This article proposes a framework for thinking about the ghostly, thus arguing that policy can be understood as a landscape of intersecting and colliding temporalities from which arouse curious workings of barely-there forces, spooky energies and vibrating saturations of affective ambivalences. I present an empirical study of a policy agenda of…

This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enactment theorising, to explicitly consider the role and contribution of materiality in this theorising. Guided by the notion of policy "matters," the article takes as its empirical context a major policy initiative, the Building the Education Revolution…

Scholars studying the global governance of education have noted the increasingly important role corporations play in educational policy making. I contribute to this scholarship by examining the Assessment and Teaching of twenty-first century skills (ATC21S™) project, a knowledge production apparatus operating under cognitive capitalism. I analyze…

This article concerns policy implementation and examines the processes of translation through which policy may be enacted at local level. In particular, it focuses on education policy and constructions of teacher professionalism, drawing on a framework of critical logics--social, political and fantasmatic--which examine different dimensions of…

Taking recent policy on education and social mobility as a working example, this article examines developments in the mechanisms for realising policy over the past ten years, as indicative of changes in the neoliberal state. This initial analysis suggests that, despite similarities in the process of policy formation before and after the General…

While it is generally acknowledged that being "historically informed" lies at the heart of critical accounts of education policy-making, the use of historically focused retrospective research methods within the field is rare. This paper makes the case for retrospective research at a time when some of the most significant episodes of…

Public-private partnerships in education (ePPP) are acquiring increasing centrality in the agendas of international organizations and development agencies dealing with educational affairs. They are designed as an opportunity to correct inefficiencies in the public delivery of education and to mobilize new resources to increase the access to and…

This paper presents the case of a relatively low-profile policy initiative that has been successively reframed as part of larger policy ensembles within UK schools over a six-year period, and translated during this time at national and school levels. The policy examined is that of study support or out-of-hours learning. The trajectory of this…

Research into parents' secondary-school choices suggests that many middle-class parents are keen to secure a middle-class peer group for their children. This article reports the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study into whether a similar phenomenon exists at primary-school level and, if so, why. In-depth interviews were conducted with 56…

The new schooling-leaving age policy in New South Wales, a state in Australia, requires all students to stay at school until they are 17 years old. The policy was introduced in January 2010, with little warning and, it appears, little consideration of its impact in complex contexts. In south-western Sydney, the most diverse region in the city, the…

In 1997, the Government of Sri Lanka launched a comprehensive set of education reforms designed to promote equitable access to basic education and improvements in learning outcomes. The package of reforms arose as a political response to widespread youth unrest in the late 1980s and attracted considerable "political will", a vague but…

Recent research on school choice highlights the tendency among some White, middle-class parents to engage with discourses of community responsibility and ethnic diversity as part of their responsibility and duty as choosers and who therefore exercise choice in ways that undercut the individualistic and self-interested character framing…

Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid-Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues…

This article examines the role of the consultants in secondary schools and local authorities within a large-scale consultancy-based reform, the Secondary National Strategy (SNS), in London, UK. The SNS follows a cascade model of implementation in which nationally created initiatives are introduced and supported within local authorities (LA) and…

The ascendency of neoliberal ideas in education and social policy in the 1980s and 1990s was succeeded in the new millennium by a "new" social democratic commitment with emphases on community empowerment, building social capital and a "whole of government" approach to partnering with civil society to meet community needs. In…