Problematising “World Class” public education policy in South Australia: Insights for education policy makers

This policy-interested South Australian public education case study problematises how the Chief Executive (CE) and members of the Education Department’s Senior Executive Group (SEG) understood system and school improvement from 2018 to 2022. We applied Carol Bacchi’s, “What’s the Problem Represented to be?”(WPR) policy analysis framework to unearth the policy assumptions underlying the Department’s overarching policy ensemble called “World Class,” initiated across South Australia’s public primary and secondary schools. WPR reveals heightened centralised technologies of command and control directed at teacher and leader work to achieve McKinsey defined World Class status by 2028.

We find school improvement policy solutions were engineered through “managerially enforced complexity reduction” techniques within the paradigm of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). These techniques impacted policy prescriptions, performance management technologies, school improvement plans, curriculum materials for schools, and promoted NAPLAN as the ultimate measure of the good school, the good teacher, and the good principal. NAPLAN is the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy used in Australia and takes the form of an annual standardised assessment for students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

Most concerningly, we find the policy logics of World Class worked to incentivise inequality across public schools through diminishing the purposes of public education and the professionalism of educators. We conclude arguing for the democratisation of existing departmental structures within iterative inquiry-based approaches to policy formation and practice to better attend to public education purposes.