The role of support staff and social inequalities in UK secondary schools – Putting ‘others' back into policy

This paper draws on a 2½ year qualitative study (2008-2011) in four ‘ordinary’ English secondary schools which explored how schools enact, rather than implement policy.  Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the research worked on the interface of theory with data, arguing that it is only possible to begin to think sensibly about policy and its enactment if we work with an extensive and conceptually dense definition of policy and policy processes (Ball et al. 2012).  Thus we recognise policy as a composite of regulation and imperatives; principles; and multi-level and collective efforts of interpretation and translation (creative enactment).  Furthermore, policies are enacted in material conditions, with varying resources and set against existing commitments, values and forms of experience.  They involve a variety of actors in the process of their production and this paper considers the role of some of those actors, support staff – often just described as ‘others’ in official documentation – who are omitted from most accounts of policy processes in schools. 

In UK secondary school environments, it is in particularly learning support staff (teaching assistants, learning mentors, behaviour officers, etc.) who often have most contact with young people who are considered ‘problem’ students, therefore the policy sense-making (or enactment) of this group of staff can be crucially important to the school experiences of these marginalised groups. This paper will thus examine how policy translation(s) by support staff in the four case study schools may impact and interact with some of the social inequalities the schools are presented with.  It will also ask whether some of these policy enactments may even be instrumental in creating school-intern social inequalities.

REFERENCES

Ball, S., Maguire, M. and Braun, A. (2012) How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactment in the Secondary School, London: Routledge.