Across the world, policymakers are now convinced that, if schools are to provide the educational foundations for citizens, workers and family members for the twenty first century, then the old modes of schooling need to be reformed. Scenarios of educational futures (OECD, 2004, 2006) depict increased instability in education systems and societies but highlight the need for responsive schools, teachers and leaders. This international symposium reports three research projects in Europe ( England, Italy and Poland) and one in Australia, all of which are concerned with better understanding the ways in which variously neoliberal oriented school reform policies are taken up in schools. The symposium has both a methodological and a policy sociology intent: it aims to show how globalised policy trends (see Henry, Lingard, Rizvi, & Taylor, 2001; Novoa & Lawn, 2002) are ‘vernacularised’ as they are imbricated in local traditions, events, issues, narratives and social relations (Appadurai, 1996). But, rather than begin with extensive discussions of globalised policies, and in order to highlight the diffuse but commonly patterned institutional ‘grammars’ of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) across our sites, we foreground the ongoing everyday institutional life which policy frames and permeates. We obviate some of the difficulties of reporting our data as case studies, easily amenable to homogenising cross case analyses, by drawing on Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s methodological work on portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1984; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Through six school portraits from our four countries the symposium illustrates the complexity of school reform in contemporary times. It explores how individual schools and their respective systems struggle with competing policy agendas, different institutional legacies, socio-geographical situatedness, and student diversity to deal with school reform on the ground. The focus in this symposium is as much on how schools succeed as much as how they fail, which has been a focus of much work on ‘disadvantaged’ schools and educational policy. Whilst we are aware that in crafting the portraits of schools we create as well as resolve certain methodological problems (English, 2000) our decision to work on the data in this way stems from the same impetus as Lawrence-Lightfoot: a desire to represent complex and dynamic school environments in ways that are accessible and debateable by a broad readership and in ways that recognise shifts towards interdisciplinary inquiry and changes in the relationship between researchers and their ‘subjects’.

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s school portraits offer vivid descriptions that, she claims, provide material ‘to work with’ in ways that distantiating policy and scholarly abstractions often do not. She argues that portraits are not the same as rich descriptions produced by ethnographers since they operate in a limited time frame, be impressionistic, holistic and ‘capture the likeness’. Combining the outsider’s distance with the insider’s immediacy, portraits require deep engagement with the school, the big themes, key events and important people, as well as the texture of everyday life. Our portraits mobilise qualitative data, all but one using observation, interviews and document analysis. Hall, Jones and Thomson’s portraits are drawn from a two year, Arts Council England funded national study of the Creative Partnerships programme, Blackmore and Hayes from an Australian Research Council project on school redesign. Saldownik's portrait is drawn from a larger participant ethnography doctoral study and Barzano’s extends qualitative doctoral research.

Our intention is twofold : (1) to explore the possibilities of and stimulate debate about the portrait method in policy research across multiple contexts and (2) to probe the nature of policy vernacularisation across multiple contexts through a focus on the everyday realities of school reform. We intend to allow significant time for discussion about the portraiture method and the substantive content.