Policy enactment

In this chapter, I discuss the processes of policy enactment ‘policy as text’ and ‘policy as discourse’, adding that it is also important to consider the affective policy ‘tone’. I identify some key characteristics of the current English educational context, and then move on to the research design, introducing the schools and the teachers and noting some limitations to the research (also indicated by the opening quotation).

I start by outlining my understanding of the relationship between policy and practice. Policy sociology is an approach to policy analysis that emphasises, first, the importance of context in order to understand the enactment of any policy and, second, that there is no simple straight line between what a policy text states and what happens on the ground (Ball, 1994; see also S. Taylor et al, 1997; Rizvi and Lingard, 2009), hence the term ‘enactment’ rather than ‘implementation’ (Ball et al, 2012). Enactment describes the processes by which those who operate at ground level, teachers and other state- employed officials – Lipsky's (1983) ‘street level bureaucrats’ – interpret and reinterpret policy, translating it to fit their own contexts. They do this in terms of both what they understand to be the needs of their students or clients and their understanding of what can mentally, physically and emotionally be achieved. However, this does not mean that the space for interpretation and translation is endless; rather, it is constrained by what seems to be possible to do and think – the limits of discourse. In their study of enactment, Ball et al remind us that ‘Policies [act] as discursive strategies; for example sets of texts, events, artefacts and practices that speak to wider social processes of schooling, such as the production of “the student”, the “purposes of schooling” and the construction of “the teacher” ‘ (2012: 16).