The paper explores the courses of educational policy contestation (schooling and higher education) in England and Italy since the turn of the century. It analyses the different national experiences of educational reform, and in the process theorises issues of policy-making and policy contestation. The questions around which it is organised are · Why is educational reform more strongly contested in Italy than in England? · What is the relationship, in each case, of global policy repertoires to national-level policy elaboration and contestation? · How might a focus on policy contestation help us understand recent changes in the ‘educational state’, both in Italy and England, and also more generally? The theoretical resources on which the paper draws are in the first instance Gramscian: the concept of ‘passive revolution’ is used to explore the programme of the post-1997 Labour government in England, and the changes to forms of state control that it has accomplished. (The paper here enters into dialogue with the interpretation of these changes offered by Ball (2008) in The Education Debate.) Two further kinds of work are utilised: · The state theory of Nicos Poulantzas, with its insights that ‘the state is a social relation’; that the state’s effectiveness is always shaped by capacities and forces that lie beyond it; and that the state is often in contestation with such forces. More specifically, the paper elaborates and revises Poulantzas’ claim that the late C20 saw the rise of a new state form, ‘authoritarian statism’, characterised inter alia by intensified control over every sphere of socio-economic life. The development of Poulantzas’ ideas by Jessop (2002, 2008) will also be a point of reference. · The international relations theory of van der Pijl (2006), that seeks to understand political contestation at the national level in terms of relations between the national state - understood as a condensation of historical experience and conflict - and a hierarchical global order, steered by agencies that seek to promote ‘economised’ versions of social and educational policy. Relevant here is van der Pijl’s contention that ‘the ability of different societies to submit to capitalist discipline varies, and the very pressure to do so tends paradoxically to reactivate the specific heritage of each separate society in new combinations’ (2006: 36). It is from these perspectives that the paper compares the ‘Blair’ and the ‘Berlusconi’ models of policy change and ‘modernisation’.

In relation to England, the paper makes use of the author’s previously published work– e.g. Jones (2003), Jones et al (2007) – which analyses both discourses of reform and reform’s impact on the social relations of education in areas of governance and the organisation of teaching and learning. In relation to Italy, the paper focuses on the protest movement of 2008. Its sources include: newspaper accounts (Il Manifesto, La Repubblica, L’Unità, Aprileonline); government statements; statements and analyses produced by different elements of the protest movement, and by critics of both government and movement; contextual material – e.g. that of the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO). These sources are read with a view to analysing issues of strategy and objectives, ideological lineage and commitment, stance towards national and global reform agenda.

Substantively, that the Labour government in England developed an effective programme of ‘modernisation’, one of whose preconditions was the prior decline, under Thatcherism, of teacher capacity to influence the organisation of teaching and learning. Italian educational reform, by contrast, has not succeeded in a remaking of the educational state in such a way as to subordinate contending social actors. In terms of the implications for research: that policy change needs to be understood in terms of contestation, as well as the development of state capacity; that there is need for an account of the relationship between change at the national level and global influences that pays systematic and concrete attention to the strategies and impact of a range of educational protagonists.