Investigating the interface between policy and practice: The usefulness of Bernstein’s binary categories

Drawing evidence from a recent empirical study, this paper argues that Bernstein’s corpus of work offers a language of description and analysis to investigate the disjuncture between policy and practice in contemporary educational reform. It is argued that the disjuncture is often the result of practitioners having to enact reforms with somewhat contradictory expectations such as meeting external accountability demands while building capacities at the local level.