As mid-level policymakers, local authority officers have previously been seen as a ‘bridge’ responsible for translating national policy into local policy and offering support to schools to interpret the abstract and generalised meanings, condensed codes, and legalistic discourses of state official policies (Singh et al. 2013). Despite this, Braun et al. (2011) note how the local authority context and the support provided by local authority officers are often factors that get overlooked in policy enactment studies. Previous research has identified local authority officers as the main source of advice for all parties involved in the school exclusion process (Ferguson and Webber 2015). However, over recent years the role of local authorities in England has changed substantially with the acceleration of academisation and removal of schools from local authority control. While local authorities remain responsible for children who are permanently excluded from school and play a role in monitoring exclusion figures and setting local targets which they are scrutinised on, they have reduced powers to hold schools to account. Drawing on data from observations and interviews with 25 local authority officers working in or with the School Exclusions Team in one local authority in England, collected as part of my DPhil (PhD) research (Tawell 2024), as well as policy enactment theory (Ball et al. 2012; Singh et al. 2013), in this paper I will explore the interpretational and translational work undertaken by the local authority officers as they made meaning of school exclusion policy in an increasingly autonomous education system in England, and how, as policy outsiders (Ball et al. 2012), they positioned themselves and were positioned in relation to school exclusion policy. I will outline seven roles that the local authority school exclusions officers were seen to take and make, namely: (1) advisors; (2) policy navigators and lay lawyers; (3) police but not judge; (4) commissioners; (5) reactive to proactive workers; (6) champions of children and families; and (7) coordinators of school placements through In Year Fair Access Panels, before focusing on the role ambiguity experienced by the school exclusions officers as they navigated a system in which they are simultaneously marginalised and responsibilised when it comes to school exclusion and the education of excluded pupils. In doing so, I will raise questions about what role local authority officers can play in the enactment of school exclusion policy and reflect on the need to rebalance power and accountability.

Ball, S. J., Maguire, M. and Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: policy enactments in secondary school. London: Routledge. Braun, A., Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., and Hoskins, K. (2011). Taking context seriously: towards explaining policy enactments in the secondary school. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), pp.585–596. Ferguson, L. and Webber, N. (2015). School exclusion and the law: a literature review and scoping survey of practice. University of Oxford. Singh, P., Thomas, S. and Harris, J. (2013). Recontextualising policy discourses: a Bernsteinian perspective on policy interpretation, translation, enactment. Journal of Education Policy, 28(4), 465–480. Tawell, A. (2024). Enacting national school exclusion policy at the local level in England: an embedded single-case study. DPhil Thesis. Oxford: University of Oxford.