The Twinning of Pupil’s Well-being and Academic Achievement in the Danish ‘Folkeskole’ Reform

Author(s):

Monica Carlsson(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

08. Research on Health Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

08 SES 01, Network Invited Talk: Research highlights from Denmark

Network 8 Opening Session

Time:

2017-08-22

13:15-14:45

Room:

K3.24

Chair:

Venka Simovska

Contribution

With the 2014 Danish ‘Folkeskole’ reform the aim of strengthening pupil’s well-being is being placed on the schools agenda, closely related to the aim of strengthening pupil’s academic achievement. Both aims are to be followed up through yearly measurements included in governance processes taking place between schools, municipalities and government. This paper is focusing on the twinning of pupil’s well-being and their academic achievement in the reform, and is especially concerned with the introduction of national comparative measurements of pupil’s well-being as a central element in policy and governance of schooling. Comparative measurements of pupil’s academic achievements have become a part of the global ‘standard’ governance toolbox within education, hereunder through a benchmarking of results on classroom-, school-, and municipality levels (Carlsson 2017). Policy studies of comparative measurements within education point out that these generally are linked to a performance discourse and to economical steering (Meyer and Benavot 2013; Schwipper and Lenkeit 2012).

Drawing on the notion of policy ideas as vehicular ideas, open to multiple interpretations, the purpose of the study is to explore the value premises and rationales underlying the formulations of the well-being aim and its measurement in the reform policy texts. The twinning of well-being and academic achievement seems to be formulated as a vehicular idea, i.e. in a rather vague and open-ended way, similar to other ideas in education policy. A vehicular idea can be taken up in different ways toward various means, its hermeneutic and contextual flexibility providing it with an ability to balance between different interests in policy (McLennan 2004). As research within critical policy scholarship in education suggests, it’s well worth its time to examine the relationships between vehicular ideas, neoliberalization and policy mobility. McKenzie, Bieler and McNeil 2015), for instance, suggest that with the vague and open-ended understanding of sustainability in education policy, there is a risk of a relative dominance of a neoliberal framing of sustainability.

Common manifestations of neoliberalism in policy include references to market-based competition, and a rescaling of political authority from an emphasis on the state to that of ‘global policy’, which e.g. is constituted through measures of comparative performance (Lingard 2011; Peck 2013). Neoliberal governance in education draws on management technologies such as monitoring, benchmarking, publication of national and international ranking lists, and school inspections systems (Carlsson in press), enforcing a focus on accountability that enables oversight at a distance and fosters a culture of performativity (Lingard 2011; McKenzie, Bieler and McNeil 2015). Drawing on Peck’s (2011) notion of policy mobility, i.e. of ‘fast-policy’ regimes characterized by the pragmatic borrowing of ‘policies that work’, the paper points at the mobility of the idea of national comparative measurements as a solution to educational problems: With the reform this idea has moved into the area of well-being in schools, where problems previously mainly has been construed as related to social inequalities and solutions mainly focused on inclusion strategies (Atkinson and Joyce 2011; Kahn and Juster 2002). As Priestly and Biesta (2013) points out in a study of policy, governance and curriculum in the Scottish school reform, conflicting value arise in the tension between the economic concerns and imperatives in neo-liberal governance strategies in education, and democratic concerns.

Method

The analysis is drawing on methodological inspiration from critical policy scholarship in education as well as interdisciplinary research on policy mobility (Bacchi 2009; Bergh and Englund 2014; McLennan 2004; McKenzie, Bieler and McNeil 2015; Peck 2011). Bacchi offers a problem-centered approach to policy analysis structured by questions such as ‘What’s the problem represented to be in a specific policy?’, and ‘What presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’?’ (Bacchi 2009: 48). Bergh and Englund (2014) compares value premises in school health promotion programs and in national education policy, demonstrating how differences in conceptualizations in health and education policy, can be understood as fundamental disagreements over ways of solving social problems. The twinning of aims and measurements of pupil’s well-being and academic achievement in education policy is analyzed as a vehicular idea, drawing on McLennan’s (2004) discussion of vehicular ideas as ways of ‘problem-solving and moving things on’, and the use of this notion in an analysis of the sustainability concept in Canadian post-secondary education policy (McKenzie, Bieler and McNeil’s 2015). The analysis is based on iterative steps of identifying, interpreting and reviewing formulations on the twinning of aims and measurements related to pupil’s well-being and academic achievement in policy documents. It focuses on premises and presuppositions underlying the twinning of pupil’s well-being and their academic achievement in the reform drawing on excerpts from two key policy documents that play a central role in the enactment of the policy (Danish Ministry of Education 2013; Danish Center for Teaching Environment 2016. The analysis focuses on excerpts from policy texts, on the actual purpose and language of the reform texts, but also broadly considers the policy context, i.e. “the politics involved in the production of policy” (Lingard and Ozga 2007). In order to situate the policy excerpts, the paper will first discuss conceptualizations of well-being in policy, and the place of measurements of well-being in governance, drawing on studies by Atkinson and Joyce (2011) and Kahn and Juster (2002). It will bring these trajectories of well-being, policy and governance together in an analysis of how problems and solutions related to the aim and measurements of pupil’s well-being are presented in the two policy documents described above, and in the key reports the policy texts refer to (Danish Clearinghouse for Educational Research 2014; Danish Ministry of Education 2016).

Expected Outcomes

The formulations of the well-being aim in the reform texts point towards broad aspects of education and schooling: Besides the core meaning of strengthening pupil’s physical and psychological well-being, the reform texts refer to strengthening pupil’s personal and academic competences, and support from the surroundings in school and at home (Danish Ministry of Education 2003; 2016a). Questions arise regarding how this open-ended understanding of well-being in education policy, based on very different components (aspects of well-being, competences and contextual factors influencing well-being) will function in educational governance. The linking of problems of disturbance in the teaching environment and school with non-well-being and poor academic achievement seems to have played a major part in the mobility of well-being into education policy (Danish Ministry of Education 2013). The twinning of well-being and academic achievement in the reform thus seems to be “a marriage of convenience” (Alfrey and Brown 2013), a pragmatic solution contributing to the broader purpose of schooling as promoting democracy, learning and well-being. However, the presuppositions behind the introduction of comparative measurements of pupil’s well-being and the linking of these to the measurements of academic achievement also point at a fundamentally different purpose of schooling linked to strong performance discourses and economical steering. The twinning of well-being and academic achievement measurements in the reform might be understood as a step towards the further neoliberalisation of education policy and governance, linking human development to economic development values. The paper closes with a discussion of the potential concerns and possibilities that arise in relation to this, hereunder whether measurements of pupil’s well-being might undermine the aspirations of strengthening pupil’s well-being, and with a discussion of the potential implications of the analysis for policymakers and practitioners concerned with pupils’ well-being.

References

Alfrey L & Brown TD (2013) Health literacy and the Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education: a marriage of convenience or a process of empowerment? Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, Volume 4(2): 159-173. Atkinson and Joyce (2011) The place and practices of well-being in local governance. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2011, volume 29, pages 133-148. Bacchi C (2009) Analysing policy: Whatʼs the problem represented to be? Frenchs Forest. Bergh A & Englund, T (2014) A changed language of education with new actors and solutions: the authorization of promotion and prevention programmes in Swedish schools. Journal of Curriculum Studies Volume 46, Issue 6: 778-797 Carlsson, M. (in press) The use of tests in evaluation within education. (Brugen af test i evaluering indenfor uddannelse), Educational science (Uddannelsesvidenskab). (red) Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard; Anders Kruse Ljungdalh; Oliver Alexander Tafdrup, Roskilde University Publisher. Danish Clearinghouse for Educational Research (2014) Research review. Teaching environment and well-being. Report to Danish Ministry of Education. Danish Ministry of Education (2013) Agreement on strengthening academic achievement in primary school. http://www.uvm.dk/Uddannelser/Folkeskolen/Folkeskolens-maal-love-og-regler/Politiske-oplaeg-og-aftaler Danish Ministry of Education (2016b) Recommendations from the expert group on well-being in schools, http://uvm.dk/Uddannelser/Folkeskolen/Laering-og-laeringsmiljoe/Trivsel-og-undervisningsmiljoe/Ekspertgruppen-om-elevernes-trivsel Danish Center for Teaching Environment (2016) The annual well-being measurement (Den årlige trivselmåling). http://dcum.dk/grundskole/love-regler-og-anvisninger/trivselsmaaling/den-aarlige-trivselsmaaling Lingard, B. (2011) Policy as numbers: ac/Counting for Educational Research. The Australian Educational Researcher 38:355-382. Kahn and Juster (2002) Well-being: Concepts and Measures. Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58, No. 4, 2002, pp. 627-644. Meyer, H-D. & Benavot, A. (eds.) (2013) PISA, Power and Policy. The emergence of global educational governance. Symposium books: UK McLennan, G. (2004) Travelling with vehicular ideas: The case of the third Way, Economy and Society, 33:4, 484-499, DOI: 10.1080/0308514042000285251 McKenzie M, Bieler A, McNeil R (2015) Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times. Environmental Education Research, vol. 221, no 3: 319-337. Peck, J. (2011) Geographies of policy: From transfer-diffusion to mobility mutation. Progress in Human Geography, 35(6) 773-797. Priestly, M., & Biesta, G. (eds.) Reinventing the curriculum: New Trends in Curriculum Policy and Practice. Bloomsbury Academic, London. Schwipper, K. & Lenkeit, J. (2012) Progress in reading literacy in national and international context. The impact of Pirls 2006 in 12 countries. Münster: Waxmann.

Author Information

Monica Carlsson (presenting / submitting)

Aarhus University

Danish School of Education

Copenhagen

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