Conference Agenda

All European states are influenced by transnational agencies like the OECD and the European Commission, transnational networks, alliances and global digital enterprises like Microsoft, to transfer and implement different versions of neoliberal recommendations and scripts in relation to market solutions and privatizing incentives (Ball & Junemann, 2012, do Amaral, Christie, 2019). At the same time, European education systems and societies are also striving to cope with new challenges in migration, health, demography, climate, environment, and welfare. These political shocks due to the neo-liberal globalization and increasing social inequalities undermine education as a common, comprehensive and emancipating project while nationalist discourses are emerging against Europe (Blossing et al).

These changing concepts and practices impact also on welfare regimes and their links with education in implementing student at-risk programs, promoting equity-based and social inclusion programs, involving private stakeholders so sustain evidence-based and what works interventions (Krejsler & Moos, 2021). These new policies challenge the state, its long-standing social redistribution and institutions while strengthening marketplace, business and privatization-thinking in policy reforms as well as new actors: social entrepreneurship, foundations, Think Tanks, charity business, venture capitalism (Verger & all. 2016, Krejsler & Moos, 2023 Forthcoming).

The pressure and inspiration from neoliberal and conservative thinkers, policy makers, and experts change the role of national/local authorities, public schools as New Public Management, accountability, and school choice mechanisms are implemented (Gunter, 2017). The encounter of marketplace logics, post-bureaucratic regulations and digital technologies promotes a new professionalism around discourses and practices that changes the relationship of professions with the State, as well daily practices and discourses in European schools (Normand & oth, 2018, Verger, Skedsmo, 2021). How do they deal at national or local levels to maintain a sense of social justice? Is it possible to maintain social cohesion and shared understandings of common goods in education? Does this hybridization between the State and the Market contributes to reduce the social inequality gap? What is changing in the relationship between Education and the Welfare in Europe? What are the consequences for teachers and school leaders?

References

do Amaral, P., & Christie. (2019). Researching the global education industry. Springer International Publishing.

Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Policy Press.

Blossing, U., Imsen, G., & Moos, L. (2014). Nordic schools in a time of change. In The Nordic Education Model (pp. 1-14). Springer, Dordrecht.

(Blossing, Imsen, & Moos, 2014)Gunter, H. M., & Mills, C. (2017). Consultants and consultancy: The case of education. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Krejsler, J. B., & Moos, L. (2021). What Works in Nordic School Policies? Springer International Publishing.

Krejsler, J. B., & Moos, L. (2023 Forthcoming). School policy Reform in Europe. Cham: Springer.

Moos, L., & Krejsler, J. B. (2021). Nordic school policy approaches to evidence, social technologies and transnational collaboration. In What Works in Nordic School Policies? (pp. 3-26). Springer, Cham.

Normand, R., Liu, M., Carvalho, L. M., Oliveira, D. A., & LeVasseur, L. (Eds.). (2018). Education policies and the restructuring of the educational profession: Global and comparative perspectives. Springer.

Normand, R., Moos, L., Liu, M., & Tulowitzki, P. (2021). An international comparison of cultural and social foundations of educational leadership. In The Cultural and Social Foundations of Educational Leadership (pp. 3-21). Springer, Cham.

Verger, A., & Skedsmo, G. (2021). Enacting accountabilities in education: exploring new policy contexts and theoretical elaborations. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 33(3), 391-401.

The privatisation of the provision of school places and access to those school places is based on an Education Reform Claimocracy (ERC) that is both contextually sited in national systems and is globally on tour through the crossing of borders. The ERC is rule by assertion. What is known and is worth knowing is proclaimed through what is said and done in offices and classrooms based on: first, that public service education is failing because it is public (owned, funded and based on open access by, for and about the public), where the involvement of the state gives unaccountable power to local politicians, professionals and bureaucrats who conspire to use public processes and funds for their own gain; second, that education is a private good and so the provision of school places in a diverse market and the exercise of consumer choice will efficiently and effectively meet parental requirements for their children; and third, the shift from parents dependent on the state to active traders and deal-makers in the market will revitalise educational services to improve and be more effective, and so those who are employed to provide educational services will be incentivised to supply what is demanded rather than teaching children what parents do not want them to know and what employers and the economy do not require. The talk may be about ‘standards’ and ‘good school places’ for children, but in reality the focus is on the protection, enhancement and legitimacy of hierarchy through organisational and systemic arrangements. Using the case of UK government reform of education in England from the 1980s onwards this paper will examine the unfolding and development of the ERC, whereby right wing ideologues have created a form of social justice that is based on the sovereign individual, whereby forms of taxation are regarded as theft, and consumerism can be deployed to purchase nationality and hence educational products within and external to citizenship. The paper will draw on a range of research evidence in order to focus on counter challenges to this reworking of the conceptualization of social justice, and show how the ERC is subject to question and push back based on forms of intellectual activism.

Gunter, H. M. (2023). A political sociology of education policy. In A Political Sociology of Education Policy (pp. 17-18). Policy Press. Van Den Berg, C., Howlett, M., Migone, A., Pemer, F., & Gunter, H. M. (2019). Policy consultancy in comparative perspective: Patterns, nuances and implications of the contractor state. Cambridge University Press. Veck, W., & Gunter, H. M. (Eds.). (2020). Hannah Arendt on educational thinking and practice in dark times: Education for a world in crisis. Bloomsbury Publishing.

In Europe and elsewhere, education systems live in a state of asymmetry. The decline of the traditional welfare state and the dominance of the neoliberal agenda are paving the way to soft privatisation and, in some cases, to the privatisation of educational offers (S. Ball, 2009; Cone & Brøgger, 2020; Lingard & Sellar, 2013). These processes concern not only the governance of the systems but are deeply entrenched with a re-culturing of education that appears more and more enclosed in the coordinates of neoliberal thought with increased effects on educational inequalities. This imbalance redefines the boundaries between the public and the private, problematising the differences and making even some of the current critical frames inadequate to grasp the current transformations. The same recurrent accuses of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘New Public Management’ as the main causes of the complex changes in education look out of tune as if the solution could be simply the reversal of the state of asymmetry. Frequently, they are conveyed with a nostalgia that underestimates how the same configuration of the state in education is partly responsible for the reproduction of educational inequalities and the shift to the neoliberal agenda, as was underlined by past educational research. Also, it does not sufficiently consider how a conservative and nationalistic agenda supports the state's return to education. To move beyond neoliberal imagery without slipping back into a conservative nation-state agenda, a possibility is to abandon the logic of ‘either/or’ of these reasonings and unfold assemblage thinking in education governance (Gorur, 2011; Landri & Gorur, 2022; Youdell, 2015) . While theoretically promising, this shift is not without risk. By drawing on a long research program on changing the governance of education in Italy ( Landri, 2018), and notably on the current post-pandemic transformations, I will contrast 1) parasitic assemblages, like in the digital governance of education, where the big multimedia companies dominate education systems with their platforms and 2) generative assemblages, as in the recent policy of ‘community pacts’ that are orientated towards equity and inclusion. While parasitic assemblage is again enclosed in a state of asymmetry, generative assemblages enact symmetrical exchanges, and education is seen as common.

Ball, S. (2009). Privatising education, privatising education policy, privatising educational research: network governance and the “competition state.” Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 83–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930802419474 Cone, L., & Brøgger, K. (2020). Soft privatisation: mapping an emerging field of European education governance. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 374–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1732194 Gorur, R. (2011). Policy as Assemblage. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 611–622. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2011.10.4.611 Landri, P. (2018). Digital Governance of Education. Technology, Standards and Europeanization. Bloomsbury and Continuum books. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/digital-governance-of-education-9781350006416/ Landri, P., & Gorur, R. (2022). An Actor-Network Theory Approach to Comparative and International Education: The Politics of a Flat Ontology. In F. D. Salajan & Tavis d. jules (Anthology Editor) (Eds.), Comparative and International Education (Re)Assembled Examining a Scholarly Field through an Assemblage Theory Lens (Issue 2011, pp. 57–72). Bloomsbury. Lingard, B., & Sellar, S. (2013). Globalization, edu-business and network governance: the policy sociology of Stephen J. Ball and rethinking education policy analysis. London Review of Education, 11(03), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/14748460.2013.840986 Youdell, D. (2015). Assemblage Theory and Education Policy Sociology. In K. N. Gulson, M. Clarke, & E. Petersen (Eds.), Education Policy and Contemporary Theory. Implications for Research (pp. 177–194). Routledge.

Educational innovation occupies a central place in contemporary pedagogical discourse. Over the last decades, pedagogical innovation has generated a power of attraction and consensus among multiple actors inside and outside the field of education who see it as an end in itself, actionable through public policies—i.e., top-down. Among the most prominent actors in this regard are international organisations such as the European Commission, the OECD, or UNESCO. While these organisations have shown special interest in educational governance and management as the main drivers of change, more recently they have turned their attention to pedagogical aspects that had been hitherto ignored. In this context, guided—and legitimised—by the rhetoric of these transnational actors and by a conception of innovation focused on pedagogical aspects, several countries have been recently promoting policies that seek to make pedagogical innovation the guiding principle of teaching and learning and organisational practices in schools in order to 'modernise' or 'transform' their education systems. This has been the case of the autonomous region of Catalonia (Spain), where the school innovation imperative has become the backbone of recent administrative-pedagogical policy initiatives aiming at 'transforming' the education system. Considering this case, in this paper we combine different theories of the public policy process to understand how the discourse of innovation has moved from the pedagogical arena to the educational policy field, and with what outcomes. Policy process theories allow us to analyse the articulation of educational problems and their solutions, and the conditions under which certain solutions are more likely to penetrate the public agenda. The results of the study show how in Catalonia educational innovation initiatives have been strongly advocated by policy entrepreneurs operating at the intersection of the philanthropic and the public sectors. These entrepreneurs define innovation as opposed to the so-called 'traditional education' and it is framed as a solution around the ideas of 'personalisation of learning', 'competence-based education' and 'school networking'. Thanks to its apparent simplicity, but also its ambiguity and inherent desirability, the idea of innovation has operated as a 'coalition magnet' able to attract previously distant educational stakeholders—both public and private—and to organise them around an influential agenda of 'educational transformation'. The plausibility of the innovation initiatives arises in a singular political and economic context, thus allowing innovation to become the flagship and one of the priorities of recent Catalan education policy.

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