Big policies and a small world: an analysis of policy problems and solutions in physical education

Abstract

This paper uses Ball’s [1998. Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130] policy analysis and Bernstein’s [1990. The structuring of pedagogic discourse. Volume IV class, codes and control. London: Routledge; 2000, Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, research, critique (Revised ed.). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield] conceptualisation of boundaries as a basis for critically examining the notion of policy ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ in contemporary physical education. The paper introduces the notions of policyscape and policy magic to explain ways in which thinking about both policy problems and solutions in education is discursively constrained. Analysis of boundaries is presented as a means of revealing and prospectively challenging such constraint. Research findings from projects spanning different international contexts and phases of education are analysed to illustrate complex inter-relationships between a series of knowledge boundaries that variously define the policy and pedagogical directions that can legitimately be pursued in physical education. The paper presents a case for further critical research and policy action in physical education that draws insight from education policy sociology and that examines ways in which equity in physical education is being (re-) framed by broader policy processes and contexts.

Keywords:

• Policy
• Curriculum
• Equity
• Policyscape: Policy magic
• Assessment
• Pedagogy
• Senior secondary physical education
• Primary physical education

Introduction

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Special Interest Group was always intended to be a forum for sharing in discussion as a means of advancing thinking and research in the field. The scholar lecture that this paper draws on was given in that spirit. It sought to emphasise that policy and curriculum developments are an expression of the politics of knowledge, and direct attention to the social and symbolic implications of structural and systemic changes occurring in education and physical education. I contend that extending understandings of complex policy processes and policy contexts is an essential foundation for policy and pedagogical work in physical education that is explicitly concerned to advance equity in education and society. Following Ball and Junemann (2012), I stress that policy analyses must attend to both the changes and continuities evident amidst ongoing policy developments impacting physical education. This paper therefore brings together concepts from Ball’s (1998) work and Bernstein’s (1990, 2000) perspectives on boundaries to direct attention to the durability of policy directions and pedagogic practices across contexts and over time. I suggest that this durability needs to be a central focus in efforts to challenge sustained inequities in physical education through critical research and policy action on the part of teachers, teacher educators and researchers.

The opening sections of the paper introduce the concepts that have provided the stimulus and analytical frame for this work. In subsequent sections of the paper, I apply the theoretical insights in analysis and discussion of two sets of research data. Spanning international contexts and different phases of education, the analysis particularly illustrates the significance of boundaries as a focus for critical policy work in physical education.

Big policies; small world

My title is in part borrowed from the work of Stephen Ball and specifically, his paper entitled ‘Big policies/Small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy’ published in Comparative Education in 1998. In borrowing from Ball’s title my intent was to direct attention to a number of the points that he made in that paper and explore their contemporary relevance for physical education internationally and in particular local and institutional contexts.

Running through Ball’s (1998) paper is an emphasis on the need to explore and acknowledge the significance of both ‘the local particularities of policy making and policy enactment’ and ‘general patterns and apparent commonalities or convergence across localities’ (p. 119). This dual focus is something that Ball (1998) identifies as a fundamental challenge for policy analysis. It is also something that has rung true for me amidst a career that has seen me live and work in a number of localities. At the time that I was invited to give the BERA scholar lecture, I was commencing a position at Monash University and embarking on life in Victoria. I was acutely aware of my lack of familiarity with things that I recognised were significant ‘local particularities’ of the State, including historical and contemporary curriculum directions in Health and Physical Education (HPE), the political landscape and professional networks. I similarly lacked understanding of the particularities characterising individual schools and communities across the State. In line with Ball and his colleagues’ (Ball, Maguire, Braun, Hoskins, & Perryman, 2012) emphasis, my work in Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and New Zealand has repeatedly reaffirmed that in education and more specifically, physical education or HPE, contexts matter! Yet, across these locations, there have also been many instances when I have been struck by ‘general patterns and apparent commonalities or convergence across localities’ (Ball, 1998, p. 119) and commonalities over time.

Generic problems; magical solutions

The analysis that Ball (1998) presents addressed what he termed ‘generic problems’. These are problems that he identifies as constituting the contemporary social, political and economic conditions for education and social policy-making, including economic uncertainty and changing patterns and conditions of employment. In this paper, it is not my intention to pursue these particular issues that were central to Ball’s analysis. Rather, my focus is on the process that his analysis followed. From the notion of ‘generic problems’, Ball (1998) turns attention to ‘the emergence of ideological and “magical” solutions to these problems’ (p. 119). In doing so, he reminds us that ‘[p]olicies are both systems of values and symbolic systems; ways of representing, accounting for and legitimating political decisions. Policies are articulated both to achieve material effects and to manufacture support for those effects’ (p. 125, my emphasis). Hence, he suggests that the advocacy and support for market-driven approaches to educational reform as ‘the “solution” to educational problems’ (Ball, 1998, p. 124) amounts to ‘a form of “policy magic”’, or what Stronach terms ‘witchcraft’; ‘a form of reassurance as well as a rational response to economic problems’ (1993, p. 6; cited in Ball, 1998, p. 124). Ball (1998) explains that key to the appeal of the solution is ‘the simplicity of the formula on which the magic is based’—in this instance ‘social markets/institutional devolution = raising standards (of educational performance) = increased international competitiveness’ (Ball, 1998, p. 124). Thus, while not denying the significance of so-called generic problems, Ball draws attention to the equal significance of the solutions that come to be progressively taken up and legitimated across national contexts. He explains that these solutions, expressed in the marketisation of education, ‘ … become an inescapable form of reassurance; they discursively constrain the possibilities of response and are borrowed, enforced and adopted through various patterns of social contact, political and cultural deference and supranational agency requirements’ (Ball, 1998; p. 128).

In this paper, I use Ball’s (1998) concepts and lines of argument to provoke fresh thinking about what we have variously come to recognise and accept as ‘generic problems’, creating particular conditions for policy and curriculum developments in physical education. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, I call for the examination of the ‘generic or magical solutions’ that amidst those conditions, we regard as possible, desirable and/or appropriate and that we are complicit in reaffirming. I suggest that we need to consider what possibilities for physical education curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are discursively constrained as a consequence of the subtle effects that the broad ‘policyscape’ (Appadurai, 1990, cited in Ball, 1998, see below) is having on our thinking and practices. I pursue analysis that explores the processes via which particular discursive boundaries shape our understandings of both contemporary problems and prospective solutions in physical education.

While directing attention to generic matters, Ball (1998) registers ‘the importance of local politics and culture and tradition and the processes of interpretation and struggle involved in translating these generic solutions into practical policies and institutional practices’ (p. 128). I similarly encourage dialogue that recognises and explores the distinctive opportunities and constraints that particular local politics, culture and tradition generate in relation to thinking and practices in physical education. At the same time, I reaffirm Ball’s (1998) accompanying emphasis of the need to consider Offe’s (1984) notion of ‘real social effects’ (cited in Ball, 1998, p. 128). Thus, amidst ‘careful investigation of local variations, exceptions and hybridity’ we should not be distracted from the broader practical and ideological impact that is achieved via ‘the ensemble of influences and policy mechanisms’ (p. 128). Ball’s (1998) emphasis is that even amidst differing realisations of these influences and mechanisms, the ensemble ‘changes the way that education is organised and delivered but also changes the meaning of education and what it means to be educated and what it means to learn’ (p. 128, my emphasis). Expanding upon the effects of the increasing commodification of knowledge and changes in the role of the knowledge economy, Ball (1998) highlights both their subtlety and depth. ‘The framework of possibilities, the vocabularies of motives and the bases of legitimation (including values and ethics) within which educational decisions are made are all discursively reformed’ and with this, crucially, changes are made to patterns of ‘access to and the distribution of educational opportunity in terms of race, class, gender and physical ability’ (p. 128). Hence he argues that, ‘both in relation to patterns of convergence in education policy and the recontexualisation of policy, we need to be asking the question, “whose interests are served?”’ (p. 128, my emphasis).

Equity, policy and professional responsibility

A long line of research and scholarship in physical education has pursued whose interests are being served, marginalised, privileged, overlooked and denied within and by physical education amidst policy and curriculum developments (whether initiated by governments, education authorities, other agencies seeking involvement in physical education or by schools and teachers) (see e.g. Dowling, Fitzgerald, & Flintoff, 2012; Evans, 1986, 1993; Evans, Davies, & Wright, 2004; Penney, 2002; Stidder & Hayes, 2013; Wilkinson, 2017). Alongside this there is a sustained body of work in education policy sociology and physical education that challenges simplistic, linear portrayals of policy and that emphasises that the negotiation of policy outcomes is an ongoing, complex process (see e.g. Ball, 1993, 2007; Ball & Junemann, 2012; Ozga, 2000; Penney, 2013a; Penney & Evans, 1999). Frequently, however, the language used in talking about policy still seems to generate a sense of detachment and reflect a tendency to position oneself apart from developments. While it may be comfortable to draw a boundary between ourselves and ‘privileged others’ who we see as ‘involved and influential’ in policy matters in physical education, such a distinction is at odds with notions of fluidity, openness and contestation amidst complex processes, relations and networks. In advocating for a focus on connectedness to and involvement with policy, I am by no means implying that the policy playing field is an even one. Far from it. But the crucial point is that we are players. We are inside rather than outside of the field of play. Hence, I advocate the shift in language that Ball et al. (2012) have called for, from talk of implementation to ‘enactment’ and see this as important to prompt fresh thinking about the policy processes that we are a part of in physical education (whether we choose to recognise it or not) (Penney, 2013a). As indicated, this is not to deny the complexity of the processes or the political and power-relations that are integral to them. To the contrary, Ball et al.’s (2012) emphasis is that the language of enactment directs attention to ‘discursive processes that are complexly configured, contextually mediated and institutionally rendered’ (p. 3) and that teachers are implicated and active in. Enactment thus embodies inherent tensions in a process that features ongoing contestation and varied interpretations, and that allows for ‘originality and creativity’ (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3) in our readings of and responses to policy, but with a crucial caveat. The exploration of creativity is always set within and limited by ‘the possibilities of discourse’ (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3). Enactment is thus a process in which teachers and I would argue, teacher educators and researchers, are simultaneously ‘policy subjects and agents’, active in the mediation and negotiation of policy, while generating meanings from and amidst embedded understandings, language and professional practice (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3). To further explore limits to our understandings, language and practice, I return to concepts that were central to Ball’s (1998) ‘Big Policies/Small World’ paper.

Policyscapes (Appadurai, 1990), policy problems and policy magic

Drawing on Appadurai’s (1990) term ‘policyscapes’ Ball (1998) highlights dynamics that I want to consider in relation to contemporary developments in physical education:

If these various ‘policyscapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) of global change adumbrate a set of ‘problems’ and challenges for education and social policy, what then are the ‘solutions’ in play from which makers of policy might ‘choose’ as modes of response? (p. 121)

‘Adumbrate’ points us to the subtle nature of influences here, with policy contexts foreshadowing particular ‘problems’ and challenges, and presenting them in certain terms. Steering mechanisms associated with performativity and neoliberalism collectively contribute to a situation internationally in which the policy contexts foreshadowing particular problems are simultaneously ones in which only particular solutions are deemed legitimate (Ball, 1998). Following Ball (1998), I therefore suggest the need to consider contemporary global policyscapes and also more localised policy contexts, as generative of particular problems or challenges for physical education, but also particular solutions, with the simplistic ‘magic’ of them making them all the more appealing.

In further exploring these issues, as indicated, I draw on Bernstein’s work, and specifically, his emphasis of the significance of boundaries. Bernstein’s (2000) contention is that boundaries represent a potentially productive point of tension between the past and possible futures, and as such, can be ‘more enabling than disabling’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. xiii). From this perspective, they are an important generative focus for action that can prospectively challenge mechanisms that sustain inequity. Boundaries are a necessary structural feature of any curriculum. They also have undeniable symbolic and social significance, simultaneously representing ‘points of division and connection amidst contemporary knowledge structures in/of physical education’ (Penney, 2013b, p. 8). From a critical perspective, points of division and connection are inherently also points of systemic inclusion and exclusion. Further, ‘a crucial aspect of Bernstein’s conceptualisation of boundaries is the notion of “a space between” that presents the potential for transformative [thinking and] action’ (Penney, 2013b, p. 8). In the sections that follow, I explore a number of boundaries featuring in physical education and consider issues of ‘boundary maintenance’ and ‘boundary dissolution’ in relation to contemporary policy contexts, perceived policy problems, and what are recognised and accepted as policy solutions. My hope is to prompt critical reflection about the structures and practices that we are active in maintaining or challenging, and to engage with the question ‘with what effects?’—in relation to the prospective physical education futures that will be articulated in official curriculum, enacted by teachers and experienced by students.

Boundaries in physical education

As Williams (2012) explains, boundaries ‘are often sites of conflict, miscommunication and misunderstanding’ and arguably ‘too often perceived as barriers and protected by organisational, sectoral and professional walls’ (p. 139). Alternatively, ‘they can be the locus of transformation, collaboration, imagination, energy, innovation and creativity through the juxtapositioning of multiple communities of practice and interests’ (Williams, 2012, p. 139). Returning to one of Ball’s (1998) points, I also suggest that boundaries that are variously expressed in physical education curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and play a key role in offering ‘inescapable form of reassurance’ (accepted logic) about the legitimacy of current practices, while at the same time generating discursive constraints (p. 128) that limit thinking and practice. Some of the boundaries that I refer to will be very familiar. Variously they are explicit in everyday policy and practice of physical education internationally and are either being actively reinforced, challenged, denied or are becoming increasingly blurred. The following are all boundaries that in my view, it is important to examine in considering current practices in physical education and future directions, particularly from an equity perspective. The list presented is not intended to be exhaustive and nor is a hierarchy implied by the sequencing.

• Curriculum/pedagogy/assessment

• The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of curriculum (Bernstein, 1990)

• Assessed/non-assessed knowledge, skills and understandings

• Being able/not able in physical education

• Learning within and beyond schools

• Providers/educators

• The Official Recontextualising Field and the Pedagogic Recontextualising Field (Bernstein, 1990)

• Formal curriculum policy/implicit curriculum policy (Connelly & Connelly, 2013)

• Past/current/future practice

In the discussion that follows, I locate these boundaries in relation to contemporary contexts of physical education and what within these contexts, are conceived as problems and solutions. In doing so, I illustrate the need to also examine the interplay between different sets of boundaries.

Policy contexts, problems and magic in physical education

The first illustration comes from research in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a project that I undertook in collaboration with Kirsten Petrie and Sam Fellows (Petrie, Penney, & Fellows, 2014; Penney, Petrie, & Fellows, 2015).

The project arose in response to our growing awareness of the growth in so-called external providers offering resources, services and ‘support’ to schools and teachers, that was variously directed towards their provision of HPE, physical education, health, physical activity and/or sport programmes within or outside of curriculum time. We recognised that this growth arose from and also acted to perpetuate particular policy relations associated with HPE in New Zealand. These were characterised by an increasing absence of HPE curriculum leadership on the part of Ministry of Education, and a parallel prominence of other government departments and agencies investing in this ‘policy space’ (Petrie & lisahunter, 2011). These developments clearly had their origins in a broader policyscape that as others have observed (Macdonald, 2011, 2015; Powell, 2015), featured the privileging of market and neoliberal discourses and generated national policy responses that will be familiar to many international observers, such as the attention being directed on students’ and schools’ performance in literacy and numeracy (Petrie & lisahunter, 2011).

Petrie and lisahunter’s (2011) analysis demonstrated how HPE and more specifically physical education, was openly marginalised in national education policy arenas and prospectively, also in schools (particularly in primary schools). I say ‘prospectively’ quite deliberately. In New Zealand and indeed, any national or state context within which I have worked, I have been constantly reminded that it is not appropriate to make statements that imply consistency or comparability from school to school, in either provision of or experiences in physical education or HPE. While there are stories of marginalisation of HPE, there are also stories that contrast to this—but the variation and accompanying absence of any assurance that all children will enjoy access to the skills, knowledge and understandings that official, national texts such as the New Zealand Curriculum HPE (Ministry of Education, 2007) identify as a curriculum entitlement and expectation, is, I suggest, important to continue to highlight.

Our research was designed to, as we termed it, ‘scope’ or ‘map’ the market—to generate data about the extent and nature of involvement of ‘external’ agencies and organisations in the HPE curriculum space, through the identification of programmes and resources being promoted for use by schools and teachers in the context of the HPE curriculum. The results of our research portrayed extensive and complex networks of provision, involving direct and indirect government funding, and not-for-profit, charitable and commercial organisations (Petrie et al., 2014). At one level the data could be read (particularly in the primary school context) as a reflection of a perhaps familiar set of policy problems for physical education, and some equally familiar ‘magical solutions’ consequently being generated. These were, firstly, inadequacies in initial teacher education and an absence of ongoing professional learning for primary teachers being associated with many teachers’ lack of knowledge and/or confidence in teaching HPE. This combined with curriculum marginality and pressures on schools to be directing attention to numeracy and literacy. The resulting situation was one in which fitting HPE into the curriculum and/or being able to provide students with the breath and quality of HPE learning experiences that one might expect from reading the official text of the NZC, become conceived as distinct ‘problems’ for HPE. This scenario is representative of the problematic landscape of primary [H]PE internationally. In these circumstances, for some schools and some teachers, offers from other organisations and/or individuals to provide resources and/or a delivery service, can be seen as a ready-made, ‘magical solution’—particularly if the offer involves no cost. But while this may well be the pragmatic reality of some decision-making associated with primary HPE, it is only a part of the policy, curriculum and pedagogical picture. The New Zealand context and the trends that we were observing provided a vivid reminder that: ‘[p]olicy analysis requires an understanding that is based not on the generic or local, macro- or micro-constraint or agency but on the changing relationships between them and their inter-penetration’ (Ball, 1998, p. 127). More specifically, the picture of policy and pedagogy that emerged from our analysis highlighted that contexts are dynamic and that understanding relational aspects of policy is critical to understanding the ways in which both ‘problems’ and accompanying ‘solutions’ associated with curriculum and pedagogy in physical education are created and/or re-framed.

Talk of relations also implies something about structures and boundaries. The boundaries or distinctions that I particularly direct attention to here centre on recontextualisation, a concept that Ball’s (1998) paper also emphasises as significant. Ball (1998, p. 127) cites Bernstein (1996, p. 24) to make the point that ‘Every time a discourse moves, there is space for ideology to play’. Control of the moves thus becomes important and Ball’s more recent work brings to the fore that structural change is simultaneously symbolic (Bernstein, 1990), with policy networks recognised as simultaneously constituting discourse communities (Ball & Junemann, 2012). The composition of networks and the relations embedded within them are thus identified as ‘critical in defining power-relations that underpin the creation, contestation, recontextualisation and legitimation of discourses in/of HPE’ (Penney et al., 2015, p. 45).

In turning to Bernstein to better understand the networks revealed in our research, our contention has been that the networks that physical education is located amidst are both ‘carriers of discourse and contain sites of discourse, wherein new policy ideas [and we argue pedagogic ideas] are naturalised and made eminently thinkable and obvious as the constituents of public sector reform’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 11). Here, I focus on something that particularly stood out from our research; the changing nature of the ‘recontextualizing fields’ (Bernstein, 1990) and the prospective significance of the changes for physical education. Essentially, we observed a critical linkage between structural changes in networks, the texts that then hold authority and attention in those fields, where (and who) those texts arise from, and the discourses that are consequently being positioned at the fore of ‘educational’ provision. Bernstein (1990) explains that the function and impact of ‘the positions, agents, and practices’ within the recontextualizing field and its sub-sets [the Offiical Recontextualizing Field and Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field] is the regulation or control of the movement of texts, and the legitimation and expression of discourses. Hence, who is influential in this field and what agencies and organisations have status and authority as recontextualizing agents are important. Recontextualizing agents appropriate and transform texts, re-positioning them in relation to other texts and practices, and modifying and re-focusing them through ‘selection, simplification, condensation, and elaboration’ (Bernstein, 1990, p. 192) of content (see Penney et al., 2015).

At the time of his writing, Bernstein identified the Official Recontextualizing Field with ‘specialized departments and sub-agencies of the State and local educational authorities together with their research and system of inspectors’ (p. 192). He described the Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field as including tertiary education institutions, their research activities and associated ‘private foundations’ together with education media, publishing houses, readers and advertisers (Bernstein, 1990). His analysis reflected the policyscape at the time in the UK. Particularly notable given our findings is that Bernstein (1990) pointed towards shifts in the recontextualizing fields that have clearly gained momentum in the context of HPE internationally. Specifically, he indicated that there may be more than one government department active, and that the Official Recontextualizing Field ‘may incorporate, selectively, specialized services from agents/agencies external to it, which in turn alter the position of these agents in their respective fields’ (p. 196, my emphasis). This description—or prediction—rang true in relation to our research in New Zealand and many readers may relate to a situation of multiple government departments active and influential in education policy spaces, and the notion of specialised services from external agents/agencies becoming a very recognisable feature of physical education.

I suggest that there is some policy magic at work here in the sense that changes in policy relations have been progressively advanced that structurally and discursively redefine the policyscape of physical education. Further, I suggest that central to this ‘magic’ is another matter that Bernstein (1990) signalled as vitally important; a ‘crucial dependence/independence’ between the Official Recontextualizing Field and the Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field (p. 208).

A changing policyscape (Appadurai, 1990) and the dissolution of key policy and pedagogic boundaries

This section further examines policy developments in New Zealand and elsewhere internationally to discuss ways in which a number of the boundaries referred to earlier are becoming increasingly blurred. I argue that an emerging feature of the contemporary ‘policyscape’ of contemporary physical education is the weakening (or in some instances, dissolution) of historic distinctions between the Official Recontextualizing Field and Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field, between ‘formal’ and ‘implicit’ curriculum policy (Connelly & Connelly, 2013), and between teachers and other professionals active in the physical education curriculum space. I suggest that these developments have potentially profound implications for future policy and provision, with changing relations between policy actors having implications for the flow and control of discourses in the field (see also, Penney & Mitchell, 2017).

Returning to New Zealand, policy developments with their origins in multiple arenas of government have progressively accentuated a situation in which the Ministry of Education and educational agencies appear increasingly marginal players in the Official Recontextualizing Field. Funding decisions have played a key role in raising the profile of sport and health agents/agencies in this field, to the point that the Ministry of Education has been seen as inactive (Petrie & lisahunter, 2011), with its influence in the field superseded by sporting agencies in particular. As discussed in more detail elsewhere (Petrie et al., 2014; Penney et al., 2015) our data clearly demonstrated that this change in the configuration of the Official Recontextualizing Field was being mirrored in the Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field. In both fields, the impression was that significant displacement of educational agencies was occurring. Further, we identified that funding decisions and the funding streams thereby established by government were central to a new interdependence between the (reconfigured) Official and Pedagogic Recontextualizing Fields. In New Zealand investment in particular policy directions and initiatives (most notably, the KiwiSport funding programme¹ and more recently, the PlaySport initiative²), and in turn particular agencies (in the case of KiwiSport, Regional Sport Trusts), is at the heart of progressively re-shaping relations within and between the Official and Pedagogic Recontextualizing Fields. I suggest that this has simultaneously contributed to a situation whereby a distinction between what Connelly and Connelly (2013) term ‘formal curriculum policy’ (focusing on mandatory curriculum texts) and ‘implicit curriculum policy’ (encompassing policy documents and resources produced by various agencies) also becomes increasingly difficult to make. Funding strategies and the resources and services that they generate, effectively promote particular interpretations of formal curriculum texts, and offer schools and teachers particular approaches to enactment.

The data from our project in New Zealand (Petrie et al., 2014) highlighted that amidst re-configured and re-constituted recontextualising fields, there has been a diversification in the sources of implicit curriculum policy and the resources that are promoted and/or recognised as such. A similar situation is now evident in Australia as many organisations offer resources and services to support implementation of the new Australian Curriculum and state derivatives of this. The situation in Australia and internationally (Evans & Davies, 2015a, 2015b; Griggs, 2010; Powell, 2015) is one that demands that we look closely and afresh at ‘who controls the movement of discourses’ across and between sites of policy and pedagogy in physical education; who and what frames emerging visions of quality physical education; and following Ball (1998) consider, whose interests will be served by the developments occurring.

The final ‘boundary’ that I address in the light of the above research in New Zealand and research internationally that has similarly explored privatisations in/of physical education (Evans & Davies, 2015a, 2015b; Griggs, 2010; Macdonald, 2015; Powell, 2015; Williams, Hay, & Macdonald, 2011; Williams & Macdonald, 2015) is between past, present and future/s. As reported previously (Penney et al., 2015), the surface impression created by our analysis was that the scene of HPE in New Zealand had changed in seemingly profound ways, with quantitative data relating to numbers of providers adding a sense that the change was dramatic. However, Ball and Junemann’s (2012) work prompted us to reflect further on the structural changes and examine the power plays of discourses in and around HPE with a different orientation. Specifically, we were led to question the extent to which the policy dynamics and furthermore, policy outcomes that we were describing should be regarded as ‘new’, given that the power-relations playing out appeared to be further legitimating familiar dominant and arguably narrow discourses of ‘sport’ and ‘health’ in H/PE—while simultaneously marginalising discourses that may support broader views of the knowledge, skills and understandings that define H/PE as a field and as pedagogic practice (Penney et al., 2015).

Following Ball (1998) and Ball and Junemann (2012), I suggest that the subtlety and also familiarity of these policy effects should capture our attention, specifically because of the cumulative effect of incremental shifts in policy networks and their internal and external relations. Ball and Junemann (2012) explain that over time the incremental changes amount to ‘a change in the possibilities of policy, making the unthinkable possible, and eventually, obvious and necessary’ (p. 24). This cumulative policy effect illustrates that changes to policy contexts are not incidental—they are conceived and achieved by design, and they generate new understandings of policy problems and prospective solutions. Hence, the significant changes lie in the sophisticated mix of structural changes and graduated outcomes in terms of what future policy and provision is deemed possible, appropriate and entirely legitimate in HPE. From our research we saw that what we may once have thought of as ‘unthinkable’ as a model for curriculum provision in HPE—with a range of providers displacing and/or replacing teachers and teacher educators as authoritative figures in relation to matters of curriculum and pedagogy—was now entirely thinkable, and presented from a fiscal perspective as necessary and/or highly justifiable. Ball and Junemann’s (2012) work calls for us to probe whether and in what ways the dis- or re-placement of policy actors in education and physical education is accompanied by the replacement of existing value systems and sensibilities with others. Arguably, there is an urgent need for critical policy and pedagogical research that pursues the ways in which equity in H/PE is being (re-)framed amidst such developments (see also Wilkinson, 2017). In the following section, I bring equity more to the fore in looking at another illustration of boundaries, problems, solutions and touches of policy magic amidst developments in physical education.

Senior secondary physical education: the maintenance of established knowledge boundaries

In 2005, the policy and political context in Western Australia was supportive of significant changes in post-compulsory (subsequently renamed senior secondary) education, such that the State curriculum authority embarked upon a the development of some 50 new senior secondary courses and the dissolution of a longstanding distinction between courses that counted for tertiary entrance and courses that did not (Curriculum Council of Western Australia, 2002; Penney, Jones, Newhouse, & Campbell, 2012). At the time, I regarded the context as one of distinct opportunity to advance changes in education that explicitly, privileged issues of equity and inclusion amidst development of a new senior physical education course. It has also been a development that vividly demonstrated that ‘[c]urriculum settlements are by definition unstable, contingent and volatile’ (Luke, Woods, & Weir, 2013, p. 9), with political and media pressure, and a change in State government, ultimately leading to a re-direction of the senior secondary reforms, and in my view, shifts that have seen much of the progressive intent of the new Physical Education Studies (PES) course lost.

To a great extent that intent can be conveyed in terms of efforts to work ‘across boundaries’ in and of physical education, that collectively define the nature and scope of knowledge that is encompassed and valued in senior secondary physical education. The development of the PES course engaged with knowledge boundaries relating to (i) established disciplines and thus, areas of knowledge in senior secondary physical education, (ii) ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ knowledge and ways of knowing (Brown, 2013; Brown & Penney, 2013), (iii) learning within and beyond schools and (iv) notions of being ‘able’ or ‘not’ in physical education. The initial design of the PES course arguably sought to prompt a connectedness and coherence in learning that was progressive for the time, certainly in WA. It drew on insights from developments in Queensland and Scotland in attempting to privilege discourses of integration, personalisation and authentic learning in the curriculum structure and requirements, and was explicit in seeking to open up a range of opportunities for learning in physical education, and enable recognition of learning, in ways not seen before (see also Penney & Hay, 2008). For example, initial texts foregrounded the potential for students to explore content and achieve course outcomes through coaching or officiating roles in addition to that of player/athlete, and encouraged learning connections to be made with participation contexts beyond schools.

In relation to concerns for connectedness and coherency in students’ experience in the PES course, Maton’s (2011) distinction between ‘cumulative learning’, characterised by transfer across contexts and integrative progression, and ‘segmented learning’ characterised by ‘educational practices where learned knowledge is strongly bounded from other knowledges and contexts’ (p. 128), is useful. The former prompts us to span knowledge and learning boundaries; the latter reinforces them. Elements of the new course and particularly, the fact that all units of work were required to address all content areas (see Penney et al., 2012), encouraged a cumulative orientation, but other features and particularly external assessment (see later) countered this. Furthermore, making pedagogical connections requires that we consider both ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ of curriculum (Bernstein, 1990). In WA as in many jurisdictions, how curriculum requirements will be met in particular local contexts is deemed the professional domain of schools and teachers. While I am certainly not advocating for prescriptive curriculum texts, I do see it as essential that linkages between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are directly addressed in curriculum developments, and see boundary maintenance between them as potentially inhibiting advances in both quality and equity.

During the development of the PES course in WA the political and policy terrain rapidly shifted, such that the ‘problems’ for/of senior secondary education in WA were effectively re-defined, in turn demanding and legitimating different policy solutions—and discrediting those previously identified as an appropriate response to the policy problems that were at the fore of the ‘Our Youth; Our Future’ report on post-compulsory education in WA that was published in 2002 (Curriculum Council of WA, 2002). The shift was essentially from a focus on matters of equity, to concerns with rigor and standards; and from a focus on outcomes and learning opportunities that would support students to achieve those, to distinct content knowledge that would (and could) be assessed, particularly in the context of external examinations. Boundaries were effectively re-drawn at this stage, between valued (externally assessable) knowledge and ways of knowing, and ‘other knowledges/ways of knowing’—but also therefore, between who the senior physical education course would appeal to or not, who would be best placed to achieve in it or not. Ultimately, the developments in WA highlighted (not for the first time, see e.g. Thorburn, 2007; Thorburn & Collins, 2003) the tensions that can arise between curriculum intentions and accompanying ‘high stakes’ assessment requirements.

Other research has revealed these tensions as equally evident in senior secondary physical education in Victoria, where a formal curriculum text in some ways supports an emphasis of the inter-relatedness and interdependency of learning in, through and about movement, while external examination arrangements appear largely at odds with that emphasis (Brown & Penney, 2013, 2016). Exploring teachers’ interpretation and enactment of the Victorian Certificate of Education Physical Education (VCE PE) official text has also raised interesting issues in relation to Connelly and Connelly’s (2013) notions of formal and implicit curriculum policy, showing in particular that guidance provided about the written VCE PE examination, together with past examination papers, effectively take on authoritative status as implicit curriculum policy resources, shaping (and arguably narrowing) interpretations of the official curriculum text that then play out in physical education classrooms and pedagogies (Brown & Penney, 2016). Here then, boundaries between assessment, curriculum and pedagogy are crossed, with external assessment the driver, while other boundaries are clearly drawn—most notably again in terms of what is valued knowledge in the VCE PE context, how that can legitimately be communicated in senior physical education, and who therefore, is advantaged in this setting.

In relation to teaching and learning, senior secondary physical education seems a context that vividly illustrates Frandji and Vitale’s (2011) point that typically, ‘contradictory current education policies require cumulative learning, yet foster segmented learning’ (p. 12). It is a context that brings to the fore the need to be examining the interplay between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment particularly from an equity perspective. I suggest that across physical education more broadly there is a need for more research that actively explores their combined capacity to support breadth of learning in physical education and meaningful application and extension of it in contexts outside of schools; and that works to alleviate prospective tensions and contradictions amidst multiple sources of formal and implicit curriculum policy.

Conclusion

In this paper I have used Ball’s (1998) work and insights from Bernstein (1990, 2000) to examine policy developments and pedagogical practice in physical education in terms of ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ that are politically framed and that potentially, run counter to interests in advancing equity in physical education. I have drawn on recent research to reveal aspects of ‘policy magic’ playing out in contemporary contexts of physical education. I have suggested that the ‘magic’ is possible and is achieved as a consequence of both changes and continuities in the ‘policyscape’ that simultaneously frames and limits contemporary thinking, policy and practice in physical education. The concept of boundaries has been used to add depth to analysis of these changes and continuities and particularly, to provide a perspective that enables discursive, policy and pedagogic constraints to be revealed and potentially, challenged.

In closing, I return to points raised by Ball (1998) that provide further prompts for critical reflection in relation to the policy and curriculum developments that I have discussed. Firstly, as indicated earlier, Ball (1998) identifies that changes in the organisation and delivery of education have a broader and deeper impact, ultimately changing ‘the meaning of education and what it means to be educated and what it means to learn’ (Ball, 1998, p. 128). Further, he draws on Taylor (1997) to direct our attention to the prospective implications for equity, as equity issues are themselves ‘framed and re-framed’ amidst and by new policies, such that, ‘[t]he meanings of equity are refracted, reworked and realised in new ways “glossing over the different perspectives of key players” (Taylor, 1997, p. 10)’ (Ball, 1998, p. 126). This, above all, reaffirms the need for us to be both proactive and increasingly strategic in efforts to define for ourselves the policy problems that really matter in physical education. Such action is arguably fundamental to creating conditions in which it will be possible to advance research, policy and practice with a critical agenda.

Acknowledgement

This paper has been developed from my British Educational Research Association (BERA) Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Scholar Lecture, presented at the Institute of Education, London, September, 2014, entitled ‘Big policies and a small world: Physical Education without boundaries?’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See http://www.sportnz.org.nz/managing-sport/search-for-a-resource/programmes-and-projects/kiwisport.

2. See http://www.sportnz.org.nz/managing-sport/search-for-a-resource/programmes-and-projects/play-sport.