From Generic Skills to Behaviour Monitoring: Exploring Materializations of the Key Skills Framework in Public-Private Relationships

• In Event: "Rethinking Competency-Based Learning, Accountability, and Equity"

Proposal

Introduction
In 2015, the Key Skills Framework (KSF) was introduced as part of a curriculum reform in Irish secondary education and represents a shift towards skills-based learning. Changes to assessment and the overall reform have been heavily contested with various negotiations between teacher unions and governmental actors (MacPhail et al., 2018), but local negotiations and responses to the KSF has received less attention.

Irish schools present a special case because of their long-standing relationships with the Catholic Church, whereas the majority of post-primary schools still remain under a religious order. This suggests the Irish school system is ‘not strictly public, nor strictly private, but a hybrid’ (Rougier and Honohan, 2015, p.73). However, in later years, there has been new ways of privatizing Irish education, mirroring international waves of privatization in the education sector (Skerritt and Salokangas, 2020; Verger et al., 2017). This raises new questions about how Irish schools interact with (new) governing actors while negotiating national curriculum reforms and has important contributions to the field of comparative and international education by interrogating questions of how international trends such as generic kills materialize in particular public-private relationships.

Purpose
The main aim is to explore how responses to the KSF are materialized in two Irish schools. In previous research, there has been an emphasis on contextual, organizational and individual factors in studying the enactment of generic skills frameworks (González-Pérez & Ramírez-Montoya, 2022; Tan, 2017; Ward & Parr, 2011). The approach I take in this article works in a different way as I understand education and its policies as processes of constant micro-negotiations that are defined by their particular unfolding in practice.

Analytical Framework
Previous literatures in educational policy research have worked with a priori of what generic skills mean, and as such contribute to establish these types of frameworks as taken-for-granted objects. This is the case for ‘what-works’ research (i.e. Tomei, 2013) as well as research applying critical approaches (i.e. Braun, Maguire & Ball, 2010). I draw from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), an approach that works without a set priori, to show how policy texts are more than discursive processes that can affect their own content as well as their materializations in practice (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2020).

I use two ANT sensitivities as analytical entry points to the data: ‘spaces of prescription’ and ‘spaces of negotiation’ (Murdoch, 1998). Spaces of prescription are tightly connected spaces with clear boundaries, and I used this sensitivity to interrogate how the KSF gathers allies and stabilize its main ambitions. Spaces of negotiation are created through connections between actors that are provisional, meaning enactments are frequently changing. This sensitivity was used to study the fluid negotiations and compromises in the schools. A key concern in the analysis has been to show how these spaces co-exist, rather than how they stand in opposition to each other.

Methods and data
The data in this paper draws from two different schools: one Voluntary Secondary School (‘West School’) that is owned and managed by the Catholic Church, and one Educate Together School (‘East School’) that is not affiliated with any religion and run by Education and Training Boards. The two schools were chosen based on their different governing structures to invoke further examples and interrogate their role in the responses to the KSF.

The data consists of individual and group interviews with principals and middle management within the two schools. To uphold ANT methodologically, I employed specific ‘tricks’ and designed the interviews as ‘hearings’ (Decuypere and Simons, 2014). Such interviews do not focus on perceptions, but rather the interactions that take place in an activity. Digital and physical presentations of the KSF that were observable actors in the interviews were included in the dataset. Screenshots of these were later coupled with the interviews transcripts and included in the coding scheme.

Research Findings
In East School, spaces of prescription were characterized by a digital learning management system (LMS) offered by an Irish tech-company. The system offered to give points on each skill, and was frequently used to award positive and negative behaviour. In West School, spaces of prescription connected to local traditions of school houses and physical tokens. Some key skills were represented within a code of conduct developed by the Board of Management in the school, and points were also given by using the physical tokens.

Spaces of negotiation included a customized space in East School, where teachers and leaders added their own categories in the LMS that they believed better represented the KSF (i.e. resilience and growth mindset). This challenged the KSF, and the companies’ interpretation of the KSF. In West School, spaces of negotiation were clear in overall negotiations with the reform. These informants reported a wish to not engage with the KSF because of defiance in the overall reform changes.

Conclusion
It might seem like the schools show two different responses to the KSF; one of acceptance (East School) and one of resistance (West School). However, these materializations are similar as both connect to traditions of behaviour monitoring and disciplinary routines in the Irish school system. The spaces were framed by two main actors: one private company in one publicly run school, and by school professionals in one privately/Catholic owned school. This raises important questions of how private companies gain power in practice (by offering solutions to immediate concerns in schools, here; assessment and assessing the key skills), and the level of transparency of the involvement of private companies in comparison to other private actors like the Catholic Church. While the code of conduct has clear connections to religious values, the digital platform does not tell the same story although it is also imbued with similar connotations. These findings suggest new insights into how international trends move and are negotiated between public-private relationships. Future research may study the relationship between private companies and religious orders, to conceptualize how education policy is negotiated between private actors themselves.

Author

• Ida Lunde, University of Oslo, Norway