Standardised testing has become a ubiquitous part of schooling across economically developed nations (Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013; Verger, Fontdevila & Parcerisa, 2019). At the same time, various stakeholders, including scholars, practitioners, parents, and politicians continue to debate the merits, purposes, and utility of testing. Some actors have grown increasingly sceptical of how tests are being used, leading various groups to mobilise around a desire to resist such trends in education. In the US, for example, a group of New York-based parents initiated the Opt-Out Movement, which has grown in number and force over the past several years (see Hursh et al., 2020; Pizmony-Levy, Lingard, & Hursh, 2021). In Chile, students and teachers have banded together to resist high-stakes testing and other forms of neoliberal control of the education sector (Stromquist & Sanyal, 2013). Whilst there is a growing body of research around traditional forms of contestation and transgression such as opting out of statutory assessments, there is virtually no evidence of concerted, multi-actor forms of resistance. Drawing on a year-long network ethnography, this paper focuses on the More than a Score (MTAS) campaign in England, with particular attention to the role of professional organisations. The MTAS organisation is made up of multiple actor groups, but the professional organisations occupy a particularly significant role in helping the network accomplish its primary goals through the deployment and strategic mobilisation of various forms of expert knowledge.

To this end, we use this paper to illustrate how the development and use of knowledge-based mechanisms and practices of resistance allowed MTAS to move beyond traditional forms of contestation and transgression, towards more complex and granular modes of refusal and struggle. Drawing upon Foucault’s conceptualisations of power/knowledge and resistance (Foucault, 1972) and Heclo’s (1978) notion of ‘issue networks’, we analyse the professional organisations affiliated to the MTAS campaign with a focus on their use of expert knowledge as a technology of resistance. In particular, by examining their transactions and exchanges we identify three main mechanisms of resistance: i) a diffused policy approach, ii) expert reports, and iii) a deep understanding of network boundaries. We conclude with a discussion about how this work can extend our understanding of resistance, and the tensions and compromise that multi-stakeholder resistance involve.

Powerful policy players in global education have been well researched, such as the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO, and others, such as edu-businesses, EdTech companies, philanthropies and social enterprises, have only recently started to be explored. In our previous work (AUTHOR, 2017; AUTHORS, 2022), we gave primary attention to the new actors in the global education policy network (foundations, education corporations, think tanks, funding platforms and management service companies) while acknowledging the need to study voices of dissent. These dissident voices question and challenge shared beliefs of the mainstream global policy community members, and they are unwelcome and often unheard, or rarely attended to. Such voices are excluded from the mainstream global education epistemic community because they speak about education differently and constitute a network among themselves, which we continue to investigate in this paper. We suggest that ‘network ethnography’ (Ball and Junemann, 2012; AUTHOR, 2017) is best suited to our attempt to specify the exchanges and transactions between organisations involved in resisting standardised testing in England, and the roles, actions, motivations, discourses and resources of the different actors involved. The network we describe and research is primarily focused on the More Than a Score campaign, and includes teacher, parent, and head teacher-led organisations, as well as other related professional bodies. There are different sorts of data involved in network ethnography, and a combination of techniques of data gathering and elicitation. Network ethnography requires deep and extensive Internet searches (focused on actors, organisations, events and their connections). Drawing on initial findings from actor and organisation-focused searches (including newsletters, press releases, videos, podcasts, interviews, speeches and web pages, as well as social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs), we developed topic lists and open-ended questions to inform each in-depth interview with nodal actors within the network. We have conducted a total of 20 semi-structured interviews with directors and spokespersons of member organisations of the MTAS coalition. In order to maximise the relational potential of interviews, we heavily rely on follow up questions, as a way to explore emergent associations. We also conduct post-interview searches, that in turn inform subsequent interviews. Network ethnography also involves participating in some of the key occasions where the network participants under consideration come together. Whilst COVID-19 restricted the possibility to attend face-to-face events, as part of our network ethnography we attended a series of online events including conferences, Q&A sessions, and webinars.

While resistance in education (broadly) has been investigated in a variety of ways, resistance to high-stakes testing remains a space that is relatively under-explored and theorised (AUTHORS, 2022). Across the literature, some have focused on the more overt forms of resistance, like the Opt-out Movement in the U.S. (Hursh et al., 2020; Pizmony-Levy, Lingard, & Hursh, 2021), or the collective protests against neoliberal reforms in Chile (Stromquist & Sanyal, 2013). Others have focused more on the ‘everyday’ forms resistance that takes place in classrooms and schools (Anderson & Cohen, 2014; Blackmore 2004; Perryman et al., 2011). We argue that MTAS as a conglomerate of organisations have operationalised resistance in a way that sit outside of this obvious binary. As we have shown in this paper (and elsewhere, see AUTHORS, forthcoming), some forms of resistance cannot be described as overt or covert. MTAS, for example, brings together a variety of strategies, and it is the careful coordination of these sometimes disparate interests and strategies that make MTAS successful in its efforts. On one hand, the campaign does not self identify as a resistance group, yet their tactics are indisputably aimed at disrupting a system they see as harmful to students. This raises important questions about how we, as researchers, define resistance and how we make sense of the varied ways stakeholders are pushing for change and creating new possibilities. In this particular case, knowledge mobilisation is a key strategy for appealing to different audiences, and helps acquire buy-in from groups who may not naturally align otherwise. While it might not look like resistance in a traditional sense, it arguably succeeds in achieving similar goals.

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