NAPLAN data: a new policy assemblage and mode of governance in Australian schooling

ABSTRACT

As part of a policy assemblage, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is representative of a new mode of governance for Australia's schooling systems, indicative of international trends in educational accountability based on testing. The policy assumption was that the introduction of a national performance measurement system would tightly couple school practices to national agendas targeted at improving learning outcomes. This paper presents a comparative case study of two primary schools within a single Queensland region to interrogate how coupling and decoupling strategies are enacted in respect of the policy usage of NAPLAN data. The granular analysis of the governance relationship between the school principals and their supervisors is set against the politics, policies and pressures of NAPLAN that recast the initiative as high stakes for systems, schools and their leadership. Specifically, we argue that Queensland's choice and enactment of policy instruments have produced a new mode of governance of principal conduct, but one mediated by the specific contexts of the two schools. The analysis shows how this mode has precipitated two types of decoupling.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance governance
• policy instruments
• schooling
• decoupling
• educational accountability
• high stakes testing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the schools and staff of Education Queensland for their generous participation in this research. In addition, we have greatly valued the thoughts and comments on this paper of our co-researchers Michele Foster and Paul Henman and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alison Gable is a Research Fellow and Project Manager located in the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland. Her research interests focus on the study of complex phenomenon, social policy, professionalism and interdisciplinarity.

Bob Lingard is a Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Education and the Institute of Social Science Research at The University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science is Australia. He has an international reputation in the areas of sociology of education and education policy and has published widely in these fields.

Notes

1. NAPLAN is one part of a composite set of policies – what we might see as an assemblage. Parts of this assemblage include the My School website, the Australian curriculum, various accountability policies and various state government initiatives in education. On assemblage, see Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

2. Both school names are pseudonyms.

3. While like school measures responsibilise schools, principals and teachers in holding SES contexts constant, thus ensuring explanations of student performance are school and classroom based, in the interview with the ARD, examples of schools being able to make a difference referred only to middle class schools; perhaps a silent acknowledgment of the difficulties facing schools in low SES communities.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was supported under Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme [DP110100803].