Annette Braun
Biographic Data
| ID | 3701151 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annette Braun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annette |
| FAMILY NAME | Braun |
| SIGNATURE | BRAUN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 619 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Intervention culture, grouping and triage: High-stakes tests and practices of division in English primary schools
This paper explores the practices of division in operation in primary schools in England in response to the pressures of high stakes tests at age 10/11, known as SATs. Using data from interviews with 20 primary headteachers and information from a survey of nearly 300 primary heads, we argue that the organisation of pupils in preparation for SATs involves 1) the use of grouping by ‘ability’ in sets, despite the increasing evidence of the disadvant…
Headship as policy narration: Generating metaphors of leading in the English primary school
This paper explores how doing headship may be considered as a form of policy narration. A key role of the headteacher as policy narrator is to tell/sell a story about their school to themselves, their staff and the outside world of parents, inspectors and other stakeholders. The accounts they construct will depend to some extent on their perspectives, commitments and personal-professional identities as well as an interplay between national priori…
Discomforts, opposition and resistance in schools: The perspectives of union representatives
This article draws on case studies of four English schools to explore some of the ways in which trade union representatives in these schools see their roles and the role of their unions in relation to how policy gets done in their schools. The article attempts two things. First, it details and describes some discomforts, oppositions and resistances that are evident in these schools in relation to some of the educational reforms and policy imperat…
Surveillance, Governmentality and moving the goalposts: The influence of Ofsted on the work of schools in a post-panoptic era
This paper asks the question: to what extent do inspection regimes, particularly the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), influence the work of a school, and how might that influence be conceptualised? It draws on an ESRC-funded study of ‘policy enactments in secondary schools’, which was based on case-study work in four ‘ordinary’ schools. Here the data set is re-examined to understand the extent to which Ofsted had an ongoing influence o…
Translating policy: Governmentality and the Reflective Teacher
This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and oth…
Where you stand depends on where you sit: The social construction of policy enactments in the (English) secondary school
Drawing on a study of education policy enactments in four English secondary schools, this paper argues that different ‘types’ of policies call-up different forms of enactments, and that teachers and others who work in schools will have different orientations towards some of these possible ways of ‘doing’ school. Through exploring the ways in which two main policies are being enacted, ‘Behaviour Management’ and ‘Standards and Attainment’, we argue…
Wahrnehmung Von Wald und Natur
Being ‘fun’ at work: Emotional labour, class, gender and childcare
This paper reports on data drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council ‐funded project investigating the experiences of UK ‐based students training on level‐2 and level‐3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students’ experiences of emotional labour and the expectations placed upon their behaviour and attitudes are shaped by c…
Assessment technologies in schools: ‘Deliverology’ and the ‘Play of Dominations’
This paper, based on ESRC‐funded research work in four case study schools, explores the ‘pressures’ to ‘deliver’ which bear upon English secondary schools in relation to GCSE performance. It further illustrates the ways in which pressure is transformed into tactics which focus on particular students, with the effect of ‘rationing’ education in the schools. Foucault’s analysis from Discipline and Punish is deployed to examine these tactics and to …
How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools
Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to beimplemented by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attentio
The ordinary school – what is it
In this paper we describe some of the complexities involved in the construction of a sample of ‘ordinary’ schools. We outline the policy context in England that produces pressures to resist ‘ordinariness’. The paper then explores two theoretical tools, fabrication and rhetoric, that are deployed in an analysis of some key artefacts of fabrication from schools in England. Through an examination of artefacts such as school brochures and websites, t…
Walking yourself around as a teacher’: Gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives
This paper considers the psychic and social dynamics reported by student teachers when learning to embody their teacher persona in the secondary school environment. Focusing on gender dimensions of embodiment and drawing on qualitative interview data from a UK study of postgraduate teacher‐training students, teaching is examined as a physical experience. The paper conceptualises findings under two related headings: the appropriately gendered body…
Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era
This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achieve brings and the possibility of resistance
Taking context seriously: Towards Explaining Policy Enactments in the Secondary School
This first paper in the series concentrates on school context and outlines a framework which identifies and relates a variety of factors that influence differences in policy enactments between similar schools. In taking context seriously in our four case-study schools we argue that policies are intimately shaped and influenced by school-specific factors, even though in much central policy making, these sorts of constraints, pressures and enablers…
Policy actors: Doing Policy Work in Schools
This paper considers the ‘policy work’ of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the ‘problem of meaning’ and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get ‘enacted’. It argues that ‘policy work’ is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of ena…
Policy subjects and policy actors in schools: Some Necessary but Insufficient Analyses
This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects – as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the hermeneutics of policy, that is the ways in which policies in schools are subject to complex proces…
Policy enactments in schools introduction: Towards a Toolbox for Theory and Research
Policy discourses in school texts
In this paper, we focus on some of the ways in which schools are both productive of and constituted by sets of ‘discursive practices, events and texts’ that contribute to the process of policy enactment. As Colebatch (2002: 2) says, ‘policy involves the creation of order – that is, shared understandings about how the various participants will act in particular circumstances’. In schools, part of the ‘creation of order’ takes place around the prod…
Working-class fathers and childcare: The economic and family contexts of fathering in the UK
This paper reports on a UK-based study that explored the ways in which working-class families living in the inner city negotiate and resolve childcare and domestic responsibilities between mothers and fathers and how men balance employment and family demands. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, including interviews with 16 men, we explore how the respondents practice fathering roles in their particular economic, socia…
Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: Examining policy, practice and school positioning
This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where 'enactment' refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and 'translated' by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools…
Between the estate and the state: Struggling to be a ‘good’ mother
The paper draws on an ESRC‐funded study of 70 families in two London locations. It focuses on a set of contemporary and contradictory political discourses that work on and through the lives of working‐class mothers and thereby create tensions and impossibilities within their lives. We illustrate the ways in which these women are positioned by and within these discourses in ways that leave them vulnerable to political and media criticisms
Local links, local knowledge: Choosing care settings and schools
This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity. The processes by which working‐class parents in one …
I’m so much more myself now, coming back to work’ – working class mothers, paid work and childcare
This paper explores the ways in which working class mothers negotiate mothering and paid work. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, we examine how caring and working responsibilities are conceptualised and presented in mothers' narratives. Mothers showed a high degree of commitment to paid work and, in contrast to findings from an earlier study with middle class and professional mothers, did not feel that keeping their…
Childcare, choice and social class: Caring for young children in the UK
This paper draws on the results of two qualitative research projects examining parental engagements with the childcare market in the UK. Both projects are located in the same two London localities. One project focuses on professional middle class parents, and the other on working class families, and we discuss the key importance of social class in shaping parents' differential engagement with the childcare market, and their understandings of the …
"It's like Saying "Coloured: Understanding and Analysing the Urban Working Classes
This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term 'working class', and consider what forms 'working class-ness' takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We em…
Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: Examining policy, practice and school positioning
This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where 'enactment' refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and 'translated' by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools…
Policy actors: Doing Policy Work in Schools
This paper considers the ‘policy work’ of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the ‘problem of meaning’ and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get ‘enacted’. It argues that ‘policy work’ is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of ena…
Taking context seriously: Towards Explaining Policy Enactments in the Secondary School
This first paper in the series concentrates on school context and outlines a framework which identifies and relates a variety of factors that influence differences in policy enactments between similar schools. In taking context seriously in our four case-study schools we argue that policies are intimately shaped and influenced by school-specific factors, even though in much central policy making, these sorts of constraints, pressures and enablers…
Policy subjects and policy actors in schools: Some Necessary but Insufficient Analyses
This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects – as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the hermeneutics of policy, that is the ways in which policies in schools are subject to complex proces…
Translating policy: Governmentality and the Reflective Teacher
This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and oth…
Childcare, choice and social class: Caring for young children in the UK
This paper draws on the results of two qualitative research projects examining parental engagements with the childcare market in the UK. Both projects are located in the same two London localities. One project focuses on professional middle class parents, and the other on working class families, and we discuss the key importance of social class in shaping parents' differential engagement with the childcare market, and their understandings of the …
Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era
This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achieve brings and the possibility of resistance
Surveillance, Governmentality and moving the goalposts: The influence of Ofsted on the work of schools in a post-panoptic era
This paper asks the question: to what extent do inspection regimes, particularly the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), influence the work of a school, and how might that influence be conceptualised? It draws on an ESRC-funded study of ‘policy enactments in secondary schools’, which was based on case-study work in four ‘ordinary’ schools. Here the data set is re-examined to understand the extent to which Ofsted had an ongoing influence o…
Between the estate and the state: Struggling to be a ‘good’ mother
The paper draws on an ESRC‐funded study of 70 families in two London locations. It focuses on a set of contemporary and contradictory political discourses that work on and through the lives of working‐class mothers and thereby create tensions and impossibilities within their lives. We illustrate the ways in which these women are positioned by and within these discourses in ways that leave them vulnerable to political and media criticisms
Working-class fathers and childcare: The economic and family contexts of fathering in the UK
This paper reports on a UK-based study that explored the ways in which working-class families living in the inner city negotiate and resolve childcare and domestic responsibilities between mothers and fathers and how men balance employment and family demands. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, including interviews with 16 men, we explore how the respondents practice fathering roles in their particular economic, socia…
Where you stand depends on where you sit: The social construction of policy enactments in the (English) secondary school
Drawing on a study of education policy enactments in four English secondary schools, this paper argues that different ‘types’ of policies call-up different forms of enactments, and that teachers and others who work in schools will have different orientations towards some of these possible ways of ‘doing’ school. Through exploring the ways in which two main policies are being enacted, ‘Behaviour Management’ and ‘Standards and Attainment’, we argue…
Local links, local knowledge: Choosing care settings and schools
This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity. The processes by which working‐class parents in one …
"It's like Saying "Coloured: Understanding and Analysing the Urban Working Classes
This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term 'working class', and consider what forms 'working class-ness' takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We em…
Assessment technologies in schools: ‘Deliverology’ and the ‘Play of Dominations’
This paper, based on ESRC‐funded research work in four case study schools, explores the ‘pressures’ to ‘deliver’ which bear upon English secondary schools in relation to GCSE performance. It further illustrates the ways in which pressure is transformed into tactics which focus on particular students, with the effect of ‘rationing’ education in the schools. Foucault’s analysis from Discipline and Punish is deployed to examine these tactics and to …
The ordinary school – what is it
In this paper we describe some of the complexities involved in the construction of a sample of ‘ordinary’ schools. We outline the policy context in England that produces pressures to resist ‘ordinariness’. The paper then explores two theoretical tools, fabrication and rhetoric, that are deployed in an analysis of some key artefacts of fabrication from schools in England. Through an examination of artefacts such as school brochures and websites, t…
Policy enactments in schools introduction: Towards a Toolbox for Theory and Research
Policy discourses in school texts
In this paper, we focus on some of the ways in which schools are both productive of and constituted by sets of ‘discursive practices, events and texts’ that contribute to the process of policy enactment. As Colebatch (2002: 2) says, ‘policy involves the creation of order – that is, shared understandings about how the various participants will act in particular circumstances’. In schools, part of the ‘creation of order’ takes place around the prod…
I’m so much more myself now, coming back to work’ – working class mothers, paid work and childcare
This paper explores the ways in which working class mothers negotiate mothering and paid work. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, we examine how caring and working responsibilities are conceptualised and presented in mothers' narratives. Mothers showed a high degree of commitment to paid work and, in contrast to findings from an earlier study with middle class and professional mothers, did not feel that keeping their…
Intervention culture, grouping and triage: High-stakes tests and practices of division in English primary schools
This paper explores the practices of division in operation in primary schools in England in response to the pressures of high stakes tests at age 10/11, known as SATs. Using data from interviews with 20 primary headteachers and information from a survey of nearly 300 primary heads, we argue that the organisation of pupils in preparation for SATs involves 1) the use of grouping by ‘ability’ in sets, despite the increasing evidence of the disadvant…
Headship as policy narration: Generating metaphors of leading in the English primary school
This paper explores how doing headship may be considered as a form of policy narration. A key role of the headteacher as policy narrator is to tell/sell a story about their school to themselves, their staff and the outside world of parents, inspectors and other stakeholders. The accounts they construct will depend to some extent on their perspectives, commitments and personal-professional identities as well as an interplay between national priori…
Walking yourself around as a teacher’: Gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives
This paper considers the psychic and social dynamics reported by student teachers when learning to embody their teacher persona in the secondary school environment. Focusing on gender dimensions of embodiment and drawing on qualitative interview data from a UK study of postgraduate teacher‐training students, teaching is examined as a physical experience. The paper conceptualises findings under two related headings: the appropriately gendered body…
Discomforts, opposition and resistance in schools: The perspectives of union representatives
This article draws on case studies of four English schools to explore some of the ways in which trade union representatives in these schools see their roles and the role of their unions in relation to how policy gets done in their schools. The article attempts two things. First, it details and describes some discomforts, oppositions and resistances that are evident in these schools in relation to some of the educational reforms and policy imperat…
Being ‘fun’ at work: Emotional labour, class, gender and childcare
This paper reports on data drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council ‐funded project investigating the experiences of UK ‐based students training on level‐2 and level‐3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students’ experiences of emotional labour and the expectations placed upon their behaviour and attitudes are shaped by c…
Wahrnehmung Von Wald und Natur
I’m so much more myself now, coming back to work’ – working class mothers, paid work and childcare
This paper explores the ways in which working class mothers negotiate mothering and paid work. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, we examine how caring and working responsibilities are conceptualised and presented in mothers' narratives. Mothers showed a high degree of commitment to paid work and, in contrast to findings from an earlier study with middle class and professional mothers, did not feel that keeping their…
Childcare, choice and social class: Caring for young children in the UK
This paper draws on the results of two qualitative research projects examining parental engagements with the childcare market in the UK. Both projects are located in the same two London localities. One project focuses on professional middle class parents, and the other on working class families, and we discuss the key importance of social class in shaping parents' differential engagement with the childcare market, and their understandings of the …
"It's like Saying "Coloured: Understanding and Analysing the Urban Working Classes
This paper draws on data from a qualitative project exploring the engagement of working class families in London with childcare. It is a first attempt to throw some light on our usage of the term 'working class', and consider what forms 'working class-ness' takes in relation to our respondent families. We discuss some recent sociological literature on the working class(es) in order to understand the emphasises and focuses of other research. We em…
Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: Examining policy, practice and school positioning
This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where 'enactment' refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and 'translated' by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools…
Between the estate and the state: Struggling to be a ‘good’ mother
The paper draws on an ESRC‐funded study of 70 families in two London locations. It focuses on a set of contemporary and contradictory political discourses that work on and through the lives of working‐class mothers and thereby create tensions and impossibilities within their lives. We illustrate the ways in which these women are positioned by and within these discourses in ways that leave them vulnerable to political and media criticisms
Local links, local knowledge: Choosing care settings and schools
This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity. The processes by which working‐class parents in one …
How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools
Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to beimplemented by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attentio
The ordinary school – what is it
In this paper we describe some of the complexities involved in the construction of a sample of ‘ordinary’ schools. We outline the policy context in England that produces pressures to resist ‘ordinariness’. The paper then explores two theoretical tools, fabrication and rhetoric, that are deployed in an analysis of some key artefacts of fabrication from schools in England. Through an examination of artefacts such as school brochures and websites, t…
Walking yourself around as a teacher’: Gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives
This paper considers the psychic and social dynamics reported by student teachers when learning to embody their teacher persona in the secondary school environment. Focusing on gender dimensions of embodiment and drawing on qualitative interview data from a UK study of postgraduate teacher‐training students, teaching is examined as a physical experience. The paper conceptualises findings under two related headings: the appropriately gendered body…
Life in the Pressure Cooker – School League Tables and English and Mathematics Teachers’ Responses to Accountability in a Results-Driven Era
This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achieve brings and the possibility of resistance
Taking context seriously: Towards Explaining Policy Enactments in the Secondary School
This first paper in the series concentrates on school context and outlines a framework which identifies and relates a variety of factors that influence differences in policy enactments between similar schools. In taking context seriously in our four case-study schools we argue that policies are intimately shaped and influenced by school-specific factors, even though in much central policy making, these sorts of constraints, pressures and enablers…
Policy actors: Doing Policy Work in Schools
This paper considers the ‘policy work’ of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the ‘problem of meaning’ and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get ‘enacted’. It argues that ‘policy work’ is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of ena…
Policy subjects and policy actors in schools: Some Necessary but Insufficient Analyses
This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects – as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the hermeneutics of policy, that is the ways in which policies in schools are subject to complex proces…
Policy enactments in schools introduction: Towards a Toolbox for Theory and Research
Policy discourses in school texts
In this paper, we focus on some of the ways in which schools are both productive of and constituted by sets of ‘discursive practices, events and texts’ that contribute to the process of policy enactment. As Colebatch (2002: 2) says, ‘policy involves the creation of order – that is, shared understandings about how the various participants will act in particular circumstances’. In schools, part of the ‘creation of order’ takes place around the prod…
Working-class fathers and childcare: The economic and family contexts of fathering in the UK
This paper reports on a UK-based study that explored the ways in which working-class families living in the inner city negotiate and resolve childcare and domestic responsibilities between mothers and fathers and how men balance employment and family demands. Drawing on interviews with 70 families with pre-school children, including interviews with 16 men, we explore how the respondents practice fathering roles in their particular economic, socia…
Assessment technologies in schools: ‘Deliverology’ and the ‘Play of Dominations’
This paper, based on ESRC‐funded research work in four case study schools, explores the ‘pressures’ to ‘deliver’ which bear upon English secondary schools in relation to GCSE performance. It further illustrates the ways in which pressure is transformed into tactics which focus on particular students, with the effect of ‘rationing’ education in the schools. Foucault’s analysis from Discipline and Punish is deployed to examine these tactics and to …
Wahrnehmung Von Wald und Natur
Being ‘fun’ at work: Emotional labour, class, gender and childcare
This paper reports on data drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council ‐funded project investigating the experiences of UK ‐based students training on level‐2 and level‐3 childcare courses. We focus on the concept of emotional labour in relation to learning to care for and educate young children and the ways in which the students’ experiences of emotional labour and the expectations placed upon their behaviour and attitudes are shaped by c…
Where you stand depends on where you sit: The social construction of policy enactments in the (English) secondary school
Drawing on a study of education policy enactments in four English secondary schools, this paper argues that different ‘types’ of policies call-up different forms of enactments, and that teachers and others who work in schools will have different orientations towards some of these possible ways of ‘doing’ school. Through exploring the ways in which two main policies are being enacted, ‘Behaviour Management’ and ‘Standards and Attainment’, we argue…
Translating policy: Governmentality and the Reflective Teacher
This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and oth…
Discomforts, opposition and resistance in schools: The perspectives of union representatives
This article draws on case studies of four English schools to explore some of the ways in which trade union representatives in these schools see their roles and the role of their unions in relation to how policy gets done in their schools. The article attempts two things. First, it details and describes some discomforts, oppositions and resistances that are evident in these schools in relation to some of the educational reforms and policy imperat…
Surveillance, Governmentality and moving the goalposts: The influence of Ofsted on the work of schools in a post-panoptic era
This paper asks the question: to what extent do inspection regimes, particularly the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), influence the work of a school, and how might that influence be conceptualised? It draws on an ESRC-funded study of ‘policy enactments in secondary schools’, which was based on case-study work in four ‘ordinary’ schools. Here the data set is re-examined to understand the extent to which Ofsted had an ongoing influence o…
Headship as policy narration: Generating metaphors of leading in the English primary school
This paper explores how doing headship may be considered as a form of policy narration. A key role of the headteacher as policy narrator is to tell/sell a story about their school to themselves, their staff and the outside world of parents, inspectors and other stakeholders. The accounts they construct will depend to some extent on their perspectives, commitments and personal-professional identities as well as an interplay between national priori…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (14 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (12 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (10 works) · Politics (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works)