The movement of people after refugee experiences is at record levels worldwide (UNHCR, 2017). This has resulted in education systems attempting to provide access to schooling that meets the needs of increasingly diverse cohorts of students. Policy responses to the education needs of refugee background students have varied internationally (Dryden-Peterson et al, 2019).  In this paper, we examine the development of education policy for refugee background students in Australia, a complex federalist polity with similar tensions between different levels of government evident in European federations like France and Germany.  We specifically sought to study the ways in which refugee education policy is developed, who does this work, what informs the development and why it was developed. In this paper we present research which suggests that policy development is affected by education system structures and the agency of individual policy developers situated within those structures.

We define ‘structure’ as the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit choices and opportunities, and ‘agency’ as the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices (Barker, 2003, p. 448). Structure and agency are mutually constitutive, with social actors’ or agents’ day-to-day activity both drawing upon and reproducing ‘structural features of wider social systems’ (Giddens, 1984, p 24). Agents are located within the social structures, networks and relationships that define them, whilst structures are constructed by individuals, their actions, thoughts and interactions.  These conceptualisations of structure and agency acknowledge the interconnected relationships between individuals, social environments and systems (Shilling, 1999).

Some policy analysts like Ball, et al. (2012) have disrupted the presumed linear and logical conception of policy development by exposing the complexity and ‘messiness’ of the process.  A number of studies have examined this messiness of policy development and enactment at the local level and found that school staff work within social and institutional structures, but act in ways that are influenced by personal motivation and localised collective practice (Ball et al 2011, Bridwell-Mitchell, 2015; Burch, 2007). We use the concepts of structure and agency to further explore this understanding of policy development, highlighting the ways in which policy making in highly segmented systems is contested and variously interpreted. We examine the how policy makers, or agents, develop policy as text (Ball, 1993). We acknowledge that agents work within institutional structures which influence processes of policy development (Baak et al 2020). Policy development may therefore be shaped by the structures of organizations and, in turn, by the agents who work within (or against) these structures. 

This paper reports a critical policy study undertaken as part of an Australian Research Council project examining the ways in which schools transcend and draw benefit from students’ refugee experiences by creating social and educational conditions that can enhance resilience. For the study reported here, we created a data-set which included policies that informed the education of students from refugee backgrounds from four sectors of education in two Australian states, South Australia and Queensland. Policy documents were collected through searches of online portals of the participating education sectors, in consultation with policy makers in these sectors. They included general policies such as areas as wellbeing and inclusion, and more specific policies for teaching students for whom English is an additional language. The collection of policy documents was not intended to be exhaustive, rather representative of the range of policies that each sector considered relevant and important to students from refugee backgrounds. Policy documents were analysed according to a set of questions drawn from Bacchi (2009), such as: - What is the purpose of the policy? - What is the problem represented to be? - Who are the intended recipients of the policy? The data-set also included transcripts of semi-structured interviews that were held with 12 senior policy developers employed in the four sectors. The interviews questioned participants about issues such as: the types of policies that are important for students from refugee backgrounds, the ways in which policy development is affected by broader structures and systems, and the personal agendas of individual policy developers within these contexts. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim before the iterative development of a thematic framework (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Coding of the data within the thematic framework was undertaken using Nvivo 12 software.

Policy developers do not develop policies in a social vacuum but are informed by broader political contexts and structural requirements. We have established that three types of structures shape the development of policy for refugee background students: (a) organisational structures; (b) performative structures; and (c) knowledge structures. Organisational units or structures within departments in the four sectors were separated into particular priorities such as student wellbeing and literacy. These structures operated to limit the types of policies that were developed. These limitations provided a positive focus for targeted policies, but also reduced opportunities for cross-disciplinary policy making that could address the needs of students from refugee backgrounds. Performative structures affected the ways in which policies were prioritised. The accountability frameworks in place in schools returned certain kinds of data to policy makers at the executive level. These data skew perceptions of what was relevant to practitioners and students as well as reinforcing taken-for-granted understandings of the way things should be done. A key example of this was in the assessment of refugee students’ language and literacy progress and its links to funding which resulted in a limited focus on language proficiency. Knowledge structures, or ways of knowing refugee students framed students within deficit understandings. A key example of these structures related to wellbeing and language, with a focus on trauma and English language deficiencies. This study showed that policy developers were frequently individuals whose work was shaped by personal aspirations and experiences. The agency of individual policy makers was shaped by the structures in which they work, however, they also displayed individual agency which enabled the development of policies that fostered an assets-based understanding of the refugee experience. We conclude that the interplay between the expansive and limiting aspects of both structure and agency is pivotal to policy development.

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