Reshaping Educational Practice for Improvement in England: How Successful Secondary Schools Enact Policies

• In Event: Reshaping Educational Practice for Improvement: How Schools Mediate and Enact Government Reforms

Abstract

Objectives
The research upon which the paper is based aimed to analyse how school leaders at all levels:

1) build and sustain a strategic and operational focus on the leadership of learning and teaching whilst managing wider government initiated structural and cultural changes
2) identify the key challenges and issues that they face, mediate change and sustain academic standards within a clear ethical and moral commitment to high quality education for all.

Conceptual framework
The research built upon but extended the work of Ball, Maguire and Braun (2011) on policy enactment and examined how successful schools (as measured by pupil progress and attainment outcomes and national inspection judgement results) use policy for improvement. With Ball et al. (2011), we argue that processes of policy enactment are complex and dynamic; that they must be understood in the contexts of use and in connection with the values and capacities of educational stakeholders and actors at all levels of the system; and that they need to be interpreted and recontextualised.

Methods and data sources
Funded by the UK Social and Economic Research Council (ESRC), the research began with a mapping exercise of perceived challenges of current government reforms in England and a secondary analysis of an existing national survey on senior and middle leaders' perceptions of their principals' contribution to change and improvement in their schools (n=393 schools, 1,167 questionnaires). The survey was part of a three-year national research project which investigated the impact of school leadership on the improvement of pupils’ academic and social outcomes in England (Day et al., 2009 & 2011).

Using a longitudinal, mixed methods design to investigate the interface of reform at macro (country), meso (school) and micro (classroom) levels, these analyses formed the basis for case studies of four most improved and effective secondary schools across diversified school populations in different socio-economic contexts. These focused upon the ways in which government reforms were mediated by principals, senior and middle leaders and teachers in order to assess the extent to which the primary intentions had been translated into practice and sustained; and if not, why not.

Results and significance of the work
The research has produced new school-level empirical knowledge about how mandated reforms are mediated by principals, senior and middle leaders and teachers in improved and effective schools. The results show that in these schools it is too simplistic to focus on policy as implementation and either a top down or bottom up process. Rather, enactments involved more complex sets of interactions between school leaders, the staff and the wider school community, a clear ethical stance and the exercise of autonomy; that they built upon and developed organisational capacity, and were layered into school identified improvement priorities.

Conducting a comparative analysis between schools in contrasting contexts helps to understand better the dynamics underpinning the effectiveness of government reforms in England and complements the system level insights provided by the MacKinsey Report (Mourshed, Chijioke and Barber, 2010).

Authors

• Qing Gu, University of Nottingham

• Christopher W. Day, University of Nottingham

• Paul Armstrong, University of Nottingham