I have an Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in. 

Donald Trump, 2016 

Education policy is often presented as though it should be above politics - neutral and benign (Broadfoot, 2021). But policy decisions are always political (Whitty, 2002), constructed at particular moments, with historical, cultural, institutional and political events shaping them. As such, the dynamics differ considerably across countries. Policies are created by people, whose purposes and positions vary. Although a great deal of work has been conducted on the sociology of education policy, the underlying, personal beliefs and values of policy actors and whether these cohere into logics that link with specific assessment policy choices has not been researched.  

Beliefs regarding the purpose of education may underpin policy preferences and the perceived utility of certain assessment technologies. For some, assessment primarily serves a selection function, which will tend to social reproduction because of the educational advantages afforded to the privileged (Sirin, 2005). IQ-ists interpret social reproduction as a product mainly of genetics (Smith-Woolley et al., 2018), with implications for educational investment and the kinds of assessments required. For example, it has been argued that children should be segregated into vocational or academic education at an early age (Terman, 1919, p92) and that policies aimed at reducing the attainment gap are wasteful and unfair channelling of funds from the genetically advantaged (Hernstein, 1971). 

Research on policy documents does not unveil the intricacies of these belief systems, especially as they present a ‘front stage’ rather than the ‘backstage’ of people’s presentation (Goffman, 1993 cited by Serpa & Ferreira, 2018). Policy environments represent interactions between actors with different beliefs and agendas and with different primary stakeholder audiences in mind. Transparency regarding these beliefs and their connection with policy may not be readily apparent, since actors understand they may not be palatable (see Gillborn et al., 2022, for obfuscations in the English policy context). For these reasons, we approached this research using in-depth interviews with policy elites as a first stage. 

We focus on educational assessment policy in England as a specific case, as assessment has a widely recognised impact on distribution of opportunities in society. Whilst the UK parliament has overarching responsibilities across the United Kingdom, there are delegated responsibilities for education in the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The contexts differ in each constituency. Unusually, England has a regulated market for educational assessment, with an accompanying neoliberal hegemony.  

Assessment policy in England has been frenetic this century under successive governments, associated with changes of Minister (13) as well as political party (4) in power. Although we might anticipate alignment of political values (eg left-right wing) with policies (eg progressive-traditional), this is not always observed. It is possible that all parties in power have been captured by neoliberal hegemony. Additionally, a policy may be justified utilising different political rationales. 

Policies associated with previous governments in England are often undone by the next regime, only to be reinvented in similar form. The literature has depicted the cyclical and nugatory nature of reform as driven by weak policy memory. This neglects the political and value-driven nature of reform. Beliefs regarding the purpose of education underpin policy preferences and the perceived utility of certain assessment technologies. Policy analysis research has theorised how assessment policies internationally have common features which align with drivers of social justice, engagement and inclusion, or with a neoliberal emphasis on the economy, meritocracy, standardisation, excellence and accountability. This research investigates the impact of powerful individuals’ political ideologies on their assessment policy preferences.  

At the time of submission, data collection is on-going. Between 25 and 30 interviews with political and policy elites will be conducted. Interviewees will be from across the political spectrum, including politicians and special advisors (such as Ministers and parliamentary Select Committee Members), senior civil servants responsible for delivering assessment policy (including Chief Regulators and Chief Inspectors of Schools), key influencers of assessment policy (special advisers to Ministers, think tank heads), senior teacher leaders (heads of unions and school chain leaders) and those responsible for delivering qualifications (exam board CEOs). Interviews will explore participants’ political beliefs, ideas about meritocracy, social values and their assessment policy preferences. Interviewees will be named, enabling the data to be explored in the context of their roles and publicly stated positions. The interview schedule is lightly structured, to allow the researchers to be responsive to the interviewees’ roles and sphere of policy influence (Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992). A thematic analysis will be conducted, in which shared patterns of meaning will be sought across the data. The initial coding framework will be guided by the data and the research literature in combination. The sociological and policy literature has connected ideological, populist, neoliberal and meritocratic approaches with educational assessment policy preferences. For example, the association of neoliberalism and beliefs about meritocracy with standardised testing (e.g., Grek et al., 2009; Santori, 2023), and elsewhere, the move to more flexible forms of assessment in the pursuit of more progressive socially just policies (e.g., Randall et al., 2022). The literature has also documented assessment beliefs centred on the genetically determined and fixed nature of intelligence (IQ-ism), which have been associated with neoliberal and populist views (Winston, 2018). The coding framework will be initially applied to the data from two interviews, then reviewed and adjusted as appropriate. Two researchers will be involved in this phase of analysis. All data will then be analysed by one researcher with an inter-coder check of a quarter of the interviews. Inter-coder reliability will be calculated and the codes revisited considering any disagreements. At each of these stages, the framework will be discussed to provoke a reflexive dialogue. Reflections on the positionality of the researchers will be an important part of these discussions. The final framework will then be applied to the data. Codes will then be clustered into themes, with particular attention to the relationship between ideology and assessment policy preferences.

This paper is the first in our research programme on this topic, situated in the context of policymaking in England. With changing geopolitical positions in Europe and more widely, comprehending the way that worldviews are likely to infuse educational policy is imperative. Research programmes in varied domains have concluded that ideology is a robust predictor of a wide range of attitudes, preferences, judgments, and behaviours. In the US, conservatives have been found to express less favourable attitudes toward science, scientists, and their claims, in comparison with liberals (Azevedo and Jost, 2021). In the US, UK and Germany, womens’ and men’s political ideologies were stronger predictors of their support for gender equality than perceived personal and societal inequality (Sevincer et al, 2023). Indeed, Jost et al. (2008) found that liberals were significantly more positive about foreign films, big cities, poetry, tattoos, and foreign travel, while conservatives were more positive about fraternities and sororities, sport utility vehicles, alcohol, and television. While this research is specific to England, the theoretical underpinnings and methodology will be of interest across countries with varying socio-political and economic structures. Indeed our purpose in this presentation is to engage with colleagues across Europe and beyond regarding the likely commonalities, contradictions or extensions to the model that might be necessary to extent this work to different societies. We seek to trace the political and policy connections, first in England, with a view to an expanded international programme of research with different demographic groups and across socio-political structures in different countries.  We anticipate conceptual, theoretical and methodological lessons will arise from this initial research stage, since a null finding of association between political values and policy preferences is just as interesting as finding clear relationships.

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