‘Just Add Facilitators and Stir’: Stimulating Policy Uptake in Schools

Abstract

This article presents the evaluation findings of an education policy initiative that involved the employment of facilitators to broker the policy and its implementation. An Australian state’s education authority piloted the employment of physical activity facilitators to expedite the implementation of ‘Smart Moves’ in schools, a policy mandating daily physical activity for all state school students from pre-school to Year 10. The evaluation data was collected through facilitator diaries, semi-structured interviews, reflective writing, network mapping, and a school survey. The introduction of physical activity facilitators to accelerate the uptake of a health promotion policy in schools was highly instructive in terms of the conditions of policy uptake in schools. These facilitators were able to intervene in the value-laden, mandated state activity and shift the discourses to those that were palatable for schools and teachers. Significantly, in Bernsteinian terms, they were bridging the official and pedagogic recontextualizing fields thus acting as contributors to the recontextualization of official policy knowledge despite some school resistance.