A politics of temporality? Anticipatory governance and regimes of historicity in future-oriented education policy

Amid a future-focused present, education reforms are increasingly framed as responses to uncertainty and change. The proliferation of anticipatory governance in education policies, that not only seek to forecast what might happen but also aim to actively shape anticipated futures, raises questions about their ‘politics of temporality’. This paper critically investigates how past, present and future time are ‘used’ in two recent future-oriented policies: the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 and Britain’s Futureproof Education . Engaging with a discourse analysis and re-reading approach, we investigate how historical narratives are strategically employed within these policy documents. Our analysis reveals three dominant temporal strategies: ‘ we do not want to repeat history ’, ‘ we are different from our past ’, and ‘ we must change to win ’. These findings reveal how the past is often instrumentalized to legitimize present actions and shape imagined futures. By contextualizing these temporal strategies within broader historical patterns of transnational policymaking, this paper reveals the long-standing rhetorical patterns of education governance – sometimes reproducing the very logics they claim to disrupt. In doing so, this paper contributes to critical education policy studies by offering a historically-grounded perspective of how temporal narratives function as tools of reform, governance, and institutional self-legitimation.