The key component of China’s ‘Double Reduction’ policy (i.e. Reducing students’ homework and off-campus tutoring burdens during compulsory education stage) is to enhance the overall quality of education and services in schools by improving the quality of after-school services. The policy has sparked considerable debate since its implementation in 2022. Supporters generally acknowledge the potential positive impacts on after-school services, while critics on challenges such as the difficulty of implementation and the increased workload for teachers (Liu & Dong, 2022). Especially in the school context, students and parents hold varying perceptions and expectations concerning whether teachers should be responsible for after-school services and how these services should be organised. Moreover, the policy emphasises that ‘[schools] guide students to voluntarily participate in after-school services.’  That is to say, the effectiveness of the policy implementation heavily relies on psychological and behavioural responses of the involved students and parents. This, in turn, create greater feasibility for policy narratives.

Policy narrative is a "policy action" that can influence the effective implementation of policies. (Fischer, 2003, p169) It consists of two parts "stories" and "rhetoric". (Stone, 2022, p171;  Fischer, 2003, p162) Policy implementers construct different policy narratives aimed at different policy targets containing various stances and causal judgments. When these policy narratives are recognized by the policy targets, it essentially means that the deep-seated values and underlying logical frameworks implied in the narratives are accepted. (Li, 2019) Therefore, through policy narratives, it is possible to inspire policy targets to accept, follow, and apply these values and logic. (Hand et al.,2023) This is why policy narratives can influence individuals' s psychological and behavioural responses, ultimately affect the effective implementation of the policy.

Teachers, as the main policy implementers, construct policy narratives targeting students, parents, and other stakeholders. In the narrative process, teachers translate policy goals and information into stories.  By employing certain rhetoric, the stories serve to promote, persuade, communicate, and further shape the psychological and behavioral responses of students and parents (Cao, 2021). In this sense, policy narratives are instrumental facilitating effective policy implementation.

Building on the above understanding, this study investigates how teachers construct policy narratives about after-school services within the framework of the ‘Double Reduction’ policy. Specifically, it focuses on the factors that influence the narrative construction process. Furthermore, the study aims to provide recommendations for teachers to better utilize policy narratives to enhance the effectiveness of policy implementation.

This study adopts the Grounded Theory as its methodological perspective, as the research question- ‘how teachers construct policy narratives’- arises from school practices. The narrative process is a self-directed, spontaneous, and creative policy action by teachers, making it impossible to directly derive answers from existing theories. Grounded in daily educational activities, this study examines teachers’ livid experiences of constructing policy narratives, and inductively analyses, summarises, extracts the findings to derives and constructs its own micro-theory based on the collected qualitative data. The study selected B Elementary School in T City as the fieldwork site. B Elementary School is a municipal school known for its exemplary comprehensive school governance in T City. B school operates as a central part of an educational group consisting of six campuses, making it the largest and highest-quality elementary education group in T City. During the implementation of ‘Double Reduction’ policy, B Elementary School was rated "Excellent" in 2023 annual evaluation for its after-school services in T City. Subsequently, B school was featured as an exemplary case on the official website of China’s Ministry of Education. Its policy implementation outcomes are regarded as highly influential, offer valuable insights for nationwide practices. 30 teachers in B school were interviewed about their policy narrative, and four follow-up interviews were conducted to explore how teachers modify policy narratives to enhance effectiveness. (in February 2024 at the beginning of the semester, June at the end of the semester, and September at the start of the next semester). Supplementary interviews were also conducted with three school principals and two education supervisors. Each interview lasted between 40 and 60 minutes, resulting in a total of 43 interview records. Of these, 40 interview records were randomly selected and coded to develop a three-level coding system, completing the standardised process of Grounded Theory. The remaining three interview records were used to test the theoretical saturation of the coding results.

The study identified five key influencing factors of how teacher construct policy narratives. 1) Policy requirements. The policy texts which teachers construct their policy narratives based on, including policy requirements from central, local, and school-level policies, as well as other educational policies that interact with this one, such as the policies on the high school entrance exams. 2) Personal intentions. The outcomes that teachers hope to achieve through constructing policy narratives, which depend on their stance toward the policy, personal experiences, or their position in the school. 3) Relational context. As teachers construct policy narratives directed at specific students and parents, they refer to specific contexts, such as teacher-student relationships and school-family relations. 4) Teaching process. The influence of the educational concepts advocated by teachers in their daily work on their construction of policy narratives. And 5) Narrative strategies. Whether teachers construct the policy narrative from a first-person perspective, the language they choose, and other narrative skills. Wherein teachers adopt policy requirements as the narrative script, personal intentions as the propositions, and teaching process as the historical context to shape the stories of their policy narratives. Meanwhile, relational context serves as a reference, and narrative strategies provide the grammar for rhetoric of their policy narratives. By integrating stories and rhetoric, teachers construct policy narratives to facilitate effective policy implementation. Upon the analysis, the study underscores the importance of policy narratives in advancing policy implementation. This study suggests that teachers should focus on audience design to create more targeted narratives, further enhance the persuasiveness of their stories, and refine their rhetoric.

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