Policy actors: doing policy work in schools

Abstract

This paper considers the ‘policy work’ of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the ‘problem of meaning’ and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get ‘enacted’. It argues that ‘policy work’ is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of enactment. The teachers and other adults here are not naïve actors, they are creative and sophisticated and they manage, but they are also tired and overloaded much of the time. They are engaged, coping with the meaningful and the meaningless, often self-mobilised around patterns of focus and neglect and torn between discomfort and pragmatism, but most are also very firmly embedded in the prevailing policies discourses.