Effective policy enactment in Australia: enabling and constraining conditions for policy actors in an era of impact in education

Questions about teacher quality and teacher education have dominated educational discourse across the world for at least two decades (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018) despite a lack of evidence that such a problem exists (Bourke et al., 2016). We adopt Ball’s (2015) use of the term “discursive” to signal the ways in which discourses or communicative acts are undertaken and circulated within and across contexts. For example, how a term like “evidence” is used with increasing frequency in educational contexts and is often conflated with large-scale randomized controlled trials as the type of evidence that counts. Over the past decade, a common solution to the discursive problem of teacher quality has been to promulgate policies to improve the classroom readiness of teacher graduates (see Fitzgerald & Knipe, 2016; Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group [TEMAG], 2014). The discursive concept of classroom readiness is often used interchangeably with “impact on student achievement.”

In this study, we subscribe to Ball’s (2015) assertion that policy is a process rather than the taken-for-granted solution to a problem (see also Ozga, 2020a). As a process, it goes beyond policy implementation and shifts thinking to what Ball et al. (2012) name “policy enactment.” In contrast to policy implementation, which often elides context and the groups of people “outside the formal machinery of official policy-making” (Ozga, 2000b, p. 113), policy enactment foregrounds both context and the diverse cast (Ball, 2015) of stakeholders (policy actors) involved in the policy process. We utilize reflexivity theory (Archer, 2012) to provide the conceptual tools for a nuanced analysis of the emergent properties of these dynamic policy contexts, including the ways in which these properties are perceived as enabling and/or constraining for these diverse policy actors.

First, we discuss the policy context related to impact in Australian education, with reference to the global context. Next, we frame our study through the lens of reflexive policy enactment, to account for the contextual conditions that enable and/or constrain decision-making around policy enactment. We describe our Australian study that investigated reflexive policy enactment of the
impact agenda by principals, teachers, teacher educators, and regulators/policymakers. We use deductive analysis to interrogate the understandings, practices, and conditions of influence for these policy actors. We conclude with a discussion about the enabling and constraining contextual conditions in the enactment of the impact agenda in education in Australia.