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This paper takes inspiration from the Indigenous Fijian practice of 'curui' – weaving or patching together – as a metaphor to explore connections between climate justice, gender equality, and education in Fijian policies and practices. The paper argues that neither gender equality nor education can be 'silver bullets' for the huge challenges that the climate crisis raises, particularly for small island developing states (SIDS) such as Fiji that exist at the sharp end of the crisis. The paper contributes close analysis of Fijian national climate change policies and development plans from 2010, identifying the ways in which these policies frame and discuss the connections between climate, gender, and education, and asking whether these policies acknowledge traditional ecological knowledges, and the extent to which they are aligned with notions of justice. It argues that connected approaches to education, centred in Indigenous knowledges and ontologies, have thus far been insufficiently included in Fiji's policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a comparative analysis of policy texts from UN organisations and scholarly work since the 1990s this paper examines how mothers are portrayed in simplistic terms, as educated thus beneficial for their daughters' schooling, or deprived of education causing detriment to their daughters' future prospects. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with mothers from rural Pakistan, these global comparisons are brought into conversation with local narratives showing how mothers' aspirations facilitate daughters' educational opportunities. It is argued that mothers' subjectivities have a potential to inform global policy discourses for investigating the aspirational and transformational potential of mothers in contexts of material and social constraint. The paper proposes an informed approach to educational research and policy making which seeks to understand the processes surrounding mothers' support for their daughters' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, girls' education has been an increasingly high-profile concern in international development policy. At the same time, there has been a trend towards the greater production and reliance on quantitative data, indicators and targets in national and international education policy. Scholars have raised concerns about the rise of 'performance-based' approaches to accountability in education, and potential counterproductive effects of this for social justice and equality. However, few studies have explored how this trend plays out in practice within international organisations, particularly in relation to the heightened focus on girls' education. This paper explores the implications of the increasing reliance on quantitative measures for policy actors and draws on a set of interviews with key stakeholders working in organisations concerned with gender and education to explore their divergent understandings of accountability processes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the prospects for a transformative approach to measuring gender equality and girls' education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) PISA for Schools assessment. Our first substantive focus is a descriptive and analytical account of changes and developments in the functioning of this ground-breaking assessment since its creation in 2012. These changes include an expansion of the number and diversity of participating schools and countries, the introduction of a 'user-pays' model, the enhanced role of edtech firms and an explicit capacity-building focus, which we argue helps to strengthen an instrument constituency for the broader OECD testing regime. The second focus of the paper is the impact of PISA for Schools on changing modes of educational governance, situated against emerging spatialities of globalisation. Here, we provide an analysis using the concept of 'by-passes', which we elaborate as spatial, governance and systemic, to understand the new topological spatialities of globalisation and the global governance effects of these specific by-passes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines educational segregation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro through the lens of a multifaceted centreperiphery relationship involving geographical, racial and historical dimensions. The paper first situates Brazilian racial inequalities historically, drawing on decolonial theory, before examining student enrolment patterns in Brazil's second-largest metropolis. Although Brazil is often held to be a racially integrated society, the analysis shows sharp racial and social divisions between a 'peripherally' oriented mass public school system, a 'centrally' oriented private sector, and selective public schools run by the federal government. The selective public sector is undergoing a period of transition, driven by affirmative action policies, and provoking tensions that are examined through the experiences of two politically-engaged teachers. The findings point to the importance of political mobilisation in effecting change and the need for further affirmative action policies, along with a revised funding model for public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, Singapore has firmly established its reputation in the global education policy space as one of the best education systems in the world. However, existing policy transfer literature on Singapore has been mainly interested in Singapore as a decontextualised, ahistorical case, rather than as a unique player in the global education policy sphere. Analysis of how Singapore's educational policies and lessons have been exported to other countries tends to focus on the mediating roles of international assessments and global policy actors like the OECD or McKinsey consultants. What has been much less clear is Singapore's own proactive branding and education export strategies. Guided by the Cultural Political Economy framework, this paper draws attention to how an enabling global education policy context with an insatiable appetite for fast policy lessons has aligned with Singapore's own initiatives to cultivate and export its brand of educational success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, Amsterdam implemented a centralised primary school admissions policy, constraining school choice after a long history of highly autonomous schools and free parental choice which has resulted, in part, in the city's segregated schooling environment. Introduced out of concerns of inequality for parents and disorganisation by schools, this policy implemented a uniform choosing procedure and a distance-based priority mechanism. Drawing on interviews with school directors and municipal education officials, this paper examines how schools seek to maintain their legitimacy in a highly segregated school choice environment undergoing constrained change. The Amsterdam case serves as a unique example of local education officials confronting the well-documented negative effects of school choice through policies controlling school choice in an era of global school choice expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore - education systems with contrasting but comparably effective approaches to teacher accountability - I find that one way in which sociocultural context interacts with teachers' experiences of accountability instruments is by influencing the mental models of motivation that shape their responses to these instruments. This finding is relevant to two contentious areas in education policy. First, it suggests that teacher accountability policy is a socioculturally embedded matter, implying a need for caution rather than recommending specific forms of accountability across the board. Second, it adds to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that 'best practices' from high-performing education systems are contingent on implementation contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2019, Taiwan has implemented native language education for 'new immigrants' from Southeast Asian countries. This paper argues that the new educational provisions reflect the Taiwanese government's desire to appropriate new immigrants' cultures and languages to promote a multicultural vision of Taiwanese identity. It analyses the 12-year national curriculum guidelines and the primary-level teaching materials to elucidate the role of language education in the construction of discourse on new immigrants, exploring how this reflects and reinforces official portrayals of Taiwanese society as 'multicultural'. The analysis shows how the extension of curricular recognition to immigrants' languages and their associated cultures is driven by a desire to project a certain vision of mainstream national identity. By showing how, in the Taiwanese context, instruction in their languages in some respects reinforces the marginalisation of immigrant communities, it provides insights that may be applicable elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a 'home international' comparative analysis of education policy on social and emotional wellbeing, drawing on the case of the UK and its four distinct education systems of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have developed more holistic policy in this area, which stands in stark contrast to the disparate policies of England. These divergences in policy are likely to account for differences observed in the awareness, perceived value and 'take up' of policy by schools - what we refer to here as differences in 'policy traction' between the different systems of education. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had the highest rates of 'policy traction' compared to England where schools appeared adrift about policy in their jurisdiction. We consider these findings in light of challenges and opportunities for policy learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Early Childhood Education (ECE) has emerged as a policy priority for many governments and international organisations. Yet while there has been much research about ECE, and despite some notable exceptions, comparative studies have figured less in ECE than in other sectors of education. This paper introduces the special issue on 'comparative studies in early childhood education'. It provides the rationale for this issue alongside a brief historical overview of the relationship between ECE and comparative education, explaining how the embodiment of diverse forms of comparative enquiry can reveal interplays between policy, politics and practice in the past, present, and future comparative studies of ECE. It concludes by introducing the contrast between comparative education as a 'science of solutions' and as a 'science of difference', concepts that frame the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competence-based approaches (CBAs) in education have become an internationally important educational policy concept in recent decades. However, a substantial body of research has suggested that in order to understand and explain the evolution of CBAs, there is a need to analyse curriculum-making as a complex and multi-layered practice. To contribute to this research field, this paper makes use of Vivien Schmidt's concept of discursive-institutionalism (DI), which focuses on ideas and discourse. First, we compare ideas of competences as expressed in four influential CBA frameworks, and second, we exemplify how these ideas, with special reference to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have been translated when re-contextualised within Swedish curriculum policy-making. The results show that when re-contextualised within national borders, transnational ideas of competences are reconfigured. In the case of Sweden, this process has led to a national interpretation of CBAs, discussed in this paper as 'hybrid competences.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Callon et al's theory of the three stages of translation of research, and based on detailed empirical data, this paper describes how the technical and the political, and the material and the semiotic, work together to make PISA 'fit' new contexts, while at the same time making the new contexts 'fit' PISA. This paper demonstrates how international comparisons demand profound changes in the ways countries come to know, represent, and act upon their education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why do some ideas attain agenda status while others do not? This paper seeks to explore these questions in the context of the policy changes observed in European education policy. By drawing from the literature on agenda-setting and employing process tracing, the paper develops a theoretical argument to investigate the causal mechanisms through which a new problem definition is set. The central argument is that three factors affect how a problem definition wins over another: (i) the presence of a policy entrepreneur; (ii) the ability to construct a convincing narrative to support a particular interpretation of a problem; and (iii) the specific zeitgeist of a given period, namely the social and political context within which ideas gain ground. The paper contributes to the literature on European education policy by examining how ideas about education emerged. It also contributes to the theoretical debate on agenda setting studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue exploring parents' responses to neoliberal policy changes, especially shifting notions of risk and responsibility, this article provides a historical account of local and national policy initiatives in the contemporary United States that have increased risk and placed responsibility for this risk on the shoulders of parents (as well as educators). The opening section of the paper reviews major recent policy documents and initiatives in the United States, from the landmark 1983 report 'A Nation at Risk' to the current age of test-based accountability. In the following sections, the paper explores what two Chicago parents themselves had to say about risk and responsibility in public schooling. What, in their views, were the actual risks? What did they think their responsibilities were, as parents? What did they do in response to the shifting policyscape? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of global campaigns on girls' and women's education, including major global policy initiatives such as the MDGs and the SDGs. While scholars have critically analysed the conceptualisations of gender, equality and development in such campaigns, and their significance for national level policy and practice, less has been written about why and how girls' education came to be such a high profile feature of international policy frameworks. This paper draws on perspectives from transnational social movement theory, which has been used by gender scholars to explore the activities and significance of non-governmental organisations for agenda-setting at the global level. In this paper these perspectives are applied to the field of global education policy, through an analysis of evidence from international conferences, data on aid flows and interviews with key policy actors, to explore the factors behind rise of the global agenda on gender equality in education. In doing so, it suggests that the current dominant framing around girls' education, access and quality, may be explained by the relatively weak involvement of non-governmental women's groups in proportion to the strong involvement of multilaterals, bilateral agencies, national governments and more recently, private sector organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School segregation is both an enduring and growing area of research interest. School segregation is shaped by multiple and complex forces within educational ecosystems, including individual students and households, education jurisdictions, organisational (dis)incentives, policies, and larger societal characteristics and contexts. As a field of study, comparative education emphasises the complex interactions of historical and socio-cultural context with actors, social institutions and policy settings for explaining educational phenomena. With this foundation, comparative education is uniquely positioned to integrate studies of school segregation into a comprehensive and comparative framework for deepening our theoretical understanding of school segregation and its causes, solutions, and impacts on educational equity. This paper introduces the special issue on school segregation. In addition to providing an overview of the special issue, we present a theoretical framework that may be useful for informing future comparative studies and conclude with several possible future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to outline the educational reforms that have been taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) since the late 1990s and to explain the ideological and social dynamics shaping their implementation at the local level. The theoretical framework informing the analysis is in line with institutionalism, in particular three of its currently much-discussed variants. While sociological neo-institutionalism and historical institutionalism tend to focus on macro-level dynamics, discursive institutionalism rather focuses on actors' ideas and their interactions. Discursive institutionalism is useful in analysing the case of BiH— in particular, in discussing its system of community-based school governance because a diverse range of actors, including international agencies, national policymakers, school leaders, and community representatives, have been involved in enacting global norms and reforms. This paper then outlines how the current community-based school governance system has reached an institutional standoff wherein these diverse actors' motives, behaviours and meaning-making processes all intersect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that country size can play a crucial role in shaping the type of gradual change observed in collective skill formation systems. Collectively governed dual-apprenticeship training has its base in the industrial and crafts sectors of the economy and builds on the decentralised cooperation of multiple public and private stakeholders. As a result, it tends to be strongly path dependent, which favours gradual over radical forms of change. However, in recent years, dual-apprenticeship training has been increasingly challenged by the rise of the knowledge and service economy and the growing popularity of academic forms of education. In this context, I compare policy responses in Switzerland and Germany, which represent one small and one large collective skill formation system, respectively. The historical-institutionalist analysis finds that the dominant trajectory of change is conversion in Switzerland but layering in Germany, with different implications for the future viability of collective skill formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an exclusive jurisdiction of the sub-federal level, with important long-term implications. Adopting a most dissimilar case design by using two contrasting cases – Canada and Germany – this paper argues that boundary control has been an effective mechanism for sub-federal governments to consolidate and retain authority over education policy, despite recurring pressures for more harmonisation or even uniformity. Although both federations differ profoundly in terms of their institutional characteristics and macro-sociological contexts, boundary control strategies variously allowed sub-federal actors in both federations to thwart efforts of the federal level to assume a greater role in education policy over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has focused either on the internationalisation of China's higher education (HE) as soft power, or on soft power with 'Chinese characteristics'. There is a paucity of research combining these two foci. This paper fills this gap by: (i) unravelling the meanings and features of the 'Chinese characteristics' embodied in the policies of President Xi Jinping's new regime that seeks to rejuvenate the 'civilisational state' through internationalising HE as soft power; (ii) analysing the implications and complications therein; and (iii) exploring the predicaments and paradoxes as China seeks to construct a Sino-centric world order alongside, if not atop, the Westphalian system. It demonstrates how the internationalisation of HE as soft power with 'Chinese characteristics': finds its legitimacy in a historico-cultural narrative; rides on the tide of the current global norms/practices; builds on national agenda/priorities; and is running into conflict with the West which is pursuing its own similar interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines competency-based educational policy-making in a global context. Specifically, it explores how the thinking around competency, spearheaded by international organisations and experts, has led to the development and deployment of a particular notion of global competency. Drawing on critical policy research, I examine three international policy events in which experts convened to discuss, debate, and co-construct ideas related to competencies in education. I argue that by structuring the assessment of knowledge and fixing meanings, the OECD, along with networks of experts, has created and diffused a particular social imaginary of a globally competent learner. Given the complexity and uncertainty of the world today, increasing the global and intercultural knowledge and awareness of the world's students is vitally important. Yet, with so much at stake, researchers must critically examine the processes through which educational futures are being imagined while at the same time, pursuing more equitable and inclusive education policy-making within and beyond the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical policy analysis and network ethnography of Teach for Bangladesh (TfB). We demonstrate that TfB is a localised version of a global teacher education policy - Teach for All/America (TfAll/A). Santos, Boaventura De Sousa [2002. The Processes of Globalisation. Translated by Sheena Caldmell. Eurozine: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais and Eurozine, August, 1-48] has written about the ways some national policies travel globally. He calls these ‘globalised localisms’. When they touch down and are taken up in another national context, he calls this a ‘localised globalism’. We see TfB as a ‘localised globalism’. This paper is focused on documenting and analysing the policy network that has enabled a globalised localism, TfAll/A, to be taken up as a localised globalism in Bangladesh through TfB. We see this as the emergence of network governance in a developing world primary schooling context. The analysis shows how pivotal to TfB is the boundary spanning networking of its founder, who connects the global to the local, the private to the public, and the provision of social services to philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journalHikakukyoikukenkyu(Comparative Education Research) first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-language literature. Drawing on a review of the Japanese-language literature and semi-structured interviews with 25 JCES members, this paper identifies a particular intellectual tradition within JCES, often referred to as the area-studies approach to comparative education. This approach, often practised by JCES researchers specialising in developing countries in Asia, has long constituted the mainstay of comparative education scholarship in Japan. This paper traces the formation of this intellectual tradition, and focuses on its complex relationship with the dominant paradigm of ‘paradigmatic’ English-language comparative education scholarship. The paper shows how ‘other’ comparative education societies – such as the JCES – can be looked to as a resource with which to ‘provincialise’ the way comparative education research is conceptualised in English-language academia, and to cross-culturalise the field of comparative education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Portraying a localised educational system as part of broader global flows of policy ideas and practices emanating from multiple sources – an eduscape– the paper focuses on family practices shaped by global policy flows and the return impact of families on the translation of these policies into local school formations. Under scrutiny are the decentralising or devolutionary directives, linked so often to choice and competition, which took hold in Western jurisdictions in the 1980s, the influences of which are still strongly felt. The conceptual links spread to a mobile 'second modernity', implicating many a family in movement associated with choices they are obliged to make, and which are often correlated to family achievement and success. The observations reported here are framed conceptually by an interest in the synthesis of Beck's individualisation thesis and Bourdieusean practice approaches in order to portray and comprehend social being and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Public-Private Partnerships' (PPPs) growing popularity within education policy circles, research on their effects yields contradictory results. The understanding of PPP effects is limited by the prevalence of generalist analyses that neglect to acknowledge the exceptional heterogeneity of the policy frameworks in which PPPs crystallize. Building on a scoping literature review, this paper aims at identifying patterns of effects of main PPP modalities on education (namely vouchers, charter schools and public subsidies for private schools) by considering the mediating role of policy-design variables. Our results show that PPP configurations oriented at the generation of market-like dynamics are frequently found to exacerbate school segregation and educational inequalities. Conversely, those PPP arrangements less conducive to market competition and those that follow an affirmative action rationale (such as targeted vouchers) are more likely to yield more positive effects on learning outcomes than other types of PPPs, without necessarily undermining equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low completion rate in upper secondary education is seen as a big problem in the Nordic countries. School failure has shown to dramatically increase the risks for unemployment and labour market exclusion with severe consequences for both society and the young person. This paper analyses national policy measures to combat low upper secondary education completion rates in Norway and Sweden, often regarded as representing a social democratic welfare model and a universalistic transition regime. The analysis demonstrates that although this issue has received extensive political attention, the two countries display somewhat different policy designs. The Norwegian approach is proactive and targeted while the Swedish policy is more general and directed towards reforming organisational structures in upper-secondary education. In sum, our analysis demonstrates that national governance structures shape and influence policy design in the context of an increasingly diversified Nordic social democratic welfare state regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Indonesia's experience with neo-liberal higher education reform. It argues that this agenda has encountered strong resistance from the dominant predatory political, military, and bureaucratic elements who occupy the state apparatus, their corporate clients, and popular forces, leading to continuation of the centralist and predatory system of higher education that was established under the New Order. The only areas in which neo-liberal reform has progressed have been those where the neo-liberal agenda has aligned well with that of popular forces and there has been little resistance from predatory elements. In presenting this argument, the paper illustrates the role of domestic configurations of power and interest in mediating global pressures for neo-liberal higher education reform. It accordingly suggests that Indonesia needs to construct a model of higher education that simultaneously fits with the reigning political settlement and produces better research and teaching outcomes than the present model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Catholic schools in Scotland have been fully state-funded since the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. Under this Act, 369 contemporary Catholic schools are able to retain their distinctive identity and religious education and the teachers have to be approved by the Catholic hierarchy. Similar to the position of other forms of state-funded and partially state-funded faith schools in Europe, the position of state-funded Catholic schools in Scotland has been contested. This paper initially locates the debate and discussion about Catholic schools in Scotland in the history and development of the wider faith schools debate in the UK, particularly England and Wales. The paper outlines the key themes in the debate on faith schooling in England and Wales identifying the similarities between the debate in Scotland and England and Wales and the distinctive features of the debate in Scotland. The paper will then focus on a critical examination and analysis of two key themes concerning state-funded Catholic schools in the Scottish context. The first theme is the debate over the continuation of government funding of Catholic schooling as it is effectively government funding of religious beliefs and practices for a particular Christian denomination. The second theme is more unique to Scotland and has some tenuous links to the debate on faith schools in Northern Ireland: the claims that Catholic schools are the root cause of sectarianism or contribute to sectarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the situation of non-governmental religious schools in Germany. The available empirical data demonstrate an increasing demand for these schools in recent decades. In this paper, possible causes of this development are discussed. First, the given constitutional framework for religion in governmental and non-governmental schools is presented. The particularity of the German school system comes into view: not only the churches but also the state – as an expression of its neutrality towards religion – maintains religious schools; furthermore, denominational religious instruction is also given in governmental non-religious schools. Second, the phenomenon of religious school selection will be considered: in which educational domains are non-governmental religious schools increasing? Where are they decreasing? Third, hypotheses explaining these developments – such as the special educational profiles of non-governmental religious schools, the wish for social distinction, avoiding problems of governmental schools, and better performance – are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the shifting relations between the family and the state in Indian education policy. It charts how family resources, responsibility, and participation have been variously called upon by the state across three historical conjunctures of education reform: the decades of post-independence planning for school expansion and nation-building after 1947; the global development era of economic liberalisation and decentralisation in the 1990s and early 2000s; and the present turn to a rights-based approach in the context of intensified educational marketisation, as marked by the 2009 Right to Education Act (RTE). Across these periods, we identify an enduring paternalism of welfare governance alongside strategies for devolving state responsibility in matters of school education. The analysis situates the conditions of family responsibility for education under the contemporary RTE, in which parents are expected to be ‘morally’ compelled to meet the state's education goals. Through this analysis, we bring to the fore the politics of family governance in education policy, a politics that is largely overlooked by, despite being central to, research on education and international development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International large-scale student assessments (ILSAs) in education represent a valuable source of information for policy-makers, not only on student achievements, but also on their relationship with different contextual factors. The results are partly described in the official studies’ reports; more can be derived from the publicly released data sets. However, league tables are often the only evidence used in policy debates and decisions on education. Indeed, the comparison of student achievement across the participating educational systems is a legitimate proxy for estimating countries’ development and productivity, but the use of league tables more often turns into ‘horse-ranking’, ignoring the contexts of teaching and learning. This is often supported by the media, turning the use of results into their abuse. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use and misuse of league tables in reporting ILSA results, vs. the use of data for in-depth analysis in order to make informed decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative education is a field with a tradition that dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The field has come a long way since the times when travellers sought educational experiences that could be applied in their places of origin; it has expanded across the world, though the rhythm of knowledge production varies significantly from one region to the next. More recently, the increased attention to educational internationalisation has enlarged the pool of perspectives linked to the field. In this paper, we examine some of the more recent debates on comparative education to provide an analysis of the field within a specific context: Latin America. From a historical perspective, we analyse the continuity of, and ruptures between, the field on both global and regional fronts. We emphasise specific features of the region: how was comparison introduced, which were the main loci of production and circulation, who tends to use it at present and for what purpose. We focus on the circulation of themes and practices in three periods of time among Latin American countries. A particular form of academic institutionalisation – not driven by universities – is a unique feature of the region that differs from paradigmatic comparative education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late 1980s, education systems have increasingly moved to allocating funding for general education by means of a per-student formula. The trend started with developed economies and moved to transition and developing economies, where the World Bank has promoted the adoption of per-student funding (PSF). But promoting a particular reform, such as PSF, by including it in a package of sector-specific development projects funded by World Bank grants or loans, and employing local and international specialist staff do not guarantee successful implementation. This paper examines experience with implementing PSF to school level in transition countries, comparing varying degrees of success to date (2013) in Bulgaria, Moldova and Kosovo. The paper considers the dilemmas inherent in designing PSF formulae for schools, how this played out in each of the countries and the reasons for varying success in implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers attempts to import pedagogic practices from other educational systems. In so doing, it focuses upon policymakers’ attempts to: (a) import interactive whole class teaching approaches to the UK (and, to a lesser extent, the US); and (b) export learner-centred pedagogies, largely derived from Anglo-American theorising and practice, to industrialised and developing countries that often vary greatly in educational performance. The paper explains why such initiatives have largely proven ineffective, yet notes that while UK policymakers have largely moved away from pedagogic concerns to issues of teacher quality and expectation, learner-centred approaches continue to be proffered as a solution to the educational problems of many traditional societies. Finally, the paper concludes by emphasising student academic motivation and engagement, rather than specific pedagogic practices, as key to the differential performance of industrialised countries in international comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A crisis of student funding has led to most South African universities being closed for weeks, after protests in 2015 and again in 2016. A policy response to these events requires insight into relationships between higher education, society, and the economy. This paper interrogates the assumptions which underpin current approaches to measuring higher education in South Africa. It argues that analyses of labour market relationships, associated with forms of measurement linked to rates of return, graduate tracer studies, and employer requirements and satisfaction studies, give us a snapshot of relatively contemporary data, but do not tell much about the dynamics of causation. They contain interesting information but should not be used to overclaim about the relationship between higher education and the economy. Taken together with other approaches to higher education evaluation, they tell us more about how labour markets are looking for distinctions between candidates than about the value that higher education adds to societies and economies. A clear public policy response needs better forms of measurement and better tools of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a response to David Limond's exposition, “[An] historical culture … rapidly, universally, and thoroughly restored”? British influence on Irish education since 1922', which appeared in Comparative Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, November 2010, pp. 449–462. Limond's overall thesis is that ‘a post-colonial overhang affects Irish policy-makers and bureaucrats in their educational policies and practices’. This paper contests three main aspects of Limond's exposition. First, in his analysis of the period 1831–1922, he fails to place sufficient emphasis on the extent to which the educational system was favoured by the Catholic Church, which operated in a manner which served not only its own interests, but also those of the middle classes of Irish Catholic farmers, merchants and business people. Secondly, he does not sufficiently indicate the extent to which the structure of Irish education from the early years of independence until the mid-1960s, and associated curriculum changes, were very different from the situation in Britain at the time. Thirdly, while he is correct in stating that, since the 1960s, Ireland has imported certain ideas on educational policy and practice from Britain, he neglects to demonstrate that there were also other sources, and that they were probably more dominant than the British ones. Hopefully, as a rejoinder, the paper will be read in a positive light by indicating how the historical study of Irish education within a comparative context is a neglected area of scholarship, and thus stimulate researchers to address the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the manner in which consumers and providers of education operate within, and how they withdraw from, the educational marketplace in Pakistan. It focuses on the use of exit and voice mechanisms used by households in response to the range of educational provision available from state and non-state providers. The conceptual framework is drawn from the original model of exit, voice and loyalty created by Hirschman in 1970. The paper uses a range of exit, voice and loyalty types to map how households of different socio-economic status make schooling choices when they are faced with a range of educational providers. The evidence shows that the better-off households are benefiting more than the poorer households from the higher quality education provided by low-fee private schools. The poorer households face economic, social and political hierarchies that work against equal access. The implication of our findings regarding the diminished exit and voice mechanisms exercised by poorer households is that these are unlikely to halt further deterioration in the quality of education currently experienced in local government schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human capital and functionalist paradigms underpin the stance taken by most governments to education policy. These models have also had a profound effect upon the determination of education priorities in the poorest states and, indeed, upon aid policy. This paper argues, on the basis of evidence from the papers in this volume and from the wider research literature, that the outcomes of education for individuals and for society depend more upon national and local contexts, on history and on culture, than such models typically allow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that globalisation has implications for research and theory in the social sciences, demanding that the social no longer be seen as homologous with nation, but also linked to postnational or global fields. This situation has theoretical and methodological implications for comparative education specifically focused on education policy, which traditionally has taken the nation-state as the unit of analysis, and also worked with ‘methodological nationalism’. The paper argues that globalisation has witnessed a rescaling of educational politics and policymaking and relocated some political authority to an emergent global education policy field, with implications for the functioning of national political authority and national education policy fields. This rescaling and this reworking of political authority are illustrated through two cases: the first is concerned with the impact of a globalised policy discourse of the ‘knowledge economy’ proselytised by the OECD and its impact in Australian policy developments; the second is concerned explicitly with the constitution of a global education policy field as a commensurate space of equivalence, as evidenced in the OECD’s PISA and educational indicators work and their increasing global coverage. The paper indicatively utilises Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to understand the emergent global education policy field and suggests these are very useful for doing comparative education policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines capacity development in education in fragile contexts. This is a current concern for donors and development partners, but there has been little work on the nexus between capacity, education and fragility. The paper examines the concept of fragility and the particular problems in education associated with fragile contexts. The key argument - and tension - is that the focus should be on restoring state functions, yet this may be in a context of severe difficulties for donor agencies or NGOs of aligning with the government. The paper outlines some of the choices to be made in deciding on a focus for capacity development in education, examining the levels for intervention (individual, organisational, cultural and political) and the different sectors (administration and education institutions). It provides examples of the different sorts of areas in capacity development in education arenas that would address specific features of fragility, but draws attention to the need for research and indicators of the different impact of these strategies. The paper concludes with an analysis of what appears to be necessary to ensure that capacity development efforts are sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps the landscape of transnational higher education in the Middle East, focusing in particular on the recent expansion of satellite, branch, and offshore educational institutions and programs that foreign institutions have set up in the region. Of the estimated 100 branch campuses currently operating worldwide, over one-third are in the Arab region and the majority have opened within the last decade; two dozen additional transnational programs and universities exist in the region as well. Very little research has been conducted on these new institutions, however, raising many questions for scholars in education. This paper traces reasons for the rapid growth of the transnational higher education model in the Arab states and discusses the explanatory power for this phenomenon of the two major prevailing theories in comparative and international education. We argue that neither neoinstitutional theories about global norm diffusion nor culturalist theories about the local politics of educational borrowing and transfer sufficiently explain this phenomenon, and call instead for a regional approach. We also raise questions for further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on educational policy borrowing has mostly focused on explicit transfer processes, often highlighting how explicit reference to the international has served legitimatory purposes in the borrowing country. In contrast, this paper focuses on 'silent' borrowing, i.e. non-acknowledged processes of policy transfer. The paper argues that keeping processes of policy transfer 'silent' can also follow a logic of legitimation, depending on which patterns of legitimation are favoured in a political culture. Three propositions are argued in the paper, using the case of Sweden as an empirical example: (1) educational policy-making in Sweden has been heavily influenced by international discursive currents; this, however, has largely been left unacknowledged by policy-makers; (2) The educational research community has largely followed the official image of policy-making in its exclusive focus on the national context; and (3) Silent borrowing was so prevalent in Sweden for a long time because political culture was characterised by a powerful myth of rationality and national superiority, favouring strategies of legitimation other than explicit borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a comparative study of the growth of data and the changing governance of education in Europe. It looks at data and the 'making' of a European Education Policy Space, with a focus on 'policy brokers' in translating and mediating demands for data from the European Commission. It considers the ways in which such brokers use data production pressures from the Commission to justify policy directions in their national systems. The systems under consideration are Finland, Sweden, and England and Scotland. The paper focuses on the rise of Quality Assurance and Evaluation mechanisms and processes as providing the overarching rationale for data demands, both for accountability and performance improvement purposes. The theoretical resources that are drawn on to enable interpretation of the data are those that suggest a move from governing to governance and the use of comparison as a form of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the political-economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author demonstrates how the Japanese media interpreted the PISA 2003 findings in a way that resonated with the specific cultural, political, and economic context of the time and how the Ministry used the findings to legitimise otherwise highly contentious policy measures. Questioning the conventional interpretation that the PISA 2003 shock caused the Ministry to redirect its controversial yutori (low pressure) curricular policy, the paper reconstitutes the Ministry as an active agent that capitalised on an external reference (PISA) to re-establish its political legitimacy in a time of increasing neo-liberal state-restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the changes in the higher education funding policies and resource allocation models of the Jamaican government in the period 1962-2003. Throughout these four decades, four different systems were in force. This paper focuses particularly on the arguments for the funding policies and models and the impact of the models on the operation of the higher education institutions, access to higher education and equity and efficiency within the higher education system. The analysis reveals that each funding model has its advantages and downsides. Some of these can be traced back to the logical underpinnings of the models. At the same time, however, part of the developments and (unintended) consequences are due to path-dependent elements of the evolving small-state system of higher education, notably the fact that the main Jamaican university is an intergovernmental multi-campus university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines educational policies toward indigenous minorities in Japan and Canada during the period of nation-building, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Both Japan and Canada first segregated indigenous children into separate educational institutions and then tried to assimilate them into mainstream society. Beneath these broad policy similarities, however, lie different rationales, with substantially different implications for education and social policy in diverse societies. In Japan, national integration was promoted through a cultural or ethnic rationale, a socially coherent approach that nonetheless allows little room for minorities. Canada approached national integration using a notion of citizenship that both allows considerable space for minorities but is challenged by unity. These two strategies can be seen in two polar models of the state - a civic-assimilationist approach of the 'French model' and an ethnocultural exclusionist model of the formation of the German state. The paper argues for a multicultural pluralist model including both civic and cultural/ethnic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the introduction in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of the new Chinese curriculum for basic education. In contrast to many previous initiatives since 1949 the present reform attempts to change not only what is taught, and by whom, but fundamental notions of how learning is best facilitated. The paper considers the connections between the reform and current directions in international education policy, and seeks to explore the ways in which the values inherent within this approach to teaching and learning relate to the practices that characterise Chinese/Tibetan classrooms. It is suggested that the meaning attributed to education at the local level shapes profoundly the types of cultural production that can emerge from it. International and national reform efforts must be and are always mediated through such understandings. In the case of Tibet, where often incompatible interests are at play, the impact of national level reform is unpredictable and uneven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the extent to which American educational ideas made an impact on policy-making and practice of education in British African colonies between the two World Wars. The analysis re-examines the apparent 'borrowing' of American black industrial education models for application in Africa. It is argued that, while the view that Americans were successful in handling racial conflicts by means of education at home carried strong symbolic meaning in the colonial political arena, the ideas themselves were not new. The paper focuses on the motivations and characteristics of the people involved in this political discourse and in transferring American and other models to Africa. By doing this, the paper draws attention to a more complex network of factors that were involved in the transfer of educational policies to British colonies in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines interactions between the global and the local in the context of Japanese mainstream schooling, by focusing on the development of local government policies to manage diversity in schools. This paper reveals how local governments developed education policies in interaction with grassroots professional groups, activists and schools, and by selectively incorporating national policies. These local policies are multicultural education policies but differ in two significant ways. The first is their predominant concern with human rights education, leaving celebration of cultural diversity as a marginal consideration, and the other is the official use of the term ‘foreigners’ in the title of these policies; both of which reflect the pre‐existing local context. The paper demonstrates that new immigrants do not unilaterally impact on supposedly ethnically homogeneous Japanese classrooms, but that the pre‐existing local contexts (national, local and institutional) have mediated global forces in effecting changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]