This article examines the spread of new public management (NPM) across European education\ud systems as it has traversed national boundaries. While recognising the transnational dimensions\ud of the spread of NPM, the authors offer new insights into the importance of national contexts in\ud mediating this development in educational settings by focusing upon NPM within three European\ud countries (England, Italy and Norway). We reveal its recontextualisation in these sites and the\ud interplay between NPM, and local and national conditions. This analysis is underpinned by a theoretical framework that seeks to capture the relationship between education and the state\ud and to reveal tensions produced by NPM both as a shaping force and an entity shaped by local\ud conditions in these contexts. The article concludes by focusing upon the complexities and\ud specificities of NPM recontextualisation in the three countries as a basis for a reflection upon\ud possible future policy trajectories

Contemporary research on the European policy space in education has paid much attention to decentralisation, deregulation and new modalities of privatisation and marketisation, but there is less focus on how these processes and policies are actually played out in education. It is argued that understanding the role of commercial actors, new local and global markets and public-private partnerships in the governing of education becomes increasingly important. The aim of the article is to introduce the special issue on commercialisation of the European Educational Research Journal by discussing some general issues: theoretical and methodological considerations when studying privatisation and commercialisation in the governing of education, conceptual clarifications, and finally, possible themes and topics for study, but also for further debate.

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This article deals with the ‘troubled history’ of head teachers’ evaluation in Italy, as a specific strand of the controversial and fuzzy embedding of New Public Management (NPM) discourse in the Italian education system. Since the 1990s, NPM has shaped both policy agendas and professionals’ subjectivities, leading the way to a process of reculturing and restructuring of education. Drawing on policy texts’ analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy actors and professionals, we focus on the discursive problematisations underpinning the repeated attempts to evaluate heads and their ‘leadership as a lever for improvement’ and their implications in\ud terms of processes of subjectivation. The article offers a descriptive\ud mapping of the entering of NPM in the Italian education system and\ud analyses some ironies of the Italian NPM turn, addressing the paradoxical performative powers of the NPM strategies for the transformation of expertise and the regulation of the activities of professionals

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This article focuses on the increasing centrality assumed by non-educational consultants in the processes of policy design and knowledge production about education in Italy. We identify the recent establishment of the National School Evaluation System as a key policy trajectory and we focus on the case of the last policies to evaluate Italian schools (called Evaluation to Develop School Quality and School Evaluation and Development – VALES) as a point where a major shift occurs. We analyse these policies in a governmentality perspective as heterogeneous assemblages of knowledge(s), technologies and expert subjectivities. Our analysis shows how key changes in the dynamics of knowledge production in Italian education are producing a repositioning of the loci of policy imagination outside the boundaries of the State. Addressing the specific case of the VALES policy, we highlight how the displaced evaluative dispositif has widened the spaces for consultancy at the school\ud level, fostering the interplay between private expertise and professionals in delivering policies and producing knowledge about education. We interpret the widening of the spaces for consultants and consultancy as part of a neo-liberal process of re-culturing of the Italian Education State (i.e. a process of endogenous privatisation) and the embedding of New Public Management knowledges and technologies within its texture

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This article deals with the changes introduced in the Italian education system after the 1997 School Autonomy reform. Looking at the complex interplay between global influences and processes of local inflection, the work explores the degree to which we are witnessing a significant shift towards a new mode of governance and the interplay between governance changes, shifts in the mechanisms of control and the shaping of professional subjectivity. Analysing the interplay between politics, policy and culture, we draw on Newman’s analytical model to map the changes in the modes of governance and interpret them in terms of tensions between centralization/decentralization and internal/external change. The article highlights two main ‘paradoxes’ that cross-cut the political project of reforming education in Italy: (1) the coexistence of an attempt to introduce decentralized forms of governance and empower self-regulating actors with the tightening of hierarchical ties; (2) the simultaneous request to fulfil new managerialist accountability demands and continue to deal with hierarchical forms of control.