New
Perspectives for Learning - Briefing Paper 35
Education
Governance and Social Integration and Exclusion
Context
of the Research
Recently, changes have taken place in the way
education is governed in Europe. There has been a movement away from
governing by rules and directives to governing by goals and results, which
has often been in combination with the deregulation and decentralisation of decision-making.
This project has studied the implications of such a
transformation in relation to different contexts of educational traditions
and to the societal consequences in terms of social inclusion and exclusion.
It has explored the implications of these transitions in education
governance during the 1990s in Australia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK (England and Scotland).
The
project has aimed to explore the rules that organise policy, so that these
rules may be reviewed and alternative possibilities explored.
Key Conclusions
It
was identified that educational policy can be changed by strategies
involving the management; legislation and the way resources are allocated.
The studies showed that such measures were carried out in perceived social
contexts of instability and uncertainty in order to create consensus and
harmony and to improve economical competitiveness. This presumed harmony and
consensus made critical discussions of policy and the search for
alternatives less likely in the public spaces of education. Arguments for educational
restructuring had a fatalistic emphasis where no alternative options were
present. The following conclusions were reached: -
- The
way in which educational policy is steered, has moved away from
traditional centralised control policies to more decentralised policies
in which local government has more control over how resources are
allocated.
- Resource
steering has involved the transfer of fiscal management to local
districts, with changes in the workplace, curriculum and professional
relations, contract management, new self-evaluation procedures and laws
to modernise the education system. This has also involved addressing the
problems of social exclusion.
- National laws have introduced more explicit programmes for character,
moral and civic education to address perceived needs of cultural
dislocation and disintegration.
- Centralisation and decentralisation of educational governance co-exist. At one end there are tighter assessment
strategies in teaching, increased attention to quality assurance through
measurement of children’s and teacher performance, and other
accountability measures. At the other end of the spectrum are school
‘educational zones,’ - just one example of recent policies to
decentralize – by developing partnerships between the school,
community, the State and business.
- There
are also new governing strategies for the professional development of
teachers as well as giving them more professional autonomy through
greater involvement of them and local school administrators in school
and community decision-making related to the decentralization processes
of schools.
- There is an increase in bureaucracy and administration to monitor the
school through increased differentiation in management and the
involvement of local and national politicians.
- The professionalisation strategies have increased work demands on
teachers and school administrators and control of their time has
increased. But, this has reduced teachers’ capacity to work with
individual students, as additional resources have not been made
available.
- However, quality assurance through assessment and evaluation is
increasingly being determined centrally, thus increasing teachers' participation while reducing
teachers' autonomy.
- However,
there appears to be a shift away from teachers addressing social issues
to a pedagogical focus on the individual knowledge and attitudes of
pupils.
- Categories that classify individuals and groups by socio-economic status
and poverty – thus relating to inclusion in schools appear to have
remained the same since the 1960s. But the categories relating to
differentiation, marginalisation and exclusion have shifted to include
ethnicity, gender and race, including more detailed categories about
family and delinquency in order to identify and target educational
programmes, such as single parent families and teen-age pregnancy.
- The
cause and effect relationship of both ways of classifying exclusion are
being correlated with characteristics of deviance. For example, the
problem of marginalisation and exclusion is related to the social
problems of lack of discipline in the community, unemployment, and
dysfunctional families (single parent, teen-age pregnancy) and
educational attainment. Therefore
excluded groups are becoming defined through new social categories of
deviance that make it less likely for these populations to ever become
'of the average'.
- These
external categories of deviance are then
transferred into the school as internal ways of categorising students
and it is then assumed that the role of the school is to re-socialise
the child and family that are perceived to be deviant and lacking
educational success.
- Categories
for statistical analysis are created in a way that helps decisions about
how problems are acted upon, by relating them to the causes of the
problem. However the formulation of the categories, have often been
influenced by whatever is the “social policy thinking” at the time.
- Statistical
categories ‘make-up kinds of people’ as individuals are transformed
into calculable and governable groups. The ‘kinds of people’
targeted have typically been drawn from theories of deviancy, with the
groups and individuals designated by social planning for rescue or
redemption in the name of progress.
- Thus,
the characteristics of deviant students need to be placed against those
that define the ‘good’ student.
That student is one who is flexible, has problem-solving skills,
collaborates and is perpetually involved in a self-monitoring and active
‘lifelong learning.’ The quality of child is one that embodies an
entrepreneurial logic.
- It
is also recognized that the ‘targeted’
populations also use the categories to gain greater resource allocation.
Key Recommendations
The
following recommendations were made: -
-
There
is a need to reconsider the significance and underlying categories and
distinctions that are used to order and classify who is included and who
is excluded in policy and research about policy. The systems of reason
are governing mechanisms that should not be taken-for-granted as the
principles that order the ‘problem-solving’ of policy and actors are
not neutral but constructive and productive of educational practice.
- There
is a need to re-examine what has been generally accepted about social
policy as it might be obscuring rather than clarifying the issues that
need to be considered. This requires not giving up questions of justice
and equity but how the rectification of social problems defines the
normal and the deviant.
- There
is a need for more careful consideration of policies relating to
decentralisation with those relating to centralisation.
- While notions of market, individualization, and more efficient local
management of educational systems seem to have certain orthodoxy in
reforms, policy makers should consider the downside of such reform, such
as how new patterns of segregation and exclusion are produced.
Further Information
Full title of project - “Education Governance and
Social Integration and Exclusion in Europe” (May 2001).
Full
Final report, Partner
details, Website
Contact Person
Prof. Sverker Lindblad
Uppsala University
Department of Education
PO BOX 2109
Uppsala
SE-750-02
Sweden
Tel: +46 18 4710000
Fax: +46 18 4711651
Email:
sverker.lindblad@ped.uu.se
Visit http://www.pjb.co.uk/npl/index.htm
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Last
updated 28 June 2007