This paper is reporting on first findings from an ongoing UK ESRC(Economic and Social Research Council)-funded research project ‘Policy enactments in the secondary school’. The study aims to provide a grounded account of the relations between policy and practice and a practical understanding of the challenges faced by teachers in a period of policy ‘hyperactivity’ (Dunleavy,1987). This is being undertaken through an exploration of the ways in which particular policies are ‘enacted’ in four case study secondary schools. The research is exploring (1) the localised nature of policy; the ‘secondary adjustments’ which inflect and mediate policy (Spillane, 2004) (2) the impact of many policies simultaneously in circulation (Power, 1992) (3) the interpretational work of policy-actors (Ozga, 2000) and (4) the role of resource differences in shaping responses to policy. Our aim is to generate a theoretically informed analysis of policy enactment. Over the last two decades policy making has become an ‘epidemic’ of global proportions, not just in Britain, but across Europe and beyond (Levin, 1998). Education policy making has been appropriated by the central state in its determination to control, manage and transform society and, in particular, reform and ‘modernise’ education provision and ‘raise standards’. Increasingly, the role of the individual school is being subordinated to and by national policy imperatives (Fielding, 2001; Fullan, 2003). What is being demanded of schools and their role in national economic competitiveness and cultural cohesion is encoded in a litany of policy statements, documents and legislation; in short, a form of ‘initiativitis’ inscribed in a series of ‘fast policies’ designed to raise standards and reform schools (Moss, 2007). In consequence, schools and teachers are expected to be familiar with, and able to implement, multiple (and sometimes contradictory) policies that are planned for them by others and they are held accountable for this task. However, individual policies and policy makers do not normally take account of the complexity of policy enactment environments and the need for schools to simultaneously respond to multiple policy (and other) demands and expectations.

In this paper we undertake an audit of the ranges of policies that are in play in our four case study schools, drawing on written materials collected from the schools and qualitative interviews conducted with various members of the school leadership teams. We want to start to explore some of the reasons why some policies are taken up, or are worked with for short periods and then just abandoned. This exploration is framed by a recognition that policies are not always clear or consistent and are sometimes ‘rewritten’ or ‘retro-fitted’ as government objectives change (Spillane, 2004; Maguire, 2007). In schools, policies may be taken up and gradually allowed to wither on the vine as schools make careful, and sometimes painful, decisions about where their policy priorities lie (Maguire, 2007).

The aim of this paper is to start to examine the ways in which schools generate their own policies that elaborate on, and embed, aspects of national policy-making into their own cultures and working practices. For example, the ways in which schools take up and produce their own discipline measures – drawing on aspects of their culture/ethos, as well as on situated necessities – illustrate the capacity for school-based policy elaboration. Eventually, the project aims to formulate a theory of policy enactment based on the premises that ‘Policies do not normally tell you what to do, they create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed, or particular goals or outcomes are set’ (Ball, 1994: 19) and that putting policies into practice is a creative, sophisticated and complex process.