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Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to shape education systems. This article looks beyond dichotomies such as the national versus the European or the global, in order to focus on those governing spaces and practices that lie in between bounded, predetermined, and preconceived entities and education organisations. Our locus of enquiry is education actors and their practices as they use comparison to make governing happen. The article examines the case of Swedish education (its policy actors, governing elites, and education practitioners) to examine this relation between comparison, governing, and the transnational.

At the world exhibitions of the 1870s Sweden displayed a schoolhouse, with examples of teaching material and student work. How did Sweden ship an entire schoolhouse to these exhibitions? What impact did the schoolhouse have on visitors to the exhibition? The purpose of this article is to shed light on the transnational influences operating between Sweden and other countries at the world fairs of the 1870s, regarding both policy and practice formation. In this paper, we will explore the exhibited school, the Swedish schoolhouse, as a major political and educational intervention in the growing market of educational goods, into the group of advanced industrial nations, and into the space of leading education nations. The schoolhouse was internally focused while at the same time demonstrating advanced education thinking, closely linked to Sweden's national future as a leading economy. Exhibitions were not just events or spectacles. They had effects.

The formation of the EERA has taken place over the last twenty years and it has accumulated practices and organizational procedures. The core principles of the Association were about inclusivity, represented through membership of national associations in the Council, and European identity, safeguarded by ECER regulations and the EERJ. The founding question of the Association, and a constant and useful heuristic device was "what does it mean to be a European educational research association?" and a related question, "who are its members?" The paper suggests that these questions should be used to review the work of the EERA again as they are in danger of becoming lost.

Through a study of a privately funded and ambitious inquiry into the education system of the United States, the relations between the development of comparative education as an activity and the governing of education systems in the early 20th century can be illuminated. The relations and interests of early comparativists were mobilized and enhanced by private funding and significant numbers of public actors in education were involved in comparative inquiry. The 1903 Mosely Commission was a philanthropic intervention to reengineer the patchwork of English education, and an attempt to modernize it and influence its government on a large scale. Its innovation was in its methods of influence as well as its scientific reports. The Commission was a hybrid, transnational institution, using comparison to modernize the government of education, mainly involving policy actors and finally, claimed neither by the history or comparative study of education. Consequently, its significance has been lost.

The University of Edinburgh and Moray House teachers' college began to develop a new model of research and teaching, institutionalised in a combined university department and teachers' college, with a research laboratory and advanced research degree in the 1920s. This new institution was modelled on the innovative and influential Teachers College, within Columbia University, New York, and was driven by a strong Scottish demand for advanced practice in education. It benefited from, and was shaped by, its new head, Godfrey Thomson, and his capability and leadership produced a model of a school of education that would be radical today had it survived the 1950s.

Transnational collaboration by educational researchers in Europe has grown fast since the mid-1990s and the means to support it have become more easily accessible. A study of the growth of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) since its foundation in the mid-1990s shows how transnational research in European education began, and how it overcame organisational problems and created opportunities for new research identities and subjects to be constructed. Overcoming confusing mobilities, creating "homes" or nests inside the EERA in networks, and building necessary forms of sociality are explored in this article by means of interviews undertaken with a range of experienced and engaged researchers who have worked within the European Conference of Educational Research (ECER) since its early years. These researchers are clear that a stable European space for education research has been formed, and offer ideas about the association's role in relation to its function and value.

This paper draws on the first, completed phase of a research project on inspection as governing in three European inspection systems. The data presented here draw attention to the rather under-researched associational activities of European inspectorates and their developing practices of policy learning and exchange, and highlight their significance as contributing to an emergent European Education Policy Space (EEPS). The paper is framed by original approaches to inspection that locate it as a set of governing practices, connected to changing governing forms and the growth of networks of relationships and flows of data across Europe. Comparisons are drawn between the relationships with Europe of inspectorates in Scotland, Sweden and England, drawing on Jacobsson's conceptualisation of regulative, inquisitive and meditative governance as a framing device.

The idea of a system of education has never been fully accepted in England. A more realistic translation of the realities of English education is that of systems of education, folded inside each other. Although it is possible to outline the building blocks of a national system (primary, secondary, further and higher), the political, spatial and contextual elements in the organisation of education over time mean that it is almost impossible to describe the system meaningfully. The idea of an English system is a vernacular device used within the twentieth century to manage the contradictions and diversity of educational provision. In the twenty-first century, even this device is failing to work, as a wide range of providers and a hostile government have systematically disarticulated the idea of a system.

In England, over the last decade, powerful technologies and software have enabled a new way of governing education through performance data. This has allowed the landscape of education to be reshaped. Its surface features continue but underneath new connections are made and older relations severed. Data flows travel between schools and central government through private company conduits. The local authority, "City", studied here in a case study is bypassed and yet still tries to retain a positive local role.

Countries in Europe, through the European Union, are creating, as part of the market and its governance, a new policy space in education. It is being formed through law, regulation, networking and harmonization. The development of standards across the different fields of policy, statistical calculation and commerce underpins and extends the creation of policy spaces. Europeanization processes in education have some subtle and yet powerful features created through measurement and standardization. They may have a technical form but they are knowledge based, policy driven and exclude politics. Europe is at the leading edge of new forms of governance in education.

The starting point for this article is a film about Scottish education, "Children's Story". "Children's Story" was one of a group of seven documentaries made for the 1938 British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, under the supervision of John Grierson. The film was an official entry into the Exhibition and is a formal display of key ideas and elements of Scottish education--past, present and (especially) future. The film will be used to raise questions for researchers in the histories of education about using moving film as research data, or within the research process. Questions related to the use-value of film in educational research are central to our article. The article is organised in three parts, and followed by a conclusion; they are the film as a record, the documentary film movement and the visual as the object of research. (Contains 41 footnotes and 3 figures.)

This paper discusses evidence, collected during an ESRC-funded project ("Reconstructing a Scottish School of Educational Research, 1925-1950"), of a remarkable vision to involve teachers in educational research in Scotland by the Educational Institute of Scotland in the 1920s through the work of its Research Committee. Led by William Boyd, the Committee thought that involvement in research was a crucial stepping stone towards achieving professional status for teachers. It conducted a number of detailed investigations involving teachers, thereby introducing research into the consciousness and practice of teachers. This paved the way for Scotland to make significant contributions to educational research on the international stage. (Contains 120 footnotes.)

Educational research was established in the early decades of the twentieth century in many parts of Europe. The early years were the crucial years as they established dominant forms of inquiry, pioneer sites, and related artefacts, the tools and texts. This paper focuses on the early growth of research culture in education in Scotland, its subjects of study, and its key workers, texts and innovations, to illuminate one site of research development and, in doing so, to engage with a limited but developing field, the histories of educational research. Scotland had an inventive and novel approach to research as well as an urgency to its tasks. It was shaped by close connections with the USA, but its style of work was its own, reflecting local cultures of cooperation and meritocracy. Its culture was organic and systematic, network based, non-hierarchical, public and national. It was a leading site of empirical and psychologically based large- and small-scale research, outside North America. It was an exporter and importer of techniques, data and people, and was both national and international at the same time. The Scottish case, and its North American scientific links, illuminates the ways in which the national and the international begin to be closely interwoven in the early twentieth century. (Contains 7 tables and 98 footnotes.)

Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson is one of the key foundational actors in the history of the educational sciences in the UK. At a time when educational studies and the study of educational psychology were very closely linked, in the decades of the mid-twentieth century, Thomson was a crucial figure in education research. He is known for his work on intelligence, factorial analysis and the validation and production of intelligence tests (the Moray House tests). However, he viewed himself as a teacher in his work as a professor at the University of Edinburgh and as director of Moray House teachers' college. He managed closely an ambitious plan to develop an advanced school of education, combining the university department of education, teacher training and a demonstration school, and supervised and taught on many of its courses. This paper is based on a unique resource, an audio recording of Thomson teaching in the early 1950s. It considers the distinctiveness and the research value of this audio source in relation to complementary oral and documentary sources. (Contains 2 figures and 43 footnotes.)

Governing processes in Europe and within Europeanization are often opaque and appearances can deceive. The normative practices of improvement in education, and the connected growth in performance measurement, have been largely understood in their own terms. However, the management of flows of information through quality assurance can be examined as a new form of governance, not just at the national level but within the broad policyscape of the European Union. The shaping of policy through data and the constant comparison for improvement against competition has come to be the standard by which public systems are judged. Indeed, public systems of education are recreated, and Europe is formed. The mediation of travelling policies and policy discourses across Europe constitute a polymorphic policyscape in which quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) has become a major instrument. (Contains 2 notes.)

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. (Contains 1 note.)

Here we reprint, and provide background and a commentary on, a recently-rediscovered lecture by Godfrey H. Thomson entitled, "Intelligence and civilisation." It was delivered at the University of Manchester, UK, on 23rd October, 1936, printed in 1937 in the short-lived "Journal of the University of Manchester" and as a pamphlet in Edinburgh. It was one in the series of lectures supported by the industrialist and philanthropist Ludwig Mond. The lecture is unusually valuable in that it places the theory, testing and practical application of intelligence against the background of the rise of fascism and its threat to civilisation. The lecture is a candid and accessible "confession and contemplation"; the frank thoughts of a person committed to, but critical of, intelligence testing and theory, but convinced of the power and place of intelligence differences in people's lives and in civilisation. It comes at an important time for Thomson, with regard to three of his major achievements: his Moray House Test series, the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 (and the Northumbrian testing exercise that preceded it), and the preparation of his book "The Factorial Analysis of Human Ability." The understanding of the lecture is enhanced by recently-discovered archive materials on Thomson and his circle. ([Thomson, G.H. (1937a). "Intelligence and civilisation: A Ludwig Mond lecture delivered at the University of Manchester on October 23rd, 1936." "Journal of the University of Manchester," 1, 18-38], from the Ludwig Mond lecture). (Contains 3 figures.)

Modern factor analysis is the outgrowth of Spearman's original "2-factor" model of intelligence, according to which a mental test score is regarded as the sum of a general factor and a specific factor. As early as 1914, Godfrey Thomson realized that the data did not require this interpretation and he demonstrated this by proposing what became known as his "bonds" model of intelligence. Van der Maas et al. (2006) have recently drawn attention to what they perceive as difficulties with both models and have proposed a 3rd model. Neither alternative requires the general factor that was at the core of Spearman's idea. Although Thomson's model has been largely forgotten, the authors show that it merits further consideration because it can compete, statistically and biologically, on equal terms with Spearman's model. In particular, they show that it is impossible to distinguish statistically between the 2 models. There are also lessons to be learnt from the way in which Thomson arrived at his model and from the subsequent debate between Spearman and Thomson. The extent to which the recent proposal by van der Maas et al. may offer any advantage over Spearman's and Thomson's models is unclear and requires further investigation. (Contains 1 footnote.)

A constant element of Europeanization, from the 1950s, was the cultural strategy of creating a common identity, fabricated through cultural symbols and exchange; education was enmeshed within this strategy. In particular, cultural cooperation was associated with a new identity, "a European model of culture correlating with European integration." European identity was treated as fixed, as contained within the histories and spaces of national states; it was described as an "exceptional source of development, progress and culture." If culture was contained within the nation state, then a new language of identity, established through education as cultural cooperation, would affirm a common space. In 1971, the ministers for education, following the intentions of the Conference of Heads of State meeting at the Hague in 1969, decided to create a working party that would devise a European Centre for the Development of Education, a way of financing it, and a way to establish forms of active cooperation in the field of education. This step was preceded by reliance on the Council for Cultural Cooperation, established in 1962. Again, in 1974, the ministers for education reaffirmed their new direction, "Europe as an exceptional source of culture," by confirming that allowance must be made for the "traditions of each country" and that education cannot be seen merely as "a component of economic life." The shift toward a "Europe of Knowledge" in the late 1990s involved a further intensification of the early work on collaboration, network, symbolic acts, and the systematization of the vocational and higher education arena. The sensitivity toward national policies and planning and the blockage in the organization of Europe they had caused had to be overcome. The management of combined economic and social policies (especially in the broad area of education and research) had a new strategy. Now, it would be focused on outputs and not on inputs. It was to be based on information about systems in Europe, progress toward goals and the focus of the action shifted from the constituent states toward other social actors (cities, companies, public-private partnerships, etc.) and onto the individual. This article discusses the emergence of a Europeanization process in education, a distinctive spatial, political, and scientific process. It is describing a trend and its significant actors and events. This article also gives some background on the most significant data collection agencies that have been the main carriers of the Europeanization of education systems in Europe. (Contains 2 tables and 6 notes.)

The coincident arrival of a European policy space in education and a European Educational Research Association [EERA], and their subsequent relation, will be the subject of this paper. EERA is a hybrid organization--it supports scientific networking, it is a social partner in EU policy, it is a first level social space for networking, and increasingly it is faced with acting in policy forums. It is scientific, public and professional but most of all, like most associations, especially those working across borders, it is unstable and voluntaristic. Establishing itself in a new policy landscape, a European Policy space rapidly emerging in higher education and research around it, and burdened with the pasts of its members--and its diversity of traditions and languages--is difficult enough. Yet it has to be examined against new theories of governance and the role of networks, which place associations in Europe in a very interesting role. The paper tends to the conclusion that either EERA or the theory fails to meet the task required of it--so far. (Contains 4 notes.)

The field of education research has grown enormously in England over the last 25 years--in size, complexity, forms of production and purpose. It has been shaped by governmental, market and production changes, and it appears to be moving outside the university sector as well. The British Educational Research Association is trying to map the field and to make sense of its development. This article begins with a search for relevant data about the key elements in the field--personnel, institutions, output, etc.--and tries to draw conclusions about the next steps in the inquiry. (Contains 6 figures, 12 tables and 9 notes.)

Established in the late 1920s, the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) was a highly significant and influential institute for educational research, in both the scope and the methodology of its work, in Scotland and abroad. It was one of the first of a new kind of institution; it signalled the rise of specialized research institutes, outside the university yet closely connected to academic work and to the governing of education, across the Western world. Research Institutes are a flexible way of managing tasks and influencing policy: they appear to conform to disciplinary procedures and yet they are free to inquire and suggest policy directions. SCRE did not have a specialized staff of researchers but it did work cooperatively, as a prototype knowledge network, linking together in projects a wide range of Scottish academics, teachers and education managers. Together, they were bound in a movement for reform and experiment.

In 1938, two meetings took place that were to become significant in their effects in UK education. One took place in the imposing Hotel Royal at Dinard, near St Malo, and the other in a small flat in Finsbury, north London. In their own ways, these two meetings provide a context in which Brian Simon was to work postwar. The meetings were focused on evaluation and the discussion method - both of which were significant new ideas in education. The meetings produced effects that shaped postwar education either in the hegemonic notions of intelligence and its testing or in the common school and its methods. The Dinard meeting was the final one for an important group of American and European educational researchers, working on aspects of examinations and intelligence testing, a project that had occupied them for some years. They had begun their work in the early 1930s and, although the group varied in number, they represented several European countries (Sweden, Germany, France, Finland and Switzerland), as well as Scotland and England. They were led by Paul Monroe, the historian and comparativist from the International Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the first two meetings were chaired by Sir Michael Sadler, the great English comparativist of the early twentieth century, at that time in Oxford. Many of the participants in the meetings, and organizers of their linked, national research projects, were leading scholars at the edge of the new technology of intelligence testing.

There is a moment, when rifling through archives, when a subject, a substantive line of interpretation, gradually emerges. Sometimes returning over time, one recognizes the significance of an image or document that has been ignored heretofore. This was the case when looking through boxes of photographs, freely linked to schools, searching for evidence about classroom artefacts, and hastily passing over old, cyclostyled sheets of instructions about a school trip. It is not always apparent how public photographic collections emerge, or in what order and content they are to be viewed; sometimes even the nature of their subject is unclear. In this case, these pages of text seemed out of place as well. Returning again and again to the images, and finding the school trip guide again, it was read more carefully. It became clear that it was the operational guide for a major expedition by an elementary school to London to look at the main sites of the capital. The guide had a degree of detail that seemed overly specific but the curious aspect, to the present authors, was the expeditionary quality of the venture. It was a big event. It was also an unusual event. It described an early 1950s elementary/secondary modern school in a modest part of Birmingham and its determination to mount significant events for its children, which would have overwhelmed schools today. It had a heroic and pioneering quality. In this essay, we shall try to place the visit in the context of its time, pedagogy and ambition. It is a story from below, a novel act, an enactment of the new civics and yet also, carrying with it the older structures and cultures of work in schools as well.

Explores the development and consolidation of an English national identity, forcefully intertwined with a teacher identity, created as part of modernizing tendencies within the education system. The paper examines four 20th century texts, presenting several interlinked propositions (e.g., an emphasis on systems has obscured the deeper waves of discourse on teacher identity as expression of national identity). (SM)

Ponders questions arising from items of obsolete technology found stored in an obscure part of the Prince Albert Junior and Infant School, Aston, Birmingham (England) school building. Explores how historical debris can bring the past into the present to provide insight into past teacher experiences, working practices, and culture. (MER)