‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)’: School-level enactment of an educational innovation policy in Barcelona

Abstract

Narratives on innovation in education are spreading fast and both national and local educational administrations have been recently promoting innovation policies and programmes in many different European contexts. Academic literature analysing the potential benefits of innovation in education has expanded accordingly, with some international organizations increasingly commissioning research aiming to study the impacts of educational innovation, especially on learning outcomes. Interestingly, less attention has been given to analysing how these policies and programmes are translated into different practices at the school level. Drawing on a policy enactment framework, this paper aims to analyse the ways in which schools interpret top-down policy text and prescription on innovation and enact innovation in education. To do so, we focus on the case of Xarxes per al Canvi (XC), an educational innovation programme launched by the educational administration of the city of Barcelona in 2017 that aims to create school networks in order to stimulate knowledge sharing and innovation. Findings show how schools make sense of the innovation policy diversely. Policy enactment outcomes appear to be context-sensitive, with schools enacting its precepts in different ways, especially to serve their needs in increasingly competitive local education markets.

Keywords

Education policy innovation enactment educational change Spain

Introduction

An interest in innovation in education has experienced a surge in the last decade. Along with the Innovation Imperative, a report commissioned by the OECD urging governments to allow new and young firms to stimulate economic growth through experimentation (OECD, 2015b), narratives advocating innovation in education have become increasingly popular among various international players promoting different agendas – for example, sustainable development, economic competitiveness, children’s rights, etc. – (see, for instance, Farrell and Hartwell, 2008; Hawkins et al., 2020; Schleicher, 2015; UNICEF, 2017; World Economic Forum, 2020). In many different European contexts, both national and local education authorities have been recently promoting innovation programmes and initiatives (European Commission, 2018a). Academic literature analysing the potential benefits of innovation in education has increased accordingly, with the OECD and the European Commission playing a central role in commissioning more and more research aimed at studying the impact of innovation in education – often with a focus on measuring learning outcomes (e.g. European Commission, 2014, 2018b; Peterson et al., 2018; Vieluf et al., 2012; Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019).

Most of the programmes and initiatives implemented in OECD countries have tended to focus on a particular aspect of curriculum, such as, for instance – and most frequently in recent times – , incorporating ict into curricula and teaching and learning practice. Examples for this are the Open Discovery Space initiative at the European level (Sotiriou et al., 2016), or the various efforts to introduce computational thinking and computer science in K-12 education across OECD countries (Heintz et al., 2016). However, some other programmes and initiatives have adopted a more general approach to promoting innovation in schools. In such cases, innovation is expected to happen at the school and classroom level – and especially in relation to teaching practices – , typically as a result of a combination of school autonomy and school networking (Díaz-Gibson et al., 2019; Martínez-Celorrio, 2020). An example of this kind of initiative can be found in the Innovative Learning Environments programme developed by the OECD (2015a).

Interestingly, in these cases, little attention has been directed towards analysing the way in which these programmes and initiatives are ultimately translated into different practices at the school level. This may have to do with the fact that the reasons and narratives underpinning these programmes frequently revolve around too general statements, such as the need for constant innovation to ‘improve education’ and adapt to ‘new times’ (Baruah and Paulus, 2019; Cachia et al., 2010), or that innovation in education is essential in the context of current societies and economies, as these increasingly require individuals to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ (Fındıkoğlu and İlhan, 2016). As we will show, given the apparent polysemic and vague usage of the concept of innovation in the context of these programmes, a practical perspective that focuses on how innovation is ultimately produced at the school level becomes particularly necessary.

Drawing on a policy enactment framework (Ball et al., 2012; Braun et al., 2010, 2011), this paper aims to contribute to analysing the ways in which schools interpret top-down policy text and prescription relating to innovation and actually enact innovation in educational settings. To do so, we focus on the case of Xarxes per al Canvi (‘Networks for Change’, hereafter XC), an educational innovation programme, launched by the educational authorities of the city of Barcelona (Spain) in 2017, with the aim of creating school networks in order to stimulate knowledge sharing and, ultimately, innovation. The programme has been under the spotlight since it was originally conceived by a network of local think-tanks and philanthropic organizations – known as the Escola Nova 21 programme (EN21) – advocating for the need for innovation in an education system they perceived as ‘outdated’.¹ Before being absorbed and expanded first by the city’s educational authorities in 2017 and later by the Department of Education of Catalonia in 2020, ² the EN21 programme was originally small in scale, but soon managed to enrol more than 400 schools. Such a rapid expansion gained media attention and the educational authorities felt the pressure to respond to the ‘wave of innovation’ (Baena et al., 2022) by incorporating the programme to the official education policy. Currently, XC targets every public school in the city and certain schools within the publicly subsidized private sub-sector – although participation is not compulsory.

The paper is structured as follows. In the following two sections, we present our conceptual positioning, briefly considering the relevant actors and discourses relating to innovation and innovation policies over the last few decades and highlight the literature on education policy adoption, paying particular attention to policy enactment/policy response dynamics (Braun et al., 2010; Ward et al., 2016). Next, we discuss the methodology that we used in the collection and analysis of data, followed by a presentation of the context of the case, and displaying the main characteristics of the innovation programme – that is, XC. The findings are structured in three subsections: We first present how school actors are expected to behave in relation to the policy – that is, as policy subjects. We then present how these actors, teachers and principals, actually behave in schools in relation to innovation – that is, as policy actors. Finally, we discuss the school agents’ initial expectations regarding the programme, and how they provide relevant, context-specific purposes for translating and enacting the programme premises. In the discussion section, we revisit the enactment framework and put forward the evidence found in relation to it; we finally discuss certain unintended functionalities regarding the programme in the context of increasingly competitive local education markets.

Is innovation a trend?

Innovation is not a new concept in the field of education. Despite extensive research in this field at the end of the last century, we have witnessed a growing interest in innovation over the last decade. This is not an isolated fact only relevant to the field of education; in the field of economic development, it has been increasingly claimed that innovation is a key driver of economic growth, often considered a silver bullet to overcome the current persistent economic stagnation (Vinsel and Russel, 2020). With the project Innovation Strategy, for instance, the OECD stated the Innovation Imperative to encourage research into innovation and an evaluation of its performance, especially in the public sector (OECD, 2015b). Meanwhile, the European Union has encouraged innovation to respond to social challenges and to remain competitive (Hodgson, 2012; Ord, 2022; Villalba, 2008).

In the field of education, innovation has been affirmed as the tool through which education systems will adapt to ‘new times’ (Baruah and Paulus, 2019; Cachia et al., 2010). Similarly, Looney (2009) identifies at least four trends behind the drive for innovation in education: ‘social and economic pressures to raise achievement levels and to ensure greater equity of outcomes for all students; changes in work, social and family life; rapidly advancing technologies; and the need to motivate and engage students’ (p. 6). In this regard, innovation is seen not only as an opportunity, but as a necessity (Ferrari et al., 2009). Interestingly, innovation has become equalled to – and has even replaced – terms such as ‘improvement’, ‘reform’ or ‘change’, which where prevalent until the early 2000s (Morley and Rassool, 1999; Reynolds and Teddlie, 2002). Prescriptive, practitioner-targetted literatures dealing with educational change, have unquestionably embraced the innovation discourse, and have produced innumerable variations of the same ‘action guidelines’ or ‘step-by-step models’ for educational innovation (see, e.g. Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; Lick et al., 2014; Rikkerink et al., 2016; Serdyukov, 2017).

It seems clear that the term innovation, vaguely equated to ‘change’ and ‘improvement’, may serve numerous, not necessarily convergent education reform agendas operating at different educational levels. In this regard, innovation may, for instance, refer to changes in the organization or governance of educational systems (Looney, 2009) – and international organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD have certainly used an innovation framing to promote the adoption of decentralization reforms (Di Gropello, 2004), private-public partnerships (Verger and Moschetti, 2017; Patrinos et al., 2009) and different forms of post-bureaucratic accountability regimes (Greany, 2018; Maroy, 2012; Ozga et al., 2011). Nevertheless, innovation has been increasingly associated with ‘new or significantly improved approaches to classroom-based teaching, learning and assessment’, that is, at the school level (Looney, 2009, p. 6). As Baena et al. (2022) define it, educational innovation refers here to ‘a series of interventions, decisions, and processes, with a certain degree of intentionality and systematisation, that seeks to modify the attitudes, ideas, knowledge, content and, above all, pedagogical practices in schools’ (p. 4). Overall, however, research and innovation enthusiasts have tended to associate educational innovation with a small set of relatively stable, yet general features which include student-centred teaching, competence-based instructional practices and cross-curricular learning (Ellis and Bond, 2016; Paniagua and Istance, 2018; Serdyukov, 2017), as opposed to teaching practices otherwise regarded as traditional, teacher-centred and subject-based (cf. Mascolo, 2009; Young, 2010).

Along this conception of educational innovation – and frequently along other labels and catchphrases such as ‘learning for the 21st century’, ‘personalized teaching’, ‘collaborative learning’ or ‘education for the knowledge economy’ – , innovation has penetrated educational reform agendas worldwide. Within this global scene, and arguably replacing the ‘learner-centred education’ theme popular among donor agencies between the 1980s and the 2000s (Schweisfurth, 2011), there is a growing interest in educational innovation among international organizations such as UNESCO³ (e.g. Farrell and Hartwell, 2008), the OECD (e.g. OECD, 2017) and the World Bank⁴ (e.g. Hawkins et al., 2020), which have become key players in defining and advocating for educational innovation.

Undoubtedly, however, among international organizations, the OECD has been one of, if not the most active actor in promoting educational innovation, especially by means of mobilizing knowledge based on data from PISA and TALIS, although not exclusively (e.g. Foray and Raffo, 2012; Kärkkäinen, 2012; Vieluf et al., 2012). In fact, the OECD has a research centre dedicated to the study of educational innovation – that is, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) – and has taken measures to identify and assess innovative practices in education internationally by means of the project Measuring Innovation in Education (OECD, 2014, 2021; Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019).

Another crucial project by the OECD is the Innovative Learning Environments (OECD, 2015a), which developed a framework for innovation with seven ‘learning principles’ and three ‘dimensions of innovative organizations’ in the search of raising performance and improving equity in education systems. The project focused on analysing and developing actionable resources regarding how students learn and under what conditions they can learn better. Also, the project studied innovative ways of organization at the micro (i.e. schools) and meso level (i.e. networks of schools). As stated in its website,⁵ the ultimate goal of the project was to engage ‘with the community of policy reformers, innovators and learning scientists to discuss how to make better use of these findings to make OECD education systems learning driven’. It should be noted, however, that despite the OECD’s enthusiasm around the allegedly positive effects of creating innovative learning environments, some have pointed out that the relationship might not be so straightforward. As Schrittesser et al. (2014) contend:

although they [the schools studied] have attempted to install learning environments which could be classed as innovative according to the OECD criteria, these innovations have had no clear impact on how learning takes place, since subjectively meaningful learning processes are not encouraged, and traditional patterns of learning continue to dominate in the lessons (p. 152).

The examples above show the growing interest in innovation across contexts and, especially, the key role that some international organizations are playing in the diffusion of it. Whether this can be characterized as a trend or not, there are clear signs of convergence around the growing sense of necessity to innovate within educational systems worldwide, at least at the discursive level.

Educational innovation policy enactment and contexts

Innovation is not only difficult to track and evaluate, but its advancement across an educational system by means of policies, is particularly challenging. Many have claimed that innovation is rarely implemented as designed in top-down approaches, since it is embedded in the complex and unpredictable environment of the school (Spillane, 1999; Waks, 2007). While this can be said of most educational policies, it becomes especially true when it comes to policies aiming to change school- and classroom-level practices. In these cases, the classical ‘de-coupling’ argument seems to offer a relevant depiction of why schools may end up ‘strategically adopting symbolic changes [. . .] without internalizing relevant changes into day-to-day practices’ (Pagès, 2021: 539). De-coupling may thus be the result of conflicting and contradictory demands and coercive pressures, the different actors’ subjective beliefs regarding the efficacy of certain policy paradigms and, more broadly, school actors’ agentic dispositions and constraints (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2017; Coburn, 2005).

This is closely related to Ball’s (1993) famously known conception of ‘policy as text’ and ‘policy as discourse’. On the one hand, policies themselves, that is, the texts, ‘are not necessarily clear or closed or complete’ and also ‘shift and change their meaning in the arenas of politics’ (Ball, 1993: 11), which provides space for action and response. Ball highlights that it is impossible to anticipate how actors will interpret the texts, regardless of their normative weight, since actors are embedded in specific contexts and ‘solutions to the problems posed by policy texts will be localized and should be expected to display ad hocery and messiness’ (Ball, 1993: 12). On the other hand, policies can also be thought of as discourses and ‘are about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. [. . .] Thus, certain possibilities for thought are constructed’ (Ball, 1993: 14). From Ball’s perspective, there are actual conflicts in the enactment of policies ‘but these are set within a moving discursive frame which articulates and constrains the possibilities and probabilities of interpretation and enactment’ (Ball, 1993: 15).

In a later work, Braun et al. (2010, 2011) and Ball et al. (2012) explore this distinction between text and discourse further and demonstrate how the implementation of policies has tended to be analysed lineally and from a decontextualized point of view, through a rational and non-conflicting view of the phenomena. Thus, the authors consider that school agents ‘recontextualize’ policies (Braun et al., 2011: 586), that is, they distinguish between them according to personal and professional perspectives, and in relation to their historical, socio-political and institutional context, that is, ‘contexts of policy work’ (Ball et al., 2012: 19). They also characterize them into two distinct areas: interpretation, ‘an engagement with the languages of policy’ (p. 45) and translation, ‘a sort of third space between policy and practice. [. . .] an iterative process of making institutional texts and putting those texts into action’ (p. 45). These are not lineal moments, rather they are considered as a feedback process, in which school agents literally enact policies; there is a process of (re)creation of the policy and an individual enactment of it. In this vein, while teachers and principals can be seen as mere ‘policy subjects’, they are also, and most importantly, ‘policy actors’ (Ball et al., 2012).

Ultimately, this approach signals the idea that ‘policies are “contested”, mediated, and differentially represented by different actors in different contexts [. . .], and at the same time produced and formed by taken-for-granted and implicit knowledges and assumptions about the world and ourselves’ (Ball, 2015: 6). Arguably so, most policies are somehow inevitably – to a greater or lesser extent – de-coupled when it comes to implementation – and therefore the street-level practice represents a key sphere when it comes to unpacking the uneven and contingent reception and meaning-making of policy ideas (Heimans, 2012). One of the challenges of policy research is precisely to explore and contextually explain such ‘deviations’ (Spillane et al., 2002).

In this regard, numerous studies have aimed to unpack and explain the complexity of policy enactment processes at schools (e.g. Dieudé and Prøitz, 2022; McCloat and Caraher, 2020; Singh et al., 2013), especially in relation to New Public Management (NPM) and marketization reforms in education and their impacts in schools (e.g. Gurova and Camphuijsen, 2020; Harris et al., 2020; Lundström, 2015). Accordingly, although there is limited research on the enactment of such policies, top-down policies aimed at producing educational innovation should be understood as prescriptions that penetrate schools and that ‘inevitably convey normative messages on what good education is and why a different practice would be better’ so that these policies ‘not only contain a normative and even moral message, but also a (micro)political one, since they aim at steering (changing) practice’ (Vermeir et al., 2017: 117).

Nonetheless, policies differ according to whether what they prescribe is ‘mandated, strongly recommended or suggested’ (Braun et al., 2011: 586), and so while there may be statutory mandates such as those governing teacher hiring requirements and procedures, there are also less binding policies such as those dealing with teaching practices or even curriculum changes. Indeed, this has important implications when analysing the dynamics of education policy enactment. While enactment cannot be seen as a taken for granted process – not even in the most prescriptive cases – policy enactment repertoires – for example, resistance, negotiation, transformation – are crucially shaped by the nature of the policy itself in this regard. With innovation, although it has become an imperative for school systems in many different national and subnational settings, policies and programmes aimed at making schools more innovative are most frequently understood as recommendations. Moreover, as noted by many authors, educational policies attempting to advance ‘student-centred’, ‘competence-based’ and ‘personalized learning’ teaching practices lack specificity and clarity in their aim to steer instructional practices (Bremner, 2021; Clément, 2021; Pykett, 2009). This can lead to cases of ‘policy dissipation’ (Maguire et al., 2013), since ambiguous or weakly-unified policies allow for more interpretative work by school actors and thus highly contextual ‘pre-existing knowledge and practices’ (Coburn, 2005: 477) play a key role. This poses serious challenges when analysing the enactment of school innovation policies because, on the one hand, there is no benchmark from which to evaluate a deviation – that is, there is no ideal student-centred, competence-based practice, nor there is an ideal cross-curricular approach to learning – , and on the other hand, school actors may engage with the policy very differently, ranging from tight to loose coupling or even refusal (Ball and Olmedo, 2013; Maguire et al., 2013; Spillane and Burch, 2003).

As suggested previously, academic work around educational innovation has often been focused on building, positing and evaluating ‘how-to-innovate’ models transposed from the management studies field (e.g. Mintzberg, 1979; Senge, 1990). Such approaches have led to an overall prescriptive view of the phenomena in which analyses tend to focus on the evaluation of the continuity or deviation of innovation processes vis-à-vis a series of assumedly techno-rationally defined steps and standards (see, e.g. Fullan, 1989; González and Escudero, 1987; Stoll and Fink, 1996). In analysing how schools contextually interpret top-down innovation policy text and enact innovation at the school level, we expect to follow the seminal work of scholars who have engaged critically with innovation processes, arguing that an ‘unconnected analysis of the generation, adoption, implementation and evaluation of educational innovations, with little understanding of political, social, and economic connections among them and with the socioeconomic system as a whole’ may produce misleading insights (Papagiannis et al., 1982: 276).

Data and methods

As presented above, the main objective of the study is to examine the incidence of the XC programme in the organization of participant schools and teachers’ practices. We followed a qualitative approach in order to capture the singularity and attributes of the case, addressing complexity and rejecting the lineal causal explanations regarding agentic activity (Patton, 2014). The data collection methods drew from ethnographic techniques and document analysis. We conducted 17 in-depth interviews and school-level observations between March and May 2019. Two interviews were conducted with members of the steering committee (SC) – in charge of creating the conceptual framework for network-building, as further described below – , two interviews with programme officers (PO) – the professionals in charge of facilitating network-building – and 13 interviews with school actors, including three headteachers and 10 teachers. School-level observations included attending five programme meetings and conducting seven classroom non-participant observations. The fieldwork was paired with document analysis carried out using official, published documents relating to the programme (i.e. press releases, official presentations). Specifically, a total of nine documents were analysed, both in video and text – that is, Consorci d’Educació de Barcelona (CEB, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e, 2020f), Escola d’Administració Pública de Catalunya (EAPC, 2020), Xarxes per al Canvi (XC, 2017a, 2017b). In the data analysis stage, we followed an iterative process of flexible coding (Deterding and Waters, 2021) in which we combined predefined, broad codes derived from our analytical framework on enactment and innovation processes with codes emerging from the data. Both set of codes were confronted and refined in the search of consistency. The process of flexible coding was applied to both the interviews and the documents. We did so from a discourse analysis perspective (Rapley, 2011), inasmuch as our aim was to understand how enactment comes to be in a contextualized manner, which unfailingly needs, first, to uncover and (re)build the theory of change of the policy in question (Pawson, 2006) – thus tracking the document production and interrogating those who generated them – and, second, to understand the meanings that school actors create in relation to the expectations that are posited to them and to unpack their reasons and motivations of action (Small and Cook, 2021).

In selecting the schools, a purposeful sampling exercise was carried out to choose schools that could provide relevant information to answer the research questions (Bryman, 2016). We defined sociodemographic criteria – that is, family income, level of studies, immigrant student rate – in order to select one of the 22 networks of schools participating in the programme, paying attention to heterogeneity to avoid extreme cases. The selected network is formed by nine schools, five of which are public and four are publicly subsidized private. The schools in this network are located in a middle-class area but have a heterogeneous student composition since the catchment area corresponds to a district characterized by its diversity in terms of SES, with middle-low rates of immigrant population, and an educational background similar to that of the city’s average. From this network, we randomly selected two public schools (one primary and one secondary), and two publicly subsidized private schools (one primary and one secondary) for the in-depth interviews and observation fieldwork.

The context and formation of XC

Spain’s education system is highly decentralized, and every region (i.e. autonomous community) has competences in education. In 2013, the Spanish government passed an education law that advocated school autonomy, principals’ professionalization, and the introduction of external standardized tests (Parcerisa, 2016). Nevertheless, the autonomous community of Catalonia was a pioneer in the introduction of these measures (Verger et al., 2020). The Catalan Education Law (LEC) passed in 2009 had already introduced certain core elements of the NPM paradigm, paying special attention to school autonomy (for an in-depth perspective, see Verger and Curran, 2014). Subsequently, immersed in an economic crisis, the Catalan government applied the LEC selectively, fostering managerial autonomy and school choice policies, in a process that Bonal and Verger (2017) have characterized as a ‘conservative modernization’, following Dale (1989) and Apple (2013). After a turbulent period marked by resistance to cuts in public expenditure in education, the Catalan education arena has been characterized by a growing relevance given to innovation over the last 5 years (Verger et al, 2022 forthcoming). Still, narratives around innovation have been in evidence in the Catalan context since the beginning of the 20th century and constitute, to a certain extent, a leit motiv of the education sector debate (Besalú, 2019).

XC is an educational innovation programme, launched by the education department of the city of Barcelona in 2017, and aimed at creating school networks in order to stimulate innovation and knowledge sharing. As mentioned, the XC programme is based both theoretically and methodologically on Escola Nova 21 (EN21), an earlier programme that caught the attention of the media and was conceived by an alliance of think-tanks, philanthropic organizations, and a public-private partnership university (Escola Nova 21, 2016) – that is, UNESCOcat,⁶ EduCaixa,⁷ Fundació Jaume Bofill and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The intention of EN21 was to raise awareness of the need for change and to develop autonomy within change processes in schools (Vallory, 2019) by means of a five-step model based on Kotter’s (2012) famously known framework for organizational change. EN21 ran from 2016 to 2019 and targetted more than 400 schools within the autonomous community of Catalonia (Martí and Tarrasón, 2020), until the Catalan Department of Education took the decision to implement it as a public policy in 2020. Currently, XC concerns the city of Barcelona and targets every public school and a portion of the publicly-subsidized private sector. XC has been formed by two public organizations – the Consortium of Education of the City of Barcelona and the Educational Science Institute of the Autonomous University of Barcelona – and two NGOs – the Rosa Sensat Teachers’ Association and EN21 (Xarxes per al Canvi, 2017b).

The policy of XC

XC has designed and implemented a technical-administrative structure, integrated by state and non-state professionals, with the aim of advancing the innovative practices at the school level. This structure is pyramidally organized and consists of three levels, each with a specific function: a steering committee (SC), which comprises programme leaders from both a political and technical background, who built the conceptual basis for the programme and decide upon the implementation strategy; programme officers (PO), in charge of chairing the network meetings; and leading teams (LT) made up of school staff who voluntarily join these teams at each school and are in charge of fostering innovative practices within the school. In practical terms, the programme aims at generating ‘spaces for contact’ or ‘spaces of dialogue’ (SC 1A; PO 2A) where POs and the LTs of each school within a network can meet and share knowledge and practices, in relation to innovative approaches to teaching and learning (EAPC, 2020).

From the point of view of the SC, the programme aims to generate cooperative networks of schools and boost innovation processes within the participating schools (SC 1A; SC 1B). As described in documents and interviews, the programme is a relevant component of the education strategy of the city’s educational authorities and is expected to function as a ‘reflexive tool’, capable of emphasizing – and spreading the idea of – the need for change and updating (CEB, 2020d). This is evidenced as well in how a designer explains that ‘[the programme] is a way to shake up the system’ [PO 2B].

We have identified two elements regarding the conceptual and methodological design of XC that are relevant at this point: the ‘inspirational’ role of international organizations, and the prescribed ‘how-to’ innovation model the programme is based on. Conceptually, as explained by one of the interviewees (SC 1A), the programme originates primarily from two documents published by UNESCO and the OECD – Rethinking Education (UNESCO, 2015) and The Nature of Learning (Dumont et al., 2010) – as was the case with the EN21programme (Vallory, 2019). From a methodological perspective, a member of the SC argued that innovation, as conceptualized in the context of the programme, is understood as the result of a structured process:

One of the keys to the change process is knowing that change has certain dynamics that you must pursue, and this enables you to be able to carry them forward, which is not doing things just to be doing, but doing things in a structured way [SC 1B].

The supposedly structured nature of innovation processes as described by the SC is frequently legitimized by references to the work of John Kotter. Two elements are worth mentioning at this point that are relevant for our analysis. The first has to do with what appears to be an automatic transposition of innovation narratives between different fields of practice. Kotter (2012) developed a popular framework for innovation – ‘8-Step Process for Leading Change’ – , essentially known for its impact in the field of business management, particularly in relation to leadership and marketing. The way in which the SC members bridge the difference between the field of management and education is roughly elaborated and the transposition of Kotter’s framework to schools is justified on the basis of its clarity. As stated by an SC member: ‘[Kotter] refers to all the organizations in the world, he does not focus on educational institutions. . . but it is very clear anyway’ [SC 1B]. Second, and most important, regardless of its arguable unsuitability for education, Kotter’s appraisal on innovation is perfectly functional to the XC programme in the sense that a structured, step-by-step way of understanding innovation appears as capable of reconciling – at least in theory – two apparently contradictory ideas that appear in most interviews and documents containing the implicit theory of change of the programme: that innovation is closely tied to practice and necessarily context-sensitive – that is, autonomous and spontaneous – , and yet that innovation can be directed towards certain objectives, multiplied and ultimately, institutionalized – that is, controlled. In the following sections we examine the extent to which this tension plays out at schools, especially in the way POs and LTs interact to produce innovation.

The programme in practice

Having displayed the main characteristics of both the context and the inception and design of XC, we now present our main findings. These include, first, the tensions within the transmission chain of POs-LTs, stressing the contradiction between the supposed guidance provided by the POs and the responsibility imposed on LTs in schools when it comes to develop innovative practices. Second, we pay attention to school staff and their enactment of XC, pointing out what we describe as ‘blocking’ and ‘driving’ dynamics regarding innovation. Finally, we explore the school actors’ initial expectations regarding the programme and some unexpected translations and uses of XC resulting from the schools’ contextual needs and constraints.

Advancing innovation: Teachers and principals as policy subjects

The innovation process promoted by XC aims at establishing a contact between two agents, one external to the school – the PO – and one internal – the LT (EAPC, 2020). Given the premise that innovation should occur at the school level and tied to practice, the responsibility for change rests with the LT, as the following quote illustrates:

The leadership of change [. . .] must be formed by a team that is only in charge of leading. . . thinking about the educational change of the school [. . .], this team is focused only on this. This team is formed by volunteers, it is not ‘you, you and you’, but someone who has heart and wants to command using this leadership, effecting all this change [. . .] [those who form the leading team] are the ones who have to make decisions about the change process [. . .], the idea is that the impact depends on the leading team itself [SC 1B].

However, if policies are understood as the formalization of a power relation, no matter how weak this relation might be, there should always be an asymmetry that in this case would play out between schools as account givers, and POs and the SC as account holders. Yet, in this case, the account-holder position as embodied by the POs is presented as ‘a facilitator of dynamics, of sharing knowledge, not providing solutions, but giving explanations about what is right and what is not’ [SC 1B]. As understood by POs themselves their role in the innovation process is relegated to a secondary position in charge of just advocating for innovation. In the words of a PO:

I would say that our job is to create a context for something to happen at the level of thought, at the level of commitment [. . .]. Our role is to create the context for people to change and relate [PO 2A].

Thus, the proposal of XC to steer the innovation process in each school is to generate, in their terms, a ‘space of metacognition’ (EAPC, 2020), that is, the ‘network meeting’, and to make this available to schools (CEB, 2020e). However, neither the programme’s SC, nor the POs are expected to be present in schools, but rather steering at a distance a process that should occur somehow spontaneously and driven by its supposedly inherent and unanimous desirability. The objective of the meeting space is that ‘[the schools] participate in networks [. . .], that they join and discuss processes with other schools in their network, discuss literature on innovation, etc., and from there on they go back to their schools and decide what to do’ [SC 1B]. Therefore, the role of the programme officers might be thought of as one that starts and ends in these meetings, which means that neither them nor the steering committee are responsible for the educational change that takes place within the participating schools.

The pillar on which the programme is based is encapsulated in the role of the POs in network meetings, the aim of which is to promote the process of change within schools. The POs are in charge of disseminating knowledge to assist with innovation, without prescribing solutions or strategies for doing so, as each school is responsible for its own process of change (EAPC, 2020; PO 2A; PO 2B). At this point, one can observe the contradiction mentioned above between school-based spontaneity and controllability regarding innovation. In this regard, the role of the POs becomes ambiguous and powerless, since they must promote innovation in schools, without participating in – nor being perceived as responsible for – this process. Teachers and principals become thus sui generis policy subjects inasmuch as they are only loosely subjected to the programme’s administrative oversight and receive little to no guidance.

Driving and blocking innovation: Teachers and principals as policy actors

According to schools, the main difficulties that they have faced when participating in XC have been the creation of the LTs and the process of transmitting information related to the programme from school leaders and the LT to the rest of the teaching staff (HT 3A; LT4C; LT 4F). In relation to the composition of LTs, two of the schools had created their LTs in their second year participating in the programme. The other two schools had done so from the beginning. The creation of these teams was not, in any case, voluntary, as originally stated by XC (HT 3C; HT 3B). In this regard, a headteacher argued that the staff turnover was the main obstacle to volunteering:

Precisely because of the instability of the teaching staff—because retirements have resulted in substitute or temporary teachers—we tried to structure the leading team to guarantee that the person who attended in the first year would also be available the following year [HT 3B].

On the other hand, another principal considered the dissemination of activities related to the programme within his school to be a ‘pending task’, as follows:

How to proceed more formally is a pending subject. How to formalize information sharing when not in the teachers’ room, [. . .]; how we regularize and formalize. . . that is the pending task [HT 3A].

This aspect was also observed in the network meetings, where teachers and principals demanded monitoring and support to be able to transfer the processes decided upon in meetings within their schools. As no formal channels were established, one teacher claimed that, instead, ‘all we have is grapevine information’ [NO-LT 4C]. At this point, one school, aware of these limitations, decided to alternate the people attending the meetings, removing one member from the LT, and replacing that person with a new member for each session (LT 4F). Arguably, despite all teaching staff is expected to be an active part of the programme, there is widespread disinformation among the teachers who do not participate directly in LTs (NO-LT 5A; NO-LT 5D). Thus, even though they were usually aware that the school participated in XC, they did not have a specific understanding of the programme, they were unsure as to which members of staff were participating in the programme, and they frequently associated their participation with fulfilling bureaucratic requirements, as this quote exemplifies:

Do you know what the programme is about?

No. . . maybe if you give me a clue I might say ‘oh, yes, this sounds familiar. . . they’ve explained it to me’, but right now, consciously, if I had to tell you. . . I don’t know. There are many things happening in our school, and I do not know if they come from this programme or not, requirements we have to fulfil, which may have come from this programme you mention or from something else. . . I don’t know if it involves more staff. . . [NO-LT 4A].

The unawareness regarding the programme can be related to a school environment with constant inputs from many different programmes – focussing not only on innovation – which might cause a ‘noisy atmosphere’.

In addition to the difficulties in establishing LTs and in transmitting information to the entire teaching staff, it is important to highlight the role that the contextual factors play in each school – most of which often go unnoticed. The school culture and leadership style shape how innovation processes occur in schools, and can either drive them forward or block them, for example, by means of superficial or merely formal engagement. For instance, the school culture as a mediating force is evidenced by a headteacher who argues that the ‘reflection and self-evaluation’ demands posed by POs were already there, in a school she considers ‘very reflective, very self-critical, very self-demanding’ and thus ‘naturally innovative’ [HT 3B]. In another school, however, for some teachers who were used to horizontal and non-hierarchical work relationships, the leadership team’s demands for innovation had become ‘an imposition, a claim, a request to do X hours of innovative projects’ [NO-LT 5A]. As the same teacher ironizes, ‘nobody has done this [innovative projects] because they wanted to and, most importantly, I wouldn’t say we are actually doing innovative stuff but. . . we are an ‘innovative school’ [NO-LT 5A]’. Here, as compared with the first quote, the new principal’s leadership style appears more like a blocking force that leads to superficial commitment rather than profound changes.

Following the influence of (material) contextual conditions in the innovation process, as mentioned, the most prominent is staff turnover and the lack of funding to support innovation. Especially in public schools, interviewees claimed they struggle with these issues, to the point that they would prioritize the stability of the staff over any other ‘change’ that is requested:

What I would like is not so much a change, or an innovation, but rather that public schools could create stable teams [. . .]; the system does not adapt to work on innovation because there is a lot of staff turnover. During my three years here, out of thirty teachers, ten or twelve have left each year [NO-LT 5A].

Another teacher considers that ‘it is necessary to have permanent staff for a change to occur, but there is no continuity, no cohesion’ [NO-LT 5B]. Yet another teacher points out to the same problem:

The first year you are expected to acclimatize: ‘How do you do this here?’ So, if you are lucky, and you are still here the following year, you then say: ‘Now I pick up the rhythm’. If you are not lucky, you go to another school and start the process again. So, yes, this gives you experience, but not security, nor continuity [NO-LT 5C].

The school culture, the leadership style, the instability of the teaching staff, the absence of specific funding and the lack of allocation of responsibilities render the programme a constant source of tension between participating schools and the cross-cutting nature of the innovative process, as stipulated by XC’s design.

Creating contextual meaning and purpose for enactment

When asked about the expectations in relation to participating in XC, principals and teachers in the LTs anticipated that the programme would be a means of ‘reaching out to and staying in touch with other schools’ (HT 3B; HT 3C; LT 4E) and, to a lesser extent, a way ‘to get new ideas for changing teaching practices’ (HT 3A). An LT teacher described this as follows:

I expected it [the programme] to give me a little more training, share experiences with other colleagues, right? With other primary schools, with other secondary schools, see how they work. Maybe attend training sessions or visit schools and see how different projects work, and get some ideas, see if they work well or not. . . [LT 4A].

The expectation of sharing experiences and methodologies is a recurrent theme but is also a feature that the SC publicizes when they discuss XC publicly (CEB, 2020e; EAPC, 2020). A headteacher reveals the reasons why his school decided to participate in the programme in the first place:

Above all, we wanted to be at the forefront in relation to training. ‘If there is anything regarding innovative training, we will be very interested’—we said. And also, to have a dialogue with some schools that were already doing things that interested us. . . find out what others were doing, to share experiences, especially to nurture ourselves a little. . . [HT 3B].

In this regard, however, while the expectations regarding the training and socialization function of the network meetings were initially shared by principals and promoted by the programme’s SC, these expectations were far from being fulfilled in practice. Attendance at network meetings tended to decline after the programme’s first year and during the observation phase of this study it was most frequent to see some schools not sending any representative. As discussed above, the ritualistic nature of these meetings and the distance from the initial expectations might be accounted for this disengagement.

In other cases, the programme initially provided an external legitimation for innovation, especially serving as a symbolic support for schools’ principals to undertake action related to innovation, as argued by two principals:

The expectations were, of course, to get in contact with schools who were doing some things that could be useful to us, but also entering a layer in which we felt supported, and which forced our staff to go down this path [HT 3A].

[The change of the school’s leadership team] comes together with the emergence of the Escola Nova 21—and later XC—programme [. . .] and we were interested in this movement, because we said: ‘Perhaps they can help us in this step, as we have to renew a lot of people’ [HT 3B].

The search for external institutional legitimation through programmes like EN21 or XC may be due to the surge in innovation discourses, particularly in the Catalan context, which concerns both principals and teachers, who consider innovation to be a factor affecting families’ school choice decisions. The following two quotes talk to these two overlapping phenomena:

I think there is a certain pressure to innovate that comes from all directions [. . .], I don’t know if it is sufficiently grounded or is it that ‘I have heard that. . .’, ‘now this has to be done. . .’, [. . .] I think that it is increasing, but you do not know to what extent it is based on deep reflection or. . .is it a trend. . .? [HT 3C].

This innovation thing is a bit. . . ‘it is what you have to do, or otherwise you won’t have students’; it’s sort of ‘what parents ask for’. [. . .] When you prepare for the open school day events it’s the time when you have to sell yourself, right? And you say, ‘what do I want to show?’ And I realize that what we need to show is innovation, because it is what parents want. [NO-LT 5A].

Under these circumstances, decisions made regarding innovation are especially relevant, since they help schools position themselves in their local education markets. A headteacher highlights, for instance, the importance of innovation for renewing their school’s image:

We had been going around this whole paradigm of innovation for a long time, how it is changing, and well. . . be aware of what is being done and see that we are a school that has a lot of tradition, a lot of history, but you can’t be left behind, you cannot just have tradition and history, then you have to catch up [HT 3C].

Furthermore, a teacher within an LT mentions the importance of balancing the school pedagogically with the rest of the neighbourhood’s schools, but at the same time generating their own identity to define them:

Here in the neighbourhood, many public schools have emerged that are pioneers when it comes to innovation, or so they say, and. . . and there was a need to go in this direction, as well as to strike a balance on a pedagogical level. Not so much to reflect or copy, but rather to generate an identity for us as a school [LT 5B].

It is evident that if schools are to enact the programme, they will tend to repurpose it, adapting it to their contextual needs. As shown above, this repurposing, however, tends to assume essentially symbolic functions – that is, legitimation, renewal, market projection – that can be brought into play in each school’s internal and external micropolitical arenas in ways not anticipated by policymakers.

Discussion and concluding remarks

Recent initiatives and policies aiming at generating innovation in education can be seen as a continuation and a rescaling of the ‘traditional’ educational change and school improvement movements (Murillo and Krichesky, 2015). They both share a prescriptive view of innovation, consider the school as a basic unit of change (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012), and propose innovation ‘recipes’ with differentiated development phases (González and Escudero, 1987). At the same time, educational innovation has been increasingly promoted by various national and subnational governments as a way of renewing public education (Greany and Higham, 2018; Schoen and Fusarelli, 2008; Sidorkin and Warford, 2017), and has offered a new discursive frame for some international organizations advancing global education policies (e.g. Hawkins et al., 2020; OECD, 2021; UNESCO, 2021), while in turn offering local and national actors an opportunity for external legitimation, as can be seen in the case of XC.

The central focus of the paper has been, however, on understanding the implementation of educational innovation policies from a policy enactment approach. In this regard, as explained by Ball et al. (2012), schools’ micropolitics and context specificities cause policies to vary in each case. This is evidenced in the case of XC: each school interprets and translates the programme according to its own perspective, needs and institutional context. Our data indicate how these elements can either drive – deeply or superficially – or block engagement in the programme. In addition, a school’s material context can either limit the extent and sustainability of innovation – due to, for instance, severe staff turnover – or otherwise enable it. Furthermore, all schools are exposed to their external contexts and experience, for instance, the pressure and expectations of innovation especially from families exerting choice, but also from the media, government officials and civil society organizations. In other words, there is a clear contrast between the discursive level of the programme designers within the context of generation and transmission of the ideas that underpin XC, and the reality experienced by schools, with their own specific circumstances and contingencies. The programme certainly does not operate in a vacuum; instead, schools as organizations that come into contact and interact with the programme in a particular context, rebuild, adapt or reject it accordingly.

There is a notable deviation from the proposed objectives in the implementation phase of XC and much of it has to do with the specific features of school contexts. Firstly, leading teams are not made up by volunteers, but are summoned by schools’ management teams, even though voluntary participation is considered a prerequisite by the SC, since they consider that innovation in education stems from personal initiative and motivation. However, it should be noted that participation in these teams is neither a paid job, nor are teaching hours reduced to allow for participation, which eliminates any incentive to join these teams. Secondly, no innovative practices associated with the programme are evidenced – although some are discussed superficially by certain schools, but not specifically. Decoupling between innovation discourse and practice may be related to schools experiencing pressure to innovate in a context of material constraint. This tension between what Braun et al. (2011: 588) call the material and external contexts leads to most schools’ participation in the programme being formal, symbolic, and thus, becoming ritualized. Thirdly, network meetings, originally intended as spaces for cooperative practice between schools and for innovation training, function primarily as a means of socializing rather than as collaborative workspaces. There is also a major difficulty in the transmission of information from the LTs who participate in these meetings to the whole school staff, resulting in widespread ignorance in relation to XC on the part of the staff that do not – but should – participate in it directly. Somewhat paradoxically, network meetings appear to end up becoming spaces for discussion and bounded socialization that keeps the programme ‘alive’ and yet disconnected from actual impact in practice.

Professional contexts (Braun et al., 2011) seem to play a central role as well. Teachers’ and principals’ pre-existing ideas regarding educational innovation deeply affect the way they make sense and engage with the programme (Coburn, 2005). In many cases, these ideas are based on profound doubts about the actual need to innovate – and even about the pedagogical status of the notion of innovation itself – especially when teachers’ and principals’ professional convictions resist what they perceive as a trend based on a somewhat empty or nonspecific signifier. This seems to be particularly relevant in the case of policies addressing pedagogical work, whose binding force is inherently weak and where the account-holder position is therefore unclear. Resistance, refusal, and especially ritualization can be seen as the consequence of teachers perceiving these kinds of policies as an intrusion in their professional autonomy, even when arguably these policies can only exert power through mere persuasion.

Finally, despite the discrepancies in the implementation phase, other remarkable unforeseen uses and repurposes of the programme have also emerged. On the one hand, it is evident that participation in this kind of programmes can be used by some schools as an element of external legitimation, that is, as a symbolic external support for leadership teams to undertake actions related to innovation. On the other hand, the programme may be used to renew – or, most accurately, rebrand – a school project and/or to enable a school to position itself pedagogically and differentiate itself from other schools in the area. To be sure, these cases demonstrate an instrumental and superficial use of educational innovation narratives and frames that serves the contextually conditioned interests of schools, with a specific purpose different from that proposed by the policymakers. In this regard and considering that the Catalan education system contains market regulation elements (Verger et al., 2015), it comes as no surprise that some schools use the XC platform to try to identify and copy ‘successful’ innovative practices from other schools, or that some use their participation in the programme as an ‘innovative school’ badge vis-à-vis the local education market pressures. While XC builds territorial networks and asks schools to cooperate, these same schools are called to compete in their local education markets. Somehow then, XC may unintendedly update the NPM policy agenda, thus strengthening a market-oriented style of educational governance.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Edgar Quilabert

Mauro C Moschetti

Notes

Author biographies

Edgar Quilabert teaches Comparative Education and Economics of Education at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He is researcher at the Globalization, Education and Social Policies Research Centre. He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the UAB. His work focuses on accountability policies in education and its relationship with innovation.

Mauro C Moschetti is a Serra Húnter lecturer at the Department of Theories of Education and Social Pedagogy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research is concerned with public-private partnerships and market policies in education, educational inequalities, and the evaluation of educational policies from an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of comparative education, sociology of education and global studies.

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