Conference Agenda

As society develops, human knowledge continues to be updated. Policy entrepreneurs recognise the need to refresh school knowledge and identify it as a public problem and strives to push it into the agenda setting (Laswell, 1956; Kingdon, 1995). This action lays more pressure on school system to follow the change and also causes curriculum overload (OECD, 2020), forcing the gatekeepers to rethink “what knowledge is of most worth”. The government needs to decide whether and how to integrate the new knowledge into curriculum, and more importantly, how to negotiate with the advocates.
In China, the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), widely known as “two sessions”, provide an opportunity to observe this communication. During these annual sessions, the deputies of NPC present their motions and the members of CPPCC give their proposals on integrating new knowledge into school curriculum, requiring the government to respond. In these responses, the ministry has adopted a fixed narrative structure to convince the proposers of its capability and commitment to do what they care about.
To understand these strategic discourse of policy actors, researchers recently use narrative policy framework (NPF) (Jones & McBeth, 2010) to analyse the structure of the negotiation texts and especially the impact of specific policy narratives on public (Bertrand et al., 2024; Billings et al., 2024; Capano et al., 2023; Price, 2019). Through this method, qualitative and quantitative analysis provides insights on how the narrative is crafted purposely to fit a pre-existing problem agenda.
Therefore, this study also uses NPF to explore the structure of the ministry’s responses and its narrative strategy to persuade audiences. In this manner, the variations in the ministry’s stance towards diverse forms of new knowledge are inherently illustrated.

Narrative is a powerful tool used by policy actors to persuade other stakeholders of their advocacy. The construction of narrative happens throughout the whole process of decision making, from a small group raising up a new problem, to the policymakers enacting a new policy. The NPF provides an approach to clarify the what’s floating in the policy primeval soup. Jones and McBeth (2010) recognise four main dimensions of policy narrative: (1) a setting or context, (2) a plot that introduces a temporal element, provides the relationships between the setting and characters, and structures the causal mechanisms, (3) characters who are fixers, causers, and victims of the problem, (4) the moral of the story and the policy solution of the problem. Some studies conceptualize new characters, beneficiaries and allies (Vogeler et al., 2021). This provides an approach to understand a relatively clear structure of the confusing policy discourse, also its factors and influences.

Firstly, it’s adopted by researchers to understand the structure. Billings et al. (2024) structure the narratives of officials to legislators. Gray and Jones (2016) compare the competing narratives of key stakeholders and illustrate the differences of strategies.Moreover, researchers are further interested about the result of policy narrative. Policy narratives do have an impact on public attitude, but how? Jones and Song (2014) cultivate the mechanism of belief systems. McMorris et al. (2018) determine that narratives which align with cultural belief systems are effective in enhancing their persuasiveness.

In this study, we adopt NPF mainly to analyse the structure of narrative that government crafted to respond (and persuade) proposals. In addition to the four aforementioned narrative elements, we also consider the embodiment of political narratives within them. Therefore, the research questions are: How does the ministry develop narratives and apply narrative strategies to advocate for its policy preferences? And why?

In this paper, we share a multidimensional framework, including spatial (e.g. global governance), temporal (i.e. genealogical analysis), political (i.e. political discourse theory), psychosocial (i.e. sociological, psychoanalytic and hauntological theories). We illustrate the purchase of this framework by using it to critically examine the issue of ‘inclusion’, a key theme in efforts to establish socially democratic education, across two European sites, to identify similarities and differences across these contexts. Our focal cases include Finland – a country whose reputation for social democratic education is currently threatened by the long-term economic austerity and growth of right-wing ethno-nationalist politics; and Scotland – a quasi-independent education system in the 'United Kingdom', that aspires to a social democratic vision for education but where the legacy of historical forms of social and economic stratification remain powerful.

Our analytical framework seeks to offer a multidimensional perspective that resists the lure of simple, one-size-fits-all answers to complex problems and challenges, and recognizes that “all reductive procedures are also traps” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 106). The engagement with multiple theoretical lenses is one strategy for resisting such traps. Our framework involves three intersecting axes: spatiotemporal, political, psychosocial, which combine to enable rich, detailed explorations of complex issues, such as the struggle for social justice in education.

The spatiotemporal axis recognises that seemingly discrete developments in policy and practice are located in space and time, including within the global policy arena (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), as well as the fractured timelines that critical genealogy (Koopman, 2013) helps us recognise as a key aspect of the challenge of understanding the complex and contingent histories of our present social and cultural conditions. Crucially, the spatiotemporal axis is not limited to locating policies in space and time; it also recognises how policy and practice organise the world spatially and temporally in ways that are contingent and contestable

The political axis focuses on the struggles over meaning between different actors in social practices. Here, Political Discourse Theory (Glynos & Howarth 2007) helps us scrutinise the creation and dissolution of political projects and coalitions in policy-making with a rich conceptual framework. For instance, social logics characterize particular ways of doing, organising and valuing action in a particular practice and political logics explore the ways in which the practices have emerged, how they are legitimated, reproduced or contested.

The psychosocial axis draws on psychosocial studies (Frosh, 2010), which draws on sociological and psychoanalytic traditions, but in which no hard and fast distinction is made between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘individual’ and social’. This axis also draws on critical fantasy studies (Glynos, 2021), with its insights into the role of ‘beatific’ and ‘horrific’ fantasies as means to recruit and ‘grip’ subjects for the purposes of particular ideological projects, as well as incorporating insights from hauntology (del Pilar Blanco & Peeren, 2013; Gordon, 2007), which highlights the influence of lingering presences and absences, memory and history, beyond the fictional and supernatural, that we can see, for example, in phenomenon such as ‘policy mortality’ (Gunter & Courtney, 2023), where policies unwittingly anticipate and incorporate their own past and future failures.

This paper involves conceptual development and critical analysis. With the lenses of our framework we scrutinise national policy documents and research literature to present multidimensional problematisation/reading of the state of inclusion in Finland and Scotland.