoing responses to policy, sometimes durable, sometimes fragile, within networks and chains. There are minute and mundane negotiations and translations which go on at these points of connection over time and space – sometimes ‘virtually’ through school intranets. Policy is not ‘done’ at one point in time; in our schools it is always a process of ‘becoming’, changing from the outside in and the inside out. It is reviewed and revised as well as sometimes dispensed with or simply just forgotten.

Given all of that, understanding and documenting the myriad ways in which policy is enacted in schools is a somewhat elusive and complicated process. Spillane (2004: 6) argues that in what he describes as ‘conventional accounts’, there is a tendency to highlight the role of principle policy agents and rational-choice theory. That is, there is a view that policy is implemented, put into practice (or not), based on ‘personal interest or utility maximisation’. In this approach, lead policy actors, and Spillane’s example is local officials, choose what policies they want to attend to, what they think will be of the most value and sideline any alternatives that do not fit with their agendas. Nevertheless, Spillane (2004: 7) believes that local officials tend to work hard to put mandated policies into practice; ‘they do not typically work to undermine policy directives from above’. In addition, he claims that policy implementation is a complex cognitive process. Based on a large-scale empirical study in Michigan, he found that policies were, or were not, implemented because of the ‘sense making’ schemas of those charged with this task, from School District policy makers, down to classroom practitioners. Spillane (2004: 8) says of policy implementation that ‘the story is morphed as it moves from player to player… this happens not because the players are intentionally trying to change the story; it happens because that is the nature of human sense-making.’ His point is that taking a cognitive approach towards what he calls policy implementation ‘supplements’ conventional accounts by allowing for some degree of rational-choice theory but also incorporating a view that includes the sense-making, and thus agency, of policy actors – a difficult issue which we will return to throughout this book (see Chapters 4 and 5). More recently, Supovitz and Weinbaum (2008) have stressed the way in which policies become ‘iteratively refracted’. They suggest that policy reforms become ‘adjusted repeatedly as they are introduced into and work their way through school environments’ (p.153). In many ways though, this kind of approach to the ‘doing’ of policy remains set within a linear, top-down and undifferentiated conception of policy work in schools. It tells us something about how policies are understood and worked on and recast as they filter into classroom life but it views all policies and all schools and all teachers in the same way. It is an institutionally and socially ‘thin’ account of policy processes.

Supovitz and Weinbaum’s approach, like Spillane’s work, stresses the ways in which individual, social and institutionally contextualised factors influence policy implementation and policy adjustments. However, in both cases, the stress is with implementation as a way of describing how a single, unitary policy reform from the centre/top is worked out in practice in schools. These approaches, useful though they are, do not necessarily help with understanding how it is that certain policies, or strands within policies, become picked up and worked on, why they are selected and who selects them and what alternatives are discarded along the way. They do not illuminate the ways in which policies can be clustered together to form new policy ensembles that can have unintended or unexpected consequences in schools. They do not help us understand how and why school leaders and schoolteachers negotiate with, manage and put sometimes conflicting policies into practice simultaneously. Even more crucially, many of the school-based policy implementation studies conceive of the school itself as a somewhat homogenous and de-contextualised organisation that is an undifferentiated ‘whole’ into which various policies are slipped or filtered into place, either successfully or ‘unsuccessfully’ – whatever that might mean.

In many of these studies, there is no proper recognition of the different cultures, histories, traditions and communities of practice that co-exist in schools. The education and preparation of teachers, now of a variety of kinds, and the changing role and constitution of professional discourses and professional expertise are also left out of account. There is little attention given to the material context of the policy process, neither the buildings within which policy is done, nor the resources available (see Chapter 2), nor are the students with whom policy is enacted often accounted for. The emphasis on sense-making literally de-materialises policy. Nor do these studies usually convey any sense of the way in which policies fit into the overall texture and rhythms of teachers’ work – the different times of year in schools and the deadening tiredness with which teachers often grapple. This is an overbearingly rational and emotionless world. The clash of personalities, the dedication and commitment, the ambition and burn-out, the humour and the moments of cynicism and frustration are all erased.

It doesn’t matter how many [policies] there are or what they might be or whether we personally agree with them or can’t see the logic of them… the whole idea of there being a debate of any kind or any sense of the teacher’s opinion, even though they’re the people that actually deal with it every day, it’s completely ignored. Totally ignored!

(Neil, English, 2nd in department, Union rep., Wesley)

The external pressures on the school to meet certain targets is always going to override anything a school wants to do that’s individual about personalised learning. And since most schools are stretched to the limit, with staff working over the number of hours, they’re not going to be able to introduce anything substantially new.

(Joe, head of Sociology, Atwood)

There is also an ontological issue here, or rather two. First, what kinds of teacher are conjured up in these accounts and analyses? Too often, they are cardboard cut-out sense-makers, just too linear and too rational, too focused and logical, too neat and asocial. Second, what is the relation between the teacher and policy? Do teachers simply make sense of policy, re-iterate, refract, implement it? Or does policy also make sense of teachers, make them what and who they are in the school and the classroom, make them up, produce them, articulate them. There is a complex web of interpretations, translations, ‘active readership’ and ‘writerly’ work round policy (Lendvai and Stubbs 2006) and the effectivity of policy discourse, that produces particular kinds of teacher subjects.

Teaching is set within policy regimes and policy discourses which speak teachers as practitioners – at least to an extent – through the language of curriculum and pedagogy and through the subjective possibilities that the relation to knowledge and to learning in policies makes possible. What we refer to as policy is most usually what is most recent and most immediate but there is a history of other policies, other languages and other subjectivities, a discursive archive on which, at least sometimes, teachers can draw, over and against contemporary policy. These other possibilities seem to be missing from stories of implementation – teaching is de-politicised. In practice, schools are made up of different types of, and different generations of, teachers with different dispositions towards teaching and learning, set within different waves of innovation and change.

Those people who have more recently joined the profession, it’s something that they’ve always known (change), it’s something they always do… we do have a split between those who will be looking for new ways to do something and those who will, sort of, plod on as before.

(Robert, AST Art, Wesley)

Above all, policy is also only ever part of what teachers do. There is more to teaching and school life than policy. There are ‘discretionary spaces’ (Fenwick and Edwards 2010: 126) in and beyond policy, corners of the school where policy does not reach, bits of practice that are made up of teachers’ good ideas or chance or crisis – but this space for action is also produced or delimited by policy, as we shall see.

And Policy Enactment?

In this book, drawing on our data, we explore the ways in which different types of policy become interpreted and translated and reconstructed and remade in different but similar settings, where local resources, material and human, and diffuse sets of discourses and values are deployed in a complex and hybrid process of enactment. As indicated above, many of the studies that explore how policies are put into practice talk of ‘implementation’ which is generally seen either as a ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ process of making policy work, and these studies ‘stress the demarcation between policy and implementation’ (Grantham 2001: 854). In contrast, we see policy enactments as a dynamic and non-linear aspect of the whole complex that makes up the policy process, of which policy in school is just one part. Policies ‘begin’ at different points and they have different trajectories and life spans, some are mandated, others strongly recommended or suggested (Wallace 1991). Some policies are formulated ‘above’ and others are produced in schools or by local authorities, or just simply become ‘fashionable’ approaches in practice with no clear beginning.

At any moment in time, schools have hundreds of policies in circulation, albeit of different status and reach (Braun et. al. 2010). Our attempt at a ‘policy audit’ identified more than 170 policies in play across the four case study schools; by now, some of these will have been discarded or reworked and others will have appeared. They range from safeguarding and CCTV policies, to health and safety, to community cohesion, to uniforms and school trips. Most of these never make an appearance in education policy research and yet in different ways they frame, constrain and enable the possibilities of teaching and learning, of order and organisation, of social relations and the management of problems and crises. They ‘speak’ differently to specific in-school groups and specialists, subject disciplines, or age-related cohorts and are (sometimes) differently enacted within the same school by different policy actors – for example, within different subject departments or in back offices or technical areas. Some policies also cluster, to form policy ensembles, inter-related and mutually reinforcing policy sets which can in some instances ‘over-determine’ enactment – as is the case with ‘standards’ and ‘behaviour’ (see Chapters 4 and 5). Some collide or overlap, producing contradictions or incoherence or confusion. Lyn, an assistant head teacher in George Eliot, talks of tensions between ‘soft’ policies, such as emotion...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Doing enactments research
• 2. Taking context seriously
• 3. Doing enactment : people, meanings and policy work
• 4. Policy subjects : constrained creativity and assessment technologies in schools
• 5. Policy into practice : doing behaviour policy in schools
• 6. Policy artefacts : discourses, representations and translations
• 7. Towards a theory of enactment : ‘the value of hesitation and closer interrogation of utterances of conventional wisdom’
• Appendix: case study schools and interviewees
• Notes
• References
• Index