Objectives and Research Questions

This paper reports the findings from a large research study that investigated how schools enact behaviour policies in a humane and educative way. The study investigated policies and practices that were markedly different from the dominant punitive, ‘law and order’ view of managing student behaviour.

This research was guided by the following questions:

• How do schools interpret, reconcile and make decisions about what student behaviour research, legislation and advice to consider when developing local student behaviour policies?
• What micropolitical skills and understandings do they employ to do this work?

Theoretical framework

Policy enactment

The study draws on policy enactment literature to help understand the complex work schools do to interpret, translate and enact behaviour related policies (Ball, et al., 2012). Policy work done in schools is complex and messy. Drawing on the recent work of Ball, Maguire and Braun (2012), we understand policy as a composite of directives, legal requirements, procedures and local practices. Schools receive policies and then ‘do policy work’, that is, they construct, translate, interpret and enact policies (Ball, Hoskins, Maguire, & Braun, 2011). ‘Policy is always contested and changing (unstable) – always ‘becoming’’ (Ball et al. 2012, p. 119). Every school is a unique context with ‘actors’ who assume various roles in doing this policy work. Ball et al. (2012) found that various contextual dimensions influence the enactment of policy. Additionally, they found that, in doing this policy work, not all actors assume equal roles. Some actors are positioned to take more responsibility for leadership and others avoid it. The descriptions of various policy actors and the work they tend to do are useful to understand the complexity of policy work in schools. School principals and other leaders are in positions of authority and can be ‘instrumental policy interpreters, translators and enactors’ (Sullivan & Morrison, 2014, p. 616). With this authority and power, school leaders can adopt various roles whilst ‘doing the policy work’.

Policies can complement and/or contradict each other. When doing policy work, schools have to interpret, translate and enact the plethora of policies they are expected to address. ‘The policy texts that schools produce and the enactments generated are complex, but sometimes ‘untidy’ co-constructions – sophisticated, ramshackle and flawed’ (Ball et al. 2012, p. 119). Furthermore, this work is complicated by the fact that there are numerous actors both within and outside the school. How schools and actors make sense of policy is influenced by the ways in which they understand what is meant by behaviour and discipline. The challenge for schools is to interpret, translate and enact the abundance of policies so that they complement rather than contradict each other.

The micropolitical perspective

The enactment of policy in schools is complex work that involves a ‘rich ‘underlife’ and micropolitics … [which] means that policies will be differently interpreted (or ‘read’) and differently translated and worked into and against current practices, sometimes simultaneously’ (Maguire, Ball, & Braun, 2010, p. 157). A focus on micropolitics acknowledges that schools are intrinsically political organisations in which teachers and school leaders use both formal and informal power to achieve their goals (Vanderlinde & Kelchtermans, 2013).

In this study we drew on insights from studies of the micropolitics of schools (Ball, 1987; Blase, 1991; Johnson, 2004) to help unravel the complex processes schools use to develop student behaviour policies and practices in a social and political climate characterised by greater ‘outside’ interest in student behaviour.

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