Conference Agenda

As education systems around the world respond to rapid social, technological, and policy changes, the need to build stronger, more meaningful connections between research, practice, and policy is increasingly significant. This paper critically examines the 2025 reforms to school inspection (Ofsted, 2025) in England and explores to what extent these were a genuine response to research and consultation and what lessons can be learned. Prompted by a government inquiry into the tragic suicide of a headteacher awaiting an inspection report, the reforms were presented as responsive and consultative. Yet, through policy analysis of ministerial speeches, academic literature, media coverage, and social discourse, a persistent gap emerges between the rhetoric of listening and the reality of implementation. Widespread calls for contextual, less punitive approaches had minimal impact, highlighting how consultation often legitimizes rather than co-creates change.

The 2025 Ofsted reform came as a direct response to a UK Government Inquiry which concluded that Ofsted, had ‘contributed’ to the death of a Headteacher (HOC 2023) who had committed suicide whilst awaiting publication of an inspection report. To many this was the tipping point in public opinion against the organization. In England, Ofsted plays a central role in shaping school culture, priorities, and practices. While intended to promote accountability and improvement, inspections have often produced unintended consequences for educators. Research shows they increase workload and stress, while reducing professional autonomy (Ryan et al., 2017, Case et al., 2000; Perryman et al., 2023; Tian, 2023; Bradbury et al., 2025; Kilian et al., 2025; Calvert et al., 2025), contributing to persistent issues in teacher recruitment and retention (Perryman & Calvert, 2019, Bousted, 2022). Inspection is not just an English phenomenon, though it could be argued that the inspection regime Ofsted is at the more punitive end of the spectrum. The US-based National Center on Education and the Economy (Rothman, 2018:1) provides a useful summary of inspection systems and notes that the Standing International Conference on Inspectorates, ‘formed in 1995 to provide support for the inspectorates in Europe, now includes 36 nations and regions’. Faubert (2009: 11) states that ‘the majority of OECD countries schools are regularly inspected’ and lists Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. The difference for England lies in the experience and consequences of inspection; inspection in England is a key component of performative accountability, and this is not necessarily true elsewhere.

The suicide brought to the forefront of public discourse concerns about Ofsted and its effects and calls for fundamental reform. Despite these calls, instead, with no break in the inspection cycle, Ofsted launched a consultation (Ofsted 2025b) into a set of proposals for a new framework which it eventually launched in 2025. The consultation was presented as an opportunity for genuine dialogue, but this paper questions whether the resulting reform truly reflected the voices and concerns raised, specifically asking:

1. How were research, practitioner perspectives, and public responses framed, mobilised, or marginalised in the development of the 2025 Ofsted reforms?
2. To what extent did Ofsted engage meaningfully with the knowledge generated through consultation and research?
Although the empirical focus is England, the issues it illuminates are shared across European education systems: the tensions between accountability and professional autonomy, the symbolic politics of consultation, and the selective uptake of research in reform agendas. In this sense, the paper contributes to comparative debates on how educational research is valued, instrumentalised, or sidelined in different national contexts.

The central status of accountability policies in global education reforms over the past thirty years is no longer disputable (Verger et al., 2024). Although controversial and widely debated in the education field, accountability systems seem to be here to stay. Framing autonomy and accountability as two sides of the same coin, these policies yield diverse institutional designs worldwide while resting on common principles and being promoted as key solutions to the ‘problems’ of education systems (Tröhler et al. 2014; Verger, Fontdevila & Parcerisa, 2019). Compared to the most stringent forms of accountability subject of much controversy (Amoako, Quainoo & Adams, 2019), accountability systems have found their way into the European context mainly but not solely in softer forms (Grek, Maroy & Verger, 2021). Focusing on French‑speaking Belgium—arguably a “late adopter” (Steiner‑Khamsi, 2006) — which introduced a new accountability policy in the mid-2010s, promoted as reflexive, support oriented and data-driven to promote school leadership and collaborative work to tackle inequalities in the education system, this paper examinates how key factors converged to put this policy on the agenda. The argument at the heart of this paper is simple: context, narratives and actorhood are key to understand the promotion and adoption of education policy models.

Across many education systems internationally, equity policies call for substantial organizational and cultural transformations by questioning entrenched institutional norms, governance structures, and the data‑driven definitions of “student achievement” shaped by performance‑based accountability and datafication (Grek et al., 2021). Datafication has reconfigured educational governance by embedding data‑driven accountability mechanisms, fostering global competition, and enabling new forms of regulation and control while raising concerns about equity and the broader purposes of education, prompting policies that promote a more holistic conception of student learning and require new metrics and multiple forms of data to capture both learning processes and outcomes (Bae, 2018; Ikemoto & Marsh, 2007).As a result, school actors are increasingly expected to select, interpret, and integrate diverse data sources to guide equity‑driven decision‑making (Datnow & Park, 2018). Yet these expectations are layered onto longstanding accountability systems that continue to prioritize narrow, centrally defined standards of achievement, creating tensions in leaders’ data practices.

A growing body of research has examined these tensions, showing that school actors’ data‑informed decisions can either broaden or constrain students’ learning opportunities (Datnow & Park, 2018). Studies highlight persistent dilemmas, such as relying on a single standardized data source versus using multiple forms of data; focusing narrowly on students near proficiency versus examining data for all students; using data to confirm assumptions versus questioning beliefs; and employing data for academic tracking versus supporting more flexible grouping strategies (Gannon Slater et al., 2017). While this work illuminates the challenges school actors face in making data‑informed decisions, less is known about how the design of policies themselves (re)directs their attention toward new priorities, purposes, and uses of metrics and data.

This presentation examines how equity policy designs layer past and current policy goals and instruments, and how these layered designs shape the signals school actors receive about the priorities and purposes of equity‑related metrics and data use. We draw on equity policies from Ontario, Canada, as a case of a system shaped by three decades of student‑achievement‑oriented reform, which has more recently layered new metrics and data related to equity.

The conceptual framework integrates three perspectives. First, policy design theory conceptualizes policy aims and the tools selected to achieve them as deliberate choices informed by knowledge of how instruments affect practitioners (Howlett, 2019). Policy design focuses on how governments develop and implement coherent goals and tools by mapping aims to instruments. Second, the sense‑making framework highlights how policy design produces signals that shape what school actors attend to, how they interpret policy messages in relation to their contexts, and what actions they prioritize (Spillane et al., 2002). Ambiguous or insufficiently clear goals can constrain sense‑making by obscuring expected changes, while policy instruments, whether informational, procedural, regulatory, or financial, constitute the mechanisms through which governments pursue goals and influence practitioners’ behaviour (Howlett et al., 2023). The type and content of instruments can either enable or constrain how school actors interpret policy aims. Third, the concept of policy layering explains how new goals and instruments accumulate atop existing ones, producing complex policy mixes in which complementary and competing signals coexist (Howlett, 2014).

We address two research questions:

1. How do equity policy designs in Ontario integrate and layer past and current policy goals and instruments?
2. What signals do these layered designs convey about the priorities and purposes of equity‑related metrics and data use?

By analyzing how equity policy design signals expectations for the use of new metrics and data, this study illuminates the mechanisms through which these policies are interpreted by school actors.

Comprehensive schools were established and won legitimacy across Europe in the 1900s (Caruso & Waldow, 2024). In Sweden, a sparsely populated country in Northen Europe, comprehensive schools were established in 1962, after several decades of political mobilization from joint liberal and social democratic politicians and the civil society (Holmén, 2018). Between the 1960s and 1980s, Sweden became globally known for having one of the most equal school systems in the world. Just like the rest of Europe, and beyond, Sweden was smitten by neoliberal policy ambitions and agendas in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulting in several reforms. These reforms impacted greatly on the comprehensive school system with a simultaneous introduction of school choice, an opening for independent and commercial actors to run schools, a new goal-oriented curriculum, as well as a decentralization of school governance from state to local, municipal level (Lundahl, 2002).

Almost four decades into these reforms, there are increasing evidence of a national school system permeated by undesirable effects such as inequality, segregation, and grade inflation (Muench et al., 2022). Our focus in this paper is on the policies related to school choice. Even if existing school choice regimes are recognized for their failure to support equity in school allocation processes, current global policy actors suggests that school choice “is here to stay” (Musset, 2012; OECD, 2019).

In our ongoing study Comprehensive school allocation through school choice: How Swedish municipalities organize for freedom of choice and equal opportunity (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2023-03616), we explore how the school choice reform is implemented in Swedish local public authorities and the everyday and mundane struggle between liberal values of choice and the lingering ideal of the comprehensive school system as a means for ensuring equality. This struggle entails everyday matters assigned to civil servants, with the task of handling accounts of fairness, justice, accountability, and transparency in the school allocation process on an everyday basis. We have identified automated school admission algorithms as key in these operations.

In this paper, we focus on how the making of fair, accountable, and transparent school allocation processes are assembled together with automated school admission algorithms procured by local public authorities in Sweden. We focus particularly on which technical solutions that are considered necessary for fair and just mandatory school choice systems to be realized in Sweden today.

Conceptually, we draw on an assembled understanding of algorithms that stem from later theoretical developments of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and social studies of algorithms (Lee, 2021). Such ontological understandings of algorithms make it possible to pay “attention to the assembling of agency in practice and the performative effects that the assemblage has” (Lee, 2021, p. 68). This means that automated algorithms are seen as already embedded in social structures, but also that the introduction of automated algorithms entails the possibility of affecting and changing social structures (Fourcade & Healy, 2024). Drawing on the theoretical understanding that automated algorithms entail both technical and social dimensions, we ask: How are automated algorithms for allocating children to schools by local public authorities in Sweden assembled, and how is the balance between choice and equality envisioned through the algorithms?

We contribute to the research literature addressing the automation of education and data infrastructures (Gulson et al., 2022; Swist & Gulson, 2023; Williamson, 2018) as well as to research on how school admission algorithms are constructed (Abdulkadiroğlu & Sönmez, 2003) to facilitate a discussion on what educational values they evoke in a European perspective.