Conference Agenda

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.