This set of papers will focus on pedagogical relationships, in the context of wider issues of pedagogy and professional practice, and also within the context of current educational policy trends. Pedagogy – teaching and learning – are increasingly the focus of policy initiatives and edicts across the developed world. This focus occurs in a policy climate which is globalised. Policy makers are keen to influence pedagogy towards the effective production of learning outcomes which will contribute to stated policy objectives, especially attainment, successful competition in the new knowledge economy, and social orderliness. As Ozga and Jones (2006: pp.1-2) observe, ‘globalization foregrounds education and education policy in specific ways that attempt to harness education systems to the rapid and competitive growth and transmission of technologies and knowledge’. However these globalised trends are interpreted and mediated in national contexts. As Ozga and Jones further observe, such globalised trends can be usefully conceptualised as ‘travelling policy,’ which is implemented by national policy elites with ‘differing degrees of local “policy inflection” in which various forces (local policy communities, trade unions, social movements) have forced adaptation of global agendas, or in which local policy elites have integrated travelling policy with national agendas’ (p.2).  Policy on pedagogy differs from nation to nation, but can be seen almost everywhere to be dependent on micro-management through measurement of performance indicators, competencies, targets, outcomes, especially attainment, and regimes of surveillance and inspection.

There has been less attention paid to pedagogical relationships. This is an interesting gap, because those relationships are at the heart of education – or so we contend. This lack of attention may be because such relationships are difficult to measure or even to inspect – though they are constrained, and often constricted, by policies relating to the micromanagement of teaching. The difficulty of surveillance may mean that it is possible for pedagogical relationships to retain a measure of independence from policies: even perhaps to escape and subvert them.

Partly in response to the policy focus on pedagogy, there has been a burgeoning of philosophical and theoretical interest in pedagogy and educational practice. This includes, for instance, attempts to contest the emphasis on learning at the expense of teaching (Biesta, 2006) and to examine the contradictions such policies have for the ethics of teaching (Higgins, 2010). But within this literature, as for the policy documents, there has been less emphasis on pedagogical relationships themselves. For instance, while both Biesta and Higgins examine both pedagogy and professional practice illuminatingly and in depth, and while both mention educative or pedagogical relationships, neither discuss them in detail.