This article outlines the damage done by more than a decade of Conservative education policy and offers a set of arguments by which Labour could win support for a radical reconfiguration of formal education in England. It sets out elements from the Socialist Educational Association's "Manifesto for Education" in an attempt to inspire a…

This study interrogates how one of the least-studied regional intergovernmental organisations, the African Union (AU), operationalises or recontextualises the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the process of developing its post-2015 education and development strategies. Employing critical discourse analysis and drawing on…

UNESCO's relatively high prestige across East Asia has spurred intensifying efforts by governments to use its imprimatur to legitimate official narratives of the past and visions of the future. This article focuses on China's use of UNESCO as an arena for competitive national 'branding' in the education field, especially relating to STEM and AI.…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is changing across Europe, reflecting multiple-policy intentions and assumptions about education in early years, and the role of the state in supporting, funding and regulating its institutions. In this article, we examine the evolution of ECEC comparatively in Finland and Sweden, and we explore the shifts…

This article conceptualises the notion of the 'education hustle' as a case of Bourdieuian doxa and illusio. It is argued that the plethora of education reforms engaged in across the globe encompassing privatisation, corporatisation, marketisation, strong accountability, and the governance structures of the New Public Management (NPM), especially…

There is a growing sense that the orthodox set of theories and policies for VET do not work. This is particularly true in the South where all such Northern theories and policies face the common problem of being constructed for other contexts and then imported. In the light of persistent poverty and inequality; widespread precarious and indecent…

Analyses of policy documents and interviews with three Norwegian politicians revealed differences in how school leaders were described, positioned and ascribed responsibility in Norwegian education policy between 1990 and 2017. While how politicians positioned school leaders changed substantially during the period, a stable trait was vague…

This article examines the long-term effects of the regulation of private education adopted in the course of the education reform in 1996 and the sustainability of the guiding principles that served as the starting point for this regulation. It reviews the guiding principles of the introduction of private education, the goals of the reform laid…

This article offers a comparative analysis and interpretation of leadership in the four UK education jurisdictions (Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland), informed by the articles in this special issue and by a project report, all outcomes of an initiative, 'Educational Leadership, Management and Administration in the United Kingdom: A…

Kindergarten has the potential to influence children's food choices and habits at an early age and prevent nutrition-related diseases later in life. This paper comparatively analyzed the goals and requirements for kindergarten food and meal policies and guidelines in Norway and China based on the author's self-constructed 'NES' analytical…

Teachers' negative experiences of high-stakes accountability have been documented extensively, but the ways in which teachers are able to engage in tactics of resistance in response are less well known. This is most especially true in terms of the subtle, covert forms of resistance which occur through the practice of teachers' everyday working…

Over the past decade, the OECD has gradually shifted its governing mechanism from promoting 'best practices' based on comparative data on pupils' cognitive skills to actively advocating for individual and collective well-being as an "alternative" and "ideal future." This article focuses on the OECD's use of 'techno-scientific…

Unprecedented reform to teacher education in England, through the Initial Teacher Training Market Review, led to the threat of removal of the right for established providers to offer programmes of initial teacher education beyond 2024 without reaccreditation. Such policy reform has been constructed in relation to a perceived gap in research about…

Sex education has long been a controversial topic in the United States in terms of both policy and practice. A lack of consensus on the implementation of sex education, its content, and its participants continues to be a concern for equitable inclusion of all young people and their sexual and emotional health as a result. Current policy guidance…

Through their collaborative practices of quantification and standardisation in large-scale comparative literacy and numeracy surveys, international organisations (IOs) are both constituting new realities and being reconstituted themselves. This article aims to substantiate how the dominance of global measurement regimes has had profound…