Session Information
23 SES 06 A, Fabricating Quality in Europe: Data and Education Governance (Part 2)
Symposium, continued from Session 23 SES 05 A
Time:
2009-09-29
10:30-12:00
Room:
HG, HS 28
Chair:
Ken Jones
Discussant:
Jane Kenway
Contribution
The landscape of Quality Assurance and Evaluation (QAE) practices across Europe has been changing rapidly and especially over the last decade. Some of the initiatives which have been introduced in its name have clearly been overtly intended to signal a changed approach towards the governance of schools; the introduction of system-wide programmes of national testing coupled with subsequent publication of results falls into this category. Others, such as promoting the enhanced use of parent/pupil satisfaction surveys or encouraging discussion of targets for pupil performance may be less obviously challenging to the prevailing order.
This paper explores the extent to which these various policy initiatives (some of which are in reality of relatively recent origin) can be picked up in teachers’ responses to the survey we conducted across the five countries involved in our research programme (Denmark, England, Finland, Scotland and Sweden). To what extent has QAE penetrated the different systems? Does the system described by teachers in each of the five countries correspond to the official discourse outlined above? And how far has a culture of ‘governance by QAE’ taken hold? To what extent do teachers in these countries see themselves as part of a common QAE-driven ‘European project’? And how far has the autonomy available to each country enabled it to maintain its own traditions and build its own distinctive approach? (Andersen and Petersen 2007) Whilst QAE practices have undoubtedly become more prominent in the lives of European teachers, however, the degree of convergence across systems has been a good deal more limited.
Method
Analysis of the survey of teachers in the 5 different counties in the study.
Expected Outcomes
There are contradictory –or at least complex-findings from our study. These follow from tensions that are being experienced by a workforce that has been subjected to redesign throughout the last decade, and longer, in some contexts. Decentralisation produces management activity on a greatly increased scale within the school. Pressure to ensure that all pupils are achieving their targets, and to record and account for progression increases time pressures and the sense of there never being time enough to complete all tasks or to give sufficient attention to them. As change produces a speeding up of work, it also, in its performative aspects, brings a fracturing of identities (Ball 2003).
References
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