This article seeks to provide a new paradigm for questioning how quality and excellence in teaching practices are understood and evaluated. By combining ideas from complexity theory and Michel Foucault's conception of polymorphous correlations, I argue that a shift away from the forms of thought that engender reductionist evaluations can become a…

Despite the expansion of New Public Management reforms across the globe and complimentary trends of disintermediation, performance and privatisation, local government authorities in England continue to shape local schooling landscapes. In this paper, we document the role of a local government authority in England in an initiative called 'Building…

Recent controversies have highlighted the importance of local school district governance, but little empirical evidence exists evaluating the quality of district policy makers or policies. In this paper, we take a novel approach to assessing school district decision making. We posit a model of rational decision making under uncertainty that…

Background: Knowledge brokering plays an important role in the evidence-to-policy system, but little is known about whether and how it occurs within government departments. Aims and objectives: Using empirical evidence from one UK government department, this article analyses how knowledge brokering takes place inside the policy making process and…

The AAPT/AIP Master Teacher Policy Leader Fellowship is a one-year fellowship that aims to build teachers' policy knowledge, skills, and dispositions to act as change agents in science education policy spaces. The locus of teachers' work is typically perceived as occurring in classrooms or school buildings, directly oriented toward students and…

Background: The canonical view of expert legitimacy in policymaking links it to objectivity and autonomy from politics. Yet, in practice such 'epistemic gains' stemming from the separation of facts and values are problematic, as expert advice inherently combines political and technical considerations. Aims and objectives: This article addresses…

Background: Academic research on technical advice to policy commonly focuses on social and related policy areas such as health, education and crime (Oliver et al. 2014) and disciplinary advice from science disciplines (Jasanoff 1994; Millstone and van Zwanenberg 2001). Little or no prior research in the social sciences have explored engineering…

Exhibits offer insight into what an organization values while providing patrons the opportunity to be challenged and engaged. This paper explores ways exhibits policies can be crafted to move exhibits beyond the walls and cases to create a space for community discussion that promote growth and understanding by providing space for discussions,…

This study applies the policy process framework and bounded rationality theory to look at a specific program, about specific stakeholders, within a policy process, and during a specific timeframe. The purpose of this study was to document the process of establishing and describing how the program's stakeholders navigate, collaboratively, through…

Ensuring that all students graduate high school prepared to pursue a career, postsecondary degree, or enter a certification program requires all stakeholders to work together for a common goal. The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 gave state education agencies the opportunity to partner with their local education agencies, restructuring school…

This Report by Nicola Dandridge considers the different approaches taken by higher education institutions, students, academics and policymakers towards the relationship between teaching and research. It notes how frequently the concept of research-informed teaching is invoked, yet how obscurely it is implemented. The relationship appears to mean…

This article shares what was learned from the feasibility assessment of a nurse-led school-based active surveillance (SBAS) pilot to track chronic absenteeism using myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) as an exemplar. This pilot encompassed a 3-year period with training and feedback from school nurses (SNs) on data…

'We're not useless, we know stuff!', said a four-year-old when asked why adults should ask him what he thinks about his experiences at his early learning centre. This paper describes the literature and methods used to gather children's voices in early childhood and education (ECEC) settings across Stage 1 and 2 of the 3 stage national Learning…

This paper picks up and elaborates on the conception of policy translators in schools -- key actors in the enactment of policy. The qualitative data presented here highlight how it is often middle leaders doing high-profile policy work in schools, turning ideas into actions and bringing policy to life. As translators, they organise, manage, lead,…

This paper explores the enactment of government policy during the COVID pandemic in primary schools in England. Based on interviews with school leaders and teachers across the period 2020-21 (n = 66), drawn from two major studies of primary schools' priorities during the crisis, we argue that school leaders' responses can be understood as a…