23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
Knowledge Use in Post-Pandemic Education Recovery Policy
Jennifer Ozga1, Jo-Anne Baird1, Margaret Arnott2, Niclas Hell2
1Oxford University, United Kingdom; 2University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Baird, Jo-Anne
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.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedWe seek to answer the following main research questions:
(i) Do covid recovery plans reflect party political differences across the 4 jurisdictions of the UK?
(ii) What kinds of expertise and knowledge are mobilised in these plans?
The approach taken draws on theorization of governing as narrative, with attention to the social construction of practices of policy making through the ability of individuals to create and act on meanings.
Narrative approaches connect to critical discourse analysis (CDA) through approaching policy text as persuasive, and as referencing particular contexts and connections to claim the legitimacy and authority of selected policy strategies. CDA enables scrutiny of how discourse creates and recreates the world by ignoring some possibilities and selecting and prioritising others. Importantly, discourses also represent possible worlds, and construct ‘projects’ to change the world in preferred directions. CDA interrogates policy texts to illuminate the resources that are being mobilised, and their role in creating governing narratives-in this case, narratives of education recovery.
We analysed key policy texts from the four administrations, for example the Covid 19 Education Recovery Group (Scotland), DfE publications on Education Recovery, the Independent Panel Review of Education in Northern Ireland, the Renew and Reform plan in Wales and the Covid Inquiry. We also carried out text analysis of selected, relevant speeches by key policy actors across UK.
We understand policy as a site of interaction of actors and agendas in education -an interaction revealing the relationship of knowledge, expertise and politics. We understand policy as made and (re) made in processes of enactment, as requiring policy work that depends on the alliances that actors build, the interests that they accommodate, and the extent to which agreement can be brokered about the direction of any policy process. Such perspectives stress attention to the ways in which policy and policy actors are embedded in social and cultural worlds, and to the extent to which expertise is relational, mediating between knowledge production and application, welding scientific and social capabilities.
We ask what resources are identified and seen as useful, explore how they are mobilised, and examine the extent to which politicians select from them, emphasise some rather then others-in order to try to navigate competing values and interests.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsOur findings show England as exceptional amongst the four nations, with the neoliberal rationale of marketisation and privatisation framing the governing narrative of education policy in the return to normal following the pandemic. In Scotland, there is a strong narrative of education as important to societal cohesion, with recognition of education professionals and their contributions to community. A number of reviews of aspects of the education system in Scotland drew upon local expertise and consulted widely across the education sector and beyond. Wales’ policy narrative also showed a co-construction narrative, with a vision of renewal. Teachers are seen as key to the revitalisation of the country’s education system. In Northern Ireland, the governing narrative focussed upon integration and collaboration. Economic development, tackling inequalities and improving health were identified as key priorities. The exceptionalism of England is a curiosity that requires an explanation. We pose some potentially explanatory factors regarding the nature of the functioning of the state in England. In addition to party political agendas, there are politics internal to political parties which have influenced the recovery plan governing logics.
ReferencesElena Andreouli &Emma Brice (2021) Citizenship under Covid 19: an analysis of UK political rhetoric during the first wave of the Covid pandemic Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 32(3) 555-572
Margaret Arnott & Jenny Ozga (2016) Education and nationalism in Scotland: governing a ‘learning nation’, Oxford Review of Education, 42:3, 253-265, DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2016.1184865
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23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
Utilisation of Research Knowledge in Parliamentary Deliberations on Educational Policies
Nora Wazinski
DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Germany
Presenting Author: Wazinski, Nora
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.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe body of the document analysis is formed by around 400 documents that contain publicly accessible minutes of parliamentary committee meetings from two German federal states: Berlin and Hamburg serve as cases for an analysis of the use of research knowledge in parliamentary deliberations on education. As city states, they share certain structural characteristics regarding their political organisation as well as similar challenges for the education system caused by urban demographics. At the same time, the public image of the quality of their education systems differs: While Hamburg has made significant achievements in school quality, committing to an engaged shift towards evidence-informed educational policy-making (Tränkmann & Diedrich, 2023), the Berlin school system seems to be challenged. This clearly reflects in the results of the study IQB-Bildungstrend (Stanat et al., 2023) which compares the competencies of students between federal states: While Hamburg has developed rather well, the study shows lower ranks for Berlin students. To have a sufficiently extensive sample that frames the time when the coronavirus pandemic dominated educational policies, and additionally covers more than one election period in both cases, the time span under investigation is set from January 2017 until June 2023.
In order to organise and structure the totality of documents, text segments were identified which explicitly refer to research knowledge. In a predominantly inductive process guided by the Qualitative Content Analysis (Kuckartz & Rädicker, 2023), using the software MAXQDA a category system was developed to fine-code the identified segments on three levels of analysis: the type of reference (e.g. study, expert commission), the speakers (e.g. members of parliament, or senate representatives) and the respective education policy topic on which research knowledge was mentioned (e.g. pandemic, teacher shortage). Subsequently, by analysing overlaps between codes, this shows certain patterns in the utilisation of research knowledge in parliamentary committee deliberations in two federal states, while contributing to a research problem of international significance.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsFirst empirical findings based on the document analysis describe that the way in which research knowledge is referred to in debates of parliamentary committees on education differs depending on the actor group and education policy topic, and changes over the course of the investigated period. From its numerous mentions in the debates it becomes clear that research knowledge – including evidence such as monitoring and evaluation studies – does play a significant role in the policymaking process of the institutions under investigation. One type of research-based evidence frequently found in the committee debates are studies that are closely linked to the concrete matter of a policy. Stating that the decentralized federal states make their own educational policies, it becomes explicable why only a small part of references to research were found in both Berlin and Hamburg. Apart from that, first interpretations of the material indicate that many of the references to researchers are made to persons that were consulted in the course of the policymaking process. Therefore, in accordance with existing research (Rickinson & Edwards, 2021), relational work seems to have significant influence on whether or not research influences political negotiations. The analysis of a selection of text segments shows a a generally strong orientation towards research, but also critical engagement with research, for example when questioning the validity, methodology or significance for practical action. Thus, the documents are a rich resource for learning how policymakers try to apply and navigate knowledge to face the current educational challenges.
This study shows how, to what extent and what kind of research knowledge is being used in policymaking and allows conclusions on success factors and barriers for transfer. What remains to be further investigated is in how far this enables educational policymaking to effectively reduce inequalities.
ReferencesArnautu, Diana; Dagenais, Christian (2021). Use and effectiveness of policy briefs as a knowledge transfer tool: a scoping review. In: Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 (1).
Autor:innengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung (2022). Bildung in Deutschland 2022 [Education in Germany 2022]: Ein indikatorengestützter Bericht mit einer Analyse zum Bildungspersonal. wbv Media.
Bachsleitner, Anna; Lämmchen, Ronja; Maaz, Kai (Eds.) (2022): Soziale Ungleichheit des Bildungserwerbs von der Vorschule bis zur Hochschule. Eine Forschungssynthese zwei Jahrzehnte nach PISA. Münster: Waxmann.
Dietrich, Hans; Patzina, Alexander; Lerche, Adrian (2021). Social inequality in the homeschooling efforts of German high school students during a school closing period, European Societies, 23:sup1, p. 348-369.
Farley-Ripple, Elizabeth; May, Henry; Karpyn, Allison; Tilley, Katherine; McDonough, Kalyn (2018). Rethinking Connections Between Research and Practice in Education: A Conceptual Framework. In: Educational researcher 47 (4), p. 235–245.
Hadjar, Andreas; Alieva, Aigul; Jobst, Solvejg; Skrobanek, Jan; Grecu, Alyssa; Gewinner, Irina et al. (2022): PIONEERED: Elaborating the link between social and educational policies for tackling educational inequalities in Europe. In: sozialpolitik.ch 2022 (1).
Kuckartz, Udo; Rädiker, Stefan (2023). Qualitative content analysis: Methods, practice and software. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC, Melbourne: Sage.
Lewalter, Doris; Diedrich, Jennifer; Goldhammer, Frank; Köller, Olaf; Reiss, Kristina (Ed.) (2023). PISA 2022. Münster, Germany: Waxmann.
Renn, Ortwin (2017). Kommunikation zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik. In: Heinz Bonfadelli, Birte Fähnrich, Corinna Lüthje, Jutta Milde, Markus Rhomberg und Mike S. Schäfer (Ed.): Forschungsfeld Wissenschaftskommunikation. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, p. 183–205.
Rickinson, M. & Edwards, A. (2021). The relational features of evidence use. Cambridge Journal of Education, 51(4), 509–526.
Schrader, Josef; Hasselhorn, Marcus; Hetfleisch, Petra; Goeze, Annika (2020): Stichwortbeitrag Implementationsforschung: Wie Wissenschaft zu Verbesserungen im Bildungssystem beitragen kann. In: Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 23 (1), p. 9–59.
Stanat, Petra; Schipolowski, Stefan; Schneider, Rebecca; Sachse, Karoline A.; Weirich, Sebastian; Henschel, Sofie (Eds.) (2023). IQB-Bildungstrend 2022. Sprachliche Kompetenzen am Ende der 9. Jahrgangsstufe im dritten Ländervergleich. Waxmann.
Tränkmann, Jenny; Diedrich, Martina (2023): Forschungs- und Evidenzorientierung in der Bildungspolitik und -administration. Good-Practice-Beispiel Hamburg. In: Kris-Stephen Besa, Denise Demski, Johanna Gesang, Jan-Hendrik Hinzke (Eds.): Evidenz- und Forschungsorientierung in Lehrer*innenbildung, Schule, Bildungspolitik und -administration. Neue Befunde zu alten Problemen. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, p. 325–348.
Wößmann, Ludger; Freundl, Vera; Grewenig, Elisabeth; Lergetporer, Phillipp; Werner, Katharina; Zierow, Larissa (2021). Bildung erneut im Lockdown: Wie verbrachten Schulkinder die Schulschließungen Anfang 2021? ifo Schnelldienst, 74 (5), p. 36-52.
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
Decolonizing Finnish Education Export as a Way to Deconstruct Knowledge Production and Circulation
Helena Hinke Dobrochinski
University of Helsinki, Finland
Presenting Author: Hinke Dobrochinski, Helena
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”.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedI investigate discursive practices of Finnish education export/import, highlighting the contextuality and relationality of policy flows from Finland to Brazil. Brazil has been importing education from Finland for over ten years, being an avid market for innovation and differentiation due to its unequal public-private education system divide. Relying on interview data with Finnish policymakers and exporters, and Brazilian importers (n=29), I explore the imperatives and contradictions associated with the legitimization of Finnish knowledge and its circulation globally, centering in the case of Brazil.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe preliminary findings show some degree of decontextualization in Finnish education export along with a neocolonial approach in global education governance carried on and embedded in education export. The context of action seems to be deemed secondary (or irrelevant) to exporting education, and almost fictional (and picturesque) on the import side. The “context” is rather relative than relational, whereas otherness and Finnish exceptionalism play a relevant role in the education export/import dynamics. Contextualizing “knowledge” would not only unveil the taken-for-granted form(s) and origin(s) of knowledge but also question power and hegemony in a world still rooted in colonial premises. This paper contributes to current discussions in education politics and sociology scholarship as the mechanisms and epistemologies of knowledge production and circulation affect the nature of that knowledge itself and the direction(s) and agenda(s) of global education governance.
ReferencesAhmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.
Candido, H. H. D.; Brunila, K. (forthcoming) Finnish Education Export as Part of Precision Education Governance.
Rönnberg, L.; Candido, H. H. D. (2023) When Nordic education myths meet economic realities: The “Nordic model” in education export in Finland and Sweden. Nordic Studies in Education, 43(2), 145–163.
Souza, J. J. F. de (2015) A tolice da inteligência brasileira. São Paulo: LeYa.
Tiburi, M. (2021) Complexo de vira-lata: Análise da humilhação brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
Waldow, F.; Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2019) Understanding PISA’s Attractiveness: Critical Analyses in Comparative Policy Studies. Bloomsbury.
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