Beatriz PONT

LIEPP affiliate, Senior Education Policy Analyst at OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Title: "Education reform: The case of school leadership in comparative perspective"

Abstract: While there has been increasing evidence on the key role of shool leadership in improving school outcomes, reforms targetting the education, training, selection and career progression of school leaders has not followed suit across OECD countries. This research explores what factors have promoted the adoption of school leadership reforms across OECD countries in the past 8 years, building on public policy theoretical framework. Among some of the main findings are that school leadership reforms do not come alone: They are part of broader policy packages that involve the increase of education and school accountability  as well as changes in school autonomy. In this way, school leaders are seen as both actors and objects of education reform.

Hélène BUISSON-FENET
Senior Researcher at the ENS of Lyon, member of the LaboratoryTriangle  (Political Sciences, CNRS)

Title: "Negociating the accountable control: a sociology of accountability policies regarding (high)schools as « social orders » (France)"

Abstract: The trajectory of French accountability policy shows that throughout the 2003-2012 period, there were a significant number of discourses on « results-based steering » in education, which increased the State power to conceptualise future institutional reforms. We focus here on the response of the French shifting education policy at the school level, which has been featured by researches as buffering teaching from environmental pressure. Drawing on a recent qualitative study on the management of school accountability in France, our presentation suggests that even if the managerial environment of upper-secondary schools is converging, organizational designs and professional relationships play a crucial role in the degree (and even the way) to which managerial instructions influence local classroom practice and pedagogical work. Moreover, many regulative mechanisms can support coupling the school-level with its political environment, among which accountability tools are not necessarily the most important - or even the most effective ones.