Funded, then forgotten: politics, public memory and national school reform

Funded, then forgotten: politics, public memory and national school reform

Governments apply education policies and funding compacts to shape school reform. Yet, once agreements are endorsed and ratified, the ongoing commitment to the enactment of agreed education reforms can be ‘forgotten’. In this paper, the Australian National School Reform Agreement is examined as an illustrative example of the ways in which policy promises are articulated by politicians as key policy actors. We draw on Wodak’s discursive analytic framework, alongside Ricoeur’s conceptualisation of the ‘forgetfulness’ of collective public memory to demonstrate how successive politicians have attempted to frame public discourse through official ministerial pronouncements in ways that obscured earlier promises. By focusing on key discourses surrounding funding, achievement and equity, and collaboration, politicians have sought to redefine public accounts of school reform in deliberate ways, in which politics takes priority over policymaking. In doing so, politicians work as key educational policy actors who seek to discursively shape public sentiment and collective memory regarding school reform. Given the increasing emphasis on national school reform in Australia and elsewhere, it is important to ‘remember’ the need to work towards more deliberative mediations of national school reform, in which the purpose and value of policymaking is rendered purposefully in the collective public memory.