Educational innovation has been considered for decades the keystone for leading the adaptation of education systems to 21st century societies and economies (Greany, 2016; Hallgarten & Beresford, 2015; Hargreaves, 2003). It has been the answer to diverse school systems and societies needs such as providing training to guarantee countries economic competitiveness; diversifying the standardized model of schooling characteristic of bureaucratic educational systems; bringing teaching-learning processes near to traditionally excluded populations or improving students’ academic performance (Lubienski, 2009). Both as a mean to achieve other goals such as school effectiveness or students’ performance improvement or as an end in itself, innovation has become a large-scale reform (Fullan, 2009; Glazer & Peurach, 2013; Sotiriou et al., 2016), that has been closely connected with school autonomy and accountability policies, becoming a global movement (Greany, 2022; Lubienski, 2009).

The key role assigned to innovation within the global education agenda has been supported and promoted by the OECD, which has announced “the innovation imperative” (2005). The use of innovation as an imperative displays the mechanisms of governing through concepts (Mausethagen, 2013); understanding innovation as an imperative serves for structuring educational policies according to the rationale of continuous change, shaping schools as units of constant improvement (Peurach, 2015) and placing its main goal on a concept of students’ performance shaped by marketized understandings of education and educational systems. That use of governing concepts allows a process of framing in which a particular meaning is built (Lakoff, 2006), selecting a specific definition of a problem as well as its solution.

Despite the widespread of educational systems reform policies that have promoted innovation, research on its adoption and effects in the context of national educational systems is scarce and poor. Although some research has explored the impact of educational systems reforms on school innovation (Greany 2022, 2016; Lubienski, 2009), most of the literature on school change is produced from within the discursive framework of innovation with the goal of supporting the development and adoption of changes (Fullan, 2017; Hargreaves, 2003), but without carrying out a deep analysis of the innovation imperative discourse and its policy adoption and schools implementation.

In that context, the present paper seeks to identify the adoption of the innovation imperative within the Spanish education system, the meaning that the concept adopts and the rationale that its use helps to build. To that end, an analysis of the main national educational laws approved since the 90s is carried out, in order to identify the increased presence of the term and the frame from which it is defined.

The data collection has focused on primary data extracted by document analysis, based on the 6 national educational laws that have regulated the Spanish educational system in the last decades (approved in 1990, 1995, 2002, 2006, 2013 and 2020). The analysis has been carried out form the Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) methodological approach, used in social sciences for analysing semiosis; that is, the production of meaning under certain contextual conditions. The singularity of PDA is that it “deals specially with the reproduction of political power, power abuse or domination through political discourses, [highlighting] the consequences of social and political inequality that results from such domination” (Van Dijk, 1997: 11). Taking this into account this paper aims to show to what extent the imperative of innovation has been playing an increasingly important role in Spanish educational laws, and how the use of the term addresses to marketized understandings of the Spanish educational system. Specifically, we analyse the presence of the term innovation within the educational laws in order to identify if it appears to schools and teachers as an imperative. Also, we identify key words used by the OECD for conceptualizing innovation in education, as learning outcomes, productivity, quality, efficiency, workplace, digitalization (2021) and associated meanings, and analyse its use in the Spanish educational law, in order to identify the adoption of the OECD frame by the Spanish education system. These terms and others associated with them are used as traces for contrasting the influence of the OECD discourse on the understanding and spread of innovation within the Spanish education system.

Since 1990 there has been an increase in the presence of innovation in the laws that regulate the Spanish educational system. The number of explicit references to this term that we can find in the law that currently regulates the Spanish educational system has tripled compared to the law that regulated it in the 1990s: 5 references compared to 16. Additionally, the way in which it appears has been changing as well. While in the law of the 90s the term "innovation" was always related to research, currently it appears fundamentally linked to the concept of experimentation. This conceptual change is what has determined that educational innovation is no longer one means among others to improve educational processes and practices, as it was before, but rather constitutes an imperative to be fulfilled by all education professionals. This is so to such an extent that its promotion is one of the skills that every headmaster must have, and it is considered as a merit in teacher transfer competitions as well as it is subject to economic incentives. This has turned innovation into an end in itself, forcing it to stop being at the service of education, as it should be.

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