In this chapter, we focus on arrangements between the state and non-state actors in the delivery of continuing professional development for teachers that extend existing understandings of education privatisation (Verger et al, 2016a), the reform of public services ‘by substitution’ (Ball, 2010) and, particularly, theories of the ‘shadow state’ (Wolch, 1990, 1999). First, we examine post-qualification continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers in England through an analysis of one recent, significant policy intervention in the context of English Conservative political interests in promoting ‘social mobility’. As such, this chapter builds on previous chapters by looking at policy interventions designed to help teachers already in the classroom to ‘keep getting better’, a phrase often used to describe the continuous improvement required of the existing teaching workforce to meet national economic needs (for example, Barber and Mourshed, 2008), sometimes also captured in the phrase, ‘Love the one you’re with’ (Wiliam, 2013). The chapter therefore primarily develops our argument that a highly distinctive situation has emerged in England since 2010 around both pre-service and continuing teacher development that makes England interesting in terms of cultural political economy. Of note are the relations between the state – its responsibilities, resources and values – and non-state actors, relations of a qualitatively different kind to those that have been part of the English education– welfare state assemblage historically.

We then return to the case of Relay Graduate School of Education (GSE) to trace the emergence of a major player in the US education shadow state. We show that the concept of shadow state is still relevant in the context of teacher education in the US as it was when Wolch first coined the term. Further, our analysis of Relay also substantiates our argument that the kind of shadow state, and the political economy underlying it, in England is highly distinctive internationally and a radical departure from historical precedents. Relay GSE is a profoundly different type of organisation, with profoundly different capacities, resources and relations to the state, than the organisations and sole-traders we see being co-created and empowered by the state in England.

At the end of the film adaptation of Michael Lewis's The big short (2010) – an account of how the US sub-prime mortgagebacked securities market led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 – one of the main characters, in voice-over, offers this coda:

This book, like that character, identifies the GFC as a significant point in the evolution of social policies around the world and, particularly, policies for education and for the preparation of schoolteachers. The GFC was a social, cultural and political shock to globalised systems as well as an economic one. It prompted nations to rethink different aspects of their welfare states – not only benefits (such as pensions and sickness payments) but public services such as health and education, their scope and scale. As Andrew Gamble put it soon after the immediate shock, the GFC created ‘spaces for thinking differently’ about societies (Gamble, 2010, p 703), at the level of a ‘fundamental reordering’ (p 4), and the aftershocks of the GFC have unfolded across societies in the years that followed.

As the character in The big short observed, there was also a new emphasis on linking teachers – and their effectiveness in achieving good test results for their students – to the economy, often explicitly to measures such as gross domestic product, to industrial productivity and international competitiveness, from a ‘human capital’ perspective (Becker, 1975). Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2004) had previously shown how teacher education became a ‘policy problem’ – and not only a teacher education policy problem but a much larger one of societal consequence. So it wasn't that this hadn't happened before; it had (see also Furlong et al, 2009).

This book is the first in the ‘shorts’ format within the Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education series. This is an important book, a book that is challenging for the field of comparative and international education (CIE) and one that opens up new ways of thinking differently about policy analysis, policy mobilities and education policy transfer.

The authors, Steven Lewis and Rebecca Pratt, propose that bringing work on policy mobilities and assemblage theory together can creatively foreground ‘the contingent nature of policy as emerging through, and as, complex multidimensional encounters of people, places and things’. This, they go on to argue, has ‘important implications for how we might do and research policy, as well as consequences for the notional source of power and how it operates within policy spaces and/or actors’.

There is currently no sustained treatment in published work that explicitly combines policy mobilities and assemblage theory while exploring possible new ways forward for CIE. This is, therefore, original, complex and multifaceted work that we hope comparativists and readers across the social sciences will find helpful in taking them deeper in to the related literatures and the innovative approach developed throughout the volume.

The ‘shorts’ format fits these aims well for the ways in which it enables complex issues and arguments to be presented in relatively concise and accessible ways. Indeed, all involved in the production of this volume hope that this publication will stimulate further work, developments, challenges and creativity, along these and related lines within and beyond CIE and policy constituencies.

A second key strength of the book relates to the authors’ efforts to demonstrate the potential of their ideas through practical application and a ‘worked example’ – based upon their own ongoing research on Pacific Regional Education Policy. Given our collective shared history of research in CIE within the Pacific region, or what pioneering Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa (1993) called ‘our sea of islands’ or ‘large ocean states’, this connects closely to my own work in CIE (Crossley 2019) and adds an important and timely contribution to the contemporary decolonization debate and literature.

At the outset, we offer a policy mobilities and assemblage theory conjoined approach (PMAT) to simultaneously access the insights made possible by PM and AT. However, our conjoined PMAT approach is not the mere sum of these respective parts, whereby a dash of PM and a sprinkle of AT provide more than each possibly could in isolation. It is instead something quite different, enabling a new approach that, while at times having features recognizable from PM and/or AT, is patently neither of those individual things. While there is indeed something of an additive effect from deploying each approach in tandem with the other, we see PMAT as providing an analytical, conceptual and methodological approach that is at once comprehensive, systematic, explicit and consistent. We can then, after Deleuze and Guattari, be creative of concepts and produce something that is both (more or less) useful and (more or less) different. We then leave it to the reader, ultimately, to determine whether what we have produced (intentionally and otherwise) is worth the effort as they seek to address research questions or policy scenarios through the lens that our PMAT approach affords.

At the same time, our purpose in bringing PM and AT together in conversation is to open up new lines of flight. While we want to offer something that is comprehensive and systematic, we are equally open to it taking us along paths that we ourselves might not foresee, both now and in the future. It is in this vein that we present PMAT as an approach, not the approach. We are not trying to present it as something that is definitive, fixed and complete, but rather as something that might open up new lines of thinking and questioning for ourselves and others, including in relation to PMAT, and in ways that we are yet to consider.

To this end, we begin this chapter by summarizing the key points of synergy between PM and AT and use these as the basis for developing our conjoined approach. We then delimit the key features of PMAT, presented as four distinct but related orientations for thinking that respond to four fundamental questions: Where is policy? What is policy? Why is policy? and How to research policy? Within each orientation for thinking, we offer some suggested specific research questions to help demonstrate how each might be applied to a research problem.

Following our discussion of the importance of the enterprise narrative to policy makers, in this chapter we look at two ways in which concepts from business and economics have been appropriated in teacher education reform consequential to a new emphasis on school systems ‘growing their own’ (that is, training and educating) their own supply of teachers. We examine the growing importance of branding and vertical integration in teacher education, particularly in how they seek to address questions of quality and effectiveness but also how they figure in the social control of ideas about teaching among the teachers being ‘grown’. The chapter begins with a discussion of the influential concept of ‘producer capture’.

Producer capture and welfare state failure

The eminent British sociologist of education Geoff Whitty made a significant contribution to understanding teacher education policies in England and internationally. Whitty traced a ‘growing antipathy’ during the 1970s ‘towards the “swollen state” of the immediate postwar years’ on both economic and cultural grounds (Whitty, 2008, p 165). The Thatcher governments after 1979 sought both to disrupt and shrink welfare state responsibilities, partly on market choice principles and premised on the supposed failings of the state to deliver high quality public services. Whitty points out that these Conservative governments ‘acted to increase the power of the “consumer” and reduce that of the “producers” ‘ (2008, p 166). With specific reference to teacher education, and drawing on the work of Landman and Ozga (1995), he described the basis of the supposed failure of, particularly, universities in teacher education as the idea of producer capture, something that Taylor described as the ‘process whereby the goals of an organisation reflect the interests and prejudices of its employees (the producers) rather than those it is supposed to serve (the consumers, customers or citizens)’ (Taylor, 2008, np). University-based teacher educators and their institutional cultures were the guilty producers in the failures of the English education system and Whitty showed that this argument was made by both the Right and the Left:

In this chapter, we delineate the key theoretical resources – namely, policy mobilities (PM) and assemblage theory (AT) – that inform our conjoined PMAT approach and our efforts to better understand policy movement in a time of unprecedented connectivity and complexity. Within such a globalized milieu, we characterize comparative and international education (CIE) as, in part, a concern for the emerging modes, spaces and relations of education policy making and governance, and the influence these exert upon localized ‘moments of encounter’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002) with policy. By working creatively across PM and AT, our aim is to destabilize the taken-for-granted and universalizing concepts that frequent policy research in CIE and instead foreground the contingent nature of policy as always becoming; that is, as emerging in unpredictable ways.

As such, this chapter details our own understandings of and engagements with PM and AT. Perhaps most importantly, we seek to move beyond PM and AT (and their related concepts) as being mere ‘words’. Specifically, we want our thinking with PMAT to move beyond neologisms or linguistic devices that allude to something in a general sense but which elude concrete meanings or research applications, or that fail to engage with the more substantive features of these concepts and approaches. For instance, we seek to distinguish this work – and the development of our conjoined PMAT approach – from ‘assemblage’ standing as a vague shorthand for something that is complex or relationally defined. Our purpose here is not to suggest that an ‘assemblage’ cannot be useful when describing or denoting something that is complex, or to police some form of orthodoxy around the (in)appropriate uses of assemblage. Arguably, people (including us) will deploy these terms because they feel there is something gained by using them, even if their interpretation differs (more or less) from the concepts’ original purpose. That being said, our purpose is to emphasize what more or what else can come from moving beyond more superficial understandings and uses of PM and AT, and instead consider their respective lineages and the broader intellectual tradition in which they were developed: the fields in which they originated, the questions they sought to answer and, importantly, the questions they might be profitably directed towards in CIE research.

In this book, we have taken cultural political economy approach to the critical analysis of teacher education policies and institutional practices after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. While this has involved the examination of political-economic ideas and their materialisations underpinning the activity of preparing teachers, specifically for public education systems, across national contexts, it has also involved considering the cultural dimensions of these materialisations and how they continue to evolve historically. We have situated our analysis within broader historical accounts of the emergence of the institutional practices of teacher education and how these practices have been associated with the expansion of public education and how this provision has responded to changing social class relations, industrialisation and nation-building as well as the exercise of colonial power, including through enslavement and segregation. We have shown how new forms of teacher preparation have emerged, and continue to develop, in relation to historically evolving welfare state structures – and the challenges to them – and their underlying cultural as well as political-economic bases. The three global settings on which we have focused – the US, England and Norway – provided critical reference points in this discussion as well as allowing us to explore the nuances of similarity and difference, something which we believe makes our research distinct from the more usual teacher education policy critiques that can assume that there is both a uniform travelling idea (usually neoliberalism, writ large) as well as uniform effects across contexts (usually the creation of free or quasi-markets as a result of privatisation). We have traced the power of the enterprise narrative – in terms of its power as a narrative – and the allure of the teacher education policy entrepreneur and how the creation of shadow state structures has been both channelled through value-laden discourses of reform and innovation as well as through power relations that have influenced the distribution of state funding.

While we have argued that the turning point of the GFC in 2008 accelerated the crises of teacher education that had been more or less consistent features of public policy over the previous three decades,

The previous chapter explored how a PMAT approach directs our attention to the ability of policy assemblages to produce space-times. In this chapter, we extend this disruption of the ontology of space-time to the ontology of policy itself and explore how a concept of policy assemblage requires us to focus on what policy does (or produces) in our worlds and why it does so, rather than simply describe which components or actors (pre-existing) comprise policy (see Figure 5.1). We see this as a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around what is policy; that is, rather than assuming policy has a fixed identity, we ask instead what policy does to better understand what it is. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate how PMAT offers different ways of understanding the apparent inconsistencies in intentions, rationalities and outcomes in a given policy, which provides new insights into why we so often persist with policy that we ‘know’ to be ineffective at achieving its stated outcome, or else accept policy that may appear to be against our ‘interests’.

Within comparative and international education (CIE), a conventional ‘rationalist’ definition of education policy is that of an institutional (State and non-State) instrument intentionally designed in response to a ‘real’ educational problem.1 It is then deemed to be (more or less) effective at solving this problem, influenced by the extent to which it is ‘flawed’, be that by context (it doesn't work here), poor implementation (it wasn't enacted properly) or poor design (it wasn't conceived properly). If we adopt a more critical lens, education policy can instead be defined more in terms of an act or process of the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ (Prunty, 1985): an attempt to intervene both in the way we understand education problems and solutions, and the means of defining acceptable or valued ways of being educational or educated. This way of thinking rejects the rationalist, linear and teleological notions of policy offered in more conventional policy studies and situates the actors of policy as discursive subjects, operating within and reproducing (or resisting) discursive norms and the conditions of possibility they produce.

We began this book by problematizing comparison, the very notion central to the being of comparative and international education (CIE). Building on many scholars before (and no doubt, yet to come), we argued that CIE has conventionally undertaken comparisons between supposedly fixed entities (for example, nation-states, time periods, school sites) for the purpose of determining difference from some prior notion of unity, and then identifying the possible cause(s) and effect(s) of this divergence (for example, culture, policy settings, practices). We posited the limitations that this can place on thinking in general, and particularly in relation to education policy. Finally, we reflected on how our own encounters with(in) CIE and policy – and our own engagements with onto-epistemologies relegated to the side of the ‘abyssal line’ historically made invisible by Enlightenment forms of thought – has stimulated this thinking.

In response, we offer policy mobilities and assemblage theory (PMAT) as an attempt at creating an approach that adopts a different view and purpose towards comparison. It does not presume that you can compare two things for the purpose of determining causality (that is, Place A does Thing X, which accounts for Outcome Y), or to understand one thing through the lens of a different other (for example, understanding Place A as being similar to Place B). Rather than reducing uncertainty, PMAT sees comparison as an inherently disruptive activity, in which encountering the outside of one's territory (that is, the psycho-social assemblage we inhabit) provides different opportunities for sensing things differently, and thus makes possible new ways of thinking, relating and doing. This is not to say that nothing comes from comparison, but it is more about explicitly reframing the purpose for which comparison is undertaken, and the desire to which comparison is responding. Put differently, we must think about what comparison does, as well as which possibilities are enabled by doing comparison. If CIE (and the social sciences more generally) are indeed at something of a crossroads in having to reckon with issues relating to the broader politics of knowing and being, then we must consider whether, and if so how, the ‘redemptive’ purpose of CIE (that is, the desire to improve educational opportunities and outcomes by reference to other places and times; see also Ball, 2020) can continue to exist alongside the decentring of previously privileged (and often unquestioned) epistemologies and ontologies.

As noted in the preceding chapters, we have chosen to demonstrate the utility of policy mobilities and assemblage theory (PMAT) via a focus on the respective orientations for thinking that it makes possible and emphasize the ways PMAT destabilizes more conventional comparative and international education (CIE) research assumptions and approaches. Orientation #1, summarized in Figure 4.1, is a key feature of PMAT, insofar as it focuses on two central issues: space as becoming and emergent (rather than a priori), and policy and space as recursively and mutually co-constituted. We see this as a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around the question, where (and when) is policy? That is, what are the space-times in which we find policy? Put differently, PMAT approaches space and policy as a concern for the ongoing and intertwined processes of movement and (re)production. At the risk of repeating ourselves, we feel that these assumptions not only undergird PMAT but also, significantly, the empirical ‘realities’ of what we typically conceive of as distinguishable space-times of policy processes, including policy making, movement, contestation and enactment. Such orientations then provide new ways of thinking about existing policy spaces and scales (for example, the role of the State and State power in shaping the mobilization of policy) and help to complicate solely geographical, State-centric accounts of policy making. To this end, we will now consider a specific policy assemblage – the Pacific Regional Education Policy, or PREP – to first show the relevance of the broad research interests before then exploring how each of our specific research questions can take shape as actual policy research.

Although the broader question of what policy does will be discussed more in Orientation #2, we focus here on just the dimension of space. To this end, Orientation # considers how policy problems produce certain configurations and categories of space (and, at the same time, not others). For instance, PREP evidently animates a particular concern for becoming-regional As a policy assemblage, PREP both responds to and – among other effects – (re)produces a regional policy space that brings together vastly different nation-states, concerns and contexts into a singular geo-political bloc (that is, the Pacific) for the purpose of developing and enacting common education policy initiatives.