Austerity and the Remaking of Education Policy in Europe since 2008

Abstract

The literature about education policy-making in Europe tends to keep education closely in focus, while education's wider determinations are presented in less precise ways. We don't wish in this chapter to lose sight of the detail of education -but we do intend to locate the emergence of new forms of governance, management and curriculum in broader contexts of policy and social and economic change. The main aim of the chapter is to understand central features of educational change by analyzing the kinds of flow and pressure, originating outside, as well as within, the field of education, which impact on the education systems of European states and on transnational institutions. Acknowledging the accelerating pace of change, we discuss it in terms of such vectors of transformation as adaptation to the wave of financial and economic shock that began in 2008, the commitment of mainstream political parties and transnational institutions to austerity measures and the consolidation of neoliberal paradigms, even after the moment of the 'credit crunch' which was momentarily thought to have destabilised them. Alongside these largely economic dimensions of crisis, conflict and change, we will discuss the significance of other forces and events, especially mass movements of migration into Europe, and the renaissance of nationalism and xenophobia that has accompanied them. In complex ways, which vary across European states, these tendencies act to frame educational debates, and to prompt policy changes. i.Before Neoliberalism

Re-articulating the form of the political: Contemporary education governance in the European Union. Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Education policy activities have in recent decades become increasingly integrated with major EU frameworks and strategies, reflecting an assumption about the ‘dynamic effects’ of education, lifelong learning and skills when addressing a range of social and economic issues, as well as novel ways in thinking about policy sectors and intersectoral coordination (Sorensen, 2021). This emphasis on the ‘wider determinations’ of education (Traianou and Jones, 2019: 5) was reinforced with the ‘educational turn’ (Delanty and Rumford, 2005) of the mid-1990s, when the European Commission harnessed the ideas of a learning society and lifelong learning as a driver for modernising Europe as a knowledge-based and social market economy (Lawn and Grek, 2012; Milana et al, 2020). In increasing the salience of educational issues, the Lisbon Strategy of the 2000s proved pivotal for bringing education from the periphery towards the centre in EU policy-making, thereby opening the policy area to influences from other areas – and vice versa (Pépin, 2011; Walkenhorst, 2008).…”

The European Union’s governance of teachers and the evolution of a bridging issue field since the mid-2000s

“…Our contribution to the literature is twofold. Empirically, the paper demonstrates that it is increasingly difficult to make sense of EU education policy on its own terms ( Traianou and Jones, 2019 ) and that policy activities associated with teachers are pertinent in getting at the cross-sectoral implications of EU governance, since teachers as educators and a distinctive workforce are framed as important for the operation and performance of the EU as a political, economic and social entity. The paper argues that EU governance on teachers over the period from the mid-2000s to 2020 has come to form a ‘bridging issue field’ ( Zietsma et al, 2017 ), blurrying the boundaries between education, employment and economic policy, and constituted by increasingly elaborated issue framings, a widening array of actors and an institutional infrastructure, which has evolved dramatically over the period.…”