Three policy problems: Biocreep and the extension of biopolitical administration

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers (DFE, 2021; DFE, 2022a) and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of “biocreep”. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of “biopolitics” into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers’ approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a “problematic subject”; secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction; and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine.