Exploring England’s Secondary Educational Policy Discourses from the Perspective of a Social Justice and Sociopolitical Turn in Science Education

Abstract For the past years, science educators both in Global North and South contexts have been reflecting on the need for a sociopolitical and social justice–informed turn in science education in the face of growing local–global social justice science issues (SJSIs), confronting science’s political, economic, ethical, and epistemological entanglements. In this article, I will examine how discourses about these sociopolitical and social justice dimensions of science education have been constructed and/or absent from England’s policy landscape surrounding secondary education. Using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, this study analyses key educational policies guiding science curricula, school inspections, and teachers' professional development and work in the country. Main findings reveal a predominance of technical rationality-informed discourses about school science, characterised by an emphasis on an objective and apolitical perspective on science as factual knowledge and empirical processes, and on a utilitarian solutionist view of the relevance of school science. In addition, the sociopolitical dimension is often framed as undesirable, whilst social justice is narrowly conceptualised as individual academic achievement. These policies can be located in a broader landscape of global educational reforms, privileging market-oriented STEM career preparation for global competition and national growth, whilst marginalising critical engagement with sociopolitical and social justice issues.