ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author undertakes a narrative policy analysis of the state of Australian education, with illustrations drawn from the context of Queensland state education. He begins from two key insights on educational policy since the 1980s' philosophical work of J.F. Lyotard and Michel Foucault: that state policies and their critiques actually constitute a series of overlapping discourses. And moreover, that policy intervention actually have strong narrative chains, story grammars about specific domains of problems and their possible solutions, about material societal and institutional conditions, about prospective social agents and scenarios of action. Educational policy and policy analysis are bids to reconstruct institutional syntaxes: sequences of actions, interventions and reforms with normative yet concrete material consequences. The author explains how educational systems can respond to conditions 'after the marketplace'. He concerns the movement between 'cultures' of research and policy, university and state bureaucracy.