Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research within an Australian State Educational bureaucracy this paper explores the parameters of policy from within the bureaucracy. In the initial stages of this study there are indications that policy is formed and created by many hands. Who writes policy?

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research within an Australian State Educational bureaucracy this paper explores the parameters of policy from within the bureaucracy. In the initial stages of this study there are indications that policy is formed and created by many hands. Who writes policy? There is no signature, no individual to whom fame or blame can be apportioned making the collective accountable and through which the rationality of the state emerges. Policy texts and directorates are the tools used by bureaucrats to communicate changes in practice, in this study changes in educational practices. With a political focus on classrooms and devolution of funding to the individual schools power and autonomy is supposedly placed in the hands of the educational institutions themselves. This study follows the process of writing a policy. It interrogates the ways in which the management strategies act on the policy-writers in their struggle to equate political ideology with educational vision. The process of writing and forming a policy can be long and tedious the result of many hours of discussion and decision making and compromises made by a range of people. To what extent does policy have an owner?