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The world of higher education today is saturated by expressions of size and greatness. Universities are described as global, world class and excellent and they are expressed in international rank d...

This paper explores how, in what ways, and with what outcomes, deep structural transformations have reconstituted higher education in England, and are deeply implicated in the rise of authoritarian...

Eulogy for Jim Marshall (read at the funeral)Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at t...

The 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in the United States have acted as moments of rupture in debates on politics and societies, particularly in the Wes...

In 2018 the OECD added a set of global competence measures to its PISA programme, and reported on the outcomes in November 2020. In this paper I explore the provenance of the idea of global compete...

There is now an extensive body of research concerning the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and its recent additions and variations. Despite this, we argue that there is...

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar as dinâmicas de mudanças de poder, inclusive a causada pelo processo de Brexit a partir do referendo de 2016, e suas conseqüências sociais, políticas e econômicas na sociedade e na educação superior no Reino Unido e na Europa.

Background The purpose of undergraduate nursing education is the preparation of graduates for clinical practice. Despite this focus, graduates are often unprepared for independent practice, particularly in the use of skills such as time management, delegation and critical thinking in clinical situations. This paper reports on students’ views of using extended, immersive simulation to consolidate the use of both technical and nontechnical skills in preparing them for independent nursing practice. Aim To investigate students’ views on the value of extended, immersive simulation in preparing them for independent practice as registered nurses. Methods Cross-sectional research involving content analysis of open-ended survey questions. The study involved comments from 287 final year nursing students conducted at a university in Western Australia. Findings Themes related to critical thinking, the role of the registered nurse, communication, time management, teamwork and leadership were identified through the content analysis. Students believed exposure to extended simulation facilitated development of the essential skills required to practise independently and helped them prepare for the role of a registered nurse. Many expressed the wish for this type of simulation to be included throughout all years of the nursing curriculum. Discussion Students need experience in clinical situations where they are challenged to use multiple skills simultaneously to develop the expertise required of registered nurses. The ability to practise independently, and take responsibility for decisions made in complex ward conditions, is not currently required of students on clinical placements. Simulation is a way to fill this void in nursing education to enable students to experience the full role of a registered nurse. Conclusion Based on our findings nursing students believed that extended, immersive simulation was an effective method of supporting students as they undertake the full responsibilities of registered nurses to enable them to be safe and effective practitioners on commencement of the registered nurse role.

Place matters, and for schools located in the neighborhoods of towns and cities, place not only holds meaning for individuals, but shapes their experiences of school and education trajectories. This is not simply a question of meaning and identity. Rather, it is that education settings and their opportunity structures shape and are shaped by structural inequalities, in turn reproducing differences. In this paper, I make the case that the state plays an important role in producing inequality by the ways in which it governs, and that contemporary forms of governing on the global level exacerbate these differences whilst erasing the differences that matter. I explore these dynamics by focusing on socio-economic differences between schools in England, UK. I argue that a particular politics of state spatial power is at play, and that the national state and shadow sovereigns manage questions of authority and legitimacy through the use of ideologies (e.g., school effectiveness, social mobility), devices (such as rankings and league tables), and explanations of cause (such as aspiration gaps), with which one can re-express the problem of difference, not as structurally caused, but as a failure of individual effort, expectations, and aspirations.

We present this volume as an invitation to explore and critically reflect the interplay between space, place, and educational settings. As part of the Knowledge and Space series, this book’s authors follow a comprehensive approach bringing together a set of contributions reflecting various disciplines with their methodologies and theoretical backgrounds. We understand educational settings as the broader framing of education, which includes the out-of-school environment, neighborhoods, and institutional arrangements, as well as the agendas of the multilateral and corporate world. Education literally takes place in the neighborhood and educational landscapes are embedded in local communities, although they are exposed to and are part and parcel of educational policies and the ongoing dynamics of transformation at regional, national and international scales.

Drawing on Marion Fourcade’s notion of ordinalization, we develop a conceptual grammar of comparison to explain a shift in the nature and outcomes of the governing capacity of the OECD over time. We argue that comparison as a mode of governance has been bound into the DNA of the OECD as a lever for advancing political liberalism since the inception of the organization. Moreover, we show that around 1990 the organization injected competitiveness into comparison by embracing ordinal modes of comparison revolving around the vertical ordering of things and people according to their relative positions on ranking scales. Yet, by analyzing the case of OECD statistics on teachers and in particular the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) program, we argue that the outcomes of the mechanism of ordinalization in the context of TALIS have thus far remained muted due to methodological constraints as well as the pluri-scalar politics involved.

This article introduces the Special Issue 'Re-reading the OECD and education: the emergence of a global governing complex'. Its distinctive contribution is related to its dual epistemological aims: to explore how different conceptual lenses and methodological approaches add to our understanding of the OECD as an intergovernmental organisation; and second, to understand the ways in which the strategic activities and priorities of the OECD have been constructed, historically and contemporarily, and the implications in terms of governance and education on a global scale. Broadly, this dual dynamic - of 'seeing the OECD' and 'seeing like the OECD' - has generated the papers included in this Special Issue. Our Introduction outlines the specific foci and contributions of these papers with reference to four thematic lines of analysis in the research literature: (i) the changing capacities and positions of the OECD in global governance; (ii) the main ideas and styles of reasoning underpinning OECD governance; (iii) the formal and informal processes and workings of OECD's policy formation; and (iv) the impact and wider implications of the OECD in education policy and practice.

This paper presents and engages with Basil Bernstein’s rich conceptual grammar in order to generate a sociological account of the outcomes for teachers’ work, identity and social class, of strategic shifts in governance to the global scale. Our aim is to develop a two-way conversation between Bernstein’s conceptual grammar and how best to theorise the nature of the social regulation of teachers as a result of the dominance of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in setting the rules for pedagogic governance of teachers through its Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). We show that important functions for symbolic agents have been relocated to the economic arena away from the state, as well as being rescaled to sit within the governing ambit of the OECD. We also reflect on the prominence of constructivism in TALIS as a preferred pedagogy and the eschewing of disciplinary knowledge as the basis of expertise. We ask what this new market identity means for teacher knowledge, consciousness, identity, the division of labour, and the social base.

This paper explores the methodological challenges in comparing education policies in a globalizing world. It will be developed in the following ways. We begin with sketching out the contours of the changes that have taken place in the governance of education systems as a result of global processes and the challenges to presents us with regarding how we study, and compare, education policies. We do this by way of four ‘isms’ which we problematise as litmusses of global educational change. We then raise the question of comparison, and point to two conflicting ways that it can be used in studying education policy. In the final section of the paper we offer three (not exhaustive) methodological reflections - each with a different dimension through which to explore global education processes - time, space, and logics of governing in education policymaking.

This paper brings issues around forecasting and change to the fore to stimulate a conversation around three related questions: How do we understand the challenges of this global era? What might be the role of higher education in re/shaping this future? What competences might students need and how should be go about developing these?

This original book provides a unique analysis of the different regional and inter-regional projects, their processes and the politics of Europeanisation, globalisation and education. Collectively, the contirbutors engage with international relations and integrations theory to explore new ways of thinking about regionalisms and inter-regionalisms, and bring to the fore the role that higher education plays in this.

When Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century was released in 2014, it became an overnight success. Piketty focused on the concentration of wealth in a tiny social elite, and showed that their wealth had increased following the financial crisis in 2008. Yet the value of Piketty’s book offers something more than this for social scientists concerned with social inequalities. His work on a large data-set of long-run income and wealth statistics illustrates that the assumptions and models which have guided the work of neoclassical economists are flawed, but that societal arrangements matter. Yet despite this insight, Piketty’s solution to the problem of inequality is to argue that ‘… the best way to reduce inequalities with respect to labor … is to invest in education’. In this article I argue that there are major problems with this proposed solution and outline three lacunae that need to be addressed.

This paper examines the rise and rise of a range of individual, institutional, national and regional mobility projects in the global higher education sector, and explores the implications of these dynamics for the economisation, and thus instrumentalisation, of English as a global language, as a medium of instruction and a competitive advantage. Yet we also point to new counter-tendencies at play, including the rise of China as an education exporter, and promoter of Chinese soft-power through the Confucius Institutes. Along with changes in Western labour markets that might well alter what has been to date a Eurocentric set of flows, this suggests a dynamic and changing landscape. We conclude by pointing to the tensions and contradictions in a changing higher education landscape and the issues this generates for those cultural and civilisation projects that languages are constitutive of.

This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketization’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in which making markets involve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector.