The research project addressed an important social policy puzzle: why some policy cultures readily embrace neoliberal educational developments, while others resist and reject them. Building on a comparison of three contrasting cases: the UK, Sweden and Russia, the research examined grassroots interpretations of key neoliberal ideas in education, including, for example, ‘education as a commercial service’ and ‘standardisation in education’, explaining the crucial role of bottom-up policy reception in neoliberal policy. The research action contributed to facilitating a dialogue between different-level policy actors - teachers, parents, school administrators and policy makers at the local, national and international levels - by re-framing a long-standing social policy dilemma: ‘social change is hampered by public resistance’, in a new light: ‘public resistance is an organic part of social change’. The main contribution of the research action is in explaining, theorising and popularising the idea of social policy being ‘owned’ in equal measure by policy actors, as well as in promoting a feedback culture and a culture of policy negotiation among various policy actors. Another key contribution of the action lies in the re-shaping of the production of knowledge and expertise, both within the academic and public sectors, through promoting ergonomic research designs that utilise publicly available and secondary data, as opposed to generating new data, as well as in popularising digital data collection and the preservation and re-use of specifically qualitative data.
