Tore Bernt Sørensen Centre for Globalisation, Education and Social Futures

1. Dimensions of acceptability: England in the OECD TALIS programmeGSOE, University of Bristol, 29 February 2016 Tore Bernt Sørensen Centre for Globalisation, Education and Social Futures Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol t.b.sorensen@bristol.ac.uk

2. The presentation • The research project • The OECD programme Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) • Contextual conditions in England: 3 dimensions of acceptability • Comments and debate

3. PhD project: “The political construction of TALIS” • What structures and mechanisms made TALIS possible and made it what it is? • Through what processes did TALIS emerge and develop? • What does TALIS do? • What does TALIS mean, politically and theoretically? Pluri-scalar governance focus including three comparative cases of Australia, England and Finland

4. Empirical material • Documents (official policy conclusions, reports, policy briefs, news items, meeting materials) • Qualitative research interviews (35 interviews conducted) - intervieweesselected on the basis of desk research and snowballing • Today a focus on England (5 interviews)

5. Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) “The overall objective of TALIS is to provide robust international indicators and policy-relevant analysis on teachers and teaching in a timely and cost-effective manner. These indicators help countries review and develop policies in their efforts to promote conditions for high-quality teaching and learning.” (OECD 2014, p.27)

6. A few facts about TALIS • TALIS 2008 the first round, with results reported in 2009. 24 countries participated. • TALIS 2013 conducted during 2012-2013. initial results published in June 2014. 34 countries/regions, including Finland and USA. • Two questionnaires: one for teachers, one for heads • Staff in lower secondary school (ISCED 2) main target group • International options to include also ISCED 1 and 3, and TALIS-PISA link • England took part in TALIS 2013 focusing on ISCED 2

8. TALIS as policy instrument • Nodality as ressource: using the property of being in the middle of a social network from which to dispense and draw in information. Involves also organization (Hood and Margetts, 2007) • ”Persuasive” information-processing policy instrument (Peters, 2015) - revolves around OECD ”open method of coordination”

9. Taming education • Indicator development as part of education governance and the authoritative allocation of values • Statistics enables the unification and administration of political entities: the very creation of a space of common measurement have descriptive (capturing reality) as well as prescriptive dimensions (master unpredictability) Desrosières, A. (2002). The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Harvard University.

10. A critical realist notion of causality (Pawson, Dale) “Outcomes are the result of Mechanisms in Contexts” - an alternative to quantitative research traditions of correlational or multivariate analysis - step away from the description of regularities to their explanation through causal reconstruction of processes that account for macro-phenomena

11. TALIS as outcome resulting from mechanisms in contexts The TALIS programme as outcome resulting fromthe action of underlying mechanisms in particular contextual conditions. Mechanism: current appeal of persuasive information-processing policy instruments in the global educational policy field. 2 contextual conditions: • Knowledge-based economy paradigm fuelled by human capital theory ; the world needs more and better education to drive capitalist development. • TALIS as compromise, engaging a range of policy actors that recognize education as a labour-intensive growth sector in the foreseeable future Will the mechanism be triggered? Sorensen, T.B.(forthcoming). Teachers and the global educational policy field. In Jules, T.D. (ed.) The New Global Educational Policy Environment: Gated, Regulated and Governed. Emerald.

12. What contextual conditions shape the ways TALIS plays out in England? 3 dimensions of acceptability: • Government and unions • England and EU • The fragmentation of the English school system

13. CENTRE OECD TALIS secretariat 5 OECD bodies State government authorities European Commission Instrument Development Expert Group TALIS consortium National TALIS centres Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD – Education International Business Advisory Committee to the OECD PERIPHERY

14. The TALIS ensemble in England • Department for Education • Teachers team (lots of changes in personnel) • International comparisons team (stable) • National Study Centre • NPM: RM Education – edu-tech firm NPM • Partner: Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education, University of London (since 2014 UCL) • TALIS advisory group – consultation stakeholder group • Senior executives from unions and professional associations

15. Timeline of TALIS 2013 • Early 2011: • Late TALIS 2013 project start in England due to General Election in 2010 – ministerial agreement required • Pilot studyw/ 2 focus groups – quotes for TALIS website • Spring 2012: Field trial • March – May 2013: Main data collection • 25 June 2014: Publication of international and national reports – PR disaster due to teacher strike threat (2 Advisory Group meetings, in the beginning and end)

16. Special features • Comprehensive 200 pages report • “Complete” IOE autonomy • Low status academic work • Comparison w/ 9 high performers • National administrative data; school type, Ofsted rating, % pupils FSM, school population’s input and output scores in English and Math • Good response rates: • 75% schools and 83% teachers - 154 head teachers and 2496 teachers

17. Some TALIS results for England • More autonomous schools in England e.g. teacher pay • Greater numbers of teaching assistants and administrative and managerial staff in schools • Long working hours on average (48 hours for FT teachers) - but not face-to-face teaching hours (20 hours) • Half of teachers in England believe that appraisal and feedback are largely done to fulfil administrative requirements • 35% of teachers believe that their profession is valued by society • Teachers are confident in their abilities – self-efficacy is quite high compared to teachers in other countries

18. TALIS questionnaire adaptations • Maximum 5 minutes extra • “In a sense, there’s no freedom in TALIS at all, because the whole thing is so controlled by the OECD.” (RM NPM) • Three sorts of adaptations: • Wording in questions to make them work (7 adaptations) – RM • Extra questions elaborating on job satisfaction – DfE • “To be honest, the job satisfaction ones were to encourage the teacher unions to endorse the survey” (RM NPM) • Family responsibilities and household circumstances – designed by IOE • “All the teacher questionnaires in PISA [and TALIS] focuses very much on this narrow view on teachers within their jobs” (IOE)

19. Dimensions of acceptability “The quality or state of meeting one's needs adequately” (Merriam-Webster online)  There are red lines that cannot be crossed

20. A shared focus on workload - 1st dimension of acceptability • DfE commitment to focus on workload • Teacher Workload Challenge – “the big policy … came directly out of the TALIS results in England” (DfE official) • Monitoring in the future • “… one of the good things with OECD studies is that it is not government-run studies, and it’s not a union-run study, but it’s a study that comes from an external place” (DfE official) • TALIS results fed into union campaigns (e.g NUT “Stand up for education”) • The unions take credit for the focus on the high number of hours that teachers are working, and the kind of work that teachers are doing, and hold government to account (NUT official) • TALIS and PISA offer rich ammunition for unions – but still they are a concern

21. England and EU – 2nd dimension of acceptability “Well, umm, the European Commission and the OECD is like a touchy subject, perhaps, from the England perspective in the research. Because sometimes we think that they are trying to have too much of a voice. They do have a big impact on European countries participation, mainly because they provide funding for quite a lot of the countries. And important and vital funding, so countries won’t participate if they don’t get that. It’s a huge political question in England, and UK, if we should be part of Europe or not. I think it’s an even bigger question in education, because education is supposed to be a devolved responsibility, so therefore, arguably, there shouldn’t be a European Commission perspective on a teacher research project … We don’t feel that there should be a European position on education policy and priority research questions, because they don’t have policy competence in that area.” (DfE official)

22. A system-less system - 3rd dimension of acceptability “… whereas previously the Department’s role would have been quite … involved in kind of communicating to teachers what we think they ought to be doing, putting frameworks together, kind of saying, we are putting these policies in place and you have to work within this framework. What we really moved away from is all of that, towards a kind of really more autonomous system for teachers which means that teachers and their headteachers are the ones that should be making lots of decisions and deciding what to look at, deciding how to organise what they do and structure it. Part of that is that Department of Education officials are no longer allowed to send lots of communications to teachers and to schools directly … I think there is definitely a gap, but it’s not a gap that current Department olicy thinks that we ought to fill.”(DfE official)

23. … a systemless system ”If a system can still be said to continue in England, then an opaque complexity is its main feature.” ”What may appear fragmented, uneven and excluding, compared with the post-war past, can be conceived as a system unified through the data management capacity of the system” ”Pragmatism, the decline of democratic politics and the power of technology will continue to create micro systems nested within larger systems, all of which will be imagined through data as if it comprised a whole. Its direction will depend not on its own past national traditions or structures but on its comparison with other external or world systems” Lawn, M. (2013). A Systemless System: Designing the Disarticulation of English State Education. European Educational Research Journal, 12(2), 231-241

24. Trade union strategies • Rapprochement: Going with the grain of educational reform and seek to maximise gains through interest-based bargaining and identification of common solutions • Resistance: Going against the grain, challenging educational reform and calling for collective bargaining • Renewal: Decentralization offers opportunies for more flexible and participatory forms of organisation on workplace level, breaking free from former bureaucratic and centralised structures. Carter, Stevenson & Passy (2010). Industrial Relations in Education. Routledge.

25. Limitations of today’s analysis and the project overall • Focus on international and national ”arenas of formulation” • The nature of the interview data material and the position of interviewees in organisations • Where is policy settled? Not at meetings …

26. Wrapping up • TALIS as outcome resulting fromthe action of underlying mechanisms in particular contextual conditions • TALIS is a compromise based on negotiation of indicators on teachers and school leaders, and the interpretation of data • 3 dimensions of acceptability as contextual conditions in England • Sovereign decision-making is the ideal, yet move towards globally standardized vocabulary on teaching • More data to come

27. Thank you Tore Bernt Sørensen t.b.sorensen@bristol.ac.uk