| dc.description.abstract | This PhD investigates how the British Labour Party and the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ)
have changed their position on the issue of comprehensive schooling since the 1980s, motivated
by a wider interest in how social-democratic parties have interpreted their goals and strategies
in education policy after the ‘golden age’ of social-democratic educational reform in Europe in
the 1960s and 1970s.
Throughout the 20th century, the question of whether children should be sorted based
on their academic ability into different educational tracks has been one of the most controversial
issues in education policy in Western Europe. Since the 1960s and 1970s, when reform movements
sought to widen educational opportunities by abolishing academic selection in secondary
schooling, comprehensive schooling has remained a reference point in often-passionate political
debates over the purpose of education. At their core, debates over comprehensive schooling
have focused on the relationship between educational selection, opportunities and standards;
however, this policy has also become an umbrella for various reform ambitions and aversions
concerning the organisation, content and governance of public schooling. While these
controversies tend to be portrayed as a conflict between conservative and progressive
perspectives, the positions of political parties on comprehensive schooling have not always been
clear-cut. Although officially supporters of comprehensive schooling, social democratic parties
often struggled to balance more radical aspirations for educational change with pragmatic
strategies to expand educational opportunities within existing educational structures. Changing
discursive and electoral contexts since the 1980s have given rise to additional challenges for these
parties and their attempts to develop a vision and strategy for education policy.
This research aims to contribute to better understandings of: 1) the different meanings a
shared policy aspiration can acquire in different contexts and at different points in time, and 2)
how such meanings are constructed, in this case, through the processes in which collective
attitudes and policy preferences are formed within political parties. Building on a dialectical
conception of political parties, this study understood political parties both as political actors who
try to navigate external political arenas as well as internally differentiated coalitions which aim to
unite different demands and have over time created shared understandings and collective norms.
This research argues that investigating the interplay of parties’ engagement with their external
environment and their internal dynamics can provide a more nuanced understanding of what
parties want and do in education policy and why. In two in-depth case studies, this research
traced processes of policy formation and contestation within the SPÖ and the Labour Party (with
a focus on education policy in England) since the 1980s. Drawing on 41 interviews and a wide
range of documentary sources, the empirical investigation paid particular attention to the actors
involved in these processes, their ‘assumptive worlds’ and interactions in shaping policy. Based
on the case study findings, this study then comparatively analysed on how shared concerns and
dilemmas of social-democratic parties in the area of education policy have played out in different
political and educational contexts.
The case studies revealed considerable variation in the policy preferences, ideas and
processes through which the Labour Party and the Austrian Social Democrats have interpreted
and reformulated their positions on comprehensive schooling over time. These findings indicate
not only the variety and fluidity of meaning that a shared policy idea can assume across political
contexts and over time, but also the interdependence between such meanings and the processes
in which collective preferences are formed. Despite their symbolic attachment to comprehensive
schooling, both parties displayed a considerable degree of ambivalence in their vision and
strategy for educational reform, which sometimes made it difficult to even determine their
‘official’ policy on comprehensive schooling. As such, this research indicates not only that political
parties’ policy preferences are shaped by struggles at different ‘sites’ within the party where policy
is created, contested and reinterpreted. The tensions between these different sites and demands
also provide important insights into the nature of political parties as complex political
organisations which a have their own identities and internal lives and whose policies are shaped
by both their specific pasts and their ongoing attempts to make sense of themselves in their
particular context. The historical and comparative perspective of this research further indicated
that the institutional context (particularly political institutions and the ‘feedback effects’ of
previous education policy) exerted considerable influence over actors’ perceptions of what is
‘possible’ and ‘desirable’ in educational reform in England and Austria.
Highlighting the role of
institutions, this study at the same time showed that the particular trajectory of the two parties’
struggles over comprehensive schooling cannot be understood without recognising the agency
of a handful of key individuals, whose personal beliefs and various attempts to mobilise and
construct opportunities for (and constraints on) change have left clear marks on the two parties’
visions and strategies for educational reform. | en |
