Exploring policy enactment in Further Education colleges in Scotland and England

This pilot project is part of a larger proposal to investigate how policy is ‘enacted’ in Further Education colleges in Scotland and England. Policy enactment theory suggests that policy is not simply implemented but rather interpreted and shaped by a range of ‘policy actors’, leading to variation in interpretation and sometimes differences in outcome. The project will examine decisions around entry requirements in England and senior phase provision in Scotland as case studies to help build understanding of how policy enactment happens in the FE sector and how this phenomenon could be systematically and robustly studied in a larger project. The project combines perspectives from sociology, education and social policy to examine institutional practices that have a real impact on young people’s life chances and therefore on social justice more broadly.