Neither a borrower nor a lender be: exploring ‘teaching for mastery’ policy borrowing

Abstract

Mathematics education is a high-stakes indicator of success in ‘über’ performative systems. The search to address England’s mathematics underperformance resulted in cross-national attraction toward, and policy borrowing of, ‘teaching for mastery’ from the high-performing education systems of Shanghai and Singapore. We argue that the cultural baggage implicit in mastery was in direct conflict with fundamental structures underpinning the English education system—structures which resulted in significant barriers toward implementing and internalising mastery. Theoretically grounded in the work of Lyotard, Foucault, and Ball, our paper maps how teachers working in the East Midlands region of England borrowed, implemented, and internalised mastery. Our micro, classroom-scale, examination reveals macro-scale performative drivers, as well as the pitfalls of policy borrowing without due care and attention. We highlight that policy borrowing is far more complex than simply copying and checking for fidelity between the original and the borrowed. We conclude by suggesting that underestimating the consequences of policy borrowing has highly significant and even detrimental outcomes at both the micro and macro scales.

Keywords:

• Policy borrowing
• performativity
• cross-national attraction
• mastery culture

Notes

1. Andreas Schleicher was the then Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) education director, with the OECD leading PISA.

2. OfSTED is a non-ministerial department of the UK government, reporting to Parliament. OfSTED inspects state schools and some independent schools, childcare, adoption and fostering agencies, and initial teacher training, and regulates a range of early years and children’s social care services.

3. See also the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS).

4. This target required a 59-point improvement from 495 to 554 with the highest PISA score for maths in Europe being Liechtenstein 535, and globally South Korea 554.

5. From exploring the literature, the fourth of these conditions most closely maps with the mastery policy borrowing under investigation here and is the focus of this paper.

6. The hubs, in conjunction with NCETM, publish a newsletter: Bespoke.

7. The project adopted the British Educational Research Association (BERA, 2011) ethical guidelines and all names of participants and organisations are pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

8. We also asked a sample of the participating teachers to highlight themes they identified as particularly revealing—they also identified the mastery as policy and culture themes.

9. For example, Reuven Feuerstein’s work on cognitive acceleration which underpinned the Cognitive Acceleration through Mathematics Education (CAME) Let’s Think Through Maths, and Thinking Maths programmes.

10. NQT is the term to delineate Newly Qualified Teachers, teachers in their first full-time year of teaching in a school, and the support structures put in place for them.