Newspapers provide public accounts of the practices in schools, as well as the actions of their students and teachers. This paper has global relevance as media organisations are transnational corporation in both their scope of practice and ownership. While there is enormous potential for newspapers to provide affirmative narratives of the good work undertaken in schools, it is often the negative,  critical, oppressive, and reductionist discourses that are circulated in the press (Baroutsis, 2015). These discourses include perceptions of schools in crisis (Cohen, 2010), where schools are ‘named, shamed, and blamed’ in the media (Elstad, 2009), in particular through the use of measurement data that ‘compares and ranks’ schools in terms of student results on high-stakes testing regimes (Mockler, 2013). These public accounts of schools portray public education systems, globally, as being damaged and in a state of crisis (Berliner & Biddle, 1995).

Theoretically, the paper is framed around the notion of accountability. It is theorised in terms of media understandings of ‘holding power to account’ that align with reportage about schools that focus on test-based, top-down, vertical accountability practices. It is argued that instead of holding governments to account, newspaper practices tend towards acts of surveillance that focus society’s gaze on schools’ performance. Newspapers operate within ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze, 1995) that use technologies of continual assessment and continual control. Within such societies, reportage is a type of examination of school performance that Foucault (1995) describes as, ‘A normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them’ (p. 184). Media practices of top-down modes of vertical accountability, with a gaze focused on schools, do not provide support for schools and contribute to a situation where teachers are identified as ‘the problem’ in education systems. That is, if the media were actually ‘holding power to account’, government practices would be scrutinised and schools would be supported through a media insistence that governments guarantee human and material resources to support schools; what Darling-Hammond (2010) refers to as ‘opportunity to learn standards’ as part of an intelligent and reciprocal accountability system (pp. 279-280).

Within this process, the global media are key actors in accountability policy enactment. Braun, Maguire, and Ball (2010) suggest that policies are not simply implemented, but ‘enacted’ as they are ‘interpreted and “translated” by diverse policy actors’ (p. 549). This paper argues that media reportage acts as interpretations of accountability policies, demonstrating that the media are part of the enactment process. The research questions focus on the role of the media as policy reinforcement agents rather than working toward policy construction or indeed contestation of policy, questioning the similarities and differences between metropolitan and regional newspapers.

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