There is a plethora of laws and plans that contemplate the incorporation of a gender perspective in education in Catalonia, along the same line with what is happening in the national and the international context, as the introduction of gender perspectives in education has become central in the global education policy field (Jacquot, 2015). However, little is known about what actors in secondary schools –namely teachers, principals, and students– do regarding a gender perspective in education, as the enactment of policies is always subject to individual interpretation as well as to complex social interactions between the respective actors involved (Ball et al., 2012). This article seeks to analyse how the policy mandates in this regard are interpreted and translated in Catalan secondary schools. Drawing on 15 focus groups with representatives of teachers, students, management teams and families (N=103) from 12 secondary schools in the region, the paper explores the multifaceted or even contradictory processes that occur during the ‘implementation’ of policies, considering the specificities of each context and the social interactions that take place.

Using the analytical framework by Braun et al. (2011), the results show how the material, the situated, the external, and particularly, the professional context, shape the enactment of gender policies in Catalan education. To explore what happens in secondary schools regarding gender, it is key to look at the ways in which secondary-school actors re-signify the policy orientations considering their agency in context.  In this regard, the article introduces an analytical view that situates teachers and school leaders as agents who, mediated by their habitus (Musofer & Lingard, 2020), are immersed in a continuous process of interpretation, appropriation and negotiation of educational policies in their specific contexts. Therefore, the article highlights the importance of the professional context as many instances in this study show the extent to which introducing gender in the curriculum is up to the individual teachers. The fact that the efforts to include gender perspectives in schools is due to the school level actor's informed decision to do so, rather than a result of the official curriculum, has consequences such as the feelings of loneliness and misalignment with the school strategy. The analysis on the material context allowed for a more specific understanding on not only how secondary school actors interpret the content taught in classrooms, but also how their enactment spills over into the ways the classroom and school space is interpreted from a gender perspective. The sense of urgency amongst secondary schools to create gender commissions or groups following the recommendations by the Catalan Department of Education appears as the main influential external context. However, this external pressure is controversial as there is still no legal requirement by the Department about the existence of such commissions and their functions and responsibilities. In relation to the situated contexts, an urban-rural divide was identified, as well as the importance of a sustainable coordination with and support from the local administration as a driver to develop gender-sensitive practices. Alongside the text, the article discusses the ways and under which conditions there is also policymaking processes within the schools.

Finally, the results proof true the assumption of this paper regarding the importance of taking context seriously when implementing gender-sensitive policies. This is to say, having analysed the contextual factors and mechanisms intervening in the enactment of gender-sensitive education, it is evident that among the multiple roles of school actors (principals, teachers, students, families, and others) there is the role of policymaking. Thus, far from a top-down approach, this article evinces that gender-sensitive policies are also made at the bottom level of the education system: the schools.

This research involved the participation of 12 public secondary schools in Catalonia, the selection of which followed three main criteria: (i) the secondary schools undertook specific initiatives and experiences regarding gender; (ii) they were territorially distributed throughout the four Catalan provinces (Barcelona, ​​Lleida, Girona, and Tarragona); and (iii) they were public. In October 2020, we published an open call for participation for the secondary schools in Catalonia. This led to response from 28 secondary schools, of which 13 were first selected following the previous criteria. This means that the participating schools had experience in enacting gender-sensitive initiatives and were actively involved in the topic. Finally, one school withdrew from the project due to the pandemic situation, thus leading to the final participation of 12 secondary schools, with 6 in the province of Barcelona, 2 in Girona, 3 in Lleida and 1 in Tarragona. The research followed a qualitative approach framed within the ‘feminist-activist’ research perspective (Knight, 2000; Biglia, 2007), which is based on feminist epistemologies and situated inference research. Specifically, we drew on 15 focus groups as our main method, for they are a group technique of interactive and social nature that is oriented towards participants’ joint reflexivity (Wilkinson, 1995). The research design consisted of two complementary phases. In the first phase, with a total of 103 participants, we conducted a focus group within each secondary school (N=12) to explore the gender-sensitive initiatives and the actors’ experiences and conceptions, with the joint participation of teachers (n=47), students (43), principals (6), and families (7). Specifically, questions related to which initiatives secondary schools undertook at the classroom and school levels, the methodologies used, the organisational aspects involved, the spaces where they occurred, and the actors’ approaches. Notably, the participation of secondary school actors beyond teachers provided us with more nuanced and complex data regarding the processes of policy enactment. The second phase, in which teachers shared their initiatives and the contextual aspects that shaped them (i.e., obstacles and drivers), consisted of between-schools focus groups (N=3). In each of these three focus groups, eight teachers coming from four of the twelve schools participated. All meetings were recorded with the consent of the participants and later transcribed to facilitate collaborative coding and analysis by the research team using specific qualitative data-analysis software. The analytical categories used corresponded to those proposed by Braun et al. (2011) –i.e., professional, material, external and situated contexts–, which structure the results section below.

Far from a top-down notion of policy implementation, the research stresses the importance of looking at school actors, as well as their processes of interpretation and translation of policy mandates, to understand the complexities of the enactment of gender policies in education. Drawing on the four analytical dimensions of context proposed by Braun et al. (2011), our results emphasise the influence of the material and, to a lesser extent, the situated and the external context of each secondary school on the enactment of gender policy mandates. However, the research evinces that it is precisely the professional context which becomes the main factor for explaining the diversity in school practices. The ways gender policy mandates are enacted by school actors are closely linked to the values, knowledge, and teaching experiences of the school staff. The fact that gender policies in Catalonia lack clear and specific guidelines implies a wide divergence of actions in secondary schools. Therefore, the implementation of the ‘coeducation principle’ is mainly left to teachers’ motivations and initiatives, meaning that there is a devolution of responsibility to the school-level actors in providing gender-sensitive education. All in all, a more operationalized and concrete legal framework on gender education might be necessary to ensure the first steps for the effective fulfilment of equity in education. Despite the need for more straightforward forms of governing gender education policies, the role of school level enactors renders crucial, as their agency and capacity to re-interpret gender-sensitive mandates has shown to be particularly relevant. Therefore, not only laws, policies, action plans and the curriculum ought to incorporate a comprehensive gender perspective, but also all the actors involved in the education community. In this regard, teacher training on gender awareness, both in professional development and in-service training, gain especial relevance as they have the potential to foster the bottom-up transformative school initiatives.

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