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…

With early childhood inhabiting a firm position on policy agendas, an emerging global consensus acknowledges the need for research into early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems. However, standardised approaches to comparison dominate the field. These studies tend to be grounded in methodological nationalism, assuming nation states as the…

The article investigates how and when the two first movers in knowledge-based regulation -- the OECD and the World Bank -- developed policy brokerage as an instrument of global governance in the education sector. We also examine how their target clientele -- national governments -- responds to this instrument. Given the surplus of research…

This paper revisits the question of the importance of a historical dimension in comparative inquiry and reflects on some problems in what is termed "comparatography", the writing of comparative education.

Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a means to improve a nation's global competitiveness as measured by its performance in international league tables of pupil achievement. This has created a demand for comparative research which identifies "what works" in high-performing school systems. A diverse array of consultancies, thinks…

In 2013 Spain introduced a series of educational reforms explicitly inspired by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results. These reforms were mainly implemented in secondary education--based upon the assumption that this is where Spain's educational problems lie. This paper questions this assumption by attempting to…

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

Although international student assessments and the role of international organisations (IOs) in governing education via an evidence-based educational policy discourse are of growing interest to educational researchers, few have explored the complex ways in which an IO, such as the OECD, gains considerable influence in governing education during…

Comparative research on education in small states has attracted international attention since the mid-1980s when the Commonwealth sponsored a number of seminal meetings and publications, and became a key advocate for the advancement of such work. This article considers the place of different dimensions of scale in comparative research; re-examines…

In the context of low-income countries, the role of donors in public policymaking is of great importance. Donors use a combination of lending and non-lending instruments as pathways of influence to shape policy directions in aid-recipient countries. This paper reports some findings from a doctoral study on the role of the World Bank in the recent…

This article develops a critical discourse analysis of Australian youth and community policies, examined through a discussion of theoretical debates about citizenship and vulnerability. Informed by a Foucauldian genealogical approach, it explores citizenship, not in terms of rights and universal categories, but in terms of relational, situated and…

This paper examines the outstanding performance of Shanghai, China on PISA 2009 and its effects on other national systems and within the global education policy field. The OECD's PISA is helping to create this field by constituting the globe as a commensurate space of school system performance. The effects of Shanghai's success are considered in…

This article presents a comparative analysis of two country-specific cases. The comparative analysis is situated within the broad domain of the changing knowledge economy landscape for educational policy. The two cases examine the transfer, embedding and enactment of policies during the interactions between supranational, national, institutional…

Public school districts in Buffalo, USA and Toronto, Canada reviewed their safe schools policies in 2008. Revised Codes of Conduct are compared to earlier versions and each other, and a conceptual policy web is used to understand how local, state/provincial, national, and international influences affect local safe school policies. The comparison…

In the post-Mao era, the Chinese government carried out a series of education reforms to modernise education provision. This paper explores two related aspects of these reforms through comparative case study research in three different school locations within the same region in China. The first focus is upon system reform initiated through…