Practices of scalecraft and the reassembling of political boundaries: the contested nature of national schooling reform in the Australian federation

Abstract

This article contributes new insights to research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy production by synthesizing the concepts of "policy assemblage" and "scalecraft". By conceptualizing scale as socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori), we argue that assemblage and scalecraft provide generative means for examining how scale is imagined and assembled, and the boundary dynamics associated with these processes. To make this argument, we focus empirically on changes to the governance of schooling policy in the Australian federation over the past two decades. We argue that despite being a federation in which subnational (state and territory) governments maintain responsibility for schools, a new national policy assemblage has emerged that rests upon and produces new forms of boundary imagining, crossing and blurring. This is generating tensions and issues for policy actors, central to which is contestation about federal involvement in national reform. Drawing upon insights from semi-structured interviews with senior policy actors, we argue that new ways of imagining and seeking to govern schooling, at the national scale, grate uncomfortably against the realpolitik of Australian federalism, the principles underpinning the design of federal systems, and forms of scalar thinking that shape how policy actors perceive the "ideal" division of roles and responsibilities.

Schooling for equitable excellence: principles of systemic design

“…Australia makes for an interesting case study for testing the novel model. Located on the periphery of the developed world, with a unique education policy architecture (Savage et al. , 2022), between-school segregation along social, economic and academic lines is pronounced (Maire, 2021), there are high levels of choice, privatization and competition (Perry and Southwell, 2014), variable degrees of school autonomy (MacDonald et al.…”

“…An empirical site to test the assumptions Australia makes for an interesting case study for testing the novel model. Located on the periphery of the developed world, with a unique education policy architecture (Savage et al, 2022), between-school segregation along social, economic and academic lines is pronounced (Maire, 2021), there are high levels of choice, privatization and competition (Perry and Southwell, 2014), variable degrees of school autonomy (MacDonald et al, 2021), public accountability, and it has been dominated by policy incoherence and reform hyperactivity (Ball, 2019). A distinct political-educational imagination has simultaneously sought social democratic ideals of equity and social justice within the architecture of globalization and competitive capitalist economics (Savage, 2011).…”

Global policy mobilities in federal education systems

“…Existing scholarship analyzing global policy mobilities tends to focus on how global influences are adopted and adapted at the national level, paying less attention to the complex power relations and policy dynamics between different political scales within federal education systems (Wong et al, 2018). As scholars have recently argued, research on education policies in federal systems rarely considers the intricate ways that global policy flows interact with and contribute to shaping national and sub-national political and bureaucratic structures, and the relations between these (see Savage et al, 2022;Savage & Lewis, 2018).…”

Imagining “national” funding in the Australian federation: The Gonski Review and the Schooling Resource Standard

“…In line with recent work undertaken by Papanastasiou (2017aPapanastasiou ( , 2017b as well as McKenzie and Aikens (2021), this requires a mobilization and understanding of scale as a category of practice-that is, socially crafted as opposed to a pre-existing or given category. As argued by Savage, Di Gregorio, et al (2021), critical engagement with scalar practices is particularly "crucial in research on federal systems, because scale is a central category used by policy actors to imagine and assemble political spaces and reforms" (p. 963).…”

“…Empirically, this paper focuses on schooling policy in Australia, which has experienced over two decades of unprecedented national reforms, resulting in "major changes to the governance of schooling in the Australian federation" (Savage, Di Gregorio, et al, 2021, p. 963). As Savage, Di Gregorio, et al (2021) write, the intensified intergovernmental collaboration over the past 2 decades has "radically reshaped how schooling policies are made and enacted in Australia's federal system" (p. 964). This has led to what Savage, Di Gregorio et al (2022, p. 962) and others (see Savage, Gerrard, et al, 2021;Savage & Lewis, 2018) have referred to as the emergence of a new "national policy assemblage," which has contoured significantly distinct conditions of possibility for the production and enactment of schooling policy compared with decades prior (Lingard, 2018;Savage & Lingard, 2018).…”