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AbstractThis paper explores the utility of hybrid governance as an analytical lens for understanding policy design and delivery in Australian schooling reform. Using the National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) as a case study, we argue that its design and delivery processes exemplify hybridity in myriad dimensions. In a federal system in which national schooling reform relies upon negotiation and consensus building amongst a multiplicity of government and non‐government stakeholders, we argue that NAPLAN's hybridity serves as a governmental technique for managing and sustaining collaborative governance arrangements. Hybridity also supports the standardised implementation of the assessment across diverse schooling systems and sectors. While NAPLAN's hybridity generates strategic benefits for Australian governments, it also produces risks. A challenge for policymakers is to harness its benefits while ensuring transparent decision‐making and clear responsibilities and accountabilities. To address risks and leverage opportunities, we argue there are benefits to having a convening agency with authority to manage and sustain hybrid networks at the national scale.Points for practitioners
Hybrid governance offers productive insights into how Australian governments work collaboratively to design and deliver national schooling reforms.
The National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is an exemplary case study for examining hybrid governance in the Australian federation.
Hybrid governance serves as a technique for managing and sustaining collaborative governance arrangements at the national scale and for ensuring NAPLAN's implementation is standardised across Australia's diverse subnational schooling systems and sectors.
Hybridity creates risks and opportunities. A challenge for policymakers is to harness its benefits while ensuring transparent decision‐making and clear responsibilities and accountabilities.
There are benefits to having a convening agency with authority to manage and sustain hybrid networks at the national scale.

This article takes up Bonnie Honig's notion of 'public things' to conceptualise schools as sites of attachment and meaning that draw people into the relationships of care and concern that are crucial for democratic life. By linking this with Sara Ahmed's theorisation of affective relations and use, we develop Honig's idea that communities cultivate public things through their use of such things, at the same time as the things themselves shape the communities that care for them. Drawing on focus groups conducted with predominantly white Australian mothers, we examine how relational attachments and affective relations of care and concern circulate through the object of the school, shaping boundaries between self and Other, and experiences of community and public space. The article identifies two broad themes. First, it identifies white mothers' desires for alignment between themselves and the school, articulated as seeing oneself reflected in the values of the school and community. Second, it argues that mothers' affective relations with schooling were also expressed as racialised concerns about the potential risks of 'Other' communities attaching to the school, in ways that involved demarcating 'self' and 'Other'. We argue that the analytic lens of public things draws attention to the ways that schooling imbricates parents in relational and mutually constitutive affective environments that speak to the collective power of public things.

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals.

This article reflects on what doing critical policy sociology means in shifting theoretical, empirical and methodological contexts of education. We focus our analytical lens on two primary considerations. First, we reflect on the politics of criticality, examining differing claims and debates about what it means to do critical research and be a critical researcher of education policy, paying particular attention to how critical policy sociologists position their work in relation to elite power and policy networks. Second, we build on these foundations to consider the trend towards researching mobilities within critical policy sociology, arguing that contemporary 'follow the policy' research risks orienting researchers to the problems and agendas already established by elite policy agents and organisations, while obscuring the not-so-mobile forces that continue to define education policy and practice. We also raise questions about the elite networks and privileged levels of resourcing typically required to conduct this kind of research. In conclusion, we invite further discussion on the politics of knowledge production and challenges for policy sociologists seeking to be critical in shifting contexts.

AbstractThe media's central role in the policy process has long been recognised, with policy scholars noting the potential for news media to influence policy change. However, scholars have paid most attention to the news media as a conduit for the agendas, frames, and preferences of other policy actors. Recently, scholars have more closely examined media actors directly contributing to policy change. This paper presents a case study to argue that specific members of the media may display the additional skills and behaviours that characterise policy entrepreneurship. Our case study focuses on mandatory childhood vaccination in Australia, following the entrepreneurial actions of a deputy newspaper editor and her affiliated outlets. Mandatory childhood vaccination policies have grown in strength and number in recent years across the industrialised world in response to parents refusing to vaccinate their children. Australia's federal and state governments have been at the forefront of meeting vaccine refusal with harsh consequences; our case study demonstrates how media actors conceived and advanced these policies. The experiences, skills, attributes, and strategies of Sunday Telegraph Deputy Editor Claire Harvey facilitated her policy entrepreneurship, utilising many classic hallmarks from the literature and additional opportunities offered by her media role. Harvey also subverted the classic pathway of entrepreneurship, mobilising the public ahead of policymakers to force the latter's hand.