Research on ‘global’ education policy and its relationship to national contexts developed in the period 2000 – 2009 (Grek 2009). This period saw an increasing convergence among processes and objectives within national education systems in Europe through mechanisms of soft law (e.g. ‘policy learning’) and consensual co-ordination.  Since 2008/9 ‘convergence’ has acquired a different emphasis, becoming a process subject to closer direction by supranational organisations (Traianou and Jones 2019).  However, contextualised research, a key principle of comparative education research, and an essential element in the analysis of new processes of education policy alignment, has not been developed to a point where this shift can be identified in its tensions and complexities.  This paper aims to contribute to this debate through the analysis of interviews with key policy actors involved in the making of the Greek national education policy in the period 2015-2019.  This paper is part of a larger project aimed at investigating the remaking of national education policy in a period of structural adjustment. Greece stands out as a case in which the logic of austerity has been taken to an extreme point.  By treating Greece as an ‘extreme exemplar’ (Yin 2013), the project aims to illuminate processes of policy change under conditions of ‘conditionality’ (Dunlop and Radaelli 2013) in the presence of powerful external actors. 

In this paper I take as my starting point the analysis and recommendations of 2018 OECD reviewers for compulsory and upper secondary education, treating them as a catalyst of debate, resistance and action among Greek policy actors.  OECD experts under the guidance of the European Commission led successive policy reviews (OECD 2011, 2018) which treated the economic crisis as an opportunity for the Greek government to accelerate the Europeanisation of a centralised education system still strongly marked by the characteristics it had acquired in the transition to democracy of the 1970s: a sector which provided secure employment, embodied aspirations towards equal opportunity and emblematised national identity (Traianou, 2009).  An earlier period of structural adjustment in Greece (2010-2015) generated a small number of qualitative studies involving interviews mostly with middle-ranking education administrators at different levels of compulsory education (Tsatsaroni, et al 2015).  Their findings suggested that, despite continuing resistance, a new school ethos has emerged which tends towards the acceptance of the norms of public management, with an attendant depoliticisation of educational questions, of a kind familiar to public management practice in the UK.  My project, exploring similar issues, turns attention onto top-ranking policy actors, involved in decision-making with systemic breadth and consequences.  It aims to treat the ‘policyscape’ (Ball 1991) as a field in which questions of both contestation and convergence are brought into play.

Research Questions:

1. What are the views of key policy actors about the ways in which aspects of the OECD/EU education policy influence the making of education policy in Greece?
2. What are the main tensions between these aspects of OECD/EU education policy and the state’s post-2008 history? 
3. What are their main forms of adaptation and resistance to supranational policy?

This is an empirical paper that will report the findings from analysis of eight narrative interviews with key policy actors involved in the making of the Greek national education policy. These will include policymakers from the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, and the Institute of Education Policy regional directors of education and trade union representatives. The interviews will focus on the actors’ views about the problems with the Greek education system, the kind of reform that may be needed, and on their views on the ways in which, under the influence of OECD/EU, national education policy may be changing education policy. Key policy documents will be identified and analysed in relation to the aspects of EU/OECD education policy incorporated. Analysis of debates found in the media (newspapers, blogs, websites) about the problems with the education system and the Reform agenda required to address these problems will also be presented in order to examine the main tensions and conflicts between the national and the global. This combination of methods will allow me to access narratives from different standpoints and stakeholders and provide the basis for the subsequent development of the theoretical argument of this project. Thematic analysis will be employed, informed by a broadly interpretivist framework. I will be particularly concerned to explore those areas of policy where the difference in perspective between supranational policy norms and national pathways seems especially sharp: around questions of equal opportunity in a period of austerity, school autonomy and governance and the role of the private sector.

Through the analysis of national experiences from Greece Ι will try to identify vectors of transformation that are at work in Europe as a whole – renaissance of nationalism and religious influence; mass movements of population; privatization and other aspects of neo-liberal paradigm; decentralization/centralization as a model of governance; emergence of new educational actors; changing role and status of educational workforce; adaptation to economic shock, austerity and labour market change. The findings will also help us to understand how the position that a state occupies within the European state system Europe affects its internal configuration: the subaltern status of Greece in relation to other European states has an effect on the strength and orientation of its governing class; the economic and social resources that it has at its disposal; its capacity to withstand or accommodate external pressures. The research findings aim to produce new theorisations about the mobility of education policy, understood as a process by which policies, administrative arrangements and institutions in one political system or among non-state actors are utilised in the development of similar features in another political system (Peck and Theodore 2010).

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