Covid 19 disrupted education provision globally, highlighting and deepening inequalities. It prompted public demands for education recovery planning to go beyond a return to ‘normal’ in thinking about the future shape of provision, including recognition of the impact of poverty and poor mental health on educational attainment. Tensions between policy initiatives to address these challenges and developments that focus on a rapid return to ‘normal’ are evident in the publications of organisations such as the OECD and the European Commission. These global policy tensions are also evident, in contrasting ways, in each of the UK’s four systems. This paper explores these tensions through an analysis of key education recovery planning documents from each national administration and considers the extent to which the different national systems are adopting or adapting global and European templates for recovery.

The paper focuses on the following research questions:
(i) What are the key priorities in recovery planning in each UK administration?
(ii) What knowledge sources do they draw on?
(iii) Are these nationally embedded or transnational sources?

The objectives of the paper are to (a) compare and contrast recovery policy across the UK (b) illuminate the role of party politics in explaining difference (c) analyse the role of knowledge and expertise in recovery planning (d) contribute to analysis of the governing-knowledge relationship in education.

Differences in party political control across the UK are an important factor in explaining policy differences between Westminster and the rest of the UK (rUK). It is against that backdrop that we examine the policies for education recovery put forward by the four administrations: the UK (Conservative-majority) government, the Scottish Government (SNP-Green party in a co-operation agreement) the Welsh Government (Labour minority government) and the Northern Ireland Executive (currently suspended).

Theoretically we build on our previous work on the importance of governing narratives to explain differences in the construction of education as a policy field across the UK. We also draw on recent research on the management of the examinations crisis in the UK in 2020 when long-term school closures disrupted examinations across all four UK nations. That research identified differences between the UK government’s policy rhetoric in England and the policy discourse in the rest of the UK (rUK), showing how in rUK, education was presented to the public as an important societal resource. That research also highlighted the reliance of policy makers in England on consultants, think tanks and government agencies as sources of expertise, and the exclusion of academic expertise. Preliminary analysis of the key policy texts on education recovery across the four nations suggests that these differences are reflected in the current construction of recovery policy.

We pay particular attention to the differences in the sources of knowledge and expertise that are referenced and mobilised in these policy contexts. The emphasis on politics as central to understanding the workings of the knowledge-policy relationship in education recovery indicates our broadly interpretivist theoretical approach, in that we understand policy as enmeshed in politics, as made and (re) made in processes of enactment as contingent and mobile. Knowledge, in this perspective, is characterised by internal struggles that always return to politics and is shaped through the historical contingency of processes at work in its production, so that knowledge is understood as produced, accepted and contested in specific contexts. Expertise is relational, mediating between knowledge production and application, welding scientific and social capabilities.

We will select key policy texts from the four administrations, for example the Covid 19 Education Recovery Group (Scotland), DfE publications on Education Recovery, the Independent Panel Review of Education in Northern Ireland, the Renew and Reform plan in Wales. We will also carry out text analysis of selected, relevant speeches by key policy actors across UK. We adopt a political discourse analysis (PDA) approach to the scrutiny of these texts, drawing on Ruth Wodak’s analysis of legitimation strategies to identify what she suggests are the main elements in constructing a rationale for policy, that is through appeals to experts, to statistics, to historically embedded assumptions and to socially salient values and norms. This provides the ‘framing’ of a problem or issue, enabling its acceptance by the public. We will search the selected texts for instances of those key concepts, using Nvivo. An interpretative approach is then adopted to constructing narratives of the meaning-making about recovery contained in the key, connected words that exemplify legitimation strategies in the policy texts. We will draw out reliable inferences about the political context and its influence on the selection of the knowledge sources of recovery planning and on how they are constructed and presented, thus locating the discursive event in a wider frame of social and political relations, processes and circumstances. In analysing the texts, we ask what knowledge resources are identified and seen as useful, where they originate, explore how they are mobilised, and examine the extent to which politicians select from them, emphasise some rather then others-in order to try to navigate competing values and interests. By contrasting the approaches across the four nations, we also elucidate silences and gaps in each policy-process.

At this stage in the research, we can only indicate some possible conclusions based on a preliminary analysis of some key texts, and on our previous research. We anticipate considerable difference in the narratives being constructed around recovery across the UK, as a consequence of differing party politics, where difference is heightened by a cost-of-living crisis and constitutional tensions between Westminster and the rUK, following Brexit. In line with our earlier research, preliminary analysis indicates a stronger foregrounding of economic concerns in the English policy context, with recovery based on policies to ‘catch up’ that focus on additional, targeted funding to close the attainment gap. We anticipate that closing the attainment gap is expressed as a priority across the four administrations but predict that it will be inflected differently in rUK as part of a broader approach to recovery that prioritises cross-agency working and community-based initiatives. We anticipate conclusions that highlight the importance of partnership and community-based recovery planning as important elements of the policy discourse in rUK, along with the involvement of academic experts, including international advisers. In contrast, we anticipate that UK (English) education recovery planning will stress the role of business, enterprise and commercial consultancy in both the design and delivery of policy.

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