The psychological complex in contemporary education policy

This paper brings together work in critical psychology and network governance to build a distinctive critique of how education policy mobilises the psychological complex to reinscribe deficit accounts of children and young people. While contemporary work in the critical analysis of the global educational policy assemblage has uncovered the undercurrents of scientism working to frame mainstream discourses, this paper excavates the manifestation of this through the ‘psy-complex’, which works to construct specific, narrow visions of possibilities and pupil subjectivities. To achieve this, the paper draws on critical psychological research to interrogate the dominance of, and position awarded to, psychology in the research report that informs the education inspection framework used by Ofsted to inspect schools in England. The discourses and assumptions produced and reproduced through this resource are of profound influence in wider constructions of, understandings of, and responses to educational contexts. We argue that the framework draws on the psy-complex to reinscribe deficit accounts of children and young people while perpetuating systemic inequities. We call for a more critical approach to research in psychology and education within which cultural, social, and historical contexts of inequality in education and childhood are deployed in explanations of educational inequalities.