Conference Agenda

The core of investigation in this double symposium is how national school policy reforms in a number of key European countries and regions are framed in transnational collaborations that meet with national particularities and contestations. The symposium presents results from a collaborative book project (Krejsler & Moos, 2023 forthcoming).

The symposium explores school policy developments in a number of different countries and regions to represent the diversity of Europe within a comparative framework applied to all presentations. It takes point of departure in the fact that European countries in their school and education policies have been increasingly aligning with each other, mostly via transnational collaborations, the OECD and EU. Even the IEA has been instrumental to motivate alignments by means of influential surveys, knowledge production and methodological development (Hultqvist, Lindblad, & Popkewitz, 2018; Krejsler, 2020; Lawn & Grek, 2012; Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Moos, 2017).

This alignment in terms of common standards, social technologies, qualification frameworks and so forth have aimed at facilitating mobility of students, workers, business and so forth as well as fostering a European identity among citizens from Europe’s patchwork of small and medium-size countries, representing a patchwork of different languages, cultures and societal contexts (Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002; Popkewitz, 2012). This symposium explores and maps processes of de-contextualization, when policymakers broker consensus in transnational agencies, up against the ensuing processes of re-contextualization when this de-contextualized consensus has to be re-contextualized in widely differing national contexts; here standards, frameworks and social technologies have to be adapted and digested to forms that make sense in relation to what is politically and educationally possible in each and every of these different contexts.

Unsurprisingly, however, these processes of policy transfer, exchange and mutual inspiration are equally rife with national contestation as transnational norms meet with national traditions. The presentations in this symposium thus explore and map the diversity of contestations that transnational policy also produces when it meets particular national contexts, ranging from progressive reform pedagogy and Bildung resistance to positivist and economistic approaches to education over increasing focus upon ‘national values’ to recent outright nationalist resentment to transnational and multilateral encroachment upon national sovereignty (Blossing, Imsen, & Moos, 2016; Hörner, Döbert, Reuter, & von Kopp, 2015; Krejsler & Moos, 2021; Rizvi, Lingard, & Rinne, 2022).

Equally problematic – and possibly even more opaque - is the national uptake of transnational school and educational policy is the ‘intermediary’ of issues like digitalization and commercialization by means of which policy passes as it is transformed into organization and practice.

In our approach we thus see the interplays of transnational and national school policy reforms as the intended and unintended strategies and effects of widely differing contexts for making policy for schools, i.e. reflecting what is politically and educationally possible within the national contexts, framed by its particularities: This includes attention to increased focus upon ‘national values’, immigration, populism, and so forth (Bergmann, 2018; Judis, 2016) as well as the framing effects on transnational and national school policies by particular approaches to adopting global challenges like digitalization and increasing commercialization (e.g. big data, algorithmization and platformization) (Appadurai, 2006).

The papers in this double symposium draw on critical education policy theory, governance and governmentality theory. Empirically they draw on analyses of transnational and national education policy documents as well as national education debates and existing studies on policy reform.

This paper highlights Denmark as a case among Nordic countries, where school policies have turned increasingly transnational. The paper finds that the OECD, EU and IEA have been important drivers for school reform in all five countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (Blossing, Imsen, & Moos, 2016; Krejsler & Moos, 2021b; Telhaug, Mediås, & Aasen, 2006). In addition, transnational collaboration has transformed Nordic collaboration as the new format by which inter-Nordic comparisons are made. In these processes neo-liberal discourse, in particular, has been instrumental in driving school to become an entity on a competitive market for students opening up for increasing commercialization, although welfare state ideals of equity still offer a strong counter-force to this development (Hultqvist, Lindblad, & Popkewitz, 2018). Danish school used to be admired internationally as an example of Scandinavian progressive and equity-oriented educational thinking. From around the millennium shift, however, Danish school turned around towards a strong NPM-inspired accountability model where standards-based education with an output focus to be controlled by testing was increasingly enforced (Imsen, Blossing, & Moos, 2017). This development drew strongly on Anglo-American NPM, school effectiveness and evidence models (most explicitly from England, New Zealand and Ontario) as opposed to previous more German-inspired didactics- and Bildung-models (Krejsler & Moos, 2021a). More recently, a turn towards more national(ist) solutions offer increasing resistance to transnational solutions: Accountability, testing, standards-based education are questioned by some. Simultaneously, increasing focus on ‘Danish values’ is required by others. Similar developments are observed in the neighboring Nordic countries, albeit with considerable differences according to different contextual backgrounds (Bergmann, 2017; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). Theoretically the paper employs a post-Foucauldian governmentality research approach in analyses that focus upon education policy research and Danish national as well as Nordic and transnational government reports, national media debate and other material that is relevant for the scrutiny of school reform policies (Dean, 2007; Pereyra & Franklin, 2014; Popkewitz, 2015).

Bergmann, E. (2017). Nordic Nationalism and Right-Wing Populist Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Blossing, U., Imsen, G., & Moos, L.(Eds.). (2016). The Nordic Education Model: 'A school for all' encounters neo-liberal policy. Dordrecht: Springer. Dean, M. (2007). Governing Societies. NY: Open University Press. Hultqvist, E., Lindblad, S., & Popkewitz, T. S.(Eds.). (2018). Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance. Cham: Springer. Imsen, G., Blossing, U., & Moos, L. (2017). Reshaping the Nordic education model in an era of efficiency. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 61(5), 568-583. Krejsler, J. B., & Moos, L. (2021a). Danish – and Nordic – school policy: its Anglo-American connections and influences. In J. B. Krejsler & L. Moos (Eds.), What Works in Nordic School Policies? Cham: Springer. Krejsler, J. B., & Moos, L.(Eds.). (2021b). What Works in Nordic School Policies? Cham: Springer. Pereyra, M. A., & Franklin, B. M. (Eds.). (2014). Systems of Reason and the Politics of Schooling. NY: Routledge. Popkewitz, T. S. (Ed.) (2015). The 'Reason' of Schooling. NY: Routledge. Telhaug, A. O. et al. (2006). The Nordic Model in Education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50(3), 245-283. Uljens, M., & Ylimaki, R.(Eds.).(2017). Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik. Cham: Springer.

This paper seeks to make sense of a 35 year period of marked disruption and hyper-innovation in England seeking variously to displace and reform a social-welfarist model of schooling that had unevenly and frequently precariously emerged during the post-war era. It is a contribution that is centrally concerned with characterising and making sense of a bewildering range of reforms that seeks to develop an educationally focused theorisation of the interlacing of neo-liberalism with new modes of governing, governance and populism in this context. Stretching from the Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s, through the New Labour administrations of the late 90s and 00s and on to the Conservative and Coalition administrations since 2010 the paper charts the displacement of lighter touch, self-regulating ‘club government’ (Moran 2003) characteristic of education during the post-war era prior to the election of the Thatcher-led governments from 1979. It then moves to examine their replacement by processes of marketisation, privatisation and corporatisation tightly bound to neo-liberalism and, simultaneously, by radically intensified forms of centralised regulation. Contrary to dominant accounts of contemporary shifts towards governance that emphasise the hollowing out of central government (Rhodes, 1997), it is argued that the marketised, neo-liberal turn in school reform in this context has been strongly allied to an ostensibly very different phenomenon; a dramatic increase in centralised regulation (Hall, 2023). Whilst the election of a New Labour government in 1997 did result in significant discontinuities from previous Conservative administrations, not least in terms of increased government expenditure on schools and teachers, the dominant model of tight regulation combined with neo-liberal approaches to school reform was largely reinforced during this time. It is argued that this ultimately acted to enable and legitimise further rounds of marketized, privatising and increasingly corporatized approaches to school reform that developed markedly from 2010. England’s early adoption of this approach in the 1980s and its wider role in the UK more generally, alongside a small group of other countries, as a front-runner in the New Public Management (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011) are associated with it emerging during the 1990s and 2000s as an international laboratory for educational reform. The paper ends by considering the pronounced emergence of populism in school reform in England, and the increasingly idiosyncratic and erratic governmental interventions that have developed strongly since 2010 and which seem likely to have significantly reduced wider interest in this national educational laboratory.

*Hall, D. (2023) England: Neo-liberalism, regulation and populism in the educational reform laboratory in Krejsler, J. and Moos, L. (Eds) School Policy Reform in Europe. New York: Springer. *Moran, M. (2003). The British regulatory state: high modernism and hyper-innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Pollitt, C., and Bouckaert, G. (2011) Public management reform. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Rhodes, R. (1997) Understanding governance. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Since the early 2000s, the French education policy has taken a transnational turn in participating increasingly in the PISA consortium, OECD activities, and the European Open Method of Coordination with some effects in the development of national programs on basic skills, early school leaving, school climate and dropouts, but also national assessments of students' skills and school self-evaluation approach. However, due to republican heritage and civic nationalism, the influence of neo-liberalism is limited, and the development of school market and school choice have been resisted until now. The republican compromise still emphasizes standardized national curricula based on school subjects and student guidance regulations on behalf of equal opportunities and a specific conception of citizenship and secularism. This republican vision is combined with reform proposals and implementations in which national interest groups and the ministerial technostructure play an important role in buffering international influences. The French education policy is also subject to a strong (and sometimes authoritarian) statism that conveys imaginaries of education and entrenched ideologies hiding policy borrowing and leading. Based on Actor-Network-Theory and policy research, this communication explores the political assemblages and epistemic governance that have allowed this policy borrowing and lending. It shows that forms of epistemic authority transposing the PISA survey relay the expert knowledge circulating in the international space, but that these forms also maintain a political imaginary and a great republican narrative. First are presented spaces of interest and political associations between different national actors involved in the transfer and hybridization of knowledge built around PISA. The communication seeks to characterize some influential spokespersons in the production and translation of this knowledge into a French-style reformist political agenda. Based on an analysis of data on these various policy assemblages from official documents, scientific and professional journal articles, and website consultations, map of the interpersonal links between these reformist actors has been developed in order to better understand their connections and associations in promoting the PISA paradigm. To do this, the Gephi network software has been used to map the links between individuals belonging to different institutions.

*Hultqvist, E., Lindblad, S., & Popkewitz, T. S. (Eds.). (2018). Critical analyses of educational reforms in an era of transnational governance. Cham, Springer. *Normand R. (2020) The French State and Its Typical “Agencies” in Education. Policy Transfer and Ownership in the Implementation of Reforms. In Ärlestig, H., & Johansson (eds) Educational Authorities and the Schools (pp. 151-168). Cham, Springer, 2020 *Normand, R. (2022). PISA as epistemic governance within the European political arithmetic of inequalities: A sociological perspective illustrating the French case. In Critical Perspectives on PISA as a Means of Global Governance (pp. 48-69). London, Routledge. *Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2014). The OECD and the expansion of PISA: New global modes of governance in education. British Educational Research Journal, 40(6), 917-936. *Steiner-Khamsi, G., & Waldow, F. (Eds.). (2012). World yearbook of education 2012: Policy borrowing and lending in education. Routledge.

This paper explores relational issues of the nation, collective belonging and its interiorization of its external other, “Europe”, in the study of policy and school reform. Grek (2020) and her colleagues explored this relation as different institutional and political agents that connect as nodules and connections. My concern relates to this but differs by giving attention to the social epistemologies that travel and insect with the nation; that is, with the systems of reason that order and classify the phenomena of education at the interstices of European and international spaces. The trope of Europe is not meant as an originary site, but is about the episteme of uneven historical lines with no single origin. “Europe” is a symbolic marker of an exteriority of multiple practices that fold into the interiority of national policy and educational research in Eastern and Western Europe. Europe or the European Union, then, is not the origin of the calculative reasoning that folds into national policies. Rather Europe is a space in which patterns of recognition and expectations of experience are generated external to the nation but settles in policy and educational practices of difference in nations as a global homeless, location-less knowledge. The notion of “Europe” as the external Other is explored as indigenous foreigners or historical practices projected as global and universal (which they are not!) that settle in and appear as indigenous, affectively attached as principles of national salvation and redemption in national policies. These settlements are studied as: (1) the non-polemic language of management, (2) numbers and statistics are cultural artifacts, (3) the alchemy that reterritoralizes disciplinary knowledges into the pedagogical knowledge of children’s literacy and the school curriculum, and (4) the comparative reasoning of policy and research that excludes and abjects as equality. The significance of “Europe” in the infrastructures of policy and science is to generate new phenomena as objects of “the will to know” or desires; and as phantasmagrams that “act” as analogous to the magic lanterns of the 17th century to create illusions about the real. The strategy of the paper is to move from the formal categories of the state, its welfare institutions, and human actors as the sole originary sites of importance. My interest in knowledge is directed to the politics of schooling; the principles ordering and comparing who people are, should be, and who does “not fit” into the spaces of normalcy, excluded and abjected.

*Grek, S. (2018). OECD as a site of co-production. The European education governance and the new politics of ‘policy mobilization. S. Lindblad, D. Pettersson, & T. Popkewitz, T. (Eds.). (2018) Education by the numbers and the making of society. The expertise of international assessments. (pp. 185-200). New York: Routledge. *Popkewitz, T. (in press) Infrastructures And Phantasmagrams Of Inclusions That Exclude: International Student Assessments. The International Journal of Inclusive Education).