Alternative approaches to governing street-level work in the classroom: Australian tales of entanglement and distance

© 2021 Jordana Catherine HunterThe delivery of public schooling is far from straightforward. School education is complex, involving competing interests and an uncertain technology (Labaree 2008, Wilson 2000, Rowan 2006, Kennedy 2016b). Meanwhile, teachers tasked with 'making policy work' experience the acute dilemmas of the street-level bureaucrat (Brodkin 2011, Lipsky 1980). Bannink, Six, and van Wijk (2015) argue this creates a 'double control challenge', as governments lack the control tools to support discretionary action while simultaneously aligning decision-making with (often unclear) policy goals. Further work is required to understand how policy designs can influence street-level bureaucratic action under these conditions. The study of street-level action within a nested and multi-level organisational and institutional context allows for a richer understanding of how policy design and operational control decisions influence policy enactment (Hasenfeld 2010, Hupe, Hill, and Buffat 2015, Winter 2012). This study involves a multi-level, comparative case study of two recent Australian policies—the Professional Learning Communities policy in Victoria and the Early Action for Success policy in New South Wales (NSW). Both policies sought to improve student learning by raising teaching quality. However, they differed significantly in the calibration of the policy tools embedded and the operational control strategies employed. The study incorporates over 100 interviews and 60 school-level observations with participants across the Victorian and NSW education departments and six primary schools in 2018. The study’s findings have significant implications for policy design in school education and other policy fields. The findings suggest different policy design choices can have a significant impact on patterns of policy enactment, including the application of discretionary expertise to tailor services to individual client needs. Importantly, this study suggests that more prescriptive policy and capacity building tools, buttressed by a stronger mix of bureaucratic and professional control strategies, may in fact be more effective in encouraging this shift in discretionary action, than less prescriptive policy tools and weaker control strategies. The study also highlights how street-level organisational contexts can have a significant influence on policy enactment. Despite this, well-calibrated and targeted policies can enable policy enactment even in challenging local contexts. The study also shows that Australian teachers retain considerable scope for discretionary action in government schools and many teachers value opportunities for high quality, classroom-focused professional development, including substantive feedback on their teaching practice. The policy implementation literature is often presented as a tussle between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ perspectives, with proponents of a ‘synthesis’ view offering an alternate framing recognising the interrelationships between different actors within a policy system (Brodkin 2012, Elmore 1979, Hill and Hupe 2014, Matland 1995). This study contributes strong empirical support for the ‘synthesis’ view as a theoretical and methodological orientation for researchers and a valuable practical perspective for practitioners. Recognising the importance of information, opportunities and constraints generated across multiple levels of a system, in which different actors play distinct but often complementary roles in the joint production of policy and policy outcomes, is critical to charting a path forward to more effective policies