This paper explores the salient role of middle leaders in bringing a policy such as school self-evaluation to life in schools. It brings a sociological perspective to policy, evaluation, and leadership matters to provide new ways of thinking about, understanding, and explaining how school self-evaluation is enacted in schools. In doing this, it also provides much needed empirical data to bolster a creative and contemporary typology from policy enactment theory (Ball et al. 2012) only now entering its second decade, and makes a strong contribution to the school leadership literature which tends to focus on principals (O’Brien and Murphy 2016; Gumus et al. 2018; Edwards-Groves et al. 2019; Grootenboer and Larkin 2019; Shaked and Schechter 2019; Leithwood et al. in Harris 2020).

Utilising the typology of policy actors and positions put forward by Ball et al. (2012), we have recently shown how school self-evaluation, a mandatory national policy in Ireland, is performed in various ways by various people in Irish post-primary schools: narrators, entrepreneurs, outsiders, transactors, enthusiasts, translators, critics, and receivers (Skerritt et al.2021). Here, we follow the developing trend of scholars focusing on single aspects of the typology, such as narrators (Maguire and Braun 2019), translators (Perryman et al. 2017), and critics (Golding 2017; Maguire et al. 2018), and home in on one specific policy position. We direct our attention here to the influential ‘translators’ leading school self-evaluations in Irish schools, and policy enactments more broadly, picking up and elaborating on a specific policy position deserving of further attention:

The role of translators in particular is not to be underestimated, and principals in particular emphasised the importance of staff members doing what would be called ‘translation’ work (Skerritt et al. 2021, 15).

Translators are the ‘policy activists’ in schools (Ball et al. 2012). They ‘plan and produce the events, processes and institutional texts of policy for others’ and induct them into its ‘discursive patterns’ (Ball et al. 2012), and thus are, as we will show, the key actors in bringing school self-evaluation to life in Irish schools. While sometimes principals, the translators we refer to here are predominantly teachers assigned posts of responsibility i.e. they are post-holders and members of middle leadership and management in their respective schools.

The data presented and discussed here will not only be of interest and of use to researchers and policymakers concerned with policy, evaluation, and leadership but to practising teachers and school leaders attempting to make sense of their own policy, evaluation, and leadership experiences at the coalface.

In this paper we draw on interviews with six middle leaders, six senior leaders, and one retired school inspector to specifically focus on what appears to be the key actor bringing school self-evaluation to life in Irish schools: the translator. The 12 senior and middle leaders came from 12 different primary schools of varying sizes (i.e. small, medium and large) and had all previously completed a voluntary questionnaire for one of the researchers where they indicated their willingness to be interviewed. These participants were then specifically invited to partake on the basis that a range of school sizes were represented. As part of the purposive sampling strategy, a retired school inspector was also invited to participate in the interviews. Having three different groups included in the interviews serves ‘as a form of triangulation’ (Edwards-Groves et al. 2019). The 13 participants were all interviewed individually, either in person or by telephone, and with their permission an audio recording was made of each interview and transcribed afterwards. Interviews were generally between 30 minutes and one hour in duration and were of a semi-structured nature.

This qualitative data highlight how it is often middle leaders doing high-profile policy work in schools, turning ideas into actions and bringing policy to life. As policy translators they are the ‘policy activists’ in schools (Ball et al. 2012). They ‘plan and produce the events, processes and institutional texts of policy for others’ and induct them into its ‘discursive patterns’ (Ball et al. 2012). They organise, manage, lead, plan, produce, inspire, persuade, and appease, and in doing so they translate policy into practice and make it a collective effort. At the same time, however, they are often overloaded and inundated.

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