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Policy subjects and policy actorsin schools: some necessary butinsufficient analysesStephen J. Ball a , Meg Maguire b , Annette Braun a & Kate Hoskinsc

a Institute of Education , University of London , London, UKb Department of Education and Professional Studies , King'sCollege London , London, UKc University of Roehampton , London, UKPublished online: 14 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Stephen J. Ball , Meg Maguire , Annette Braun & Kate Hoskins (2011) Policysubjects and policy actors in schools: some necessary but insufficient analyses, Discourse: Studiesin the Cultural Politics of Education, 32:4, 611-624, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2011.601564

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PAPER 3

Policy subjects and policy actors in schools: some necessary butinsufficient analyses

Stephen J. Balla*, Meg Maguireb, Annette Brauna and Kate Hoskinsc

aInstitute of Education, University of London, London, UK; bDepartment of Education andProfessional Studies, King’s College London, London, UK; cUniversity of Roehampton, London,UK

This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy inschools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in whichpolicies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects � asproducers 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 whichpolicies in schools are subject to complex processes of interpretation andtranslation. We suggest that both views are necessary to understand the work ofpolicy and ‘policy work’ in schools but that neither view is sufficient on its own.

Keywords: policy work; subjects; policy actors; teachers; Foucault

Introduction: policies, possibilities and murmurings

In this paper we emphasise the role of policies in producing teacher (and other adult)

subjects in schools, and in the next paper (Paper 4) give more attention to the role of

agency, interpretation and creativity in relation to the problems posed by policy.

Thus, each paper ‘positions’ teachers in a different ontological relation to policy. This

has been referred to elsewhere as policy as discourse and policy as text (Ball, 2005).

While an analysis of ‘policy work’ which gives significant emphasis to meaning and

interpretation is absolutely necessary for understanding how policies get done, it is

not sufficient. Thus, we attempt a ‘balancing act’ (Apple, 1999, p. 61) which works

across the dialectic tension between actor and subject. On the one hand, the focus on

actors (in Paper 4) is about the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of policy and the ways in which

teachers work upon one another and themselves in ‘doing policy’, the effect of ‘sets

of actions upon other actions’, both as enabling and inhibiting (Foucault, 1983,

p. 219). On the other hand, this paper is mainly about the ‘what’ of policy and the

ways in which the possibilities for action are constructed within discourses as sets of

conditions which enable and constrain ‘the socially productive ‘‘imagination’’’

(McHoul & Grace, 1993 p. 34). That is, ‘what can be said’ and ‘what can be

thought’. ‘One cannot speak of anything at any time, it is not easy to say something

new, it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, to be aware’ (Foucault,

1972, p. 44).

The teacher subject is constructed in a network of social practices which are

infused with power relations. Teachers do think about, perceive and act towards

policy in particular ways in local circumstances but they are not simply autonomous

*Corresponding author. Email: s.ball@ioe.ac.uk

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Vol. 32, No. 4, October 2011, 611�624

ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2011.601564

http://www.informaworld.com

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and transparent social subjects. The challenge is ‘to account for agency in a

constrained world’ (Harker & May, 1993). Neither are they coherent subjects,

although they are typically represented as such in research, indeed below we begin

with a ‘discontinuity’, two variable and contingent ‘enunciative modalities’ (Fou-cault, 1972, p. 54) of policy. That is, two subject positions or identities as agents in

discourse that are themselves aspects of discourse. The explication rests on, is drawn

from and is illustrated by extracts from data, but shortage of words means that the

specific data are not examined in any detail, and the problematic of the teacher

subject is presented and discussed via a set of propositions. Here we are trying to

bring theory to policy using these propositions as starting points, as provocations.

The propositions are inter-related but also in tension as they move from a

consideration of the teacher as subject to the teacher as agent. What we aresuggesting here is that teachers make meanings with the discursive possibilities

available to them. However, it is important to note that what Foucault calls his

embarrassingly ‘bizzare machinery’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 135) of archaeological

analysis does not address this level of enunciation, it does not ‘take into account’

(p. 75) the elaborations, connexions, deductive series or style of ‘texts (or words)’ (p.

75) that are the ‘terminal stage of discourse’.

This discussion rests heavily on an inter-related set of binaries. This seems to be a

meaningful and effective starting point for making sense of our data and is difficultto resist. However, some of these binaries need also to be troubled and de-centred.

They work but only to a certain extent.

Proposition 1: Not all policies are the same!

Different policies, or more precisely kinds of policy, position and produce teachers as

different kinds of policy subjects � within these differences different narratives of the

teacher and teaching are discernible which also shape what it means to be a teacher,and for the learner, what it means to be educated, in different ways. We want to

contrast what we call imperative policies with those we call exhortative within which

very different relations of power are realised.

Imperative/disciplinary policies like those involved in the standards agenda (that is

the drive to continually raise the level of student performance in tests and

examinations) produce a primarily passive policy subject, a ‘technical professional’

whose practice is heavily determined by the requirements of performance and

delivery (see Ball, Maguire, Braun, Perryman, & Hoskins, in press). Little reflexivejudgement is required of this teacher, indeed it could be argued that it is ‘required’

that judgement is suspended and ethical discomforts set aside. As MacBeath (2008)

puts it, ‘warrant’ is given to teachers, that this is what their role is. Teachers are

reactive and constrained in the form and modalities of their responses. Enactment

and creativity here are narrowly defined and mostly unoriginal although there is

always room for invention within the terms of the formal structures of practice.

However, the multiple ‘interventions’ which are developed to boost student

performances are repeated almost exactly in all of our case-study schools. We canthink of these as readerly policies; teachers are put under pressure to submit to the

disciplines of necessity; although these necessities bear differently upon different

parts of the school. They do not locate the reader as a site of the production of

meaning, but only as the receiver of a fixed, pre-determined, reading. School policies

612 S.J. Ball et al.

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and practices are products rather than productions, which are articulated within a

‘linear logic’ (Buckles, 2010, p. 11). Teachers (and students) are consumers of the

policy texts, which are ‘intransitive’ and serious (Barthes, 1970, p. 4).1 Compliance is

key � acceptance or rejection are the only options. The rationale for policy is

extrinsic � outcomes (test and examination attainments) as opposed to the ‘intrinsic’

rationale and legitimation of PLTS (Pupil Learning and Thinking Skills � see below).

The problem of education here is defined by policy as one of standards and the need

to raise standards, represented in quantitative outcomes and measures. In effect, a

‘performativity discourse’ is set over and against a ‘humanist discourse’ (Jeffrey,

2002) and privileged by a set of ‘correlations’ and ‘exclusions’.2 The forms of

teaching and learning involved are for the most part ‘traditional’ and superficial �they are forms of ‘surface learning’:3

I don’t like the idea of force-feeding information into people’s heads so they pass theexam, I don’t think any teacher does. But that’s what you end up having to do. (Roger,Campion, Mathematics)

The external pressures on the school to meet certain targets is always going to overrideanything a school wants to do that’s individual about personalised learning. And sincemost schools are stretched to the limit, with staff working over the number of hours,they’re not going to be able to introduce anything substantially new that would fit thatprogramme. (Joe, Atwood, Sociology)

[W]hen we had our awful results summer, the Head and the Deputy Head came to talkto the whole department at great length, and basically we were pretty much roundly toldoff for the results . . . lot more emphasis this year on making the HOD [heads ofdepartment] accountable for their team . . . you will have been, sort of, monitoredyourself in doing these things . . . we’ve been supported a little more in the lead up toresults: supported, obviously having more demands made of you. (Nicola, Atwood,English)

The school here is represented as a cipher of government policy, policy that comes

from outside, and which ‘overrides’ local particularities or priorities or principles and

this enacts ‘designed teaching and learning’ (Buckles, 2010, p. 7). The needs of

performance and the competitive interests of teachers, departments and schools are

prioritised over and against those of students.

The interpretative/political work of the senior leadership team (SLT) is decisive

and unequivocal here and sets narrow and well-defined conditions for the enactment

of policy. Power relations are explicit. There is little or no space for ‘alternative’

interpretations of policy. The SLT act as agents of policy, policy enforcers, or as

‘suitably fitted leaders’ (Buckles, 2010; Wright, 2001). Even if sometimes members

distance themselves from the messages they convey and the pressures they bring to

bear, others revel in the opportunities for exactitude:

In our last INSET [in-service training] a couple of weeks back, the new Ofstedframework came in, particularly the focus on raw data rather than contextually value-added, which is going to have implications for who we focus on in terms of interventionand things. Ken [Headteacher] was more diplomatic but other members of SLT, whenthey were presenting it to us, basically said, ‘We don’t like this but we’re on the list for a

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no-notice inspection, we only got a ‘‘satisfactory’’ last time, we were ‘‘good’’ before,we’re going to have to do it anyway’. (Naomi, Atwood, Religious Education)

The feeling that I get from senior management and heads generally is whether they agreewith the policy or not, it’s totally nothing to do with them, whether they’re educationallyfor it or not they feel that, I mean, I don’t want to be crude, but they’re literally balls in avice kind of effect. (Neil, Wesley, English)

Such policies operate by what Barber (1997) calls ‘informed prescription’, and are

enacted through the technology of ‘deliverology’ � over and against what he calls

‘informed professional judgement’ (Ball et al., in press) and they produce a

‘consensual culture’ rather than a ‘learning culture’. While the latter challenges ‘its

own premises and ways of being’ (MacBeath, 2008, p. 145), the former relies almost

exclusively on compliance. These kinds of policies generate ‘pressure’ � which is

enacted by the SLT through a variety of other subject positions (see Paper 4). The

term ‘pressure’ was used extensively in the transcripts (mentioned 193 times in 60 of

78 interviews), and was linked to a concomitant set of negative emotions � anxiety,

worry, stress, nervousness and panic:

. . .our results went down and it happened that maths went up, so the pressure is verymuch on English to perform this year, as SLT keep telling everybody. (Carla, Campion,English)

I’m slightly dreading the summer because this is my first results summer as head ofdepartment . . . I know the heads of core subjects [English and Mathematics] haveinterviews with the Head which go on for a number of hours where you go through all ofthe results and you will be asked a lot of questions . . . that’s quite nerve wracking.(Nicola, Atwood, English)

. . .my biggest frustrations at the moment, now, in year three . . . is all the pressure fromcounty, from government to county to school, you know, LEA [local educationauthority] to school, is because there is just so much. (Clare, Campion, Mathematics)

In their daily practice teachers move between very different emotional states in a

context of overload and time poverty. As Mahony, Menter, and Hextall (2004, p.

439) write, ‘increasingly there are sets of regulations and requirements and

expectations built around those teachers who are at the peak of their professional

expertise and yet who don’t have the autonomy to define how they work’.

Kelchtermans (2003) argues that ‘teachers’ emotions have to be understood in

relation to the vulnerability that constitutes a structural condition of the teaching

job’ (p. 995), which is very evident here, but also he says that ‘emotions reflect the

fact that deeply held beliefs on good education are part of teachers’ self-

understanding’. In these schools this vulnerability often works against or muffles

such self-understanding:

I think in this school we really sometimes kill creativity. We’re so � it’s so directed, likewe have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this. (Rachael, George Eliot, Headof Physical Education)

. . .we don’t talk about government policies and new initiatives . . . we’re so busy we don’tactually get to talk about things like that. I think that’s a shame. (Aabid, George Eliot,Sociology)

614 S.J. Ball et al.

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In contrast, and at the same time, exhortative/developmental policies, like PLTS, can

enable an active policy subject, a more ‘authentic’ professional who is required to

bring judgement, originality and ‘passion’, as some teachers put it, to bear upon the

policy process, although this is tempered by the nature of the whole school response

to PLTS and whether or not departments have a choice in implementing PLTS or not

(see Braun, Maguire, & Ball, 2010). These are more writerly policies which offer a

‘plurality of entrances’ (Barthes, 1970), they are productions rather than products,

the teacher as producer has ‘access to the magic of the signifier’ (p. 4) and

the ‘pleasures’ of production � hence the possibilities of passion. A sense of

writerliness, creativity and sense-making, is conveyed by Gareth (Campion, Sixth

Form teacher):

Personalised Learning is a kind of umbrella term for a lot of things that are alreadygoing on, you know . . . learning styles and things like that needs to come into it, anddifferentiation, all of that kind of ties in together, for me, to mean PersonalisedLearning. Now, I kind of hope that’s what the government think it is as well, I don’tknow. . .

The uncertainties here and their opportunities, contrast with the absolute and clear

certainties of performance policies. Policies such as these can also be ignored, or

underplayed or sidelined, they can be spaces of delay or neglect or creative re-

packaging:

I looked at PLTS and I just thought, this is from my point of view � I am notconvinced. . . (Nick, Atwood, Deputy Head)

. . .she and I need to decide how far we’re going to buy into secondary social andemotional aspects of learning (SEAL) . . . the local authority were also still decidinghow much weight to give to this. (Bryan, Wesley, Assistant Head)

However, it is often the case that the selection of attention is done by some, the SLT

or middle managers, for others, junior teachers (see Paper 4):

. . .it’s more filtered, so they pick out the best bits, I suppose, and then implement them,so not everything is. . . (Aabid, George Eliot, Sociology)

Some of our respondents were enthused and excited by these sorts of policies and

their possibilities � reading, theory, Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

and visits to other schools to observe good practice of all sorts are brought to bear

upon the ‘co-production’ of materials, organisation and practice. Practice often

emerged as a bricolage of inventions and borrowings from diverse sources. Here the

teachers are engaged in the production of original local texts, methods, artefacts and

pedagogies which generate a sense of policy ‘ownership’.

Nonetheless, the problem of education here is also defined by policy discourses,

as learning, as a process and a set of skills and dispositions, and a disposition of

reflexivity on the part of students. However, the forms of learning here might be

described as ‘deep’, a kind of ‘new’ child-centred progressivism which is, when taken

at face value, meaningful to the teachers, and related to principled views about

student interests.4 There is a different genre of ‘delicate connexions’ here.

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 615

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Proposition 2: Time and tired, how teachers move unreflexively between contrastingsubject positions

The striking thing in our case studies is that teachers move between these different

forms of policy, these different professionalisms and subjectivities and modalities, for

the most part, with unreflexive ease. This is indicative perhaps of contemporary

teaching as ‘a liminal state of being’ � that is a state of being on the ‘threshold’ of or

between two different existential planes, being an essentially incoherent subject (see

‘dissonance’ below), both rational and passionate, compliant and inventive � like

Rachel (Campion, Physical Education):

I feel that I can change things . . . I put my case forward, he is extremely supportive sodirected, like we have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this. . .

The liminal state is normally characterised by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy

but there was no clear evidence of disorientation in our data. In part perhaps because

there is neither time nor space for most teachers to reflect on the contradictions

embedded here, they are ‘working their socks off ’ (Anjali), although the possibilities of

thinking about and ‘doing policy’ in different ways vary across the school year � ‘April/

May time it’s just mad’ (Anjali, Campion, Manager, English teacher) (see Stoll &

Stobart, 2005):

I think at the beginning of term, things like AfL [Assessment for Learning], everyone’squite excited about, then about halfway through the term everyone’s worrying aboutthings like, ‘I haven’t set a homework and I was meant to set two by the half term’. Andthen by the end of term everyone’s, sort of, ‘Oh my goodness, they’re one quartile downon their thing’ . . . I think at the beginning of term everyone’s focused on their teachingand learning-type policies and by the end very much on their target setting andpanicking. (Naomi, Atwood, Religious Education)

There is a strong sense throughout the data of the dominance of ‘coping’ and ‘keeping

up’ and of being tired and sometimes overwhelmed, which work against a systematic

consideration of contradictions, although these are sometimes noted in passing. To

some extent the problems that these contradictions pose are ‘solved’ by the

impossibilities of the job. A lot of the time teachers do not ‘do policy’ � policy ‘does

them’. This is the most recent iteration of the on-going ‘intensification’ of teachers’

work:

There is the danger that it does feel like it’s more paperwork, more bureaucracy. But interms of the teaching and learning changes that are made, it’s very clear why they arebrought out and ultimately why every policy change is made. But, you know, it’s the oldadage that it’s just more work and less time. (Robert, Wesley, Advanced Skills teacher)

We do get tired but, do you know what, I think as a school we just keep going. I don’tthink any of us just stop. We have a whinge and a moan but about doing . . . I don’tknow, we just keep going, I think, and then by the end of it we’re, kind of, like, we’re onour knees. (Anjali, Campion, English)

There is a sense, I think, at the moment, of a lot of people there that they’re quite worndown by the number of policies that are out there that are not [inaudible] allowing themto do their job. (Joe, Atwood, Sociology)

616 S.J. Ball et al.

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The sheer number and diversity of policies, set in relation to the routine demands of

the working day, work against what Hoyle (1974) called ‘extended professionality’,

within which the teacher acquires skills from the mediation between professional

experience and educational theory. Rather, in many sites, teaching is considered in

relation to short-term goals and the immediacy of the next lesson:

You just ignore it, you forget about it and just teach lessons. It’s much easier in theclassroom. (Beth, Atwood, English)

This flexible (or unstable) teacher subject, with all its incoherence, has been produced

over time through policy and the enactments of policy, and the inescapability of

policy on many planes, in many forms, and in many aspects of school life. This is a

relatively superficial subject, defined more by responsiveness than principle,

pragmatism rather reflection, action rather than judgment, each of these aspects is

present but unevenly so. Schools, Fullan (2001, p. 109) says, frequently struggle with

a lack of coherence ‘the main problem is not one of the absence of innovations but

the presence of too many disconnected, episodic, piecemeal, superficially adorned

projects’.

Nonetheless, as we have tried to indicate different kinds of policy foreground or

‘call up’ different kinds of teacher and different teacherly qualities. These are also

policy paradoxes. They are versions of schooling which contradict. They enact

different versions of teaching and learning, of the teacher and the learner, of what it

means to be educated.5 But for the most part these are ‘skated over’ or are unseen

and remain unaddressed.We have been writing here of both policy and school as generalities. There may be

no escape from some policy imperatives but policies do engage and hail teachers

differently and hail different teachers. Specialists of various sorts are subject to

specific policies, but may be peripheral to other more general policies. There are

spaces in schools where some kinds of policies do not reach or are relatively

insignificant. Schools are not of a piece, they are complexly structured and culturally

diverse � in terms of geography, departments and subject cultures (Goodson, 1983),

support services, professional identities, and the distribution of students. These

diversities and distributions also produce spaces of avoidance and creativity and

different ways of being a teacher and doing teaching.

Proposition 3: Concern and critique are reduced to discomforts and murmurings

There are hints, traces, murmurings in the data we have elicited6 that gesture towards

some of the tensions outlined above and their attendant ‘discomforts’. In particular,

as indicated above, there is a quiet moral disquiet about the interests and purposes

which animate these different policies � those of the schools as against those of the

students. The effort and creativity which are brought to bear on the standards agenda

is seen by most teachers as serving the interests of the school rather than the

students:

I would say that 95% of the staff give it all they can do. And therefore they’re notbothered: at the end of the day they can walk away with a clear conscience whether the

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 617

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results go up or down . . . I- we do, us, us teachers, are more concerned about the value-added, the individual kids and how well they do and stuff. (Joe, Atwood, Sociology)

. . .a few of us, three of us, who weren’t very happy with the way it was broken down, fedthat back to a lady who was working with Catherine [Deputy Head] on them. But, yeah,that’s, sort of, gone quiet. So I guess it is kind of like you can’t challenge it because ithappens anyway because we’ve got to do it, so. . . (Naomi, Atwood, ReligiousEducation)

These murmurings come across as subtle discontents rather than stark contrasts or

discontinuities. The social justice and social inclusion issues which are signalled here

are gestured to as asides to the main business of policy. Perhaps they are muted

inasmuch as teachers’ concerns are substantially articulated by the languages and

discourse of policy, as noted already. That is, policy provides a language for thinking

about and talking about teaching and students, squeezing out other ways of

articulating practice (see below). Thus, ‘deviance is not only unacceptable � it cannot

even be thought’ (Bottery, 2000, p. 154). That is to say, there is no discourse of

critique through which such concerns can be coherently expressed and recognised

and valid and valuable (Paper 4):

. . .you occasionally have discussions about whether you think this or that or that is goodbut mostly people just kind of get on with what they’re doing every day. We don’t seemto have that kind of overview. (Aabid, George Eliot, Sociology)

Dyson, Gallannaugh, and Millward (2003), reporting on a study of five schools, refer

to what we have called murmurings as ‘dissonance’ or ‘significant tensions’ (p. 237)

which arise between standards and inclusion. They go on to say that such dissonance

‘opened up space which was occupied by (relatively) inclusive values and approaches’

(p. 238) but ‘that space was not outside or alternative to the ‘‘standards agenda’’’ and

responses they note ‘were full of ambiguities’, the schools ‘took the ‘‘standards

agenda’’ for granted’ and as ‘the principal task of the school’. That would equally

well describe our case-study schools, but Dyson et al. go on to suggest that

dissonance ‘can generate inclusive responses’ (p. 242), it is not clear that that was the

case in the ‘mainstream’ spaces of our schools.

Grumbles are not a basis for contestation or rejection, rather policies are seen as

‘necessary evils, they’re there for a reason’ (Robert), although ‘If they’re not seen to

be overtly valuable that’s hard’ (Alice). These murmurings may be thought about as

representing the vestiges of or as referring to another educational discourse, another

archive,7 that is currently submerged or domesticated � and which we could name

inclusion. Other kinds of statements about teaching and social justice, which would

draw upon this other archive, remain mostly inaccessible and unauthorised, except to

some extent at Atwood, which continued to cling to some aspects of its historic

comprehensivism. For Foucault, only those statements which are ‘in the true’ will be

circulated: he argues that ‘it is always possible one could speak the truth in a void;

one would only be ‘‘in the true’’ however if one obeyed the rules of some discursive

‘‘police’’ which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke’ (Foucault, 1972,

p. 224). Policies work to exclude statements which they characterise as false and they

keep in circulation those statements which they characterise as true.

618 S.J. Ball et al.

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Proposition 4: Policy enactment involves different sorts of policy actors in the work ofinterpretation (decoding) and translation (recoding) of policy

Here we begin to move from discourse to meaning, from subject to actor. Fullan

(2001, p. 8) sees ‘the problem of meaning’ as the key aspect of change in schools and

meaning making is a fundamental component of our analysis but, as indicated above,

we also have to look beyond meaning and what Supovitz (2008, p. 159), following

Spillane, Reiser, and Reimer (2002), calls ‘the predominance of the individual agent

as the central influence on implementation’, to examine what is excluded and

unthinkable (as above), as well as the ways in which policies work to ‘form the objects

of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 118). Nonetheless, ‘meaning work’ is central

to policy enactment and a heuristic separation, between interpretation and

translation, is helpful here in thinking about different aspects of this work and

again the ways in which it is suffused by relations of power.

Interpretation and translation

Interpretation is an initial reading, a making sense of policy � what does this text

mean to us? What do we have to do? Do we have to do anything? It is political and

substantive reading � a ‘decoding’ (Ball, 1993). A process of meaning making which

relates the smaller to the bigger picture (Fullan, 2001, p. 8). These situated

interpretations are set over and against what else is in play, what consequences

might ensue from responding or not responding. Interpretations are set within the

schools’ position in relation to policy and the degree of imperative attached to any

policy, as indicated above, and the constraints of budget, staff, etc. (See Paper 1.):

One of my colleagues who is in the senior leadership team, he talked about, you know,what has come up and what we need to focus on. And some of that got mentioned at ourmiddle leaders meeting [and some did not]. (Alice, Campion, Teaching and Learning co-ordinator)

We’re kind of, told these are the new initiatives and these are the things we are going tobe introducing. (Aabid, George Eliot, Sociology)

In briefings [the Headteacher] talked about what’s come up and what we need to focuson . . . things that we need to try to do. (Alice, Campion, Teaching and Learning co-ordinator)

Interpretations are instantiated and elaborated in SLT meetings, staff briefings,

working groups, and by identifying responsible persons (peopling policy). These are

all recontextualising contexts, points of articulation and authorisation that make

something into a priority, assign it a value. In some cases making someone

responsible for a policy is the enactment of policy and its embodiment.8 Interpretation

is an institutional political process, a strategy, a ‘genre chain’. It involves ‘selling

policy to staff ’ (Alice):

Part of the ‘filtering’ effect as we move along genre chains is on discourses: discourseswhich are drawn upon in one genre (e.g. meetings) may be ‘filtered out’ in the movementto another (e.g. report), so that the genre chain works as a regulative device for selectingand privileging some discourses and excluding others. (Fairclough, 2003, p. 34)

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Interpretation is mainly rationalistic whereas translation is more realistic � closer to

the languages of practice. Translation is an iterative process of making texts and

putting those texts into action, literally ‘enacting’ policy, using tactics, talk, meetings,

plans, events, ‘learning walks’, producing artefacts (see Paper 2) and borrowing from

other schools, from commercial materials and official websites, and being supported

by local authority advisers (see Paper 4). These translations also give symbolic value

to policy. Making policy into materials, practices, concepts, procedures and

orientations is a ‘recoding’ (Buckles, 2010, p. 18) of policy in relation to specific

contexts, recipients and subject cultures (Spillane et al., 2002) and the ‘logics of

practice’ of the classroom (Hardy & Lingard, 2008, p. 66). Translation goes on in

relation to both imperatives and exhortations with different kinds of creativity and

spaces for invention and ‘production’ in each case. Translation can occur in staged

events and processes � department meetings being very important � as well as in

mundane exchanges, through the work of ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘models’ (see Paper 4) �and importantly and increasingly it takes place through the medium of ‘observa-

tions’. These observations are a banal example of policy ‘enforcement’ which sits

alongside the reporting of student ‘progress’ and lesson plan writing:

I don’t know if you’ve heard about the open classroom policy that we have here? There’sopen/closed signs in windows of classrooms and the idea is that if you’re on a free, you’dlike to, you know, see a class that you teach in a different context. Or you’re interestedin, you know, developing aspects of literacy, behaviour management, whatever that maybe, then there’ll be an open classroom across the school where you can go and officiallyobserve those lessons, either for a full hour or just part of it. And we just ask that youcome in, take notes and perhaps be prepared to offer a little bit of constructive feedbackat the end. (Robert, Wesley, Art and Advanced Skills teacher)

Such visibility can be formative or summative, it can be about sharing and improving

practice, a learning process, or it can be reductive, the reduction of the teacher to a

grade. It is a tactic of policy translation, an opening up of practice to change, a

technique of power. It may be that teachers have come ‘to inhabit and live and think

in terms of this discourse of a surveilled universe and accept it as non-problematic,

until it becomes difficult to think in any other terms’ (Bottery, 2000, p. 153).

Nonetheless, policy translations engage with other classroom priorities and

values and compete for attention (like at the institutional level) and through these

multiple tactics policies ‘drip’, ‘seep’ and ‘trickle down’ into classroom practice to

become part of the bricolage of teaching and learning activities, sedimented upon

previous translation effects:

I suppose it’s two-fold, it’s being able to create activities and lesson ideas yourself, whichsupport effective learning or creative thinking and so on, but I think we need to givestaff a basis of ideas for each thing. I mean, borrowing role-plays for speaking andperforming or delivering a PowerPoint; don’ts: not staring at it or not using notes orwhatever. Just a kind of a list of activities that they can do. (Laura, George Eliot,Learning and Teaching co-ordinator)

Classroom and corridor practices are sustained and constantly adapted in response

to students and as Elmore (1996) asserts, we should not assume that policy is the

only influence on the behaviour of actors. Responses are also mediated by subject

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and expert cultures of various kinds. Nonetheless, the stronger and clearer the policy

imperative, the less ‘leakage’ in and through the processes of enactment:

I think Paul [SLT] has learnt that if you brought this to the whole staff it would fall flatbecause it’s too vague if you haven’t been involved in any of the planning. ‘What the hellis PLTS?’ It’s different because I’ve been involved in the planning and now I’m teachingit but, like, if you’re the teacher, especially maybe I’m not saying an older teacher butcertain teachers who aren’t as open to new ideas, who, you know, have taught in acertain way, then you’re like, ‘Oh my God’. But they are bringing it in, they are filteringit in, like we’re all rewriting schemes of work, every department for PLTS. (Rachel,George Eliot, Physical Education)

Interpretations and translations are usually enactments of policy in different arenas,

as different parts of the policy process, and in different relations to practice but they

also interface at points. Interpretation is about strategy, and translation is about

tactics, but they are also at times closely interwoven and over-lapping. They work

together to enrol or hail subjects and inscribe discourse into practices. They involve

the production of institutional texts, doing training/professional development,

changing structures, roles, and relationships, and very importantly the identification

and allocation of posts of responsibility and the allocation of resources. Two

examples illustrate the complexity and sophistication of translation work:

Mark and myself and some others in the group tried to go through this pack. We had abig box given to us by our line manager, and she briefed me, in a meeting about this newinitiative, you know, we’re trying to get the students to think more creatively and how tolaunch that with staff. Mark went away and read the pack very closely. It was my job totry and put that into a staff conference day, to get faculties to think about it. Anotherthing we do is on Thursday mornings we have a teaching and learning briefing. And theidea being there’s a rota for all members of staff to feedback . . . And getting faculties toshare their good practice, that’s the idea, so people can pick up ideas. (Alice, Campion,Teaching and Learning co-ordinator)

Paul [Deputy Head] has come up with a five-part lesson cycle so we’re moving awayfrom the traditional three-part lessons and so on; that it is about active learning . . . Andtalking to students, I think it’s most interesting, it’s very difficult at the moment becausewe don’t have a language for learning, so they tend to equate being quiet or copyingthings neatly or something with good learning. And it’s also quite interesting, Milton[Headteacher], he’s decided to observe every teacher in the school . . . So we need � yousee, this is where the staff development comes in because you need masses of trainingbecause the implications are huge, there’s a huge cultural shift. (Laura, George Eliot,Social Sciences)

Here there is a composite of texts, artefacts, support, training, observation,

motivation, modelling, coaching, collaboration and exhortation involved in the

work of policy translation. The language of policy is translated into the language of

practice, words into action, abstractions into processes. In all of this the distance

between the original policy texts and practice can be large.

Discussion

We have sought here, within the space available, to sketch a set of theoretically

informed propositions for thinking about teachers and policy work in schools. These

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work in a number of ways, at different levels of analysis, and with different points of

focus, to recognise the complexity of policy work as a practical, discursive and moral

process. They also include an awareness of the omnipresence of relations of power

within the processes of policy enactment, and the ways in which enactment is situated

in the materiality and emotionality of school life. We have tried to escape from

treating the school, teachers and policy as generalities.

Teachers are both centred and de-centred in our account, as policy subjects in

this paper and policy actors (in Paper 4). That is to say, teachers are agents in the

mediation and enactment of policy but at the same time a great deal of the meaning

of teaching and its practice is now made up of policy concepts which have been

sedimented over time in the language of teaching and which constitute the contours

of professional practice and subjectivity. These concepts form the objects about

which they speak � what it means to be a teacher, what is learning, what is good

teaching, what is improvement, what is a good lesson. In this sense most teachers are

now fluent in policy but are spoken by it (see Robert below). Policy provides a

vocabulary for thinking about and talking about practice, reflecting on it and

evaluating it, and for estimating one’s own self-worth as a teacher. The ‘field of

memory’ of teaching made up of earlier vocabularies of possibility is being whittled

away:

Well, the way that the national curriculum has been changing and the new governmentalpolicies that are being brought in and developed, such as Every Child Matters and, inparticular, the PLTS. There’s a greater focus on things like independent learning,creative enquiry; we are moving more and more toward the role of facilitators thanteachers. So lessons are becoming increasingly student-led, student-focused. We usevarious risk-taking strategies, such as hot-seating, student as expert, in order tominimise our physical involvement within the lessons as much as possible. So we equipstudents with strategies, with techniques, with approaches, with methodologies, withwhich to approach the learning objectives, the success criteria, the source material thatforms the substance of the lessons. And have them problem solve their way, discuss,investigate, explore the objectives/themes of the lessons themselves as a group, in pairs,as individuals; with us, I suppose, really mediating rather than preaching. (Robert,Wesley, Advanced Skills teacher)

However, policy is not a coherent unity of statements about the teacher, teaching and

learning. There is certainly a dispersion of concepts, style and practices and a set of

contractions and irregularities here. The discursive practices and domains of govern-

ment which are evident in our case-study schools indicate ‘multiple dissensions’ (Foucault,

1972, p. 155) which constitute different teachers and learners and philosophies of practice

and different spaces of practice.9 Policies are complexly and creatively enacted within the

limits and opportunities of discourse (see Paper 4) but are also set within an overwhelming

materiality and concomitant affects. There is both a loving and hating of teaching, which

together modulate contemporary teacher subjectivity � this is constituted by policy

crowding and overloading, lack of time and opportunity to think, de-sociality, stress and

pressure, and the oppressive requirements of performativity.

Notes

1. Although one might want to see forms of ‘gaming’ and ‘fabrication’ around performancemeasures as a kind of creativity and resistance.

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2. This is an education for an imaginary fordist, basic skills economy perhaps?3. The ‘achieving’ or strategic approach to learning can be summarised as a very well-

organised form of surface learning, and in which the motivation is to get good marks. Theexercise of learning is construed as a game, so that acquisition of technique improvesperformance. (See www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm, retrieved February16, 2010, and Marton and Saljo, 1976).

4. This is education for a post-fordist economic imaginary perhaps?5. Two contrasting master narratives of teaching are embedded here, distinct groupings and

specific regularities of statements.6. And we must keep reminding ourselves that we did not speak to everyone and everyone did

not speak.7. That is ‘the set of rules which at � a given period and for a given society define the limits

and forms of the sayable’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 59). The term ‘archive’ is used by Foucault torefer to the unwritten rules which lead to the production of certain types of statements.‘Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happen to changethe discursive formation. Their difference to the dominant discourse also describe it’ (Mills,2003, p. 65). In Foucault’s words, ‘our task consists of treating discourses . . . as practicesthat systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (1972, p. 118).

8. Such assignments can become parts of ‘policy careers’.9. In our schools some forms of practice which were discursively peripheral to policy � like

special educational needs � were literally ‘hidden away’ in special rooms or basements.

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