School leaders, as a result of their authoritative position, can have a significant impact on students’ academic and social development as well as the achievement of inclusive education. However, within the educational assemblage, school leaders’ work interacts with a wide range of discourses, technologies, instruments and actors, which span the boundaries of school, local and national policy spaces and can augment or diminish their latitude – their capacity to act (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) – in students’ interests. For example, national and municipal policy documents can both restrict and extend their range of potential at the school level (Ydesen et al., 2022). Thus, in their mediatory role between the state and the school, “sensemaking” (Weick, 1995) becomes extremely significant to the nature of their policy enactment. Indeed, policy texts must be “re-made” at the school level through processes interpretation and recontextualisation (Ball et al., 2012). These mechanisms and tensions between school practices and policy makers’ political framings are very much brought to light in terms of inclusive education.

Inclusive education is broadly about finding good – and rarely entirely standardized – solutions on the ground. It is about finding spaces for the most appropriate pedagogical solutions for children and young people (Noddings, 2015; Slee, 2010; Walton, 2023; Ydesen et al. 2022). At the same time, policymakers and civil servants in the administrative echelons of education systems – both at local and national levels – are often pursuing a focus on assessment data and accountability - to guarantee efficiency and progress while also providing evidence for local and national authorities on how schools within their jurisdiction are faring (Ydesen 2023). In a wider perspective, the building of education systems has even been closely wedded to constructions of nation-states through the fabrication of the national citizen (Tröhler, 2020). In this sense, education in general and schooling in particular have always been a vehicle for transmitting and exercising power but also a vehicle for projects about moulding, changing and evolving society through the creation of the “right” kind of citizen.

In this sense, there is a field of tension between agendas of standardization – in which assessments often plays a pivotal role - and the recognition that all children and young people are valuable contributors to the pedagogical context. In other words, this is where concerns about data, standardization, and assessment may conflict with the achievement of inclusive education. The pinnacle of this dilemma emerges in the interactions between schooling, school leadership, and policymaking. It is therefore important to understand not only the policy intentions behind the development of national and municipal policy documents but also how their enactments implicate practice – i.e. school leadership and pedagogical practices – in general and inclusive education in particular.

In this paper, we compare national and local policymaker intentions with school leader experiences and perspectives of their enactment of the assessment and inclusion agendas in their school contexts. The aim is to explore how school leader enactments support or conflict with the policymakers’ interpretations of their goals and tease out the implications in terms of inclusive education. The paper springs from a larger international comparative project on educational assessment and inclusive education entitled ‘Education Access under the Reign of Testing and Inclusion’. The paper draws on data collected in that project and features a comparative analysis between contexts in Argentina, Denmark, and England. These countries have been chosen for their distinctive, and even contrasting, education policies, socio-cultural and economic circumstances, and variations in performance across supranational and national standardised student assessments. Notably, the selected countries have all introduced large-scale national assessment and inclusion reforms in the past decade.

In terms of methodology, the paper draws inspiration from comparativists Bartlett and Varvus (2017, 2018) who contend that meaning is constantly remade; it cannot be predicted or determined in advance. And yet it is essential because it fun¬damentally shapes actions. From this perspective, each case study is pragmatically and openly analyzed from different foci which emerge as empirically relevant for understanding the meanings produced. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with national and local policymakers and school leaders in Argentina, Denmark and England. Interview data were coded to establish the principal themes of each social group. Crucially, the research team was fluent in the respective national languages of our case countries. All interviews were conducted in the mother tongue of the interviewee and transcribed verbatim in the original language. Key passages from all transcripts were made available in English. In each case country, we selected three schools at the compulsory education level through purposive sampling. Starting from the assumption that concerns about assessment and inclusion are ubiquitous components of education, we used a very open sampling method based on existing knowledge about schools, municipalities, and national idiosyncrasies. The fieldwork does not aspire to be representative of each country case. At the same time, we did not seek to investigate “hero” schools—those educational institutions which were deemed to demonstrate exceptional inclusive practices or perform particularly well in standardised tests. Rather, we aimed for diversity among the selected schools but with a criterion that these institutions were engaged in either international and/or national large-scale assessments. The notion of diversity could vary according to each case country but might be reflected in school locality, social composition, size, or academic profile. At the policy level, we decided that the local policymakers should be officials engaged with some of the cases schools in the areas of assessment and inclusion. Typically, these were found in local and municipal authorities. The national policymakers worked with assessment and/or inclusion policy at the national level. They were found in government ministries and departments.

Through its comparative and contrasting methodology, the paper adds to our understanding of policy enactments and the workings of recontextualizations with a specific focus on as-sessment and inclusive education. In this sense, the paper points to recurring issues – and the implications associated with these issues – when it comes to finding a balance between assessment and inclusive education. A key finding is that inclusive education might be considered a ‘softer’, and to some extent more fluid agenda, which entails a risk that it will only be adopted in a limited or distorted manner in national and local education sys-tems and school practices. This may happen because policymakers and practitioners try to fit inclusion into a pre-existing national, local or school-level system that features counter-productive, or even inhospitable, technologies, practices, and modes of operation. In essence, where standardised assessments (and associated accountabilities) are prioritised, the diversity of students’ educational needs, interests, experiences and histories are reduced in number and significance.

Acosta, F. (2019). OECD, PISA and the Educationalization of the World: The Case of the Southern Cone Countries (s. 175–196). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33799-5_9 Acosta, F. (2023). Between Expansion and Segmentation: Revisiting Old and New Dispari-ties in Secondary Education in Latin America, International Journal of Inclusive Education (Forthcoming) Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. Routledge. Bartlett, L., & Varvus, F. (2018). Rethinking the concept of context in compara- tive educa-tion. In R. Gorur, S. Sellar, & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.), World year- book of education 2019: Comparative methodology in the era of big data and global networks (pp. 189–201). Rout-ledge. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: The comparative case study approach. Routledge. Caride, E. G., & Cardoner, M. (2018). Inclusion: The Cinderella concept in educational policy in Latin America. Testing and Inclusive Education. International Challenges and Opportuni-ties. Edited by Bjorn Hamre, Anne Morin and Christian Ydesen. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo¬phrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minneapolis. Florian, L., Black-Hawkins, K., & Rouse, M. (2017). Achievement and inclusion in schools (2. edition). Routledge. Hamre, B. Morin, A & Ydesen, C. (2018). Optimizing the educational subject between test-ing and inclusion in an era of neoliberalism - Musings on a research agenda and its future perspectives. In: Hamre, B. Morin, A & Ydesen, C. (eds.) Testing and Inclusive schooling – international challenges and opportunities, London: Routledge Milner, A. (2023). Confronting the Disadvantage Gap: The Challenges to Transformative Leadership in a High-Stakes Assessment System, International Journal of Inclusive Educa-tion (Forthcoming) Noddings, N. (2015). The challenge to care in schools (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press. Tröhler, D. (2020). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating na-tional minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1786727 Walton, E. (2023) Why inclusive education falters: A Bernsteinian analysis, International Journal of Inclusive Education (Forthcoming) Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage. Ydesen, C. (2023). New national tests for the Danish public school system – Tensions be-tween renewal and orthodoxy before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Assess-ment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2023.2166462 Slee, R. (2010). The Irregular School: Exclusion, Schooling and Inclusive Education. Routledge. Ydesen, C., Milner, A. L., Ruan, Y., Aderet-German, T., Comez-Caride, E. (2022). Educational Assessment and Inclusive Education - Paradoxes, Perspectives and Potentialities, Cham: Springer International Publishing