Contexts of Policy Enactment

This subject will examine the complexities of education policy enactment, considering the range of factors that affect whether and how policy is taken up in sites of education practice. This includes considerations such as materialities of policy enactment, such as available funding, professional development, or place-based specificities of education governance. It also includes interpretative factors of how local policy actors and practitioners understand or align with the purposes of education policy, and discursive considerations of the narratives and framing of policy ideas and their match with considerations on the ground. The subject will explore research on both policy implementation ‘successes’, as well as examples of policy failure, in better understanding the complexities of whether and how policy is enacted in practice.