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 micro-management 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.