Effective Policy Enactment in Australia: Enablements and Constraints for Policy Actors in an Era of Impact in Education

Policies related to teacher quality and accountability, including within teacher education, have been promulgated across the world to address the discursive ‘problem’ of teacher quality. This is despite little evidence of a problem with teacher quality or with the classroom readiness of teacher graduates. Classroom readiness is a discursive concept that has been used interchangeably with ‘impact on student achievement’. The enactment of such policies can be interrogated from the perspectives of multiple policy actors to understand the effects of the ‘impact agenda’. We use the conceptual framing of policy enactment along with Archer’s theory of reflexivity to investigate the enablements and constraints of policy enactment (Ball, 2015) for twenty teachers, principals, teacher educators, policy makers and regulatory authorities in Australia. We describe how interpretive, material and discursive lenses of policy enactment are infused with enabling and constraining emergent properties for the policy actors involved in the impact agenda in Australia. We argue that impact itself is not problematic, but that the ostensive conditions of reductive and standardised approaches to impact do not lead to improved educational experiences and outcomes for students in schools and universities.