This paper is part of a mixed methods research project on the factors in and out of schools that shape young people’s expression on race and faith equality issues. Focusing here on policy discourse, the paper presents an analysis of two key questions: (1) how liberal political concepts including those of freedom of expression may be mobilised in education policy to facilitate wider right-wing political goals, and (2) how education policy in this context shapes young people’s ‘free’ public political expression - in particular on race and faith equality issues - at school. The international significance of this paper lies in its analysis of how education policy discourse is aligned with the revival of freedom of expression as a topic of right-wing political concern across the global north. This revival, it has been argued, seeks to undermine fragile race and faith equality progress through the translation of narrow ‘free speech’ and ‘cancel culture’ claims into policy and political discourse (Mondon and Winter 2020; Titley 2020).

Our focus is on education policy and politics in contemporary English education, where government figures have defined the anti-racist organising of movements such as Black Lives Matter as ‘cancelling’ freedom of expression in higher education, and as creating risks for impartiality on the teaching of equality in schools (Trilling 2020). Political figures in the US, France and Australia have made similar claims (Goldberg 2021), advancing an “antagonistic vision” of “who constitutes the public and what values should guide public discourse” (Titley 2020: 3). However, education policy texts are typically more politically measured, and freedom of expression is a far more complex phenomenon than binary notions of ‘free speech’ and ‘cancellation’ put forward in such political discourse allows. For example, in the context of curriculum-making, mundane processes of foreclosing what is not/cannot be taught, processes of editing, and the pursuit of efficiencies and profit all play a role in shaping what can be thought, said and felt in education contexts (Mondal 2018).

The paper analyses 80 education policy texts in the English and UK policy context with a view to unearthing not just how freedom of expression is directly defined in such texts, but to identifying the ways education policy contributes to the political, cultural and affective environment that makes certain kinds of expression possible for young people. Education policy has long been theorised in terms of discourse, i.e., a body of ideas, concepts and beliefs established as knowledge or truth, framing “what can be said, and thought, but also… who can speak, when, where, and with what authority” (Ball 1993, 14). The paper draws on this theoretical tradition to understand ‘freedom’ as existing in a complex, contextual relationship to power/constraint, rather than being its simple opposite. As notions of disciplinary power and subjectivation arising from Foucault (1975) and Butler (1990) indicate, a focus on discourse helps us see the performative, i.e., normalising power of discourse in shaping the possibilities of everyday youth expression (Youdell 2006), alongside more commonly understood juridical/legal forms of constraint on expression (e.g. hate speech).

As such, a key analytic goal in this paper is to identify what kinds of subject positions and thus, possibilities for expression, are made available to young people through education policy texts. But freedom of expression, and questions of race and faith equality involve political passions (Youdell 2011). Therefore, drawing on affect theories, we seek to analyse how the possibility of young people and their political expression on race and faith equality becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is also created/closed down through policy discourse (Ahmed 2004; Kitching et al. 2015).

The paper presents a two-step thematic and discursive analysis of English education policy texts pertaining the period 2010-2022. This period marks several Conservative-led policy changes, including the deregulation of school governance to offer schools greater budgetary and curriculum ‘freedoms’ (Academies Act 2010; Department for Education; DfE 2016), the establishment of a statutory terrorism prevention duty in schools (Department for Education 2014), the minimising of racism as a systemic issue (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities 2021), the endorsement of ‘strict’ methods to manage behaviour (Timpson 2021), and the issuing of political impartiality guidelines for schools as a response to movements, e.g. for decolonisation (DfE 2021). The data consisted of a corpus of 80 texts gathered in the areas of equality, curriculum, behaviour, safeguarding (inclusive of counter-terrorism) and inspection. These texts were identified through a process of searching these areas through the DfE government web archive for the period. We included relevant higher education texts due to the focus on freedom of expression in this context (DfE 2021). The texts included white papers, legislation, guidance on enacting legal duties in schools, policy research reports, and press statements. While engaging a broad range of policy priorities, this approach allowed us to identify dominant discourses operating across these priorities and how they aligned with or contradicted one another. The selected texts were divided between the two presenting authors, and a two-stage analytic process was conducted. The first was a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019), which enabled the identification of the range of meanings put forward in the texts. While texts were coded under a priori categories of equality, freedom, expression, and mission of school/higher education, these categories largely helped us to organise the analysis and of two separate sets of texts, allowing us to meet/communicate regularly and ‘make sense’ of each other’s coding processes. We then examined how our 265 codes overlapped and differed, to simplify and merge the codes into 31 a posteriori codes. At this point, moving towards a more deductive process, we identified five key themes as capturing the prevailing meanings advanced in the texts: truth, vulnerability, liberal equality, school excellence, and citizen-making. Drawing on samples from each of the five themes, we then conducted a second-stage analysis of the discursive strategies deployed in the texts, to offer particular subject positions for young people, and ways of feeling about freedom of expression, race and faith equality and youth.

The analysis found few education policy texts addressed the topic of freedom of expression or the political debates noted earlier directly. However, multiple discursive and affective strategies typically aligned to liberal political norms were identified as offering narrow possibilities for expression to young people. As one example, a key strategy involved not simply the production of young people as vulnerable subjects, but the discursive and affective regulation of acceptable vulnerability through discourses of child/youth safeguarding and protected characteristics. There was an implicit temporal distinction drawn between current priority (gender, sexuality, age) risks which, which in line with prevailing political climate, deprioritised concerns about race inequality. At the same time, the forms of vulnerability that youth may more actively encounter (e.g. youth-led organising, dissent) was either absent, discouraged, or defined as illegal. While processes of policy enactment will find ways to subvert and work against the above issues, we argue these discursive and affective strategies amongst others in the wider dataset powerfully work to empty liberal democratic concepts of equality and human rights of their potential to support young people’s political expression. This emptying and narrowing of the kinds of political subjects that young people can become in turn facilitates the achievement of prevailing right-wing political goals. This is not least as race and faith equality are largely depoliticised and deprioritised as protected characteristics, and any stronger representation of race or faith inequality as a live issue is designated as ‘contested’ and thus a risky basis for school-based discussion. The next phase of our research will map how these discursive and affective strategies translate into processes of policy enactment in schools and young people’s lives, through interviews with national and local policy stakeholders, and ethnographic school case studies.

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