International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

This article argues that the role of education within the gender-poverty debate needs to be reconceptualised. It stresses the importance of conceptualising the gender-education-poverty nexus as a cluster of complex interactive combinations and bonds in which education outcomes are shaped by, and shape, both poverty and gender. The aim of the paper…

Transitions to adulthood are usually defined by markers such as leaving school, starting a first job, leaving the parental home, forming a first union, marrying and having a first child. Youth policy remains strongly influenced by these linear transitions, and by the metaphor of a "pathway" from school to work and adulthood, taking…

Following political devolution in the late 1990s and the establishment of the governments for Wales and Scotland, the education systems of the four home countries of the UK have significantly diverged. Consequently, not only does that mean that education research in the UK has to be sensitive to such divergence, but that the divergence of policy…