Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: examining policy, practice and school positioning

Abstract

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where ‘enactment’ refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south‐east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school‐based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own ‘take’ on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities.

Keywords:

• policy
• enactment
• secondary schools
• personal learning and thinking skills

Acknowledgement

The research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (project number RES‐062‐23‐1484) and is projected to run from September 2008 to December 2010.

Notes

1. Not every school has all of these policies, and some overlap, for example, one school refers to ‘behaviour management’, while others call it ‘behaviour policy’.

2. A newly introduced qualification for secondary students that aims to combine ‘theoretical study with practical experience’ (DCSF 2009).

3. In contrast, one of the other schools had only just started to think about how they were going to address the policy demands of PLTS, and the fieldwork in the fourth school was still at an earlier stage of data collection at the time of writing.

4. We were not actually aware of this when we contacted the school initially.

5. Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education), the government’s inspectorate in England.