Different countries have different histories, traditions, cultures, and practices of student voice and are currently at different stages of their student voice journeys. This paper investigates how ...student voice is coming to be used in relation to classroom practice in different school types and socio-economic settings in the Irish education system. Ireland is a country without a strong tradition or history of student voice and particularly in relation to teaching and learning matters and it is envisaged that this paper will be of strong interest to those in countries where student voice is not yet prominent, but there are also wider implications. This research shows that students are now being consulted in relation to classroom practice in a variety of ways but that even within single school systems consultations are very much connected to school context with voice being used to different extents in different schools in different settings.
This paper makes a novel and important contribution to scholarship by developing and presenting a set of concepts and questions for those researching student voice in Ireland to consider and explore ...in their studies, and specifically in relation to classroom practice at post-primary level. Here, a distinction is drawn between consultations that take place inside classrooms between students and teachers and consultations that take place between management and students and cognisance is paid to school patronage, school socio-economic context, and the career stage of teachers and positions in the school hierarchy. This paper ultimately offers a heuristic device as a starting point for future research on student voice in Irish post-primary schools and sets out to bring about more critical thinking regarding how student voice plays out vis-à-vis classroom practice.
School self-evaluation is a low-stakes policy recently mandated in Ireland and while schools are becoming more consistent in engaging in this internal mode of evaluation, their engagement has not ...been uniform. This paper provides new ways of thinking about, understanding, and explaining how school self-evaluation plays out in Irish schools. Subscribing to the view that policies are not simply implemented but enacted through the creative processes of interpretation and translation, this paper shows how school self-evaluation is performed in Irish schools in various ways by various people. We identify numerous policy actors in our qualitative data: narrators, entrepreneurs, outsiders, transactors, enthusiasts, translators, critics, and receivers. This assortment of actors helps to bring school self-evaluation to life but as it comprises heterogeneous entities with varying characteristics, levels of experience, and motivations it is simply not possible for this policy to be implemented in schools as policymakers envisage.
This paper picks up and elaborates on the conception of policy translators in schools - key actors in the enactment of policy. The qualitative data presented here highlight how it is often middle ...leaders doing high-profile policy work in schools, turning ideas into actions and bringing policy to life. As translators, they organise, manage, lead, plan, produce, inspire, persuade, and appease, and in doing so they translate policy into practice and make it a collective effort. At the same time, they are often overloaded and inundated. In focusing on middle leaders as policy translators, this research makes several important contributions to scholarship: empirical data is provided to support and expand on policy enactment theory, the limited research base on middle leadership is developed, and understandings of how school self-evaluation plays out in schools are strengthened. Thus, it is envisaged that this paper will not only be of interest and of use to researchers and policymakers concerned with policy, evaluation, and leadership but to practising teachers and school leaders attempting to make sense of their own experiences at the coalface.
This paper shows how the commitment of senior leadership teams to student voice is not necessarily shared by teachers. As part of a wider study, this paper presents qualitative data generated through ...interviews with school staff in one Irish post-primary school with a strong culture of student voice to illustrate the discrepancy that can exist between senior leaders and teachers in terms of how they embrace, enact, and experience student voice. Student voice customs can be rhetorical, perhaps even exaggerated by some, and peripheral to others, and positions on student voice are often determined by positions in the school hierarchy. As student voice remains considerably underdeveloped in Irish post-primary schools despite Irish education and most Irish schools becoming replete with student-centred discourses, this paper provides one possible way of making sense of the current state of play. More broadly, it points to how different actors work on and with student voice in different ways.
The core assumption of polycentric inspection is that when schools reach a certain quality threshold, they can further improve best through a coordinated, collaborative effort between clusters of ...schools and external agencies such as, for example, social services and training providers. The suggested role of an external agency with the respect and resources of the inspectorate is to provide stimulus and support to make the network effective. Using a bounded case study method, this research seeks to assess the potential of polycentric inspection as a tool for improving school effectiveness and outcomes. Evidence from this study suggests that this mode of evaluation has had a significant impact on improving schools, supporting teachers’ practice and, arguably, increasing student examination outcomes in the network examined. In consequence, it is suggested that these findings have wider implications for the changing conception of school evaluation and how improvement can be achieved in education.
This paper reflects on compulsory school self-evaluation in Ireland. It sets important historical and contemporary context by documenting the development of a culture of evaluation in Ireland ...throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium before charting the rise of school self-evaluation during the austere economic conditions of post-2008 Ireland. Three key reasons are proposed for the rise of school self-evaluation: the influence of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the perceived need for more accountability, and the drive towards self-managing schools. In debating the purpose of school self-evaluation in Ireland it is put forward that it is not underpinned by any single logic, but an assemblage of overlapping logics interwoven by complements and contradictions. It is concluded that while improvement is predominantly promoted in official discourse, it is accountability and economic logics that dominate.
This study explores the development and implementation of a professional development intervention for teachers in data-use as part of a whole school self-evaluation (SSE) process. A review of ...literature relating to professional development in general and data-use in particular informs the key features of the intervention which is tested in five Irish post-primary schools. The intervention involves a university-based expert in SSE, working directly with SSE teams in each of the five schools to develop a data-informed school improvement process over the course of an academic year. Participants in each school are facilitated to establish an SSE team, gather and analyse data, set targets, complete a self-evaluation report and a school improvement plan. A conceptual framework for the evaluation of the intervention is presented. As such, the evaluation focuses on the core and structural features of the intervention, and changes in teachers' knowledge, skills and attitudes with regard to data-use following the intervention. The findings highlight features of the intervention that supported teachers' professional development in data-use, limitations of this approach as well as the learning that occurred for the teachers involved.
This paper suggests that distributed leadership is a vital first step in making schools flexible enough to respond to new pressures. However, it is then argued that distributed leadership per se does ...not necessarily imply a commitment to a particular stance on issues of social justice, such as equality, but rather that this can only flow from leaders becoming culturally responsive to the diverse traditions and needs of the changing populations of their schools. We define this combination as ‘distributed culturally responsive leadership’. The second part of the paper attempts to illustrate this argument by closely examining the philosophy and actions of a particular principal who is regarded as an exemplar of good practice. The methodology used in the school case study is described and, finally, we provide a presentation and analysis of the data followed by a discussion of the research findings.
As with school self-evaluation in most European countries, the Irish education system now promotes the involvement and inclusion of stakeholders such as parents and students in the evaluation ...process. Yet, in the Irish context, there is limited research exploring the role of these stakeholders in this internal mode of school evaluation. To address this lacuna, this research draws on a national survey of post-primary school principals and interviews conducted with 109 stakeholders now placed at the centre of the evaluation process: school staff, parents and students. While there are some optimistic indications in the data, this research highlights that only slight progress has been made in terms of including parents and students in school self-evaluation in Ireland. The data presented in this paper corroborate that many age-old obstacles in the Irish context still exist and continue to dominate. Ultimately, this research concludes that changes in policy do not necessarily produce changes in practice.
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