Curriculum reform as contested: An analysis of curriculum policy enactment in Queensland, Australia

This paper explores how teachers and school-based administrators at a large, low socio-economic primary school responded to policy support for a highly detailed version of the new national curriculum in Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ of field, habitus and capital, and recent theorising of policy enactment, the paper indicates how competing relations between different policy actors influenced how they responded to the policy enactment process. The research outlines what is described as the ‘field of policy enactment’ as a contested site with those educators with more capital more actively responding to policy prerogatives, at the same time as those with less capital were often simply managing to cope