The Pied Piper of Neo Liberalism Continues to Call the Tune in the Republic of Ireland: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Education Policy Texts from 2012 to 2021

The global coronavirus pandemic provides a disruption of seismic proportions and, in the short term at least, appears to further the reform agenda set by neoliberal/elite policymakers to reduce education to the exchange-value of a commodity. In an earlier article in the Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, I conducted a critical scrutiny of policy reform texts in Ireland between 2000 and 2012 and revealed the playing out of a seductive tune by the Pied Piper of Neoliberalism securing a meritocratic system of social class privilege. Here I continue this critical scrutiny using a Critical Discourse Analysis of policy texts in curriculum reform, school inspection and teacher education from 2012 to 2021. I draw from critical theory to take an emancipatory-transformative perspective and to use the metaphor of a tapestry crossed threaded between consensualism (normative consensus) and essentialism (empirical consensus) to reveal a hidden curriculum of micromanagement and bureaucratisation. An education system where social class and poverty (and intersectionalities including gender, race, colour, ethnicity) are normalised as issues of the individual and where wider socio-political issues of a just schooling system, and a just global world, are, either glossed over or abandoned.