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Critical Studies in Education

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Disciplinary texts: a policy analysis of

national and local behaviour policies
a b c a
Stephen Ball , Kate Hoskins , Meg Maguire & Annette Braun
a
CeCEPS, Institute of Education, University of London, London,
UK
b
Department of Educational Studies, Roehampton University,
Roehampton, UK
c
Department of Education and Professional Studies, Kings College
London, London, UK

Available online: 04 Jan 2011

To cite this article: Stephen Ball, Kate Hoskins, Meg Maguire & Annette Braun (2011): Disciplinary
texts: a policy analysis of national and local behaviour policies, Critical Studies in Education, 52:1,
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 Critical Studies in Education
Vol. 52, No. 1, February 2011, 114

Disciplinary texts: a policy analysis of national and local

behaviour policies
Stephen Balla , Kate Hoskinsb , Meg Maguirec and Annette Brauna
a
CeCEPS, Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK; b Department of Educational
Studies, Roehampton University, Roehampton, UK; c Department of Education and Professional
Studies, Kings College London, London, UK
(Received 5 May 2010; final version received 6 September 2010)

Drawing on ESRC-funded research this paper considers some characteristics of the

policy process in schools using the construction of behaviour policy in four English
secondary schools as a case in point. It argues that behavior policy, like other policies,
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is enacted in particular and distinct institutional contexts with their own histories; that
behaviour policy at the school level is an ensemble of issues/fragments, principles,
directives/imperatives and procedures/practices which are messy and complex; and
that behaviour policy is very much a collective enterprise. This process of construction
and enactment of policy draws upon a range of resources developed within contexts of
recontextualisation and involves sophisticated interpretations and translations of policy
texts into action.
Keywords: behaviour policy; discourse; interpretation; policy enactments; translation

1. Introduction
Policies in practice do not exist and are not enacted in schools separately from one another,
despite the tendency for most educational research to treat them as though they do. Rather,
at the institutional level policies are complexly inter-related and can dominate or are sub-
ordinated within these relations. Furthermore, within schools policies in many cases are
composites artful, sometimes awkward and ramshackle, constructions that are unstable,
synthetic entities. They are incited and informed by and draw upon policy texts that are, at
least in some cases, open to interpretation (Ball, 2008). We aim to substantiate and develop
this view of the policy process in schools in relation to a specific example behaviour
policies in compulsory school settings in England and the construction and enactment of
behaviour policies within four state secondary schools.
This paper draws on an ESRC-funded study of policy enactments in secondary
schools (RES-062-23-1484) based on case-study work in four ordinary schools. The
study has two main objectives, one theoretical, which is to develop a theory of policy enact-
ment, and one empirical, which is a critical exploration of the differences in the enactment
of policy in similar contexts. It focuses on four main issues: (1) the localised nature
of policy actions, that is the secondary adjustments and accommodations and conflicts
that inflect and mediate policy, (2) the ways in which many different (and sometimes

*Corresponding author. Email: s.ball@ioe.ac.uk

ISSN 1750-8487 print/ISSN 1750-8495 online

2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2011.536509
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 S. Ball et al.

contradictory) policies are simultaneously in circulation and interact with, influence and
inhibit one another, (3) the interpretational work of policy actors and (4) the role of
resource differences in limiting, distorting or facilitating responses to policy. We are work-
ing in four co-educational, non-denominational and non-selective secondary schools. The
schools are moderately successful schools with a sound track record of academic achieve-
ment, performing at around the national average. They have experienced and established
head teachers in post. The sample of schools is from different Local Authorities, includ-
ing one that is in inner-London, two in different parts of outer-London and a fourth in a
county town. We are collecting four kinds of data: (1) contextual information from each
school, (2) policy texts national, local and school-centred, (3) observations of meetings,
training etc. and (4) semi-structured interviews; we are also conducting a policy audit in
the schools. The research will generate a data set of 93 digitally recorded and transcribed
interviews (78 thus far) together with a wide range of documentary and observational data.
Initial coding has involved content analysis and critical discourse analysis. Analysis, theo-
risation and writing are ongoing and are fed back into data collection to enable progressive
focusing and identification of new themes and issues.
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2. Peculiar behaviour
The concern with behaviour and discipline in schools has been a peculiarly English pre-
occupation. However, how behaviour problems have been understood within schools has
always been contested and has been differently interpreted at different times. This paper
does not consider the history of behaviour within English secondary schools, rather it
addresses the ways in which current policy discourses locate and delimit behaviour pol-
icy in particular ways but are, at the same time, actively translated and complexly enacted
into practice.
Currently, we argue, behaviour policies in English secondary schools are thoroughly
subordinated to the standards agenda, that is, the pressure on schools, which is transmitted
to and exerted on teachers and students, to raise achievements, measured in terms of exam-
ination performance. This is rendered, within the current iteration of policy as behaviour
for learning (see http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=
productdetails&PageMode=publications&ProductId=DfES+0513-2004&). The domi-
nance of behaviour for learning does not mean that other competing views of behaviour,
control and discipline do not exist, but rather that the policy focus, for now, has been
captured in a specific set of texts/policy practices which marginalize and de-legitimate
these alternatives.
The New Labour governments (19972010) continually prioritized standards in
schools, measuring a schools performance almost exclusively via its test and examina-
tion outputs. In the continuing attempts to optimize achievement levels in schools, the
government policy attention focused in particular to the role of behaviour in shaping possi-
bilities for learning. The term behaviour for learning refers to attempts by schools to raise
achievement via a sustained effort to ensure a safe and secure learning environment for
all children (DCSF, 2009). Achieving this common sense goal has become a central and
organizing policy initiative in schools, informing approaches to classroom management,
teaching and learning practices and school leadership structures and responsibilities. As
four of our respondents (drawn from many examples), two deputy Headteachers and two
assistant Heads, explained:

. . . we deal with behaviour if its inappropriate or interfering with a students achievement,

but the focus is all about achievement. We dont want to turn out well-behaved individuals we
 Critical Studies in Education 3

want to turn out individuals who have got the skills, qualifications to be able to go on and lead
a successful life. (HE)
The impact of behaviour on learning isnt something you can afford to take for granted. (NW)
We work hard on behaviour here, and I think it is much improved. We have a behaviour support
learning area downstairs the Learning Zone. (DA)
Id like to think that the work that we do [on behaviour] encourages and, sort of, opens gates
and lowers barriers to, you know, higher attainment. (NB)

Schools are awash with policies, initiatives, procedures and strategies aimed at producing
and sustaining positive behaviour for learning. For example, the Department for Children,
Schools and Families (DCSF) explains that the Improving Behaviour and Attendance
for all programme aims to improve pupil behaviour and attendance, supporting practi-
tioners through developing a consistent approach building on the best current practice
(http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/behaviourandattendance/ index.cfm). Behaviour for learning is
also linked with and articulated through various policy imperatives and programmes acting
upon and operating within schools, for example, uniform regulations, truancy and atten-
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dance (see below), bullying (for example: Safe to learn: Embedding anti-bullying work in
schools is the overarching anti-bullying guidance for schools [DCSF, 2007]), violence, sub-
stance misuse (for example: Drug and alcohol education [DCSF, 2008]), knife crime (see
below), civic engagement and citizenship (for example: Inspecting citizenship: 1116, with
guidance on self-evaluation [Ofsted, 2002]). Within schools, however, behaviour for learn-
ing consists of an ensemble of behaviour initiatives and their related discourses, which
are mediated through the enactments of groups of diverse social actors and the context
(demography, staffing, resources, buildings and facilities, history etc.) in which a school is
located (see below).
A key English policy text in this field is the Steer Report (Steer, 2009) Learning
behaviour: Lessons learned, which was commissioned by the Secretary of State for
Education in 2007 and which presents an overview of a wide range of issues and practices
related to behaviour in English secondary schools. It begins by stating six core beliefs.
The first three of which are:

Poor behaviour cannot be tolerated, as it is a denial of the right of pupils to learn

and teachers to teach. To enable learning to take place preventative action is most
effective, but where this fails, schools must have clear, firm and intelligent strategies
in place to help pupils manage their behavior.
There is no single solution to the problem of poor behaviour, but all schools have the
potential to raise standards if they are consistent in implementing good practice in
learning, teaching and behaviour management.
The quality of learning, teaching and behaviour in schools are inseparable issues and
the responsibility of all staff. (p. 3)

The report makes a total of 47 recommendations, grouped under three overall themes:
legal powers and duties, supporting the development of good behaviour and raising stan-
dards higher, and suggests that schools must respond with a multi layered, whole school
approach. The report gestures towards particular forms of policy enactment for schools and
notes that the schools that made the best progress tackled the improvement of behaviour
as part of a whole-school improvement programme. They improved teaching and learning
 4 S. Ball et al.

through focused training and coaching, and planned ways to make the curriculum more
motivating (p. 47).
While the Steer Report is a significant, authoritative and comprehensive policy text, few
teachers in our case study schools were aware of it, even fewer had read it. Nonetheless,
alongside Steer there is currently in play in English education a seething and surging of
behaviour discourse a cacophonous flood of concepts, possibilities, excitements, require-
ments and practices, sometimes conflicting and contradictory, which come in variety of
textual forms and from a range of points of articulation and recontextualisation. This
discourse, focused on behaviour for learning, articulates a particular vision of what it
means to behave and provides resources for rhetorics that can be used to legitimate
ensuing policies and practices, as in the examples above. It is represented in a diverse
body of official texts, commentaries, exemplars, guidance, training courses and materials
for teachers. These come in books, magazines, journal articles, newsletters, CDs, DVDs,
downloads, television programmes, software, consultants reports, Local Authority (LA)
events, Higher Education and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses. That
is to say, policy is re-worked, represented and re-articulated within what Bernstein (1996, p.
47) called the official recontextualizing field [ORF] created and dominated by the state and
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its selected agencies and ministries . . ., but which is now increasingly infiltrated by for-
profit providers (see Ball, 2009). In relation to behaviour policy among the official sites and
sources are:

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is the government
department with responsibility for childrens services, families, schools and 1419
education (www.dcsf.gov.uk).
TeacherNet sets out the UK governments standard for UK teachers and schools-
related professions (http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/). Behaviour4learning provides
its users with access to the research and evidence base informing teacher educa-
tion (http://www.behaviour4learning.ac.uk/). Every Child Matters is described as
a shared programme of change to improve outcomes for all children and young
people (www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters).
The Training and Development Agency for Schools (www.tda.gov.uk) are responsi-
ble for the training and development of the UK school workforce.
The National College for School Leadership develops and inspires great leaders of
schools, early years settings and childrens services (www.nationalcollege.org.uk).
Teachers TV offers professional development, CPD and training for everyone
working in education. Finally, the police and criminal justice system both offer
legislative guidance.

The following three examples from the ORF the first a for-profit text, the second avail-
able from the DCFS and the third offered by a Local Authority indicate the sorts of
interpretative and promotional work that is done to bring policy into practice:

Example 1
Our highly successful training in Behaviour for Learning is led out by Peter Hook, one of the
Countrys most popular and experienced trainers in the field. It has been used by colleagues
from over 800 schools across the UK and abroad to help create highly effective learning
environments.
We take a highly pragmatic and practical approach to all our courses. Behaviour for
Learning is no exception.
 Critical Studies in Education 5

The training is firmly rooted in, and reflects, the reality of todays classroom. We regu-
larly work in classrooms to ensure all of our advice and support is tried, tested and relevant to
experienced and inexperienced teachers alike. There are six key strands of support and train-
ing that we can provide to take you on the journey towards a highly effective, practical and
sustainable approach to behaviour for learning. Some of these strands can be undertaken on
their own to support your existing areas of development or they can be combined to fit in with
a wider programme. (The Critical Difference website, http://www.thecriticaldifference.com/,
November, 2009)

Example 2
Improving Behaviour for Learning is an interactive DVD commissioned by the DfES as part of
the national strategy for improving behaviour and attendance in secondary schools. This DVD
is a drama-based resource that looks at ways of promoting positive behaviour, full attendance
and inclusion, and minimising low-level disruption in the classroom. (TeacherNet)

Example 3
Behaviour for Learning (B4L) Service (Redcar and Cleveland)
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The Behaviour for Learning Service is part of Inclusion Support Services. It is a strong team
of highly experienced specialist staff dedicated and committed to improving outcomes for
children and young people in line with the Every Child Matters Agenda. The service promotes
inclusive education by enhancing the capacity of schools to meet the needs of children and
young people experiencing behavioural, emotional and social difficulties. Funding for this
service is delegated to schools, enabling them to buy services as required.

The service works in partnership with schools by:

Offering advice on the development of consistent policies and practice in relation to

pupil behaviour in order to raise achievement
Providing pupil observation and assessments of individual or group behaviour
Contributing to the statutory assessment process for children and young people with
special education needs
Offering advice and training for schools (teaching and non-teaching staff) on strategies
for preventing and dealing with problem behaviour
Offering advice on individual cases where behaviour is a cause for concern which may
result in exclusion
Undertaking individual support work with children and young people and their
parents/carers
Undertaking group work with children and young people e.g. circle time, transition,
social and emotional skills, anger management/self control, problem solving, peer
mediation schemes
Working closely with other services/agencies in the development of joint strategies to
promote positive behaviour in schools
Contributing to the development of Pastoral Support Programmes and multi agency
meetings for children and young people at risk of exclusion
Providing health checks for schools to reduce potential risk of exclusion

Attending to and keeping on top of this glut of material created problems for the staff at
our four schools. Again from among many examples:

I think its difficult now because theres so many things online that youre expected to refer to.
And even in the induction files for new staff theres lots of hyperlinks on the forms rather than
I think it must have used to be on the form before. (RM)
 6 S. Ball et al.

. . . it just becomes a bit wearing because you have to cope with every new thing; you have to
read [everything]. Do I read things through properly? Not always. I make a very quick scan
and mark it with a decision there and then. (PVB)

To a great extent schools can pick and choose from this abundance of material avail-
able from within the state and from a range of third party agencies (state, voluntary
and private) or ignore it altogether when making decisions about how they will enact or
respond to behaviour for learning. However, they cannot escape from making a response
producing a policy in these terms. The process of selecting out and selecting from
and producing local behaviour policies is complex and dependent initially on the deci-
sions a schools Senior Leadership Team (and governors) make about school priorities at
particular moments in time, coupled with the pressure of meeting government targets, leg-
islative imperatives and the reality of resourcing and supporting these and other new (or
reworked) strategies, policies and initiatives as well as local necessities and pressures. As
one Headteacher put it very simply, but also representatively:

I tell you what it is, we respond to the minimum level with certain things, to the maximum
level with other things. Depending. (KS)
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However, behaviour policies do present particular and unusual challenges to schools.

In addition to the policy texts indicated above, legislative frameworks also increasingly
impinge upon school behaviour policies, with the effect of a juridification of practice.
According to TeacherNet (2009), currently in the UK teachers and head teachers have
more legal powers than ever before to discipline pupils. These have be put in place
in part on the basis of recommendations made in the Steer Report (Steer, 2009), that
schools be granted new powers to help them ensure discipline and secure the coopera-
tion of parents. New legal responsibilities were also established by The Education and
Inspections Act 2006, which has for the first time offered specific power for teachers
to discipline pupils for breaking a school rule, failure to follow instructions or other
unacceptable behaviour (TeacherNet, 2009). The Act has also topped up disciplinary pos-
sibilities outlined in The Education Act 1996 and The School Standards Framework Act
1998. TeachingExpertise.com summarizes these new powers, noting that the Education and
Inspections Act 2006 re-enacts other existing legal provisions on:

the responsibilities of governing bodies for discipline; and

determination by the head teacher of a behaviour policy. (section 61 of the School
Standards and Framework Act [HMSO, 1998])

Schools are also implicated in legislation aimed at tackling and reducing youth crime,
disaffection and lack of civic engagement, for example:

the Violent Crime Reduction Act (2006) (via power of members of staff to search
pupils for weapons);
the Criminal Justice Act (2003) (via substance abuse); and
the anti Social Behaviour Act (2003) (via truancy).

According to the Audit Commission (2004, as cited in Solomon & Garside, 2008) main-
stream agencies, such as schools and health services, should take full responsibility for
preventing offending by young people (p. 26). These Acts provide supporting legislative
 Critical Studies in Education 7

powers for school governors and Senior Leadership Teams (SLTs) and this legislation fur-
ther complicates and places further burdens and expectations upon behaviour for learning
policies, strategies and initiatives in schools. Schools are placed at the centre of societal
policy problems, particularly in terms of issues relating to social disorder and deviance.
Local enactments must to some extent take account of these responsibilities alongside and
in relation to the pressure to perform.

3. Policy enactments
Within the context of policy discourses and their expectations and constraints outlined
above we want to make three general points about the assembly and realization of actual
behaviour policies in secondary schools. These points will of necessity be made sparingly
here and will be unpacked and developed further as our research continues.
First, behavior policy, like other policies is enacted in particular and distinct insti-
tutional contexts with their own histories, resource sets (budget/infrastructure), staffing
(recruitment/turnover/experience/values) and dealing with different local social prob-
lems and intake demographies. The challenges of behaviour differ from one school to
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another, as does the capacity to respond. (Given space available we can only offer a glimpse
of those some aspects of those contexts):

We do have a rather large cohort of weaker teachers that would get annoyed, you know, wound
up by the low level disruption and it would escalate very quickly, rather than being kept in
classrooms and dealt with that way. (GS)
Weve got more capacity than a lot of schools in our circumstances. (NW)
Given the nature of our intake that means we are really addressing quite major issues of kids
going off the rails . . . we have a healthy mix . . . you know in terms of kids here having
different models of how to be . . . the boys from the estate were really the hardcore and now
you just see them leveling off and changing. (NW)
Were still predominantly Asian, as we have been for ten years. But out of those now, what do
I mean, theres a wide gap between achievement and home life. (RM)
We are probably 95/96% white, working class. Theyre not badly off and most of them want
jobs that are manual labour in the future. (GP)

Our four case study schools varied in their ability to recruit staff, especially in areas, like
Mathematics and Science. They also employed very different proportions of adults other
than teachers, for example, Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) to qualified teaching staff
and used them very differently. One school used the LSAs extensively in pastoral work,
at the other extreme another used them almost exclusively within subject departments to
support classroom learning. The schools also had different styles and quality of plant
producing different behavioural ecologies. They accounted for the problems of behaviour
differently in relation to their different intake characteristics. In addition, the schools and
individual actors have built-up their policy positions and policy infrastructures in relation
to behaviour over time and changes to either are not easy:

Youve got to get it right because you cant afford to have it go backwards and it takes quite a
lot of effort to make changes. (NW)

These histories and positions are informed, inflected and sometimes challenged by changes
in the wider policy environment but only in extreme circumstances (crises like Special
 8 S. Ball et al.

Measures1 ) are these accumulations of principle and practice obliterated entirely2 . Key
teachers also bring with them an accumulation of personal experience, which is brought to
bear within the policy process:

By the time people reach my position and youve worked in four or five different schools, one
is most likely making comparisons between the different schools and working out your own
working hypothesis on why behaviour in some schools is better than in others. (NW)

Second, behaviour policy at the school level is an ensemble of issues/fragments, prin-

ciples, directives/imperatives (legal/legislative), procedures/practices, which in their
messy and complex, wild profusion are not easily separated out. In practice behaviour
policy embraces a variety of problems and necessities and meanings and interpre-
tations (in relation to practice), which are added to and subtracted from over time.
The subjects of behaviour policy (in a variety of senses) and that which constitutes
behaviour policy in current schooling encompasses a wide range of elements, as listed in
Figure 1.
Policy responses and policy documents are also polyvalent. At the level of account-
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ability, in its various forms the overlapping and interrelation of responses to policy (local
documentation or practice) allows for double counting. That is, responses and prac-
tices represented in action plans and policy documents can be reconfigured to satisfy
different policy expectations (Every child matters is a good case in point). Institutional
policies can be re-configured in ways that suit or respond to the expectations of dif-
ferent policy audiences parents, Ofsted, Local Authorities, Social Services high-
lighting different points of focus, e.g. anti-bullying, knife crime, safeguarding etc. or
address different institutional needs, like attendance rates, uniform adherence or race
relations.
In the processes of enactment these subjects of policy are translated into a complex
of programmes, initiatives, interventions and tactics within schools some new, some very
old (see Figure 2 for lists of some of those referred to in our interviews), some creative
and some more predictable. That is to say, policy texts and imperatives are translated into
action, or plans for action, which are taken up in whole or part by different actors, in
different situations and at different moments when behaviour becomes an issue.

Anti-bullying
Every child matters
Child protection
Attendance
Uniform
Exclusions
Family holidays
Pastoral work
Knife crime initiatives
Students well-being and safety
Looked-After Children
Drugs education and prevention
Extended schools

Figure 1. Behaviour-related policies.

 Critical Studies in Education 9

Crime prevention/diversion programmes Reward systems

Detentions
Anger management training
Youth Against Bullying project
Conflict resolution
Training teachers in behaviour management
Community cohesion meetings
Transition groups
Peer mentoring buddy group
Assertive Mentoring
Behaviour Improvement Group
Internal Exclusion
Truancy Call (professional phone system)
Zero tolerance on holidays in term time
Competitions for the best attending tutor group
Emergency call-out
Yellow/red cards
Praise, warning and concern
IBehave (software)
Behaviour Forum
Peace Child (organization) theatre around knife crime
Anti-Bullying Club
SLT member attached to each year group

Figure 2. Behaviour initiatives, interventions and tactics.

Campion, one of the case study schools, provides an example of a local variation in
policy translation. Campions intake is almost exclusively White and working-class and
many of the teachers talked about the students lack of interest in educational qualifications
and their attitude problems:
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We just want the students to do well. We know that the hard thing is theres lots of staff
working really, really hard and were not getting the payoff in all the results. And youve got
to question why, you know, why were not getting the results? And a lot of that is to do with
student attitude . . . and were working with parents, working with students. (FN, Assistant
Head and Head of Physical Education)

Campion is located in one of the local authorities in England that is pioneering the work
of Seligmans (2002) Resiliency Curriculum in their schools. This is a US-developed pro-
gramme that helps young people listen to their self-talk (inner voice) in order to enhance
self-awareness, prevent depression and promote life skills such as persistence, resilience,
assertiveness and happiness. This approach has also led to a wide range of research and
the production of guides for schools. Campion has taken this up very seriously and staff
have attended workshop presentations of the scheme. The school hopes that this psy-
chotherapeutic approach will boost student examination performance in the longer term but
there is a simultaneously concern with broader ambitions for mental health and emotional
fulfilment.
Thirdly, behaviour policy in particular is very much a collective enterprise. It is con-
structed and enacted by a wide variety of actors, although invariably a senior member of
the Senior Leadership Team has prime responsibility, often with support from an Assistant
Head:

[My areas of responsibility] I suppose pastoral and attendance and punctuality, reward systems
and child protection . . . lots and lots of things impinge on me . . . another part of my things, I
do uniform. (DA Senior Teacher)

The key actors are typically the conduit for and interpreters of policy texts and provide
others with their interpretation of interpretations (Rizvi & Kemmis, 1987) of these texts.
And some of these key actors provide intellectual foundations for policy and practice:

I read the Steer Report; I am largely in sympathy with the views in the Report. I tend to read
newspaper articles about turnaround schools and I do a lot of reflecting. (NW Deputy)
 10 S. Ball et al.

Its about deciding how much of the material or how many of the ideas you can use directly in
your schools . . . I think it would be useful if they [DCSF] produced a lot less . . . Watching
Teachers TV thats actually very good, you get an insight into other schools. (MO Deputy)

Working with these key actors there are often (but not always) dedicated year teams, but
overall a broad variety of responsible actors are involved in influence over and the articula-
tion and enactment of behaviour policy and we do not mean that in the simple sense
that everyone in schools are responsible for pupil behaviour Weve tried very hard
with this system to make every member of staff recognize that they are responsible for
their classroom management, not me (DA). Rather, most schools award posts of respon-
sibility for such things as Every Child Matters, child protection, anti-bullying etc. and
various specialists and liaisons are drawn into the behavior-related policy process. In one
of our schools students are centrally involved in the form of a Behaviour Improvement
Group:

Peer mentoring is a very strong example of student voice because they do the training for
the next year group and they are fully consulted by people running ABC [Anti-bullying club]
about activities and they will make suggestions . . . we have sat down with groups of students
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to discuss their views about behaviour in the school, weve taken students to visit other schools
and look at their systems, weve had feedback from students . . . and we have had applications
for memberships of the BIG [Behavior Improvement Group] which will be an ongoing group
to help run behaviour policy. (NW)

Behaviour policy is constructed, managed and developed across school boundaries, inside
and out within local policy networks which in the language of Actor-Network theory are
contested and precarious multiplicities which order practices, bodies and identities through
complex enactments (see Fenwick, 2010). This means in our schools the involvement
of the Youth Offending Service, local Pupil Referral Units, Social Services, Education
Welfare Officers, learning mentors and LSAs, Special Educational Needs Coordinators,
Youth Disorder Teams, CAMS workers (Mental health service teams, psychotherapists
etc.), behaviour consultants, LA behaviour advisers, Somali Youth workers, community
police liaison officers, Safer Schools Police Officers and Behaviour Partnerships (involv-
ing other schools) (although interestingly these were not mentioned in our interviews).
Internally, behaviour policy is enacted by Heads of Year, SLT, SENCOs, peer mentors,
LSAs, teachers with responsibility for Every Child Matters (ECM), Child Protection, PSAs
(Parent Support Advisers), BSO (Behaviour Support Officers), drama teachers (theatre was
used in three of the schools) and students (as above).
These collective efforts involve the deployment of a variety of expert knowledges
(like Seligman, 2002) and forms of training (National Specialist Programme for Leaders
in Behaviour and Attendance, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust [SSAT] and
Community Leadership courses) and experience, alongside confusion, necessities (legal
and institutional) and discordant, incoherent and contradictory beliefs and values, prag-
matism, borrowing (from policy texts and other schools) (and in some cases avoidance of
texts), advice (from consultants, LAs, SSAT, National College for School and Childrens
Services Leadership etc.), muddling-through, creativity and experimentation and asym-
metrical power relations (of various kinds), sedimentation, gaps and spaces, babble and
dissensus and material and contextual constraints and limitations. The policies that emerge
are the cannibalised products of multiple (but circumscribed) influences and agendas
(Ball, 2005, p. 46). Enactments therefore, cannot be read-off from texts and neither can
 Critical Studies in Education 11

they be reduced to anything that might be called an implementation gap. Policy is always
contested and changing (unstable) always becoming. Policies in our schools always
seemed to be not quite finished or about to be changed. That is, there was a:

. . . complex interplay between discourses and ground-level practices, conflicting choices

and pressures, between the political [behaviour as an issue] and the technical [coping
at the chalk face], and indeed the metamorphosis of flexi-actors, criss-crossing sites, scales
and spaces. (Lendvai & Stubbs, 2006, p. 17)

This is what Riseborough (1992) calls the empirically rich-underlife to policy

intention (p. 37).

4. Discussion
We suggest here that it is only possible to begin to think sensibly about policy and its
enactment if we work with an encompassing (extensive) and conceptually dense definition
of policy and policy processes. That is, what Lendvai and Stubbs (2006) refer to as a more
dynamic and open-ended framework (p. 17). Furthermore, we must recognize policy as
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a composite of (1) regulation and imperatives, (2) principles and (3) multi-level and col-
lective efforts of interpretation and translation (creative enactment) and that policies are
enacted in material conditions, with varying resources, in relation to particular problems
that are constructed nationally and locally. They are also set against existing commitments,
values and forms of experience. They are made up from a wide variety of source materials
and ideas and involve a variety of actors in the process of their production. In this way
policies are almost always localized and customized. They are translated into practice,
where Translation is a process of continuous displacement, transformation and negoti-
ation (Herbert-Cheshire, 2003, p. 461) (and enactment). Translation is a form of active
readership (Lendvai & Stubbs, 2006, p. 4) a process of re-representation, re-ordering, and
re-grounding through various discursive and material practices . . . a process of displace-
ment and dislocation . . . (p. 6). Translation and enactment of behaviour policies involve
processes of borrowing/sharing/adaptation done through diverse and changing networks
of actors/participants, in and out of school.
This process cannot be understood as either active resistance or passive acceptance, but
the continuous transformation of a token by many different people who slowly turn it into
something completely different as they sought to achieve their own goals (Latour, 1986.
p. 268, as cited in Herbert-Cheshire, 2003, p. 461).
It also involves selection, systematic neglect and double counting one policy doc-
ument may serve to address and perform different policy goals and requirements for
different audiences. Key institutional policy actors have the task of rendering the policy
into something that is coherent for these audiences. However, as we indicated at the begin-
ning of the paper, the translations explored here are set within a structure of dominance,
they are articulated for the most part and, in this case, within the prevailing discourse of
standards, although there are traces of earlier now marginalized behaviour discourses in
our data.3 This gives a particular inflection to the meaning of behaviour and the construc-
tion of enactments in relation to learning. So while the interpretations, iterations and
interactions we have adumbrated here produce different assemblages of policy in differ-
ent schools they are not as different as all that. That is to say, different combinations
of principles, imperatives and practices do constitute different forms of behaviour policy
 12 S. Ball et al.

at the institutional level but these are mainly assembled with the tools and concepts of,
and remain set within the discursive boundaries of, Behaviour for Learning. Behaviour
for Learning generates the primary tools and concepts and the language through which
behaviour policy in schools is thought, talked about and written down. All of this high-
lights the demanding and sophisticated nature of policy enactment and the enormous levels
of creativity (within limits), energy and commitment (as available) involved for this enact-
ment. To reduce all of this to a problem of implementation is a travesty of the policy
process and a massive interpretational failure by researchers and policy-makers.

Notes
1. Sometimes a school is placed into special measures by Ofsted Inspectors if it is judged as inad-
equate (Grade 4) in one or more areas and if the inspectors have decided it does not have the
capacity to improve without additional help. Schools placed into special measures receive inten-
sive support from local authorities, additional funding and resourcing and frequent reappraisal
from Ofsted until the school is no longer deemed to be failing.
2. Attwoods comprehensive history and commitments were still very much in evidence and
Wellesley still bore traces of its previous incarnation as a Grammar school.
3. Amongst the discursive formation of behaviour discourse operating in our four secondary
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schools it is possible to detect traces and effects of previous and alternative intellectual fash-
ions in behaviour policy, pointing to legacies of competing and conflicting discourses. On
one hand, psychological approaches to behaviour, developed in the mid-twentieth century by
American psychologists Maslow and Skinner (amongst others), promoting understanding of chil-
dren as unconscious meaning makers, became increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards. The
focus here is on helping children develop internalized ethics and internalised control. Children
are encouraged to understand and manage their own behaviour. On the other hand, there are
approaches to behaviour as something to be managed, focusing on extrinsic pressures to enable
children to behave in a way that is seen as good. Behaviour management discourses focus
on making people act in certain ways for extrinsic reasons, for example, avoiding punishments
or gaining rewards, but does not offer understanding of why particular ways of behaving are
preferred.
Legacies of these particular approaches to managing young peoples behaviour, and
traces of others, were evident in approaches to behaviour in our four schools, although often
in diluted forms; this was apparent in recognition by long-serving staff of the supposedly new
approaches to learning as reworked versions of earlier discourses:

I mean, Im sounding a bit cynical about them but, I mean, because Ive been teach-
ing for such a long time I think that a lot of initiatives that we see I have been through
before under a different name. And they are coming round again with a fancy new
name. And theyre not new. (WJ)
. . . the whole idea of assessment for learning [AFL] isnt particularly a new idea as
far as Im concerned but is massive in schools. I mean, if youve come across the
term AFL, every school has got to have it, you know, and . . . . But I think that some
of them are just kind of jumping on a bit of a bandwagon and arent really taking the
whole concept comprehensively into their schools. You know, its just another thing
that youve got to do it. (WJ)

A schools endorsement of aspects of these competing approaches to understanding and man-

aging behaviour (or strands/ diluted versions of them) results in differing enactments at an
institutional level and will also shape enactments of relevant social actors, depending on the
views they hold. Though schools do draw on different approaches the forcefulness of the stan-
dards agenda and the press of targets would seem to ensure that extrinsic behaviour management
is predominant. These earlier discourses are often maintained by specialist actors working on
the margins of school activities, for example those working with disruptive groups, here the
prevailing discourses do not fully apply.
 Critical Studies in Education 13

Notes on contributors
Stephen Ball is Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Department of
Educational Foundations and Policy Studies and Centre for Critical Education Policy
Studies, Institute of Education, University of London and Managing Editor of the Journal
of Education Policy. His research is focused on issues of social class and education policy
analysis. Recent publications include: The education debate: Policy and politics in the 21st
century (2008, Bristol: Policy Press), and Education plc: Private sector participation in
public sector education (2007, London: Routledge).
Annette Braun is a Research Officer at the Centre for Critical Education Policy Studies,
Institute of Education, University of London. She is working broadly within the fields of
sociology of education and education policy and her particular research interests are in gen-
der and social class, transitions from education to work and professional identities. She has
articles published in a number of journals including Community, Work and Family, Journal
of Education Policy, Critical Social Policy, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and
Sociological Review.
Kate Hoskins is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Roehampton University. Her
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research draws on the sociology of education and education policy, with a particular
focus on social class, gender and ethnicity. She has articles published in Womens Studies
International Forum and the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education.
Meg Maguire is Professor of Sociology of Education at Kings College London. Her
research is in the sociology of education, urban education and policy and the work and
lives of women teachers. Her recent books include Becoming a teacher: Issues in sec-
ondary teaching (2007, Milton Keynes: Open University Press); Education, globalisation
and new times (2007, London and New York: Routledge) and The urban primary school
(2006, Buckingham: Open University/McGraw Hill).

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