Conference Agenda

Governments and international organisations have turned their attention to a return to normal, following the disruption of the pandemic. How context shapes governing narratives of education and education recovery in the four jurisdictions of the UK is explored in this paper. Our interest is in how knowledge is used and interacts with politics to create the governing narratives in each jurisdiction, as well as how these contrast between jurisdictions. Through an analysis of policy texts on education recovery in the four jurisdictions, we explore these relationships.

In Scotland, the SNP government’s political text and talk in education policy has promoted a policy narrative of joint endeavour and collaborative improvement, inflected with historically embedded references to fairness, ‘crafting the narrative’ of government that is (implicitly) nationalist in its references to a shared ‘project’ - a ‘journey to independence’ - though drawing on historically embedded themes. More recently, that narrative has focused more sharply on educational underachievement and on major curriculum and cultural change designed to support system-wide reform. That agenda is a departure from traditional reliance on a local ‘policy community’ operating consensually, with expertise and knowledge located largely within the system. In Wales, a narrative of ambitious reform has developed since devolution, and distinguishes Wales from the other jurisdictions. Its emphasis on local partnerships and ‘bottom up’ developments can be seen in its education recovery policies. Labour governments in Wales have also referenced OECD expertise to enable their ‘journey to reform’, while enhanced devolution following the Wales Act (2016) and the co-operation agreement between Labour and Plaid Cyrmu has encouraged distinctive education policy-making. From 2015 Wales has moved towards collegiate working focussed on social justice, inclusion and addressing inequalities. Northern Ireland has seen major alternations to the policy narrative with the creation of a single Education Board in 2015 and a recent review of the education system.

In England, the dominant policy narrative foregrounds individualistic goals and competition, striving for world class standards through, for example, reform of educational assessment. A qualification reform policy – the Advanced British Standard – was announced by the Prime Minister, to drive up educational standards. High standards are to be achieved through data-based governance involving performance assessment, curriculum control and inspection. This contrasts with the other jurisdictions who have sought to utilise education policy to promote the myth of education as creating a coherent, inclusive society that generates feelings of belonging, collective identity and purpose. England’s education system and policymaking is increasingly provided by private actors and reliant on outsourcing. Which expertise and knowledge are mobilised in the governing narratives for education recovery policy differs markedly across the four jurisdictions.

Following our analysis of key policy texts setting out plans for education recovery in the UK’s four nations we offer insights into the dominant education recovery narratives being constructed, the resources-including expert knowledge- that they mobilise or exclude in recovery planning, and the importance of party politics in shaping recovery responses. We adopt an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that drawing on political studies, education policy analysis and analysis of knowledge-policy relations in the governing of education in the UK and Europe. Our analyses show that the kinds of knowledge drawn upon in each jurisdiction is strikingly different, relating to the political and ideological values of the parties in power in each. In turn, this generates governance logics which frame distinct views of what a return to normal would look like for the education systems.

As in most European education systems (Hadjar et al., 2022), inequalities in Germany, some of which have worsened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Dietrich, Patzina & Lerche 2020; Wößmann et al., 2021), persist. This is regularly demonstrated by educational research such as in the widely perceived monitoring studies National Report on Education (Nationaler Bildungsbericht; Autor*innengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2022), the IQB-Bildungstrend that describes regular trends in school achievement (Stanat et al., 2023) or the recent PISA study (Lewalter et al., 2023). In the last decades, educational research has been able to gain important knowledge about the emergence and occurrence of educational inequalities (Bachsleitner et al., 2022). The fact that these efforts don’t seem to have contributed much to a significant improvement of the education system shifts the focus on a different aspect that many times has become a condition for research funding: the transfer of knowledge between research and practice as an important instrument or mechanism that may be key to enable overcoming educational barriers and inequalities for disadvantaged social groups. Transfer has therefore internationally gained importance as a practical goal for researchers and policymakers, but also – given that a lot remains to be learnt about the mechanisms and practices of transfer between different actors in the education system – as a subject of research.

Accordingly, this study seeks to contribute to closing the significant research gap on how to actually reduce inequalities in educational processes with regard to empirical research and evidence. Certain issues are connected to that: the way research knowledge enters political processes, the production of expertise on educational inequalities, and the role of research for innovations in the education system. It not only encourages us to ask about the necessary conditions for successful knowledge transfer, but also to enrichen the debate about the relationship between research and practice and to critically examine the self-positioning of the research community in the face of educational crisis.

When aiming to create an overview on what is already known on conditions that favour or diminish the use of evidence and the success of transfer activities, one can learn from a diverse range of research fields (Schrader et al., 2020). Among those, sociology, educational research, and political science are the most relevant ones for the research perspective applied in this study, providing clues on for example decisive factors for an impactful policy advice (Renn, 2017) or barriers to evidence-informed policy (Arnautu & Dagenais, 2021). One particular approach that has appeared useful in thinking about how to empirically examine transfer processes is the conceptual framework by Farley-Ripple et al. (2018) which includes key assumptions and perspectives on the connections between research and practice communities, taking the use of knowledge into account as well as the production of knowledge, and pointing out relevant aspects like the interpretation of research and the frequency of research use.

Within this context, the empirical focus of this study lies on the utilisation of research knowledge by policymakers, aiming to answer the following specific research question: How is research knowledge being used in parliamentary deliberations on educational policies? The paper discusses this question in the light of the empirical results of an analysis of educational policy documents from two German federal states, giving insights into how policymakers, facing the necessity of responding to social turbulences, deal with evidence to reduce uncertainties in decision-making.

This research studies knowledge production and circulation with the analysis of Finnish education export to Brazil. Finland’s success in PISA legitimized the Finnish education system, which has since then become a global benchmark. Many countries and education organizations, particularly from the Global South, are willing to learn (and buy) such knowledge as a projection to change their own education systems (Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). The large external demand associated with economic drivers led Finland to develop a unique education export industry, constituted by new stakeholders and networks with various agendas and interests that ultimately influence policymaking (Rönnberg & Candido, 2023; Candido & Brunila, forthcoming).

The paper offers a decolonial approach to question the taken-for-granted notions of “global” and “knowledge” from the perspective of the “politics of emotions” and the “politics of stranger making” (Ahmed, 2000, 2014), as well as upon the reflection on the “stray dog complex” (Tiburi, 2021; Souza, 2015) associated to social-historical developments in different contexts. It, thus, provides elements to deconstruct self-evident knowledge production and circulation and problematize the naturalization of “global”.

With the collapse of the USSR in the ex-Soviet countries the problem of educational inequality became more acute. There is no unified position on the reasons for the aggravation of inequality in studies. On the one hand, the growth of inequality has been attributed to the conscious policy of ex-Soviet countries to abandon the Soviet legacy at any cost as a political signal of a break with the Soviet (interpreted as colonial) past (Fish, 1998). On the other hand, the reasons for inequality are seen as steps in ex-Soviet countries aimed at carrying out educational reforms within the framework of global educational changes to reach maximum integration into global trends (Saltman & Means, 2018).

Studies of changes in the education systems of the former USSR countries during the transit period highlight such common vectors as the shift from unification to variability, competitive environment, greater freedom of choice, individualisation [Poder et al., 2016], from centralisation to decentralisation, autonomy of schools, emergence of the non-state school sector [Silova, 2002].

While there are common features, the transformation of national education systems in the former Soviet Union countries had differences in the scenarios and dynamics determined by cultural, economic and political contexts. Today, it is generally accepted to reject "a linear conceptualisation of the 'transition' process, which is characterised by the gradual replacement of 'old' socialist policies, practices and values with 'new' Western ones, and to focus on the complexity of the transformation processes, in which the processes can take an unforeseen character, with trajectories leading to several destinations" (Silova 2009).

The research delves into the critical issue of inequality among schoolchildren in the former USSR countries. Our research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the nature and dynamics of the relationship between academic test results and inequality factors.

In this research we tried to understand how do test scores correlate with common factors of inequality (such as race, gender, SES, and immigrant status) among schoolchildren in the former USSR countries? Whether the effects of inequality factors differ within Ex-Soviet countries and between ex-Soviet countries and the OECD countries?

The comparative study of the inequality in general education in the countries of the former USSR is an area of research that has remained relevant over the past decades, firstly, as part of the large-scale tradition of "transitology" (Cowen, 2000; Mitter, 2003) and, secondly, as a trends in the study of social systems transformation outcomes in a changed geopolitical context (Silova, 2009; Partlett & Küpper, 2022).

The discussion aims to unravel the multifaceted dimensions of educational inequality, providing insights for policymakers, educators, and researchers. By placing the former USSR countries within an international context, the findings can contribute to a broader understanding of global educational disparities. Ultimately, the goal is to foster dialogue on effective strategies for addressing inequality, taking into account the unique socio-political and historical context of the region.

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to critically examine the formal educational curriculum used within the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The primary focus will be to examine the curriculum in terms of its transformative potential to build peace. This project will explore how teachers, leaders and decision makers view the current curriculum and its place within the wider peacebuilding efforts in Iraq.

Research Questions:

1. How does the current curriculum contribute to preparing future citizens equipped with basic characteristics necessary for living peacefully?
2. How can the stories be used as effective teaching material to support the peace building process?
3. Is there hidden violence structured into the education curriculum of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq?
4. What are the potential ways of transferring the educational curriculum in the region into a peace building tool?
5. How can the current curriculum be improved and how do the teachers, leaders, and decision makers look at them?

We are now witnessing a global change that has developed gradually over the past 30 years, leading to more privatisation and commercialisation within public schools. Public education is in its “purest form” built upon social contracts involving the state or government, citizens, and their surrounding communities (Hogan & Thomson, 2021). In Italy and Norway, which form the comparison in this paper, the position of public schools is strong, with more than 90% of the total number of students enrolled. However, changes are evident, among other things, through the increase in “experts” who influence and often take over limited parts of the teaching in schools when the schools do not experience having the capacity to meet their demands. As a result, the complexity of the relationships within the public school system increases in new ways, in policymaking and the educational debate.

On this background, the first research questions for this paper are: What kind of private and non-governmental actors are involved in lower and upper secondary education in Norway and Italy, and how do they operate? Our next question is: Which factors are essential regarding the involvement of private and commercial actors in the public school system?

This paper, which represents work in progress, contributes to the literature by examining public schools´ experiences with private and non-governmental actors´ involvement in Norway and Italy. We combine data from qualitative interviews, organisations’ web pages, policy documents, and statistics. There is a lack of knowledge within this area in Norway. Italy shares similarities with Norway concerning the state-centred education governance and high numbers of public schools. However, the countries also have significant contrasts both regarding welfare system and relations with the EU. By comparing privatisation and commercialisation in the two countries, we aim to identify incremental changes concerning “the public” of public education and illuminate questions for further research.

We find similarities between the countries when it comes to increasing privatization and commercialization in public education. The similarities are represented, for example, by what the external provisions are about, how the private actors seek access to the schools, how the schools receive the external actors, how decisions are made to involve external parties, what criteria the school uses to sort out who they want to collaborate with, how the schools legitimize the collaboration, and how they integrate external offers into their practice. However, there are differences regarding forms of funding, such as when external offers are free for the schools. There are also differences in the extent to which the offer is seen as limited to the school or whether it is intended to impact the local community. The first has to do with the fact that Italy is a member of the EU and has large foundations that advertise funds for educational purposes, while in Norway, there appear to be many but smaller foundations that offer funding for the activities of external actors. The second has to do with the type of welfare state. In Italy, a southern European welfare state, the relationship between school, family and local community is seen as a closer unit than in Norway, a Scandinavian welfare state, where the school is seen as a unit more separated from family and local communities.

As part of marketization and privatization tendencies the last decades have provided several new pedagogical concepts, all of which seem to attract a growing interest. In the Invoice project, funded by The Swedish research council, we applied a follow the money approach (cf. Ball 2012) by collecting and following up 1,000 invoices registered on continuous professional development (CPD) accounts for teachers in three Swedish municipalities. The invoice material revealed a number of popular pedagogical concepts; Universal Design for Learning (UDL), DT (Differentiated Teaching), CP (Clarifying Pedagogy), and LRPE (Learning Readiness Physical Education). The acronymic character can be seen as an alignment to medical programs and as such lending legitimacy and giving an impression of established approaches.

In our presentation, we pay particular attention to the above mentioned UDL. The concept was launched and promoted by the American organization CAST which presents itself as a ‘a non-profit education research and development organization that created the Universal Design for Learning framework and UDL Guidelines’. According to the organization itself the concept has reached far globally.

The ambition of policy making is high; there are 130 hits of the word ‘policy’ (referring to books, podcasts, and other material) on the webpage. One illustrative text example is:

In 2006, CAST joined with several organizations to form the National UDL Task Force, an interdisciplinary coalition that advocates support for UDL in federal, state, and local policy. The Task Force has successfully advocated for the inclusion of UDL in the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 and in various policy directives from the US Department of Education.

As far as Sweden is concerned, the concept has been recommended by two powerful, Swedish policy actors; The National Agency for Education and The National Agency for Special Needs Education and Schools, SPSM. The latter advocated the concept in connection to a large national effort on special educational needs.

The presentation explores how the concept of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) constructs (1) problems related to education and (2) how these problems should be addressed. The study is based on critical discourse analysis, a theoretical and methodological approach introduced by Norman Fairclough where a discourse bears reference to a ‘way of signifying experience from a particular perspective’ (1995, p. 135). The ‘critical’ refers to injustices and power which is supposed to be revealed by a close look at linguistic features in certain texts.

In the last two decades, in Europe and beyond, there have been systematic efforts from national governments to reset the relationship between the state and contemporary schooling (Rönnberg et al. 2022, Alexiadou et al 2023; Winton 2022). These have often revolved around the management of schools and teachers (see Keddie et al. 2023; Traianou and Jones 2019). Teachers’ working practices and identities have been reformed – through the effects, for instance, of commercially produced standardised curricula packages such as the ‘scripted’ curriculum (see Fitz & Nikolaidis 2020) which are used widely in Charter schools or materials produced by Swedish school companies and are used by all teachers in their schools (see Alexiadou et al. 2023). The effects of standardised curricula on teachers’ agency have only recently begun to be explored but it has already been noted for instance, that teachers who operate within a highly structured pedagogical environment characterised by a given curriculum and a set of dominant discourses around values and teaching practices tend to understand their own agency as constrained (ibid.).

The focus of this paper in on England, where publicly funded, privately managed ‘academies’ grouped in 'trusts' have become the most common form of school organisation (Greany and Higham 2018). Post-2010 governments have been trying to generalise this model of ‘academy chain’'- characterised by willingness on the part of chains to align themselves with government objectives and to present this as an ideal enactment of a private-public relationship, combining managerial dynamism with an ethos of the common good. The rapid development of online resources during and after the pandemic (Bormann et al 2021; Cone et al 2021; Grek and Landri 2021) has to an important extent been the work of schools or academy trusts. The Oak National Academy (Oak), initiated by a loose network of people who occupied pivotal positions in edu-businesses, academy trust management, and policy-making working with the Department of Education (DfE), emerged in 2020 (see Peruzzo, Ball & Grimaldi 2022). Since 2023, Oak has received further funding by the DfE to become one of a series of large-scale interlinked projects designed to encourage among schools a standardised approach to curriculum and pedagogy. Oak promises to reduce workload and thereby increase teacher retention and well-being. Besides Oak, the other two important government projects are the Ofsted's research reviews of curriculum subjects and the reorganisation of teacher education around a common curriculum – both, like Oak, developed since 2019. These projects aim to bridge the widening ‘attainment gap’ between children of different social classes and to reshape teachers’ work through the creation of a new ‘evidence-based’ knowledge, on which their teaching should be grounded.

The focus of this paper is on the implications of standardised curricula, Oak in particular, for teacher agency. The paper is part of a wider research project aimed to: a) develop understanding of the relationship between standardised curricula, particularly OAK, and the formation of a new education state and b) to explore Oak’s reception and enactment among teachers and leaders in English schools. The paper addresses the second question. We draw on theoretical work that defines those dimensions of agency that are relevant to teachers and their work environment and frames agency through an ecological approach (Biesta et al., 2015). Teacher agency is always situated in the structures and contexts that give rise to it and within which it is embedded (Biesta & Tedder, 2007). In this body of work, agency is not a property, i.e. “not something that people have”, but “something that people do” (Biesta et al., 2015: 626). It is enacted through practice, achieved in, and through, specific contexts.

Many Anglosphere nations are in the midst of a teacher shortage crisis. In all of these, the historically hardest-to-staff schools are struggling to find enough teachers to teach their students. While UNESCO has declared teaching shortages as a global crisis (Ovenden-Hope, 2022), and teaching workforce shortages are concerning across Europe as well as throughout the US (Federičová,2021) it is useful to examine this phenomenon of teaching shortages in ‘like’ Anglosphere nations with a shared language, geopolitics and social contexts (Legrand, 2021, p. 12). Fuelled by rising student numbers, difficult workplace demands and conditions, an ageing workforce and declining enrolments in initial teacher education programs, the current shortage is placing schools and teachers at breaking point, severely impacting the commitment to deliver a world class education. While the teacher shortage is a system wide issue, its effects are most strongly felt in geographically or socio-economically marginalised communities, those served by the hardest-to-staff schools, where the difficulty of finding qualified teachers is disproportionately impacting on the educational opportunities and student outcomes. Attracting and retaining quality teachers is therefore an urgent priority for all education systems, and solutions need to be found to address the high rates of attrition, particularly among pre-service and in-service early career teachers who are at the highest risk of leaving the profession. With insufficient numbers of new teachers to replenish the ageing workforce, the capacity of schools to support the educational engagement and attainment of students is, and will continue to be, profoundly impacted.

This symposium brings together four papers from research in England and Australia examining the issue of teacher retention. Each paper addresses the common research question: What are the factors impacting current and extreme teaching workforce issues and how can a better understanding of these issues influence educational policy to attract, prepare and retain teachers in these uncertain times? Two of these papers focus on particular cohorts of teachers who are at risk of leaving the profession, considering how current policy and practices are contributing towards the high rates of attrition among precariously employed early career teachers and career change teachers. The third explores the impact of Ofsted on teacher attrition as one example of the increasingly neoliberal education policy environment in England. The fourth paper in this symposium focuses on teacher retention to examine how teachers remaining in the hardest to staff schools are managing under conditions outside of their control. The symposium will generate insight into why teachers are choosing to leave the profession, how they manage their work when they stay and offer opportunities to identify potential solutions which can address this major educational crisis.

In Australia, teaching shortages post-Covid are a growing concern as is the case to varying degrees in many other Anglosphere nations. For instance, Ireland (Geoghegan, 2022), Scotland (Wang & Houston, 2023) and England (Ovenden-Hope, 2022; Perryman, 2022) are all experiencing teacher recruitment problems, as are schools in the US (Bryner, 2021). While workforce issues are most prevalent in certain subject areas and always impact disadvantaged schools most, in all cases, teacher shortages, including teacher attrition, are seen as related to such things as untenable workloads, loss of professionalism and the overall declining status of the teaching profession. This paper reports on some early findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery project that explores the work lives of teachers remaining in schools with very high teacher turnover. In contrast to previous research that has examined the attrition of teachers from hard-to-staff schools through focusing on those who have left teaching, this study aims to develop a broader understanding of the issues of retention by attending instead on its impact on those teachers who remain. In order to understand teachers’ work lives our research aims to disentangle the interplay of the technical, moral, political, and emotional dimensions connected to these teachers’ lives. Our work-storied approach places a high degree of importance on the ‘day in the life’ of teachers who remain in schools experiencing high teacher turnover (>10% attrition in a 12-month period). This involves sculpting interpretations out of verbal accounts and observations of teachers that elucidate how they are managing their work in circumstance outside of their control. In this paper we explain our ‘work-shadowing’ methodology and reflect on what we have learned about the daily, working lives of teachers in two of our high teacher turnover case study schools. By addressing the problem of retention in this way, we aim to advance a much deeper, nuanced understanding of how educational policies and systems, as well as individual schools, can support those teachers who remain in the profession, and thus facilitate greater teacher retention at a time when maintaining support for a declining teaching workforce is urgent.

Bryner, L. (2021). The Teacher Shortage in the United States. Education and Society 39(1), 69-80. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7459/es/39.1.05 Geoghegan, A. (2022). Should I Stay or Should I Go? An Exploration of the Experiences of Career Change Teachers in Ireland: Motivations for Changing Career and the Factors that Influence Their Attrition from the Teaching Profession. Ovenden-Hope, T. (2022). A status-based crisis of teacher shortages? Research in Teacher Education. Vol.12. No 1. Nov 2022. Perryman, J., Bradbury, A., Calvert, G., & Kilian, K. (2023). Beyond Ofsted Inquiry: Final Report. Wang, W., & Houston, M. (2023). Teaching as a career choice: the motivations and expectations of students at one Scottish University. Educational Studies, 49(6), 937-954.

Successive Australian policies including the Liberal government’s Next Steps: Report of the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review (2022) and the Labor government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel Discussion Paper (2023) have positioned midcareer Initial Teacher Education (ITE) entrants as ‘game changers’ to address teacher shortages and enhance diversity in the teaching profession. Indeed, research reveals that their status as game changers is often short lived as 25% are more likely to leave the profession within the first five years than those that enter via more traditional pathways. It is therefore timely to examine the retention of this cohort in ITE in more depth. How these so-called ‘career change teachers’ are defined, and how ITE programs cater to the needs of this unique cohort, are not fully understood. This paper brings together Stephen Ball’s policy enactment, and Margaret Archer’s theorisations on emergent properties to ascertain how 40 Australian teacher educators are responding to this policy direction. We describe how interpretive, material, and discursive lenses of policy enactment are infused with either enabling and/or constraining emergences of translation. In doing so, first we outline how teacher educators speak and think about career change teachers. Second, we analyse teacher educators’ deliberations on the personal, structural and/or cultural conditions that they weigh up to accommodate (or not) this specific group. Findings reveal that teacher educators define career change teachers in similar and divergent ways and institutions accommodate this group variously. Recommendations are made for how universities can better prepare and sustain this cohort to stay in the profession.

Australian Government. (2023). Teacher education expert panel discussion paper. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/teacher-education-expert-panel-discussion-paper Australian Government. (2022) Next Steps: Report of the Quality Initial Teacher Education review> Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/next-steps-report-quality-initial-teacher-education-review

Internationally, support provided to teachers during their early career phase has long been referred to as ‘induction’. In Australia, induction is largely provided by schools because ‘school-based induction practices … [are the] … the most useful in enculturating beginning teachers to their school and to their career’ (Kearney, 2021, p.153). However, with 60% of new teachers employed casually or on short-term contracts (Preston, 2019), many work across multiple schools and education sectors. Such teachers might engage in multiple induction events at individual schools; however, it is unlikely they receive an ongoing, systematic induction that meets their individual needs across the first few years of their work. This paper reports a critical policy study that examined the ‘Graduate to Proficient: Australian guidelines for teacher induction into the profession’ (2016). It draws on critical human resources management theory, including concepts such as ‘onboarding’ with the aim of providing alternative insights into the induction process for early career teachers. Our analysis suggests that the guidelines are more concerned with onboarding practices delivered to teachers with job security, rather than an overall system of practices that develop all new teachers regardless of their employment mode. The limitation means that the guidelines are unlikely to support precariously employed early career teachers to maximise their development during the earliest months and years of their career. Finally, we argue that further research on the teaching workforce which draws on the human resource management research is needed to better understand the development of the teaching workforce.

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). Graduate to proficient: Australian guidelines for teacher induction into the profession. Canberra, Australia: Education Services Australia. Kearney, S. (2021). The challenges of beginning teacher induction: a collective case study. Teaching Education, 32(2), 142-158. Preston, B. (2019). Reforming replacement teaching: A game changer for the development of early career teaching? In A. Sullivan, B. Johnson, & M. Simons (Eds.), Attracting and keeping the best teachers: Issues and opportunities (pp. 161-191). Springer Nature.

Whilst hotly contested from within the organisation, Ofsted, the English school inspectorate, are often blamed for creating a toxic work-culture in English schools. But to what extent does Ofsted contribute to England’s worsening teacher retention crisis? This paper draws upon data from the ‘Beyond Ofsted’ research project, where a survey, focus groups and stakeholder consultations aimed to find out teachers’ opinions of Ofsted and what alternatives could be suggested. The finding of this report (Perryman et al 2023) suggested that many teachers thought of Ofsted as ‘toxic’ and ‘not fit for purpose’. In addition, survey results show how impactful inspection can be for teachers’ health, wellbeing and career plans. For example, 30% of the sample said that inspection made them want to leave teaching, and 76% thought that Ofsted had a negative effect on retention. But are Ofsted to blame? Teachers’ working lives increasingly affected by the rise in the neo-liberal performativity /accountability culture in schools as, internationally, schools are preoccupied with policies of achievement, particularly test results. The global rise in accountability mechanisms is increasingly accepted as a natural part of the neo-liberal education system, with any critics of the regime seen as being against progress. This has led many schools to adopt a plethora of strategies aimed at improving results, often referred to as ‘box-ticking’. Teachers’ work is directed towards assessment, exams, progress measures and preparation for review and inspection, and away from the more individualistic and creative aspects of the job. These strategies, and their constancy, impact negatively on teachers’ lives, and thus on retention. But such trends are found in many countries adopting a neoliberal education policy environment. The Beyond Ofsted data shows that, in England, the problem is exacerbated by the surveillance of these performative-accountability regimes. Previous research suggests that Ofsted impacts negatively on the health and well-being of staff and thus impacts teacher retention (Bousted, 2022; Perryman, 2022) and Ofsted’s own survey on the wellbeing of teachers (Ofsted, 2019), reported that the demands of inspection heavily influenced teachers’ working practices. Teachers worked a 50–57-hour week, over half of which was spent outside the classroom, on Ofsted preparation meetings, and data-focused tasks. Our paper poses the question as to whether Ofsted is to blame for these trends and increasing teacher attrition, or whether the blame lies in policy or school cultures that place value on judgement and competitive engagement over education and well-being.

Bousted, M. (2022). Support Not Surveillance: How to solve the teacher retention crisis. Melton: John Catt. Ofsted. (2019). Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-well-being-at-work-in-schools- and-further-education-providers Perryman, J. (2022). Teacher retention in an age of Performative Accountability: Target Culture and the Discourse of Disappointment. London: Routledge. Perryman, J., Bradbury, A., Calvert, G., & Kilian, K. (2023). Beyond Ofsted Inquiry: Final Report.

The social reforms of Hungary’s right-wing populist government have fundamentally reconfigured social and class relations (Geva 2021; Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton 2020). Education has been a key area for building a new order in society. The government crafted an education policy discourse centering on educating a Christian nation (Neumann, 2023) and, offering favorable financial and legal conditions, invited allied Christian churches to take a greater part in education and welfare service provision. Subsequently, the share of denominational institutions has significantly increased at all educational levels, resulting in the increasing pillarization and social segregationof local educational spaces. Arguably, the churchification of education and welfare (Fodor, 2022) is a form of attenuated governance (Hackett, 2020) in the sense that the symbolic and material support offered to allied/co-opted churches distances the government from contentious policy goals, most importantly, the pacification of rural spaces through consolidating racial segregation and institutional racism (Merry, 2014).

In conversation with the literature on the role of faith schools in contemporary European educational markets (Hemming&Roberts, 2017), the presentation focuses on the effects of authoritarian-conservative education policies and policy discourse “on the ground” (Apple, 2001). Based on three town-level case studies about the discoursive strategies of local and regional church elites, the analysis explores the restructuring of local education markets and its impact on producing and solidifying inequalities and exacerbating social divisions surrounding race and class (Allen and West, 2011; Apple, 2001; Jackson, 2003).

Neo-conservative education governments have had a controversial relationship with neoliberalism (Apple, 2004; Exley&Ball, 2011). While the churchification of education is a form of privatization, the government discourse frame church-state relations as a “strategic alliance” and presents faith schools as a primary scene for socializing good Hungarians. Official policy discourses heavily draw on Christian church discourses about the importance of value-based socialization (Neumann, 2023). Rejecting market discourses, education policy-makers contend that schooling should be a “shared responsibility” and denounce former socialist-liberal governments for approaching education as a market and commodity (Neumann, 2023). The study found that while the representatives of the local state and its secular institutions describe the churchification process as the amplification of market forces, consumer choice, and school segregation locally, denominational actors distance themselves from the competition discourse, and instead, argue that high professionalism and moral integrity offers a niche that attracts families following similar values. Furthermore, they argue, that the moral integrity and smaller school size offer a family feel (Hemmings&Roberts, 2017), “safety and stability”, and ensure better student behaviour (Butler and Hamnett, 2012) compared to secular schools. At the same time, the strategy of cultural imperialism (Grace, 2015), opening up faith schools to the wider public, results in an evangelization approach that does not aim to impose religion onto anyone but instead offers it as an opportunity to explore. Thus, religion is treated situationally and strategically: religious stakeholders expect “openness” and “cooperation” from the families and the teachers, while they also emphasize being “open” to anyone who is willing to endorse religious school practices.

In the context of the church-friendly state politics and funding, faith schools have become the synonyms of well-resourced, high-quality education in the eyes of the local elites. While secular stakeholders often point out the segregation effects of the expanding faith school system and the attenuated governance strategy which refrains from coordinating and regulating the distribution of students, faith school stakeholders defend their almost-all-white schools by pointing to token Roma students and blame disadvantaged families for self-segregation and for failing to comply with school entrance expectations.

This multi-case study in six Chilean secondary schools explores the challenges for leaders and schools in an area that has gained relevance in the national and international context due to a growingly diverse student body, and social movements that bring controversial issues to the forefront: the implementation of Citizenship Education to promote student civic involvement, in an increasingly commercialized and results oriented educational system. It uses the lens of Ethical Leadership, associated with the fulfilment of the moral imperative of education, and aims to answer how citizenship education takes place in different types of schools in Chile, exploring how managerial grammar, through the instruments of planning, accountability, and evaluation, shapes the discourses and practices of Citizenship Education.

Current transformations of the educational system under neoliberal and managerial logic make it difficult for citizenship education to be a priority at schools worldwide. In Chile, there is a contradiction between de integral development of students proposed by the Law of Education and the mechanisms that educational policy establishes for planning and assessment of schools and teachers. This results in less and less time devoted to citizenship education, promoting individual success over collective learning. Law 20.911 (2016) established that each school must have an annual Citizenship Education Plan, a tool to register actions related to citizenship education, prioritising this area and making it more visible at schools. But the initial evaluation of these plans revealed that 30% of schools did not have citizenship education actions and that there was little relationship between schools and their communities (PNUD, 2018). This study aims to further explore how this educational policy is being signified by schools, directives and teachers.

Research questions:

How can the existing methodologies examining the phenomena of school choice be augmented to more effectively examine parent choice factors?

What methodologies and approaches are available from the European context to examine the school choice in the Australian context, and how does the Australian context inform research into the European sphere?

Why are Australian parents enrolling their children in non-government religious schools in such high volumes, and what are the social and political impacts, and likely impacts drawing from understanding the European experience?

Description

Research into school choice has been prolific in recent years, including studies of European school choice. (Agasisti, 2023; Maranto and Shakeel, 2021; Mohme, 2017; Maussen and Bader, 2015; Agasisti, Barbieri, and Murtinu, 2015; Melo, 2013; European Court of Human Rights, 2011). However. researching the of issue of school choice in general, and religion in school choice in particular, needs further methodological frames to effectively gather data from a key sample: parents.

One of the primary methods for researching this topic has been political economy approaches, connected to school reform research movements. These have been driven both by critical theory approaches (Verger, Fontdevila and Zancajo, 2016; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010), and neoliberal approaches (Agasisti, 2023; Agasisti, Barbieri, and Murtinu, 2015). The focus on political economy, and ‘Hard drivers’ rather than ‘Ideation’ factors, and ‘external’ rather than ‘internal’ factors, (Verger, Fontdevila, and Zancajo, 2016) have tended to underrepresent the complex and difficult to obtain field of parent choice factors. This is particularly relevant to the role of religion, leading in turn to less coherent theories and methods for gathering and analyzing parent data in the school choice debates.

The unique Australian context provides a lively comparative case for examining school choice, particularly with reference to global factors and the European experience. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2022 total Australia non-government school enrolments were 35.6%, k-12; at the secondary level, just over 40% of enrolments were in non-government schools (ABS, 2022). By comparison, the OECD average non-government proportion of schools in a national education system is 18%. Australia ranks third highest compared to other Western nations for non-government school enrolments, over 90% being Christian- affiliated, but with a rising Islamic school population (OECD, 2018). These statistics, however, seem divergent from the dominant educational narrative of centralized state education still prevailing as normative amongst both politicians and sub-policy ‘heterarchies’. (Jessop, 1998; Ball, 2012). The clash between actual enrolment trends and the older normative discourse is causing considerable political and public energy and friction, a debate in which the author has played a public part in both media and policy. One of the key drivers of these enrolment trends is parent choice.

This paper surveys a range of European nations’ approaches to school choice, including religion, using a political economy model (Verger, Fontdevila and Zancajo, 2016), and the paradigms of ‘hard drivers’ vs ‘ideation’/ ‘External’ vs ‘Internal’, but also adding the 'hard driver' of organizational theory to the suite of paradigms to examine the influence of agile structures of non-government schools (Bush, 2015).

Choice reasons are then explored from parent perspectives, based on survey samples drawn from 3 recent studies (n=12,095), including the author’s own earlier unpublished study of parents at Anglican schools (n=3500) (Hastie, 2022; Christian Schools Australia, 2023; Independent Schools Queensland, 2021). Hence the broader field of school choice studies is augmented with three additional ‘Ideation’ elements: ‘choice architecture’ from behavioural economics (Madrian, 2014; Thaler, Sunstein and Balz, 2013), Moral Foundations Theory (Haight, 2006; 2007), and Pneumatological Imagination (PI) as a mode of examining complex personal religious motivations of parents (Yong. 2017).

Standardized tests and performance metrics are becoming increasingly widespread as key components of global education reform (Ball et al. 2017; Sahlberg, 2016). Countries with different teaching models (Voisin & Dumai, 2020) and diverse education policy approaches are adopting performance-based accountability (PBA) as a policy solution to improve the quality of education systems (Lingard, 2013).

As a response to general concerns about education quality, standardized tests are used to hold teachers accountable for students’ results, with the expectation that performative pressures will induce teachers to align their instructional practices with learning standards and utilize the achievement data for school improvement purposes. According to this theory of change, external accountability can be a suitable instrument for enhancing teacher quality, ensuring learning and improving school performance. Moreover, the test data are expected to be employed as a part of an informational system to identify areas that need further attention and eventually implement improvement plans and corrective strategies (Lingard et al., 2017).

Interestingly, existing research on PBA shows mixed results. While some investigations observe an active policy appropriation by teachers (Hardy, 2014), other investigations suggest that performative pressures, far from reinforcing virtuous circles of improvement and policy alignment, tend to erode the professional autonomy of teachers and educators (Daliri-Ngametua et al., 2021; Holloway & Brass, 2018). This mismatch between policy design and actual practices is observed in numerous education systems where accountability mechanisms result in policy decoupling, ritualistic implementation, and instrumental responses (Reinhorn et al. 2017; Thiel et al. 2017).

Indeed, schools and teachers may embrace strategic practices to escape pressure and cope with performance expectations. School competition, teaching to the test and curriculum narrowing or cheating are only some of the undesired responses that schools might adopt to dilute the external pressures associated with testing and accountability (Falabella, 2020; Koretz, 2017). These results are observed in contexts with different accountability models, but appear to be very frequent in disadvantaged school contexts (Candido, 2019; Diamond, 2012).

Still, little is known about under what conditions such instrumental practices emerge and how they become institutionalized in different education systems. In order to understand this process, we suggest that we need to better understand teachers’ interpretations of accountability mandates. We aim to unpack teachers’ discourses about testing and accountability in order to shed light on the sense-making of accountability policies, with a particular focus on vulnerable school contexts. This investigation focuses on the interpretation of the accountability mandates of schools in disadvantaged contexts because within these institutional environments, school actors appear to be more prone to adopt instrumental and undesired responses. Our argument is that by analysing teachers’ interpretations of accountability policies, we can better understand how and why instrumental practices emerge and become the norm in certain schools.

Accordingly, the research goal of our work is to unpack the different components of teachers’ discourses on PBA in vulnerable schools to better understand how school actors’ sense-making sustains instrumental practices. To do so, we conduct a comparative case study with a qualitative approach, analysing the discourses of teachers working in vulnerable school settings in Spain (Madrid) and Chile. These are interesting contexts for investigating the role of performative pressures since they combine high levels of marketization with different approaches to PBA (Falabella, 2020; Prieto & Villamor, 2012).

The participation of adults in learning and education (ALE) has been subject to research for many years, and attempts to make it more prevalent have been going on throughout the world due to its value in the labour market and the empowering role of ALE in individuals’ social relationships, social mobility, job prospects, finances, health, and wellbeing. These innumerable benefits of ALE require the genuine dedication of countries to making participation in ALE more prevalent and accessible for all adults, regardless of their educational or socio-economic background. Inevitably, this dedication necessitates effective policymaking that aims to involve more adults in learning, especially those with lower educational attainment and from lower social classes who are traditionally less prone to participate in or access ALE opportunities (Boeren, 2009; Kersh & Laczik, 2021). One of the most crucial factors influencing the effectiveness of policymaking is taking scientific evidence into account during the decision-making process concerning ALE. The consistent decrease in ALE participation rates in the United Kingdom since 2010s makes evidence-based policymaking more indispensable and urgent than ever. Through the use of scientific evidence, policymakers can better target the groups who don’t participate in ALE or those who are deprived of ALE opportunities, which can result in an increase in total participation rates and more equitable proportions of learners within those rates based on their economic and social backgrounds. However, the effectiveness of evidence-based policymaking is partially bound to the amount and quality of the scientific evidence available. It is ideally expected that the data on ALE should provide a good measurement of the people who participate, for what reasons, and in what type of learning activities as well as the benefits of ALE (Boeren, 2016). It is equally important that the data on ALE should depict a very accurate picture of who does not participate and why.

This contribution will present findings from an ongoing research project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project aims to investigate the statistical evidence-base in ALE in the UK, reveal the potential reasons behind the decreasing participation rates, and unpack how policymakers benefit from the available evidence-base during their decision-making process. In this paper, we aim to explore how participation in ALE is measured by large-scale surveys that collect data from the UK. We also aim to investigate how major determinants of participation (motivations for ALE, barriers to ALE, and the benefits of ALE) have been encompassed by these surveys. While approaching the participation questions in the surveys, we will adopt the Total Survey Error paradigm to reveal potential sources for varying participation rates. In terms of motivations and barriers, we will mainly rely on the Bounded Agency model (Evans, 2007) and Boeren’s (2017) layered model of participation, along with other theoretical frameworks such as Cross's (1981) typology of barriers and Houle’s (1961) typology of adult learners’ motivations.

The integrity and quality of information in registries are fundamental to all stages of policy development – from conception and design to implementation and evaluation – especially in fields like adult learning, where the needs and conditions can be diverse and dynamic (Roumell & Roessger, 2019). Such data can reveal trends, needs, and gaps in the current education system, enabling more targeted and effective policy interventions. Data from registries can offer insights into adult learners' demographics, learning preferences, and career trajectories. Big Data and advanced analytics are vital in creating responsive and adaptive workforce development systems (Williamson, 2017). There are expectations that education policymakers will need to be plied with quality data in the form of predictive analytical patterns (modelling, machine learning, and data mining of historical data) and knowledge about global educational predictions of future outcomes and trends (Soskil, 2018).

Reliable registries, which include information about the accreditation status of training providers and programs, are also important from learners' and employers' perspectives as they might reduce the asymmetry of information and assure the quality and the potential for a return on their investment in education and training. They might also enhance the efficiency of the search for the appropriate training offer and, therefore, contribute to better investments in human capital. The Council Recommendation on individual learning accounts of 2022 recommends developing public registers of training offers. The Council Recommendation states: “There is also a need for up-to-date public registries of recognised training through dedicated single national digital portals accessible to all, including people with disabilities, and, preferably, interconnected with the Europass platform”. Establishments of public registers in many European countries is also linked with the development of national qualifications frameworks for lifelong learning (Markowitsch & Dębowski 2022)

In the article, we aim to analyse solutions adopted in the four Visegrad countries, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, regarding developments of registries and data collection in the education sectors with particular attention to the vocationally oriented adult education sector. Following Desjardins' adult training systems typology (2017), we aim to identify how data in adult learning subsystems (sectors) is collected and used by policymakers and stakeholders. We distinguish between data (registries) regarding learners and data (registries) regarding the training offer. The analysis of data collection systems will be conducted against the background of policy frameworks that underpin adult learning in the Visegrad countries, noting the interplay between European Union recommendations and national priorities, including the structure of governance of the adult learning and financing.

The findings aim to contribute to the broader discourse on adult education systems and inform future policy development within and beyond the Visegrad region. The article draws on evidence from the international project: Digital Individual Learning Accounts In The Visegrad Countries (D-ILA in V4) financed within the Erasmus+ framework. The project used mixed research methods, including literature and policy documents analysis of public and private registries of data collection as well as in-person interviews (44 interviews in total) with the key stakeholders: training providers, employers, policymakers, trade union representatives, policy researchers.

Schools around the world increasingly rely on a range of different modes of evidence of student learning, often described as ‘data’. In keeping with Pangrazio and Sefton-Green’s (2022) call for increased attention to more local, vernacular responses to datafication processes, this paper draws upon perspectives of students, teachers and school-based administrators as they are influenced by global school data trends and seek to be more responsive to engagement with myriad forms of data. We argue there is a need to ensure meaningful aspects of education do not become marginalised. This is always a risk because numbers convey a sense of ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’ (Desrosières, 1998), and can be difficult to challenge such perceptions, especially in meritocratic contexts in which numbers are focal measures. These pressures to focus upon numeric conceptions of data are central to the quantification of social processes more broadly (Mau, 2019), which are becoming an increasingly constitutive part of social life. However, more dominant, quantified forms are not the only forms of data that exist in school settings and responses to such data are not simply passive.

After more than 20 years of international large-scale assessment (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS), and national education policies and practices that centre standardised assessment, we seek alternatives. We present from our four-year study which critiques the effects of standardized test data, and associated processes of the quantification of education, on the work and learning of system personnel, teachers and students in schools, and looks for emerging alternative approaches in Australia, Bangladesh, England, and Singapore. Inspired by Collyer, Connell, Maia and Morrell’s (2018) work of creating knowledge beyond ‘northern’ contexts alone, we have deliberately engaged with varied national contexts, including from ostensibly wealthy, ‘northern’/dominant contexts (England), more peripheral ‘northern’ settings (Australia), seemingly ‘successful’ east-Asian settings (Singapore), and ‘southern’ settings (Bangladesh). In this way, we seek to reveal the richness, diversity and plurality of the types of data, and engagement with data that occur in marginalised communities in these settings at a more genuinely ‘global’ scale. Mirroring how high stakes testing at the local, micro-level is then deployed to criticise schools at a more political, macro-level, we focus on students and educators’ stories of critique and engagement at the local level to challenge more reductive accounts that seem to characterize more ‘global’ discourses of data.

Our inquiry seeks to understand:

- the principal forms of qualitative and quantitative data (‘global’, national, local) drawn on in different national and local contexts;

- the multifarious ways in which educators engage with these data and how the current

focus upon data (‘datafication’) impacts on the lived realities of students, teachers and system personnel;

- the role of various modes of data in this work, and how these are mediated by teachers and system educators; and

- how these practices compare with more dominant, ‘global’ perspectives about data use.

We draw upon storying in marginalised settings to make visible how students and educators in schools and systems in varied policy contexts make sense of data at a more genuinely representative ‘global’ scale. We lean into storying, because humans have long ‘read’ the world through stories, and by making visible the experiences of those typically marginalised, it enables accessibility to theorizing beyond the elite and highly educated (Phillips & Bunda, 2018). Storying claims voice in the silenced margins and counters metanarratives, such as “‘monovocal’ stories about the low educational achievement and attainment of students of color” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 27).

Provide a clear outline of your research question and your theoretical framework. Bear in mind that

the European/international dimension is vital to the success of your submission.

up to 600 words

Topic: Standardisation, Diversity and Decolonisation: Enactment of Global Policies around Teaching Quality in Different Nations.

Research Question: How are teacher educators dealing with the tensions between different policy discourses which standardise quality teaching and the uncertainties which arose in struggles to decolonise curricula and pedagogies in universities?

Objectives: To develop theoretical and methodological resources to explore the enactment of global policies around quality teaching on teacher education programs and practices. The theoretical resources will include concepts from disciplinary fields such as decolonial studies (Critical Indigenous Studies, Asia as Method, Colonial Matrix of Power), as well as critical policy studies drawing on post-Foucauldian and post-Bernsteinian scholarship.

Conceptual Framework: The neoliberal educational scenarios projected by international organisations such as the OECD, World Bank and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has ‘led to a new way of thinking about how schools, technical colleges, universities and educational systems should be governed’ (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p. 117). National governments and the bureaucratic administrative state are no longer the only source of policy authority when it comes to teacher education. Increasingly international organisations, such as the OECD (2005, 2018), with their assemblage of measurement instruments, survey tools, online professional engagement videos, databases, and platforms govern teachers’ work and determine what constitutes ‘quality’ of teachers, teaching, and teacher education programs (Singh et al., 2021). Globalising discourses operate both hierarchically and heterarchically (Ball, 2016). Hierarchically, national governments may take the brunt of negative evaluation arising from publication of comparative test scores. Heterarchical effects mean that school leaders, class teachers and teacher educators can also be attacked directly through various media, including social media platforms. Moreover, the teaching workforce (including teacher educators) are held accountable and responsible for improving student performance outcomes and directed through the bureaucratic arms of the state to reform curriculum and pedagogies accordingly. The purposes of education are reconfigured in narrow instrumentalist terms, and so is the work of teachers and teacher educators, leading to the deprofessionalisation of the teaching workforce (see Robertson & Sorenson, 2018). At the same time, there are fewer people enrolling in teacher education programs and retention of teachers, particularly in schools situated in high poverty, culturally and linguistically diverse contexts is difficult. Moreover, there are increasing calls to decolonise university curriculum, which at a basic performative level, equates to a demand for more diversity in the teacher education workforce and inclusion of research by non-white scholars. In this symposium, each of the papers deals with the contradictory issues of standardisation and decolonisation of teacher education programs. The former aims to create uniform standards or norms, the latter seeks recognition for increasing cultural and linguistic diversity within nation states, and reconciliation for ongoing colonial injustices.

Reforms in initial teacher education in Australia have been driven by several interconnected global trends in education: standardisation, measurement, and processes of accountability. An increasing emphasis on standardisation in the global education reform movement (GERM) has led to the development and enactment of teacher professional standards, benchmark standards for literacy and numeracy, and national curriculum standards (Singh et al., 2021). Standardisation has been coupled with another trend, that of a growing determination to measure outcomes and to create publication league tables based on such measurements. We propose that these global policy trends, initiated by policy agencies such as the OECD, are a continuation of the colonial project of education. In this paper we outline key debates and intellectual trajectories that have shaped the field of decoloniality studies in education for the purposes of synthesising these concepts with the discipline of critical global policy studies. Decoloniality has been linked to the triad modernity /coloniality/decoloniality, which Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe as the colonial matrix of power (CMP). The CMP commenced with the project of European expansion and imperialism, often described as modernity from the 1500s onwards, and was integrally connected to colonialisation of other lands and peoples. Despite the different trajectories of scholarship within decolonial studies, emanating from different disciplinary fields and geographic spaces, we identify the following key concerns within this corpus: (1) L/land, Lore, and Country and Relationality of Epistemology-Ontology-Axiology (see Tuck & Yang, 2012; Moreton-Robinson, 2020); (2) Situated Strategic Universalisms as Movements of Solidarity (Haraway, 1988; Kapoor & Zalloua, 2022); and (3) Anti-Racism including projects around Racisms/Sexisms against the resurgence of white supremacy (Garba & Sorentino, 2020; Le Grange, 2023). We suggest that a threshold of disciplinary knowledge around the above three concerns is central to any decolonising project in teacher education (Moodie, 2019). Such a project calls for the deconstruction and reconstruction of disciplinary knowledges, and the inclusion of marginalised voices and knowledges from the global South. We ask - what contributions can decoloniality studies make to the critical policy studies literature on quality teaching, standardisation and measurement, all core to the OECD’s policies and part of the global education reform movement? We review literature in decoloniality studies to outline key debates and emergent concepts relating to teacher education. In addition, we illustrate how we have made use of decoloniality concepts in our own teacher education program work in Australia.

Garba, T., & Sorentino, S.-M. (2020). Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. Antipode, 52(3), 764-782 Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 Kapoor, I., & Zalloua, Z. (2022). Universal politics. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197607619.003.0001 Le Grange, L. (2023). Decolonisation and anti-racism: Challenges and opportunities for (teacher) education. The Curriculum Journal, 34, 8–21. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.193 Majavu, M. (2023). Toppling the Racist Anglo-Saxon Politics of Cecil Rhodes. In B. Mignolo, W., & Walsh, C. (2018). On Decoloniality. Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press. Moodie, N. (2019). Learning about knowledge: threshold concepts for Indigenous studies in education. The Australian Educational Researcher, 46(5), 735-749. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00309-3 Moreton-Robinson, A. (2020). Incommensurable sovereignties. Indigenous ontology matters. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies (pp. 257-269). Routledge. Singh, P., Hoyte, F., Heimans, S., & Exley, B. (2021). Teacher Quality and Teacher Education: A Critical Policy Analysis of International and Australian Policies.. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 46(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2021v46n4.1 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonisation is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1), 1-40.

This paper explores the potential to teacher education, of drawing lines between professional discretion, ethics of care and inclusion as a decolonial (indigenous) practice (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). In the face of accountability demands, increasing diversity, and teachers expressing powerlessness, professional discretion is challenged. Inclusion understood as decentring of dominant knowledges and world views and prioritizing experiences of marginalised groups may, reveal a potential for, and possibly contribute to, change through disrupting existing power structures. The context: Norwegian teacher education has been described as existing in a field of tension between policy and research (Brevik & Fosse 2016), and between responsibility and accountability (Smith 2018). A revised national curriculum was issued in 2017, emphasising a research-based foundation and expanding the length to include a masters’ degree. The teaching profession is, despite a comparably soft version of control, similarly described as positioned between accountability and autonomy (Lennert da Silva & Mølstad 2020), and professional ethics as mired in paradox of choice between two ethical positions of which one protests the accountability system but offers no support for action, and the other offers guidance in action whilst accepting the system (Afdal & Afdal 2019). Teachers’ professional discretion (no: “skjønn”), described as making good choice in the face of uncertainty, is seen as developed in the nexus between theory and experience emphasising the intertwining of differing knowledges and contextual sensitivity (Grimen & Molander 2008), though in practice to a lesser extent found to emphasise value-based reasoning (Suzen 2024). Recent developments in initial teacher training prioritizing scientific knowledge, can be expected to prioritize research to experience and structural demands to ethical reflection. Through a document analysis of current policy documents on, and a recent evaluation of, teacher education, we uncover the understandings of, and conditions for promoting professional discretion in teacher education in a Norwegian context. Our preliminary results suggest a lack of emphasis on experiences, values, or world views within teachers' education in Norway, and professional competence as based on scientific knowledge. We discuss the findings considering research on decolonial movements in Norwegian teacher education. Building on bell hooks ideas about theory, love and dialogue (hooks 2014) we then explore the potential of a predominant ethics of care (Afdal & Afdal 2019) as a site of resistance, providing an opening to a wider set of epistemologies and counter-hegemonic ideas promoting thinking against the grain.

Afdal, H. W., & Afdal, G. (2019). The making of professional values in the age of accountability. European Educational Research Journal, 18(1), 105-124. Brevik, L.M., & Fosse, B.O. (2016). Lærerutdanning i det 21. år hundre – Tradisjoner, Utfordringer, Endringer [Teacher education in the 21st century. Traditions, challenges, and changes]. Acta Didactica Norge, 10(2), 1-10. Gaudry, A., & Lorenz, D. (2018). Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian Academy. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 14(3), 218-227. hooks, b. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Lennert da Silva, A. L., & Mølstad, C. E. (2020). Teacher autonomy and teacher agency: A comparative study in Brazilian and Norwegian lower secondary education. The Curriculum Journal, 31(1), 115-131. Grimen, H. & Molander, A. (2008). Profesjon og skjønn [Professions and professional discretion]. In: Profesjonsstudier, 179–196. Universitetsforlaget. Smith, K. (2018). Accountability in Teacher Education in Norway: A Case of Mistrust and Trust. In: Wyatt-Smith, C., Adie, L. (eds) Innovation and Accountability in Teacher Education. Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability. Springer, Suzen, E. (2024). Vurdering for å lære - en skjønnsmessig vurdering som gir føringer for lærerprofesjonalitet. [Assesment for learning - a discretionary assessment that provides guidance for teacher professionalism] I: T. Werler og H. Sæverot (red). Pedagogiske handlinger. Fagbokforlaget

Quality teaching in school education has increasingly become central policy topic of the European Union (EU) stressing quality and equity in education and training, while it is closely linked to high-quality competences for in service and future teachers (Sarakinioti & Tsatsaroni, 2015). In 2020 (European Commission, 2020), teacher education policy for quality and inclusive, digital and green education was planned to be supported by Erasmus+Teacher Academies. The 27 Teacher Academies competitively funded today offer a range of collaboration, capacity building, network and learning activities, modules and toolkits for teachers and student teachers (Galvin et al., 2024). The paper problematises the emerging mode of transnational governance of partnerships among schools, teacher education institutions, universities, NGOs, etc in the framework of Erasmus+Teachers Academies, questioning the changes it introduces in the broad field of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Europe. The analysis adopts a topological genealogy approach that focuses on governing practices unfolding through the spatial/temporal operation of continuity and change, repetition, and difference in the emerging relations of transnational European governance of Erasmus+Teachers Academies and their productive effects for ITE (Martin & Secor, 2014, Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). A starting point of the topological approach is that “the spatiotemporal scales are not considered as being nested in one another (e.g., past-present-future as linearly and chronologically unfolding; micro-meso-macro as differing in size and scope), but rather in ‘the agential enfolding of different scales through one another'” (Barad 2007, 245, in Decuypere & Lewis, 2023, 4). Bernstein’s theoretical idea that social space and time are demarcated by symbolic and material boundaries which, as ‘tacit metaphors’, define the inside/outside, now/then, near/far, us/them regulating the knowledge/ power and control relations in different sites of practice (2000: 206), informs the topological analysis of the 27 Academies. The analysis conceives of Teacher Academies as governmental space(s) in/ through/ as change for ITE (Decuypere & Lewis, 2023). The paper describes the processes of stabilization of Teacher Academies’ policy/pedagogic interventions- how they “are being produced, enacted, facilitated and sustained” and what kinds of instruments, infrastructures etc, they utilise (“relations in change”). Also, it discusses the productive effects and standardisations of these interventions in/on the field of ITE (“relations through changes”). Finally, it reflects on the entire educational-infrastructural assemblage of Erasmus+Teachers Academies, whether they are becoming a “prototype” in the field of European ITE and about their footprint on teachers/ teacher educators’ work and professionalism (ibid, Robertson & Sorensen, 2018).

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. Revised edition. Rowman & Littlefield. Decuypere, M. & Lewis, S. (2023) Topological genealogy: a methodology to research transnational digital governance in/through/as change, Journal of Education Policy, 38:1, 23-45, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2021.1995629 European Commission. (2020). COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS on achieving the European Education Area by 2025. COM(2020) 625 final Galvin, C., Madalinska-Michalak, J. & Revyakina, E. (2024). The European Union Erasmus+ Teacher Academies Action. Complementing and Supplementing European Teacher Education and Teacher Education Research? In V. Symeonidis, (2024) (Ed) Enhancing the Value of Teacher Education Research. Implications for Policy and Practice (170-197). Brill. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Martin, L. & Secor. A. J. 2014. “Towards a Post-mathematical Topology.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (3): 420–438. doi:10.1177/0309132513508209. Robertson, S.L., & Sorensen, T. (2018). Global transformations of the state, governance and teachers’ labour: Putting Bernstein’s conceptual grammar to work. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4), 470-488. https://doi:10.1177/1474904117724573 Sarakinioti, A. & Tsatsaroni, A. (2015). European education policy initiatives and teacher education curriculum reforms in Greece. Education Inquiry (EDUI), 6(3): 259-288. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/edui.v6.28421

What does the decolonial turn mean to a postcolonial policy context like Cyprus and Hong Kong? In recent times, there has been a plethora of literature in the English-using scholarly community, on the need to decolonise curriculum, knowledge, and research. This sentiment is prevalent and widely shared amongst scholars, particularly in the West. Decoloniality has intersected with important research themes such as race, gender, climate justice, Indigenous studies, to name just a few common examples. In this paper, I offer a slightly different angle on the decolonial turn and what it might mean and be practised differently, based on a partial perspective from/in Hong Kong. I outline three tasks which constitute what I call difficult decoloniality: 1) the need to problematise existing research discourse about Hong Kong education policy studies published in flagship academic journals in the West; 2) the demand for a language of description to scratch beneath the surface of complex problems underlying politics and policy of education in non-Western context; and 3) a faithful and subversive extension of sociological theory that goes beyond the Western hermeneutical horizons. I draw on a couple of research articles published in Western journals and recent policy changes in relation to teacher professionalism in post-2019 Hong Kong, to illustrate these three points. While sociological knowledge produced by/in the West such as the ‘classics’ by Durkheim, Marx, and Weber has long been subjected to criticism by decolonial scholars, I focus instead on the fecundity of descriptions that theoretical enterprises and valid concerns expressed by sociologists such as Basil Bernstein, have enabled. More specifically, I turn to recent policy instruments related to teacher quality such as Professional Standards for Teachers of Hong Kong, Guidelines on Teachers’ Professional Conduct, and Guidelines for Handling School Complaints, all of which are connected to the post-2019 political crisis and complex problems such as teacher bashing, doxxing, online abuse, complaints against schoolteachers. Contrary to prevalent literature in the West on terrors of performativity and ambivalence arising from policy enactment, I argue that it is equally important to address what these policy instruments have done and enabled. In other words, two issues arise from the decolonial perspective on an Asian policy context: 1) the importance of historicity and contextuality in which theory produced in the West might speak otherwise; and 2) social and epistemic conditions under which a theory from the West is still rendered valid in the postcolonial context.

Ball, Stephen J., Meg Maguire, and Annette Braun. 2012. How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools. Oxford: Routledge. Bernstein, Basil. 2000. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Rev. Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Education. New York City, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2016. “Postcolonial Reflections on Sociology.” Sociology 50 (5): 960–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516647683. Carusi, F. Tony, Peter Rawlins, and Karen Ashton. 2018. “The Ontological Politics of Evidence and Policy Enablement.” Journal of Education Policy 33 (3): 343–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1376118. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter D, and Catherine E Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Singh, Parlo. 2015. “Performativity and Pedagogising Knowledge: Globalising Educational Policy Formation, Dissemination and Enactment.” Journal of Education Policy 30 (3): 363–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2014.961968. ———. 2017. “Pedagogic Governance: Theorising with/after Bernstein.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 38 (2): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.1081052. Takayama, Keita, Arathi Sriprakash, and Raewyn Connell. 2017. “Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education.” Comparative Education Review 61 (S1): S1–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/690455.

Adult Learning Systems (ALS) represent a mass of organised learning opportunities available to adults along with their underlying structures and stakeholders that shape their organisation and governance (Desjardins, 2017, 2023; Desjardins & Ioannidou, 2020). This analytical framework includes not only participants (demand side) and providers (supply side) of adult education and training but also institutions and stakeholders, e.g., states, trade unions, professional associations and firms, as well as policy measures more or less aiming to regulate interactions between them. Finally, the framework contains fundamental coordination problems and constraints connected to adults’ access to organised learning opportunities that are responsible for efficacy, efficiency and inequality inside these systems. Well-developed, open and flexible ALS able to solve coordination problems are considered a precondition for wide and equal participation of adults in organised forms of learning (Lee & Desjardins, 2021), which is a key policy aim of many international organisations (e.g., EC, 2020, OECD, 2019; UNESCO, 2022) and national governments.

While the subject of ALS has garnered growing scholarly interest in the past decade (Boeren, 2019; Desjardins, 2017, 2023; Desjardins & Ioannidou, 2020; Rees, 2013; Saar et al., 2013; Schemman et al., 2020; Verdier, 2018), there is a gap in the literature regarding a comprehensive examination of the current, post-COVID-19 status and historical development of ALS in Europe since the 1990s. In other words, how are they responding to current societal challenges?

Relatively little theoretical and empirical work has been done on the diachronic/historical perspective of ALS (Saar et al., 2013; Schemman et al., 2020; Verdier, 2018), specific institutional patterns of these systems and their recent development during the 2010s and the early 2020s. Although the period of the “Eurozone crisis” after 2010, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have brought new societal challenges, like austerity measures, disruption of job markets and new directions within political economies of European states (Garritzmann et al., 2022; Hall, 2022), we have limited knowledge of how they have affected the institutional setting of ALS.

Following this research gap, this discussion panel propose a presentation and discussion of the key institutional changes and current developments in three European ALS: (1) the United Kingdom, (2) Germany and (3) the Czech Republic. These three countries are considered paradigmatic representatives of three different models of ALS: (a) liberal, market-oriented (UK), (b) continental/Christian-democratic, stakeholder-oriented (Germany) and (3) post-socialist, mix-model (Czechia). The panel discussion will provide an overview of the evolution of these three diverse ALSs throughout the last three decades (the 1990s to the early 2020s), showing their unique paths of institutional building and how they face current societal challenges.

Societies globally are increasingly characterised by uncertainty and upheaval, including continuing concerns about inequity and access to quality public education that meets the needs of young people today (Riddle et al., 2023). This symposium takes a nuanced approach to considering uncertainty in education politics and policy by closely examining the national and local policy environments in which schools are operating; recognising that they are set against a wider, turbulent, background.

The symposium brings diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the question of uncertainty. It illuminates and instantiates the ways in which leaders might respond to uncertainty by trying to “play the game” required by differing, and often competing sets of rules. Theoretical lenses include Bourdieu and Foucault’s concepts, as well as taking a Social Network Analysis approach towards understanding the practices and experiences occurring in public education within different contexts. Further, the symposium explores the politics and policy of public schooling in England and Chile. This deliberately international focus highlights the global trends that exist in contemporary education policy while recognising the nuanced implications of local enactment of global policy trends.

The symposium explores the various ways school leaders navigate uncertainty. Two of the papers in this symposium suggest that leaders might ‘play the game’ as a method of navigating the complex political realities of schooling today in both England and Chile. In doing so, they show the ways school leaders might try to bring some certainty to frequently shifting ground – they might focus on developing relationships or on cultivating networks as a means of solidifying or renegotiating their positions within increasingly uncertain hierarchies or positions within public education.

The final paper brings an alternative viewpoint through its research with former school leaders in England who, rather than playing the game, were removed from the field entirely (either by choice, or by force). The concept of post-panopticism (Courtney, 2016) enables a nuanced analysis of the effects of school inspections in their current form, which are characterised by uncertainty from preparation all the way through to the sometimes-unintended effects of external inspection.

The symposium offers lessons about school leadership and governance, and how individual leaders as well as their school communities have navigated socially and politically turbulent periods. Their negotiation of uncertain policy environments highlights the inequities that persist in public schooling whether it be through ‘disadvantaged’ schools facing heavier scrutiny in school inspections; experiencing differential parental engagement depending on a school community’s socio-economic circumstances; or through the new ways schools are required to navigate and build relationships and networks to survive in an uncertain policy landscape.

The purpose of this paper is to present data and analysis to theorise how the corporatisation of educational leadership and governance for schools has reframed parental engagement in disadvantaged communities. By thinking with Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu, 1977; 1990; 1998) I examine how corporatised educational leadership secures parental engagement as a corporate activity to acquire, regulate and naturalise parents in a corporatised field, strengthening the position of the multi-academy trusts, their schools and those leading and governing in the MAT. The corporatisation of the field (Saltman, 2010; Courtney, 2015; Enright et al., 2020) has seen a change in the stance and position of those responsible for the governance and leadership of schools. I present a model to conceptualise how corporatisation has rewritten the rules of the game, with parental engagement operationalised as corporate activity. This study is an ethno-graphically informed case study located in three MATs in England. Generated data from twenty-one interviews with leaders was analysed to understand how educational leadership secured the illusio of the game through parental engagement. Thinking with Bourdieu’s field theory I analysed the generated data to explore how the fields symbolic order and doxic relations are secured through parental engagement. This study reveals the drive to acquire parents, through a corporate framing of parental engagement, seeks those parents who are willing participants in the illusio (Bourdieu, 1998) of the game. However, this study extends Bourdieu’s field theory as it revealed that corporate actors deployed parental engagement as a strategy to acquire parents who do not recognise the illusio of the game. The acquisition of these parents acknowledges corporate actors as experts. However, to legitimate this recognition, they are required to regulate and naturalise these parents into the dispositions and practices of the field. This analysis is significant as it contributes a model that extends Bourdieu’s field theory. This model illuminates how parent engagement in a corporatised field of educational leadership aims to acquire, regulate and naturalise parents into the field. Underpinning the extension of Bourdieu’s field theory is my argument that parental engagement has been purposed as a corporate activity to secure acquisitions and the dynamic of power between actors. Furthermore, I contribute empirically to the field by providing a model to analyse the parental engagement activities within the field of educational leadership to understand the purposing of such activities in relation to the fields forces and doxic relations.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990b) Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Standford, CA: Standford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998) Practical Reason. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Policy Press. Courtney, S.J. (2015) ‘Corporatised leadership in English schools.’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 47(3): 214–231. Enright, E., Hogan, A. and Rossi, T. (2020) The commercial school heterarchy, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41:2: 187-205, Saltman, K. J. (2010) The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The New Public Education reform (NPE) is meant to enhance the depressed Chilean public school system via new middle-tier governing bodies administrating and supporting public schools (Anderson et al., 2023). As part of this reform, thematic networks and a networking policy approach have been promoted within new school districts. This paper reports on the use of networks by school leaders to engage in and make sense of the broader social space schools are part of. This study is part of a larger research project on collaboration and support between schools in a recently established school district. The district is composed of public schools that were previously administrated by three adjacent urban municipalities in Santiago, Chile. From a Social Network Analysis approach (SNA) (Freeman, 2004; Marin and Wellman 2011), this research delves into the declared inter-organisational networks and ties reported by school headteachers from sixteen primary schools. Primary data comes from interviews where participants were encouraged to name and map other schools they have a relationship with, and reflect on the content, history and value of those ties. Declared partners range between 4 and 50 and the vast majority are other public schools from their school district. Although many of these are relationships taking place within – and thanks to – district-based mandated networks, others are ties that schools and school leaders have built and maintained on their own. This paper sets itself in the mismatch between policy-led networks and those declared by headteachers and provides insights into the reasons and purposes that formal and informal networks play in both managing and leading schools, and inhabiting the new policy landscape schools are part of. This paper unveils the importance of inter-organisational ties and the engagement of school leaders with the broader surrounding social space they are part of. It is argued in this paper that connecting with others beyond schools is key in order to make sense of, navigate, and overcome the uncertainty that comes with the settlement of a new policy landscape amidst a persisting crisis in the Chilean public education system.

Anderson, S., Uribe, M., & Valenzuela, J. P. (2023). Reforming public education in Chile: The creation of local education services. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 51(2), 481-501. Freeman, L. (2004). The development of social network analysis. A Study in the Sociology of Science, 1(687), 159-167. Marin, A., & Wellman, B. (2011). Social network analysis: An introduction. The SAGE handbook of social network analysis, 11-25.

This paper explores uncertainty in school leaders’ work, with a focus on high-stakes school inspections in England. We explore the ways inspections cause uncertainty for school leaders navigating the politics of post-panoptic education policy (Courtney, 2016). The paper takes up the network call to explore the unintended consequences of education policy in a time of uncertainty. In doing so, the paper analyses concepts of surveillance; the role not making sense to those within it; and leaders' work in filling gaps they experienced in support that would have enabled them to navigate uncertainty more confidently. Post-panopticism (Courtney, 2016) provides the lens for our analysis of uncertainty for school leaders who are navigating the politics of school inspection. The features of post-panopticism lead to uncertainty for leaders in how they might prepare for school inspection as well as to the unintended consequences of school inspection policy enactment. These characteristics include total visibility for the school and leader, norms that are characterised as fixed but in reality are in flux, and that disrupt the ways leaders have constructed themselves within these policy environments. Importantly, the effects of post-panoptic school inspections are experienced differentially depending on local context. This paper analyses stories of leaders in ‘disadvantaged’ schools who experienced school inspections in ways that were more uncertain than those who were more advantaged within the current system. Comprising loosely structured interviews (Alvesson, 2011) with 14 former headteachers of public schools in England, we undertook a collaborative analysis exploring uncertainty and the unintended consequences of school inspection policies in three areas: 1. The embodied effects of surveillance in a post-panoptic policy environment. We explore the consequences for leaders’ health and wellbeing, and intention or ability to remain within the profession. 2. The ways leaders attempt to make sense of the unintended consequences of school inspections and the surrounding apparatus. 3. The ways leaders who leave the profession undertake work that fills gaps they identified, including professional support, care work, development and mentoring. The final point underscores that former leaders are addressing inadequacies in systemic support for their colleagues. It also shows that they were not necessarily unwilling to continue in education, but that the work of a school leader in its current form is unsustainable. This holds consequences for long-term workforce planning, and greater attention needs to be paid to the stories of former leaders so we can learn from their experiences.

Alvesson, M. (2011). Interpreting Interviews. SAGE Publications. Courtney, S.J. (2016). Post-panopticism and school inspection in England. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(4), 623-642. doi:10.1080/01425692.2014.965806

Introduction

Swedish schools are facing major challenges. Swedens identity as a pioneering country in education (Tellhaug et al. 2006; Román et al.) has been questioned both nationally and internationally (SvD, 2022; OECD, 2022). The debate on the challenges facing schools covers a number of issues, ranging from poorer results in PISA, lack of access to qualified teachers and, last but not least, an increase in the number of students suffering from mental illness, with school-related factors cited as one of the causes.

This situation affects the role of teachers. Additionally, the Swedish school system is a subject to symbolic politics and sensitive to political shifts, leading to a higher frequency of reforms and changes in the legal framework compared to schools in many other countries (Jarl & Rönnberg 2019; Hallsén & Magnússon 2022). Expectations of what teachers should do to address the challenges and what they are empowered to do are not always aligned. External expectations are based both on legally binding rules and more ideological expressions that indirectly influence the role of teachers. These expectations may conflict with each other. A further area of conflict that can arise in relation to these external influences is teachers' internal expectations of themselves and their role.

These areas of conflicts and the dilemmas that might follow are accentuated in teachers' grading of students. This is also an area that serves as an example of substantial reforms. In the fall of 2024, a new grading system for upper secondary school, and consequently a new legal framework for teachers' assessments, are implemented. In the directives for the new grading system, the proposals are justified, among other things, by the aim to enhance fair assessment and counteract stress among students (dir 2018:32; dir 2019:66).

Aim and theoretical framework

We aim to illuminate the role of teachers in today's Swedish upper secondary school in the face of the pressures arising from the challenges in grading. How is the role of teachers influenced when demands and expectations are expressed regarding ensuring a fair assessment, and simultaneously supporting young people’s well-being and combating mental health issues? In particular, our study focuses on teachers as authority practitioners and employees in the public sector navigating the complex intersection between legal and pedagogical expectations and demands on this matter.

The study, based on this, have the following research questions:

1. How do teachers experience the multidimensional demands involved in grading enhancing ensuring fair assessment, and supporting well-being?
2. How can the exercise of authority by teachers as employees in the public sector, considering the cross-pressure they encounter in grading, be explained and understood in relation to legal frameworks?

Theoretically the point of departure for the study is the concept of "policy enactment," employed to shed light on the interplay between national regulations and local practices (Ball, 1993; Ball et al., 2012; Ozga, 2000; Hallsén, 2013; 2021). Within the process referred to as local enactment, governing formulations must undergo translation, interpretation and reconstruction to be practically valid in a local setting (Ball et al., 2012). The study's premise is rooted in the notion that the school constitutes the local context, and various legal regulations may lead to conflicts and dilemmas in their interpretation and application, particularly in the role of teachers as authority practitioners and as employees in the public sector. School action depends on the design and clarity of the legal framework (Enkvist, 2020). The complex nature of the school's function magnifies these conflicts and dilemmas, particularly considering the school's frequent exposure to symbolic politics and the fact that the school is constantly the subject of initiatives for change.

In Korea, there are more and more laws about education. When school violence became an important social issue, a law was enacted more than 20 years ago that set out specific procedures for dealing with school violence. The law requires that disciplinary actions against students who commit violence be recorded, and the student record can be used for admission to higher education. A decade ago, when child abuse became a serious social problem, a law was enacted to prohibit child abuse in schools. After this law was enforced, parents who were dissatisfied with a teacher's guidance of their students would report the teacher for child abuse. Last year, a teacher committed suicide after receiving malicious complaints from parents. After this incident, laws were enacted to protect the rights of teachers. Not only are the number of laws governing schooling increasing, but they are also becoming more specific. Increasingly, laws regulate what used to be done autonomously within schools.

This presentation will use actor network theory(ANT) to analyze how teacher-parent relationships change after laws are enforced. When a problem arises, many people want to utilize the law as a means to solve it. However, laws change relationships between people. In this sense, the law is a non-human actor. Within schools, various people and non-human actors form networks. When a law enters the school, it changes the network. We can call this a 'translation'.

The obligatory passage point is important as networks form and change. It is important for one actor to be able to disrupt the existing network and make other actors dependent on it in order to attract them to their network, which is called an obligatory passage point. Both teachers and parents want to use law to enforce their demands, and both want to change the other to be more in line with their demands. In this sense, law is a kind of obligatory passage point.

This presentation aims to analyze how relationships in schools, especially between teachers and parents, change after the creation of an obligatory passage point of legislation. In South Korea, the use of legislation as an instrument of education policy is increasing. And laws change schooling. This presentation analyzes the ways in which laws as policy instruments change schooling.

This paper engages with the ongoing discussion on juridification of and in education. The context is the current curriculum reform and the new Education Act in Norway. The paper aims to contribute to the knowledgebase of juridification in and of education in Norway during the last decades (2000-2025) by looking at juridification as a governing mechanism (Rosén et al., 2023). Juridification is studied both as a theoretical concept and an empirical phenomenon. Both epistemological, social, political and educational implications of the (juridical) discourse is studied.

Recent research points to the juridification of basic education, which means that processes in areas that were previously treated as pedagogical now are solved with juridical measures and juridical ruling (Andenæs, 2016; Hall, 2019; Ottesen & Møller, 2016; Novak, 2019). As a governance instrument, the curriculum can take different forms and vary from being strictly regulated and detailed on one hand to being broadly governed on the other. Regulation of the curriculum includes both the process of how the curriculum is developed and the outcome, or product, of this process (Mølstad & Hansén, 2013). The national curriculum is a legal document and a mayor educational governance instrument. This paper will be looking at the national curriculum’s function as legal regulation in the interplay between the arena of formulation of policy and the arena of realisation of policy (Lundgren, 1986). Important questions being asked are: What characterises the legal regulation of primary and lower secondary education in Norway? And how does the national curriculum function as a governance instrument in this respect?

A critical perspective will be part of the theoretical framework for this paper as there is an intention to ask how the present order came to be and to call present governance mechanisms into question. The paper has a discursive approach. Discourse analysis can be applied in analysis of many different social domains, including organisations and institutions and in societal and cultural developments involving communication. The discursive approach is applied both in policy document analysis and in analysis of practices and talk (interviews). The study has a poststructural and Foucault-inspired approach to policy analysis (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). Policy is understood as discourse (Ball, 1993) and discourse is considered to constitute the social world, meaning also that changes in discourse are a means by which the social world is changed. Lundgren (2002) identify four instruments for political governing of educational systems: the legal system, the economic system, the ideological system (goals and content) and the evaluation system. According to Lundgren, these four governance mechanisms make up the frames for governing of public education/schools. They interact and the balance between them may vary. The concepts in Lundgren’s frame factor theory are used in this paper to analyse governing mechanisms and the relations between the state, society and the educational system. The paper also draw on Habermas’ social theory of how materialised regulation might colonialise the life-world (here: education and schools) (Habermas, 1987). To analyse and discuss findings, the paper activates Blichner & Molander’s (2008) five dimensions of juridifcation. This conseptualisation is used to understand different aspects of juridification of and in education in Norway.

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10.3 aims to “ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard” (United Nations, 2015) and SDG 4.5 aims to “(…) ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations” (ibid.). Despite this, language learning policies sometimes follow exclusionary practices, such as segregating students with beginning skills in the language of instruction (LoI), even though they are often referring to aim equal opportunities and inclusive education (Bunar & Juvonen, 2022; Hilt, 2017). These policies are released in the context of education, politics, and ideologies (Cross et al., 2022) and they are intended to be implemented by schools and teachers in the classroom in accordance with legal regulations (Cushing, 2023). However, language learning policies are subject to the interpretation of school leaders and teachers and can be influenced by school resources, ideologies, and other contextual factors (Bunar & Juvonen, 2022; Cushing, 2023). For example, German language support classes for students with beginning skills in the LoI in Austria are implemented in different ways from inclusive to segregated, which deviate to a greater or lesser extent from the current legal requirements (Schwab et al., 2023). In Sweden, teaching newly arrived students is more often based on the school's routines and school-specific solutions than on the student’s individual needs (Nilsson & Bunar, 2016). Therefore, the implementation of language learning policies is not always straightforward. The resources of the school, including personnel and spatial resources, and the interpretation of language learning policies by teachers, based on their ideologies, play a crucial role in ensuring that these policies are implemented effectively (Bunar & Juvonen, 2022; Cross et al., 2022; Cushing, 2023).

Noting the dependency of the implementation of language policies on the context and the responsible persons, the symposium aims to provide insights into the challenges and solutions of implementations of language learning policies for students with beginning skills in the LoI from a transnational perspective. Furthermore, the symposium will take into account a multilevel perspective with each contribution focusing on national, regional, and/or individual contexts of the implementation of language learning policies: the first contribution will examine the interaction of context and policy implementation at different organisational levels; the second contribution will emphasize public administrations as an interface between politics and schools and their regional peculiarities; the third contribution will analyse teachers’ different understanding of the implementation of language policies in a specific region.

The symposium comprises three contributions that address the issue of second language learning policies in educational research. The first contribution analyses the extent to which contextual factors and language learning policies affect the integration or segregation of students with beginning skills in the LoI in the US. The second contribution investigates the feasibility, effectiveness, and legitimacy of German language support policies for students with beginning skills in the LoI from the perspective of employees in public administrations operating in different Austrian federal states. Finally, the third contribution focuses on how Norwegian teachers estimate the inclusion process of students with beginning skills in the LoI in upper secondary schools framed by educational policies. Overall, the results presented in this symposium will aid in the ongoing discussions about second language learning policies in educational research.

Objectives Second language learners (SLLs) in the United States--also referred to as multilingual learners (MLs)--benefit from, and are legally entitled to, specialized language instruction (Lau v. Nichols, 1974; Takanishi & Le Menestrel, 2017). Depending on how this instruction is organized, MLs may be either linguistically integrated or segregated. In this paper, we draw from studies conducted across schools in different US regions to explain how policy and contextual factors converge to create conditions for the segregation or integration of MLs. Theoretical Framework We bring together organizational and political theories to examine contextual complexities in SLL policy implementation (Burch, 2007; Honig, 2006). Such complexities mean that, while ML integration can occur in segregative policy contexts, segregation can occur in integrative policy contexts, with much variation in between (Freire & Alemán, 2021; Umansky et al., 2020). The extant literature points to four contextual dimensions that help to explain this variation: population demographics, external cultural and political forces, school and staff capacity, and organizational structures and norms (Hopkins et al., 2021; Lowenhaupt & Reeves, 2015). Methods We reanalyzed past studies of ML policy implementation conducted in different regions of the US and at different organizational levels (e.g., classroom, school, district, state) and coded for the four contextual dimensions in our theoretical framework. After examining patterns between policy and context in this cross-case analysis, we selected cases that illustrate specific relationships between policy and context and wrote within-case analytical memos (Miles et al., 2014) to better understand the connection to ML segregation and integration. Results We present four cases that highlight distinct relationships between policy and context: 1) segregative policy and segregative context, 2) segregative policy and integrative context, 3) integrative policy and integrative context, and 4) integrative policy and integrative context. Though each case is unique, we illustrate how the four dimensions converge in similar ways to create conditions for ML segregation or integration. Discussion Our findings show how local context can either exacerbate segregation, as in the case of dual language programs lacking the necessary demographics or local interest, or mitigate segregation, such as when school leaders integrate MLs despite mandates for separate language instruction. These findings have important implications for practice, given that these variations in policy implementation may be obstacles to finding solidarity around SLL policy reform and may contribute to the preservation of policies that are detrimental for MLs.

Burch, P. (2007). Educational policy and practice from the perspective of institutional theory: Crafting a wider lens. Educational Researcher, 36(2), 84-95. Freire, J.A., & Alemán Jr., E. (2021). “Two schools within a school”: Elitism, divisiveness, and intra-racial gentrification in a dual language strand. Bilingual Research Journal, 44(2), 249-269. Honig, M.I. (Ed.). (2006). New directions in education policy implementation: Confronting complexity. The State University of New York Press. Hopkins, M., Weddle, H., Bjorklund, P., Umansky, I. M., & Blanca Dabach, D. (2021). “It’s created by a community”: Local context mediating districts’ approaches to serving immigrant and refugee newcomers. AERA Open, 7. Lowenhaupt, R., & Reeves, T. (2015). Toward a theory of school capacity in new immigrant destinations: Instructional and organizational considerations. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 14(3), 308-340. Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M., & Saldana, J. (2014) Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. Sage. Takanishi, R., & Le Menestrel, S. (2017). Promoting the educational success of children and youth learning English: Promising futures. National Academies Press. Umansky, I.M., Hopkins, M., & Blanca Dabach, D. (2020). Ideals and realities: An examination of the factors shaping newcomer programming in six U.S. school districts. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 19(1), 36-59.

In response to the growing plurality of student languages, Austrian authorities introduced a novel language support model in the 2018/19 school year (BMBWF, 2019). As part of the language support model, students who do not meet a certain language proficiency level in the language of instruction are mandated to participate in German language support classes (i.e., GLSC). Previous studies with teachers and school principals have shown that GLSC are associated with considerable organizational difficulties, have a negative impact on the educational biography of pupils and that there is a lack of empirical evidence with sound arguments or justifications (e.g. Spiel et al., 2022). To expand current knowledge about the perceived feasibility, effectiveness, and legitimacy of GLSC, this study, building on Bleidick’s (1985) theoretical framework, examines the perspectives of nine public administrators from different Austrian federal states. Preliminary results of a reflexive thematic analysis according to Braun & Clarke (2022) indicate that participants perceive strong differences in terms of feasibility between urban and rural regions. In particular, the participants report inadequate facilities and an insufficient quantity and quality of staff in rural schools, which is consistent with the findings of Schwab et al. (2023). Concerning urban schools, participants point to difficulties for teachers associated with the high heterogeneity of students in GLSC in terms of age and language proficiency. However, participants were also positive about the feasibility of GLSC, particularly in relation to the curriculum for GLSC students and sufficient support services for GLSC teachers (e.g., support materials). In terms of effectiveness, stakeholders were largely critical of the impact of GLSC on students’ development and socio-emotional aspects, which is in line with the findings of Resch et al. (2023) who point to social exclusion and othering processes perceived by teachers. Interestingly, few participants expressed concerns about the impact of GLSC on students’ language development. Finally, most participants did not criticize the legitimacy of GLSCs in relation to the lack of empirical evidence. This finding could be because the participants themselves take on monitoring tasks and are not involved in the actual implementation of the GLSC. Overall, the results of the present study indicate that it is particularly important to consider the views of administrative authorities, which play an important role in the implementation of top-down decisions in the education system. The implications derived from the present study point to the need to continuously promote close communication between administrative authorities and schools.

Bleidick, U. (1985). Theorie der Behindertenpädagogik : mit mehreren Tabellen. Marhold. Bundesministerium Für Bildung, Wissenschaft Und Forschung (BMBWF). (2019). Deutschförderklassen und Deutschförderkurse. Leitfaden für Schulleiterinnen und Schulleiter. Bundesministerium Für Bildung, Wissenschaft Und Forschung. https://www.bmbwf.gv.at/dam/jcr:f0e708af-3e17-4bf3-9281-1fe7098a4b23/deutschfoerderklassen.pdf Braun, V., Clarke, V., Hayfield, N., & Terry, G. (2018). Thematic analysis. In P. Liamputtong (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences (pp. 84–103). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2779- 6_103-1. Gitschthaler, M., Kast, J., Corazza, R., & Schwab, S. (2021). Inclusion of multilingual students-teachers' perceptions on language support models. International Journal of Inclusive Education, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2021.2011439 Resch, K., Gitschthaler, M., & Schwab, S. (2023). Teacher's perceptions of separate language learning models for students with immigrant background in Austrian schools. Intercultural Education (London, England), 34(3), 288–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2023.2180487 Schwab, S., Resch, K., Gitschthaler, M., Hassani, S., Latzko, D., Peter, A., & Walczuch, S. (2023). From policy to practice: how schools implement German language support policy in Austria. Current Issues in Language Planning, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2023.2269726 Spiel, C., Popper,V., & Holzer, J. (2022). Evaluation der Implementierung des Deutschfördermodells. https://www.bmbwf.gv.at/dam/jcr:2ba5ac1e-3be9-4dd2-8d04-c2465169e726/deutschfoerdermodell_eval.pdf

The inclusion of minority language students (MLSs) has become a significant aim of Norwegian educational reforms since the 1970s (Vislie, 2003). Nevertheless, educational research indicates that recent Norwegian educational policy documents on inclusion still embed unresolved normative tensions and employ “technocratic” – or “efficiency-oriented” – narratives (Rompianesi & Hilt, in review). Not surprisingly, Norwegian teachers appear to have ambiguous representations of inclusion and cultural diversity (Burner et al., 2018) and may employ diverse and not always coherent inclusive practices (Andresen, 2020). Thus, this paper aims to investigate how Norwegian upper secondary school teachers narratively construct the inclusion process of MLSs and to discuss the analytical results within the context of Norwegian inclusion policies. The theoretical framework of this study is based on Bruner’s socio-constructivist perspective and narrative theory (Bruner, 1996, 2004). In this work, public and life narratives are understood “as a mode of thinking, as a structure for organizing our knowledge” (Bruner, 1996, p. 119), and thus as one of the ways we make sense of reality and our own experiences. Since public and life narratives are formed in a shared symbolic space, where knowledge is constructed through interactions with others, narrative research is an appropriate approach “to capture something of the multiple realities and visions which contribute to the realization and enactment of inclusion” (Lawson et al., 2006, p. 65). The study employs qualitative research methodology and methods. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews have been conducted with eight Norwegian upper secondary school teachers. The informants, selected through purposive sampling (Cohen et al., 2018), worked in multicultural classrooms and were from three different schools in the same municipality in Norway. In the first phase, the informants’ narratives will be analyzed using narrative content analysis with an inductive approach (Riessman, 2008). In the second phase, the themes and contents of the narratives will be discussed within the context of Norwegian inclusion policy narratives, as investigated by Rompianesi & Hilt (in review), to identify common patterns, differences, and similarities. The results are expected to provide new insights into how teachers make sense of educational inclusion and how they narratively construct the inclusion process of MLSs. The analysis will also offer new perspectives on how teachers navigate the tensions and paradoxes inherent in policy narratives on inclusion. A deeper understanding of the connections between policy and life narratives on inclusion will contribute to generating new insights valuable for teacher training and policymakers.

Andresen, S. (2020). Being inclusive when talking about diversity: How teachers manage boundaries of Norwegianness in the classroom. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE), 4(3–4), 26–38. https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.3725. Bruner, J.S. (1996). The Culture of Education. Harvard University Press. Bruner, J.S. (2004). Life as Narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691–710. Burner, T., Nodeland, T.S., & Aamaas, Å. (2018). Critical Perspectives on Perceptions and Practices of Diversity in Education. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE), 2(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.7577/njcie.2188. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2018). Research Methods in Education (8th ed.). Routledge. Lawson, H., Parker, M., & Sikes, P. (2006). Seeking stories: Reflections on a narrative approach to researching understandings of inclusion. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 21(1), 55–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/08856250500491823. Riessman, C.K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Sage Publ. Rompianesi, T., & Hilt, L.T. (in review). “Heroes”, “Victims”, and “Villains”: Policy Narratives on Inclusion in Norwegian and Italian Educational Documents. Intercultural Education. Vislie, L. (2003). From integration to inclusion: Focusing global trends and changes in the western European societies. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 18(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/0885625082000042294