Showing papers in "Journal of Education Policy in 1999"

Specifying globalization effects on national policy: a focus on the mechanisms

Abstract: This paper attempts to clarify the concept of globalization and to specify how globalization affects national education systems. It argues that though globalization represents a qualitative change in the nature of national- supranational relations, this does not necessarily imply greater homogeneity of policy or practice in education. The paper's particular focus is the mechanisms through which the external effects on national education systems are carried and delivered. It argues that it is especially important to specify those effects, since they have an independent influence on the ‘messages’ they carry. The main part of the paper is devoted to an elaboration and systematic comparison of eight mechanisms of external effects and the organizations associated with them: borrowing, learning, teaching, harmonization, dissemination, standardization, installing interdependence and imposition.

After globalization: emerging politics of education

Abstract: Globalization refers to the formation of world systems, as distinct from internationalization which presupposes nations as the essential unit. Globalization includes finance and trade; communications and information technologies; migration and tourism; global societies; linguistic, cultural and ideological convergence; and world systems of signs and images. While it does not negate the nation-state, it changes its circumstances and potentials. In the global era, government continues to be largely national in form, and education is, if anything, more central to government, while issues of identity and difference become more important in the politics of education.

Education and globalization in Europe and East Asia: convergent and divergent trends

Abstract: Education researchers have only recently begun to assess the implications of globalization theory for their work. This article examines the claims that globalization will lead to increasing convergence in education and training systems through an analysis of key areas of reform in a range of European and Asian states. The analysis highlights the common contextual factors that are shaping policy-making and suggests that whilst there is considerable convergence at the level of policy rhetoric and general policy objectives, there is less evidence of any systematic convergence at the level of structures and processes in different countries. National education systems, though more international, are far from disappearing.

Under new management: changing conceptions of teacher professionalism and policy in the further education sector

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of recent changes in the structure and funding of Further Education following the 1992 Further and Higher Education (FHE) Act, on conditions of academic work for lecturers in the sector. In doing so it contributes to a debate on FE lecturers' work and professionalism in the managerial state (Clarke and Newman 1997) that has largely centred on schools. The paper assesses the impact of the shifting policy framework on FE lecturers' working practices and their identities at the local level by drawing on preliminary analysis of data from an ongoing ESRC funded research project, Changing Teaching and Managerial Cultures in FE (CTMC), undertaken at Keele. It outlines three different lecturer responses to changing conditions of work in FE; these are resistance, compliance and strategic compliance. The narratives presented in the paper suggest that changes are occurring in terms of what counts as being a ‘good lecturer’ in FE, through mediation of managerialist discourses that empha...

Reasons for parental choice of urban schools

Abstract: Much of the discussion around why parents choose certain schools focuses on parents who choose an alternative to their attendance-zone school, usually a magnet or private school. However, in reality, many more parents exercise choice. Parents who seek information, look at alternative schools, but then decide to choose their assigned attendance-zone school are also participants in a system of school choice. This study explores differences in race, socioeconomic status, and reasons for choice among four groups of parents in one urban school district with a controlled parental choice plan: (1) magnet school choosers; (2) integrated non-magnet school choosers; (3) non-integrated non-magnet school choosers (i.e. 98% or greater African-American enrolments); and (4) non-choosers (i.e. those parents who do not seek information to engage in the decision-making process regarding choice of school). The results of the analysis indicate that parent background characteristics, parents' reasons for choosing a particular...

New Labour's education policy: first, second or third way?

Abstract: On coming to power in 1997, the New Labour government promised to move beyond the ‘ruthless free-for-all’ of the neo-liberals. However, rather than revisiting the ‘stifling statism’ of ‘Old Labour’, the government has claimed to be developing a so-called ‘third way’ in which policies are put forward on the basis of ‘what works’ rather than being driven by any one ideological approach. Through drawing on Giddens' outline of ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third way’ politics, this paper looks at a range of New Labour's education policies and examines the extent to which they can be seen to embody a distinctively different approach. It finds that, despite some remnants of old Labour ‘first way’ thinking, the government's strategies have largely been an extension of second way ‘neoliberalism’. Education action zones are identified as the initiative which comes closest to representing a ‘third way’. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of this initiative for addressing and overcoming the failures of first a...

Working with/against Globalization in Education.

Abstract: This article argues against the juggernaut view of globalization, suggesting that much depends on how we engage with the forces of globalization to mitigate their worst consequences and use them to advantage. The task of democratic nation building, within which education plays an important role, is seen as pivotal to the process of engagement. In exploring how it might be possible to work with and against the pressures of globalization in education, the article looks in particular at aspects of educational governance and purposes.

Governance and management in universities: the way we live now

Abstract: Although all British universities are now subject to much greater external regulation, mainly by the state and its subordinate agencies, simple generalizations cannot be drawn from the complex evolution of their management and governance. Instead a variety of organizational cultures is developing. Some, predominantly but not exclusively in the more academically successful universities with stronger traditions of collegial government, will diffuse (if not resist) the managerialism typical of the post-Dearing era; others will embrace it, fashioning tightly focused teams of executive managers; many, perhaps most, will lie between these extremes.

Towards an economic sociology of the student financial experience of higher education

Abstract: This paper reports on an ongoing research project exploring the perceptions of finance held by undergraduate students and how these perceptions modify over time. It examines changing government policy on student finance in an historical context before moving on to provide a critique of contributions made to the sociology of the student experience thus far. The rationale underpinning the case for a new economic sociology of the undergraduate financial experience of higher education is presented and then augmented by way of empirical data. The final section then examines some of the implications of the research findings for the new and arguably still evolving government policy on student finance.

Localization/globalization and the midwife state: strategic dilemmas for state feminismin education?

Abstract: This paper explores the implications of the processes of globalization/localization for state feminism, with a focus on Australia. Superficially, localization appears to be one response to globalization, exemplified by devolution to self managing schools and in the public sector. But globalization and localization are merely different aspects of the same phenomenon, and the processes articulating local/global relations have particular gendered effects which, while locally specific in their articulation, resonate in highly patterned ways cross nationally. There has been in many Western liberal democracies a fundamental change in the role of the welfare state with a shift from a more protectionist position to one where the ‘midwife’ state mediates, rather than regulates, global markets. But the shift to the smaller or more selectively interventionist state, although a common global policy ‘response’ to the ‘logic’ of globalization, is not an inevitable consequence of economic globalization. Rather, it is an...

Switching on the learning society? - questioning the role of technology in widening participation in lifelong learning

Abstract: The creation of technologically-based ‘virtual education’ has been portrayed as a means of widening access to learning opportunities for those currently excluded from participation in lifelong education and training. Now in the UK these claims are being operationalized under the ‘University for Industry’ initiative and associated Virtual College programmes all of which aim to make real the concept of Britain as a ‘learning society’ for all with an emphasis on reaching those traditionally seen as non-participants in learning. This paper examines these claims in the light of current knowledge about the characteristics of non-participants in lifelong learning and the barriers that they face. It is suggested that the application of ‘technological fixes’ to underlying socio-economic determinants of participation will solve some problems, create others, and leave many unaffected. In this way the paper argues for independent research on the impact of the ‘virtual college’ movement, and begins to outline the form...

Quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s: university perspectives

Abstract: In the last decade ‘quality’ has assumed the status of one of the meta-discourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This paper focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality policy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal of Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (national) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, policy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews with key university personnel provide evidence of the ‘messy’ realities of the policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the dif...

The marginalization of physical education: impoverished curriculum policy and practice in Hong Kong

Abstract: This paper focuses on two themes - the marginalization of curriculum subjects and the gap between curriculum policy aims and the implemented curriculum. Illustrating these themes, the study focuses on the marginalization of physical education and the policy-practice gap in the Hong Kong school curriculum. A framework recognizing three domains - normative, institutional and resources - is proposed as a useful heuristic device to gain further insight into problems connected with the two themes and as a way of generating appropriate policies to address them. In accounting for the differential weightings given curriculum subjects, it is necessary to go beyond school-level (institutional) decisions taken by principals and teachers and to consider long-cherished Chinese societal values, reflective of the normative domain. What is considered ‘valid knowledge’ is a product of deeply ingrained Chinese socio-cultural values that place high esteem on academic subjects leading to careers in the professions, public se...

Globalization and School Curriculum Change: Locating a Transnational Imaginary.

Abstract: This essay discusses a number of issues that have arisen from some initial attempts to design a research project on the links between globalization and school curriculum change. This research is broadly concerned with the ways in which processes and effects of economic and cultural globalization are becoming evident in curriculum policies and school programmes, and expressed by teachers and students, with particular reference to the ways in which meanings that circulate in increasingly globalized media (such as television and the internet) are deployed in the construction of school knowledge. The author's particular interests are in the conceptual and methodological aspects of this research and, in this essay, an approach to conceptualizing globalization as a ‘transnational imaginary’ in curriculum work is outlined. Two contextual issues that might complicate efforts are then briefly explored to inquire into local expressions of this imaginary. The issues on which this essay focus are (1) global perspecti...

Migrating metaphors: the globalization of flexibility in policy

Abstract: Trends towards greater flexibility are to be found in the reform of post-school education and training around the globe. They are part of a wider profile of changes to workplaces and labour relations within which greater flexibility is pursued. This paper charts our journey, through which we have sought to locate flexibility as a globalizing and globalized policy metaphor. Drawing on recent policy texts, we illustrate the multiple meanings of flexibility. The latter is explored within the growing debates about the globalization of education policies and the metaphors which have been deployed to frame these practices. Finally, we outline the role that metaphors have in policy texts and the readings to which they are subject. We argue for metaphorical readings of the texts of flexibility and globalization as a way of countering attempts to inscribe certain meanings and in order to sustain policy openings.

Schooling and Enterprise Culture: Pause for a Critical Policy Analysis.

Abstract: This paper claims that current preoccupations with ‘enterprise culture’ in the policy and practice of schooling deflect attention from crucially important problems such as deindustrialization and the changing nature of work, the creation of meaningful work opportunities for the young, social justice, and moral and social regeneration It is also claimed that ‘enterprise culture’ draws upon a social pathology, which locates problems in individuals and whose function is to shift responsibility for economic growth and stability on to individuals and their schools It is all part of a rush to find simple solutions to complex problems - solutions that promote the values of the business sector

The performance of grant maintained schools in England: an experiment in autonomy

Abstract: The paper examines the recruitment and examination performance from 1991 to 1996 of Grant Maintained (GM) compared to Local Education Authority (LEA) schools using data for almost 300 non-selective schools in 6 LEAs assembled as part of the Impact of Competition on Secondary Schools (ICOSS) study. The data include pupil rolls, examination results, free school meals and budgets. On a straight forward comparison of the proportion of Year 11 students obtaining five or more grades A⋆ to C and A⋆ to G at GCSE and the rate of improvement in the former measure was higher for GM schools. A level results were very similar. However, when factors which account for differences in GCSE examination performance are statistically analysed, it was found that GM schools' apparently superior performance can be attributed to having lower proportions of socially disadvantaged students and to reducing this proportion over time. Being a GM school or number of years as a GM school were not statistically significant in accounting...

Participation and progression in mass higher education: policy and the FHE interface

Abstract: This article surveys the relationship between the further and higher education sectors in the UK context of mass higher education. The commitment to increase participation rates has highlighted the policy framework of post-school education particularly with regard to participation and progression. Although recent policies have encouraged the FE sector, often in collaboration with partners from higher education, to play a key role in widening participation and particularly the development of alternative progression routes, we conclude that the boundaries between the two, still separate, sectors continue to cause problems for many without A-level qualifications. Two dimensions are explored. The first is the rising importance of higher education provision in further education colleges as a means of widening access. Contrasting experiences in Scotland and England are discussed and related to different patterns of provision and progression. The second is the development of alternative progression routes and th...

Managing curriculum policy changes: a comparative analysis of primary schools in England and Finland

Abstract: The York-Finnish project compares the effects of national policy changes on the management of change in two countries where the curriculum reforms are moving in opposite directions. During the fieldwork, primary schools in England were managing policy changes related to the revision of the National Curriculum and its associated assessment. Their counterparts in Finland were developing school-based curricula in response to the dismantling of the centralized Finnish curriculum. Schools' prior experiences of both the process and content of policy changes in combination with the values of individual teachers were powerful determinants of policy interpretation. In the English context the intensification of teachers' work and increased managerialism harnessed to external agendas were found to de-motivate and disenfranchise teachers leading to change without commitment. In Finland, despite the educational context being different, teachers were also experiencing some negative effects of intensification. It is arg...

Utopian realism and a new politics of education: developing a critical theory without guarantees

Abstract: This paper is about utopia and utopianism and the relevance of both to thinking analytically and practically about the form and content of education policy. Specifically, it commends a particular application of the utopian imagination - utopian realism - which entails envisaging possible futures in terms of detectable trends in actual social development. It also assesses the merits for education policy of a recent attempt to translate this kind of utopianism into a mode of practical politics known as the ‘Third Way’.

Credentialism, national targets, and the learning society: perspectives on educational attainment in the UK steel industry

Abstract: The United Kingdom has devised a set of National Learning Targets to be achieved by 2002. Revised from an earlier set of National Targets for Education and Training (NTETs), the latest ones embrace 11-21-year-olds, adults and employers and promote a credentialist approach to both economic and social development. Their primary purpose, according to the National Advisory Council for Education and Training Targets (NACETT) is to make the country more competitive internationally and to promote social cohesion. This paper draws on a study of how one occupational sector, the steel industry, measures up to the national targets for the adult workforce. The findings of the study question the appropriateness of using qualifications-based targets as a proxy for adult capability in the workplace and industrial viability. The paper argues that this credentialist approach detracts from the real challenges which the UK faces in becoming a learning society.

The Research-Policy Gap.

Abstract: There is a serious mismatch between the interests of higher education researchers and the agendas of policy-makers and, to a lesser extent, practitioners. This mismatch has been made worse by changes in the policy environment (the rise of sound-bite politics), within higher education (the development of mass systems) and in research itself (the increasing emphasis on relevance and/or the denial of ‘objectivity’). The higher education research community is itself fragmented and weakly institutionalized. Although its eclecticism, arguably, is an advantage in the new research environment, its shallow institutional roots and shifting membership continue to create difficulties. As a result the articulation between research and policy in higher education is both problematical and transgressive but not without intellectual opportunities.

Education and the Labour Market: Subjective Aspects of Human Capital Investment.

Abstract: This paper explores subjective aspects of human capital investment decisions in education. It gives an insight into ways in which students in Year 11 and Year 13 perceive the connection between their education and the labour market and the mechanisms by which qualifications translate into life chances. An instrument is described which was used to assess perceptions in terms of ‘productivity’, ‘screening’ and ‘credentialism’. Our findings suggest that most students believe education to play a market signalling role and that its role in raising productivity is subordinate. The influences of age, gender, educational intentions and school type are examined.

Education research and policy making in higher education: the case of Dearing

Abstract: In establishing a National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education in the United Kingdom (the Dearing Committee), the Government expected short-term problems and long-term developments to be examined in less than half the average time taken by previous inquiries. Conscious of the intellectual authority of its predecessor, the Robbins Committee, the Dearing inquiry commissioned a large number of research and analytical studies to inform its deliberations. The ways that research and other forms of evidence were collected and considered by the inquiry are discussed in relation to four themes: the context and conditions for the inquiry; the nature of the work commissioned; the treatment of public evidence and the use of research to inform key recommendations; and what the episode disclosed about the relationship between education research and policy-making in higher education. In the course of this commentary, it is suggested that the uneven engagement with research and academic literatures in the Dearing ...

Why Did They Do It? The Conservatives and Mass Higher Education, 1979-97.

Abstract: UK higher education was transformed in several respects during the 18 years of the last Conservative government (1979–97). The authors analyse the key changes in terms of the shift from a ‘post-Robbins’ to a ‘post-Baker’ system, the latter based upon dramatic expansion, modified patterns of participation, and the ending of the ‘binary line’. They then demonstrate that progress towards this end was neither linear nor uniform, and that the government entered office with a set of priorities (termed Policy A - reaching its height in the mid-1980s) which were rapidly overturned in the period 1987–1992. The revised approach (Policy B) is examined from the point of view of legislation, the motives of the key actors, and its fit with other aspects of Conservative public policy (on markets, accountability, state control and public expenditure). The anxieties and ambivalence of the ‘Conservative mind’ on higher education is connected with wider ideological inconsistencies, and offered as a part-explanation of both ...

Modelling change in a national HE system using the concept of unification

Abstract: Education systems can be characterized on the basis of whether the academic and occupational/vocational education and training they provide is compartmentalized (tracked systems), systematically connected (linked systems) or fully integrated (unified systems). This paper describes how such a typology might be used to model strategic change at the higher levels of the UK system for education and training. Successive governments have pursued a number of separate agendas (e.g. massification of HE, public accountability, standards in HE, key/employability skills, lifelong learning…) the net result of which is leading to a more unified system.

Steering futures: practices and possibilities of institutional redesign in Australian education and training

Abstract: This paper reports findings from an enthographic study of educational restructuring in an Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Victoria Australia. Educational restructuring is analysed as a process of institutional redesign and theorized in relation to recent debates in institutional theory concerning the nature of institutional change. The review distinguishes between hyperrational approaches to institutional redesign based upon assumptions about rational actors and their motivations and behaviours, and social and cultural perspectives on institutional redesign that sees purposeful institutional change achieved through processes of ‘institutional gardening’. The paper documents the way Australian governments have adopted hyperrational strategies aimed at changing education and training by reworking institutional rules that frame the day-to-day practices within particular organizations. Reworking these practices of organizing serves to steer change by restructuring and rearticulating rel...

Policy and policymaking in the unification of higher education

Abstract: In 1992 the Further and Higher Education Act unified higher education in England and Wales, as did the corresponding Act in Scotland. These features of the Act were remarkably uncontroversial. Yet they marked the end of more than a quarter of a century during which the opposite policy had been pursued by governments of both parties. Since 1965, higher education in Britain had been distinguished by a ‘binary’ policy, sustaining two separate sectors with different ‘missions’, different arrangements for funding and control, and with different titles for their main institutions. What led to this apparent and dramatic U-turn in policy in 1992? What factors prompted the change? What was the new strategy? This article explores some of the factors in policy and policymaking that led to this outcome, and considers some of the consequences.

British Labour Party policy on educational selection 1996-8: a sociological analysis

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of British Labour Party policy on educational selection between 1996 and 1998. The exercise is conceived as one of policy scholarship and the benefits of a sociological imagination are advocated. This imagination is rooted in a relational insight and particular emphasis is placed upon distributional relations. This conceptual framework is then used to examine key documents from before and after the 1997 General Election. It is argued that, in such themes as ‘standards not structures’ and ‘intervention in inverse proportion to success’, policy largely underpins existing structural relationships which maintain the significant educational inequalities which are the supposed targets of policy.

Temps in Teaching: The Role of Private Employment Agencies in a Changing Labour Market for Teachers.

Abstract: This paper explores the emergence of teacher employment agencies and the increased volume of employment agency business in teaching. It examines the role of agencies in quasi-educational markets, and the relationship between agency teaching and understandings about teachers' work. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted at the University of Warwick, the author analyses documents and interviews with agency representatives from a range of agencies of differing size and complexity. Agencies are seen as part of a wider agenda that includes the marketization and privatization of schooling that begins to mirror what is already occurring within the FE sector. This includes emerging local markets for agencies and supply teachers, and agencies' relations with schools and unions are considered. Paradoxically, agency teachers are shown to underpin aspects of educational policy and practice in which they, and for the most part, the agencies who supply them, have, until recently, remained either implicit or invisi...