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Box 1.1. Defining education policy implementation

Education policy implementation is a purposeful and multidirectional change process

aiming to put a specific policy into practice and which may affect an education system
on several levels.
 Implementation is purposeful to the extent that the process is supposed to
change education according to some policy objectives.
 It is multidirectional because it can be inflected by actors at various points of
the education system.
 It is contextualised in that institutions and societal shocks and trends –i.e.in
culture, demography, politics and economy- affect the education system and
the ways in which a policy is shaped and translates in the education sector.
This definition is developed in Section 2, which provides the detailed analysis of what
education policy implementation entails, and why we define it as such.

1.2. Key challenges of implementation

As our economies and societies have evolved from industrial to becoming knowledge
based, education has become crucial for individual and social progress. Education
systems are now more than ever required to provide high-quality education and
competencies, in addition to new demands for well-being and values, to enable young
generations to design and contribute to our fast-paced, global economy. But education
policies may not reach the classroom, failing to achieve their intended outcomes,
because of weak implementation processes.
The literature reveals a range of reasons preventing implementation from being
effective. Among others, we can highlight a lack of focus on the implementation
processes when defining policies at the system level, the lack of recognition that these
change processes require engaging people at the core and the need to revise
implementation frameworks to adapt to new complex governance systems.
These challenges call for the need to review current implementation approaches to see
if they are adapted to education policy making in the 21st century and especially,
whether they are able to support the development of professional processes that can
contribute to success in the policy process.

1.2.1. Insufficient focus on implementation

Viewing education as a driver to develop highly-skilled youth and meet the needs of
the knowledge society represents a paradigm shift from the beginning of the 21st
century (Lessard and Carpentier, 2015[13]). This shift has caused policy makers and
other stakeholders to pay more attention to schools’ performance and to raise their
expectations about the quality and the scope of the services delivered in schools.
Governments have undertaken reforms to respond to these expectations. The number
of reforms for a given system can be impressive: in Australia for instance, 38 national
reforms were introduced between 2008 and 2014 while Ireland led 23 reforms in the
same period (OECD, 2015[1]). In one country, educators may for example have to deal

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simultaneously with enhancing the equity and quality of educational outcomes,

reforming the way teachers are trained and changing the way students are evaluated.
Whether formulated policies take effect “in the world of action” (O'Toole, 2000[4]) is
not clear, however. Few studies actually document reform impact or can specify what
factors contribute the policy’s success. It is also challenging to measure policy
outcomes in education because they take time to appear, and because it may be
difficult to attribute learning performance outcomes to one specific policy.
For example, in the Czech Republic, reforming the school-leaving examination took
14 years of debating and testing various versions and ways to implement them, even
after an initial policy was passed (OECD, 2016[9]). Analysing the effects of
Comprehensive School Reforms in the United States in the 1990s, Borman et al. find
that the strongest effects are found 8 to 14 years after a reform begins (2003[14]). Policy
evaluation analysis in the United States in the 1990s showed nonetheless that assessing
the outcomes without looking at the concrete processes that produce them did not
provide a complete picture (Rist, 1995[15]).
In fact, it appeared that policy makers often do not give priority to implementation. In
an article entitled “the missing half of school reform”, education scholar Frederick M.
Hess underlines how decision makers tend to focus their efforts on formulating the
policy, with little or no follow-up on how to make the policy take effect in education.
“In education, there is often a vast distance between policy and practice” (Hess,
2013[5]): educational policies seem to be developed with little consideration for the
practical mechanisms necessary to their implementation. Questions such as “do
teachers have the skills to teach this new curriculum?” are often overlooked. As a
result, expectations concerning schools’ capacity to implement often exceed reality
(OECD, 2010[16]).
Although it is difficult to assess whether a policy failed because it was not effective or
because it was not well carried out, this lack of focus on implementation can have
serious implications. First, the public resources invested in that policy might have been
wasted when they could have served for another project. Second, after a number of
policies failing to be implemented, citizens may start losing confidence and patience
with policy makers and other actors in the education system. Passing a policy that fails
to be implemented is thus a risk for education policy makers. It is therefore necessary
to ensure that when designing and introducing new education policies, policymakers
focus and design strategies for the implementation process itself, taking into
consideration that it is a complex change process rather than the execution phase of
policymaking.

1.2.2. Implementation as a change process

Embedded within the concept of implementation is the idea that the policy that gets
implemented brings about an effective change to the education sector. For example,
implementing a new curriculum at the school level mostly implies changing schools
and teachers’ practices, their beliefs, and the materials used. On the other hand, a
policy introducing new school funding formulas requires district leaders and principals
to change the way individual schools and local education systems are managed and
funded (OECD, 2017[17]).
Reforming education is no easy task, however. As noted in Hess (2013[5]) about the
American public schools, “schools and districts do not go out of business” and follow

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their everyday activities in teaching and learning. According to a study on public

sector activities, there is an entrenched tradition for education to stick to the status quo
and resist change in a number of countries (OECD, 2017[18]). Given the cost of reforms
and the uncertainty about the outcomes, stakeholders may prefer sticking to the status
quo rather than changing (OECD, 2016[9]).
As most policies aim to bring a change to how education works, implementing them
requires facing multiple challenges in the process. These include among others,
communication and co-ordination issues, problems with organisational resources,
capacity and compliance of the policy operators and policy targets (Weaver, 2010[19]).
Different approaches to educational change or policy reform emphasise a range of
challenges to implementation. Organisation theory and public administration literature
for example emphasises the importance of overcoming resistance from stakeholders, to
build support, to provide a plan and resources for change, and to find a way to embed
the policy in daily routines to make the change sustainable (Fernandez and Rainey,
2006[20]). For instance, schools may lack capacity and resources to implement reforms
–such as funding, training or technology. The political economy of reform looks at
limited public budgets and resistance by interest groups, which policy makers must
find a way to bypass in order to reform effectively. School change scholars suggest
that unless teachers, school leaders and other actors in education understand and share
the policy meaning, it is unlikely to get implemented (Fullan, 2015[21]).
Educational change cannot be reduced to the question of resistance to reform or the
outcome of policy implementation, however. The process of implementation in itself
is an opportunity to engage stakeholders, which can benefit them and the education
system overall. For instance, during the implementation of the Race to the Top
programme in Rhode Island between 2010 and 2014, district leaders developed
problem-solving skills by learning from their peers while reporting to the State
Agency (OECD, 2016[9]).
Studying education policy implementation is therefore closely linked with
understanding what determines education systems’ ability and actors’ willingness to
engage and change. Moreover, these change processes take place in education systems
that are increasingly complex, and require more elaborate strategies than the
traditional top-down policy making.

1.2.3. Enacting change in complex education systems

Recent developments in the literature have shown how education is taking shape in
increasingly complex environments, which affects the way modern education systems
are governed (Burns, Köster and Fuster, 2016[10]). Complex systems are characterised
by new structures and new behaviours that emerge thanks to the interactions between
multiple actors.
The number and type of actors that get involved with education policy have grown.
Regional and local administrators, school representatives, principals, teachers, parents
and other actors are keen to defend their own vision of education, based on deeply-
rooted and largely personal belief systems. These actors engage in heated political
debates about what priorities to give to education, and take initiatives to bring new
policies into schools.
These evolutions have changed the relationships between the various levels of
decision-making and execution. In some systems, decentralisation allows local and

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regional decision makers, and district and school leaders to weigh more in the
policymaking process, and to adapt policies to certain local priorities. More generally,
education systems are moving from essentially top-down structures to more horizontal
interactions in which negotiation and co-construction are in order. These systems are
non-linear; they rely on feedback to shape their own evolution. They operate on
multiple time-scales and at several levels simultaneously (Burns and Köster, 2016[22]).
These new dynamics create more challenging situations for policy implementation.
Change programmes in public organisations tend to fail for reasons such as a lack of
vision, incapacity to communicate, or failure to strike the right balance between
marginal changes and structural transformations (Kotter, 1995[23]; Keller and Price,
2011[24]). The issue of building and maintaining trust for instance, is crucial in
complex systems (Cerna, 2014[25]). New mechanisms must make it possible to hold
different actors accountable for their actions, since central governments do not
necessarily control all aspects of the policy process. At the same time, strong
accountability should not hinder education systems’ potential for innovation: OECD
countries find ways to use accountability as a tool for improvement and innovation at
the classroom, school, local and national levels (OECD, 2013[26]; Burns and Köster,
2016[22])
The complexity of education governance also affects a system’s disposition for
implementation. In decentralised systems, multiple levels of governance can result
either in many layers in the implementation channels, or in different reforms or
programmes to implement in similar places for instance. This crowded policy space
may create reform fatigue and confusion in those that have to implement it (Honig,
2006[27]).
Implementing a new policy, bringing a change to the way education works in this
environment is becoming more complex and challenging than in more hierarchical
organisations (Van Der Voet, Kuipers and Groeneveld, 2015[28]). Reform initiatives
and reactions to these changes no longer come from decisions made from the top
down; rather, they result from more intricate interactions between multiple actors at
various levels in the system. Central governments still play a decisive role in the
policymaking process, if only to guarantee a coherent education system. Policy makers
thus need to understand and to take into account the new challenges that complex
education systems imply for policy implementation.
Overall, the research literature reveals a range of reasons preventing implementation
from being effective, including a lack of focus on the implementation processes, the
challenges of engaging people effectively in change and the new complexity in
education governance. These call for the need to review current implementation
approaches. Our main interest in analysing the existing frameworks for
implementation is to assess whether they are adapted to education policymaking in the
21st century, and if they can support the development of professional practices that
can contribute to effective implementation.

1.3. Methodology of the study

An analysis of the current situation and challenges in education policy implementation

leads us to pose two central questions to guide our analysis: What does education
policy implementation entail in theory and in practice? What are the determinants
involved in the process of education policy implementation? Answering these will

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