Practices of scalecraft and the reassembling of political boundaries: the contested nature of national schooling reform in the Australian federation

ABSTRACT

This article contributes new insights to research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy production by synthesizing the concepts of “policy assemblage” and “scalecraft”. By conceptualizing scale as socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori), we argue that assemblage and scalecraft provide generative means for examining how scale is imagined and assembled, and the boundary dynamics associated with these processes. To make this argument, we focus empirically on changes to the governance of schooling policy in the Australian federation over the past two decades. We argue that despite being a federation in which subnational (state and territory) governments maintain responsibility for schools, a new national policy assemblage has emerged that rests upon and produces new forms of boundary imagining, crossing and blurring. This is generating tensions and issues for policy actors, central to which is contestation about federal involvement in national reform. Drawing upon insights from semi-structured interviews with senior policy actors, we argue that new ways of imagining and seeking to govern schooling, at the national scale, grate uncomfortably against the realpolitik of Australian federalism, the principles underpinning the design of federal systems, and forms of scalar thinking that shape how policy actors perceive the “ideal” division of roles and responsibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Federalism
• schooling reform
• assemblage
• boundaries
• scalecraft

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The model emerged as a result of the 2011 Gonski Report (Australian Government 2011), which was chaired by David Gonski, a prominent Australian business person and public figure.

2 The Education Council is the intergovernmental council consisting of all the nation’s education ministers (federal, state and territory). It forms part of COAG, which is the peak intergovernmental forum in Australia, comprised of the Prime Minister, State Premiers, Territory Chief Ministers and the President of the Australian Local Government Association.

3 There is currently limited public information about how the Education Ministers Meeting will operate or compare to the Education Council. For basic information about the changes, see the final Education Council Meeting Communique from December 2020 (Education Council 2020).

4 The Alice Springs Declaration replaced the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA 2008) which was established during the early phase of Labor’s education revolution reforms (see Savage 2021 for a detailed history of these developments).

5 AITSL also plays a key role in shaping teacher training and education in Australian universities. The universities have been the policy responsibility of the federal government since 1974, which arguably informs how the federal government sees its relationship with AITSL.

6 AITSL’s curious position in this regard stems from a longer history of federal involvement in teacher education. For a detailed analysis of AITSL’s establishment and preceding developments, see: Savage and Lewis (2018).

7 The extent of vertical fiscal imbalance in Australian federalism therefore enables the federal government to “buy” state and territory support through processes of funding/compliance trade-offs.

8 We also have in mind here Peck and Theodore’s (2015) argument that policy making imaginaries are increasingly “debordered” (p. xv) even though “the achievement of policy outcomes remains a stubbornly localized, context-specific process” (p. xvi).

9 Australian Research Council Grant: ID # DE160100197.

10 Section 96 of the Constitution enables the federal government to provide financial assistance to the states for specific purposes. Section 51 xxiiiA provides a head of power for the federal government to provide “benefits to students”.

11 An illustrative example of this is that each state and territory has retained a curriculum authority which out of necessity must now work with ACARA in respect of the national curriculum.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number DE160100197].

Notes on contributors

Glenn C. Savage

Glenn C. Savage is a policy sociologist with expertise in education reform, federalism, intergovernmental relations and global policy mobilities. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia in the School of Social Sciences and the Graduate School of Education.

Elisa Di Gregorio

Elisa Di Gregorio is a PhD student at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. Her research focus is in the field of education policy, with specific interest in school funding policy, equity and intergovernmental relations in the context of Australia's federal system.

Bob Lingard

Bob Lingard is a Professorial Fellow in the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University and Emeritus Professor at The University of Queensland.