Internationally, the policy and social context of teaching has been changed significantly through a neoliberal discourse that emphasises competition and marketisation to improve the quality, efficiency and equity in education (Ball 2003; Apple 2006; Evetts 2009; Gewirtz et al. 2009). However, the educational field is an arena for political and ideological struggle and is therefore subject to compromises (Apple 2006, Bernstein 2000). Apple (2006) describes how the contradictory interests of neoliberals (marketised solutions to educational problems), neoconservative intellectuals (return to higher standards and a common culture through traditional knowledge), authoritarian populists (concerns about secularity and preservation of own traditions), and a fraction of the professionally oriented new middle class (ideology and techniques of accountability, measurement and management) are combined and implies a conservative modernisation of education.

The seemingly contradictory discourse of competition, markets and choice, on the one hand, and accountability, performance objectives, standards, national and state testing, and national and state-wide curriculum, on the other, has created such a din that it is hard to hear anything else. Even though these seem to embody different tendencies, they actually oddly reinforce each other and help cement conservative educational positions into our daily lives. (Apple 2006, 55)

In relation to this, New Public Management (NPM) has been a key mechanism in public sector reforms, combining output control measured by quantitative performance indicators, incentives for performance, the introduction of quasi-markets and competition between agencies (Clarke and Newman 1997).

However, contrary to the stated intention of providing schools and teachers with the autonomy to meet students´ diverse needs, it is often reported that external result expectations and competition have contributed to more hierarchical relations in the school organisation, decreasing professional autonomy, increasing standardisation of the knowledge and pedagogy, a narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to testing and increasing inequities (Ball 2003; Apple 2006; Au 2007; Ravitch 2010; Larsen, Schulte and Thue 2021; Bjordal and Haugen 2021). Interestingly, in response to the critique of NPM, the governments in three of the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) have stated that they will introduce trust reforms in the public sector (Tvinnereim 2017).

Following up the intention of introducing a trust reform in the education system in Norway, a joint committee was established in 2022 to evaluate and further develop the National Quality Assessment System (NQAS). In the struggles over the forming of pedagogic discourse, controlling the field of judgement is crucial (Ball 2003, Bernstein, 2000). Therefore, the revision of the NQAS is especially important in education policy work in terms of which interests set the premises for the knowledge and pedagogic priorities in schools. Furthermore, as the intention is to counter problematic effects of NPM, the recommendations for the new NQAS could also provide a picture of the borders of legitimate discourse, i.e what is thinkable/unthinkable in terms of new quality criteria and governing of schools´ work (cf. Bernstein, 2000). With that as the point of departure the problem statement for this paper is:

How might the recommendations from the joint committee for revising the Norwegian NQAS impact power relations between different agents in terms of setting premises for knowledge and pedagogic priorities, and how might the recommendations reflect ideological positions?

To analyse power relations in the policy recommendations for the revision of the NQAS, analytical tools from Basil Bernstein will be employed. Bernstein´s theory of the pedagogic device is useful to analyse how power works on micro and macro levels, and how different arenas of cultural production, reproduction and transformation of culture are related. ´The Pedagogic Device acts as a symbolic regulator of consciousness; the question is, whose regulator, what consciousness and for whom? It is a condition for the production, reproduction and transformation of culture´ (Bernstein 2000, 38). It consists of three interrelated rules that are not ideologically free and therefore becomes sites for appropriation, conflict and control. The distributive rules are based in the field of production of discourse, which is normally established by the dominant political party in the state: ´The distributive rules mark and distribute who may transmit what to whom and under what conditions, and they attempt to set the outer limits of legitimate discourse´ (Bernstein 2000, 31). The recontextualising rules constitute the rules for the specific pedagogic discourse. In the recontextualising field there is a struggle between agents from the Official Recontextualising Field (ORF) that is ´created and dominated by the state and its selected agents and ministries´ (2000, 33), including ´specialized departments and sub-agencies of the State and local educational authorities together with their research and system of inspectors´ (Bernstein 1990, 192) and the Pedagogic Recontextualising Field (PRF), which consists of pedagogues in schools and university and polytechnic departments of education, colleges of education together with their research, and private foundations (Bernstein 1990, 2000).The evaluative rules condense the meaning of the whole device and creates a field of reproduction referring to what counts as legitimate criteria for acquisition. . To describe the power relations and control that were addressed in the 40 recommendations from the joint committee the analytical tools classification (describing power relations) and framing (describing the transmission of power) are used. Bernstein (1990) distinguishes between four classification elements: extra-discourse relations of education, intra-discourse relations (the organisational context), the transmission context, and the system context (relation between state and school). The data material consists of the 40 main recommendations for making a new NQAS presented in the Norwegian Official Report (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research 2023).

The combination of datafication, tighter hierarchical relations and decentralisation of output control over subjects of the curriculum represents a stronger manifestation of neoliberalism and managerialism and a weaker neoconservative position. Increasing the external and centralised control through standardised evaluative tools can be related to the datafication of education, where ´the use of data must be seen within the context of an international education system which is driven by neoliberal values of managerialism and accountability´ (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes 2018, 4). As demonstrated, in addition to increasing the use of data as policy instruments, it is also recommended to make the relations between the different agents in the organisation tighter through more hierarchization, mandatory ´quality dialogues´ and procedures emphasising the relation between results and practice in the quality development work. The priorities of basic skills suggests that the neoliberal position is reinforced through the recommendations. The increasing emphasis on basic skills coincides with the decreasing emphasis on subjects of the curriculum, suggesting a weakening of the neoconservative position. As the neoconservative position requires the state to control both input and output (Bernstein 2000), the recommendation from the joint committee of also decentralising ´output control´ over subjects of the curriculum indicates a further weakening. Bernstein described how the combination of neoliberal and managerial positions with the neoconservative stance creates a pedagogic schizoid position (Bernstein 2000, 71), where schools and teachers must balance the extrinsic values of meeting external competitive demands with the intrinsic values related to curriculum subjects. The rhetoric devices that mark a break from the current system, ´learning-supportive tests´, ´quality dialogue´ and ´broad knowledge´, could thus obscure the reinforcement of already established values.

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