Since the late 1980s, school curriculum revisions in Japan have sought to promote capabilities and dispositions that transcend subject boundaries and are often labelled 'competencies' in international curricular discourse. This study examines policy documents over the period, showing how Japanese policymakers have sought to navigate pressures…

The Programme for International Student Assessment has become an important policy tool that has affected educational practices in many countries. Despite some remarkable results in PISA's global ranking tables from China's Eastern provinces, China's distinctive policy response has not been well documented or understood. We systematically examine…

Improving schooling by reducing achievement gaps based on family background has been on the agenda of school governance worldwide for more than three decades. International benchmarking like the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is used to find models of best practice in effective school governance. Enlarging school…

Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD's education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure 'students' feelings'. However,…

In response to declining results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, the then governing Swedish coalition in 2010-2014 introduced earlier grading, more extensive national testing and a new standards-based curriculum. These reforms coincided with a greater emphasis on inclusive' education understood in the 'narrow'…

The OECD is a key player in global education policy advice and part of the edu-business network. This network comprises of companies, philanthropies, consulting agencies and think tanks profiting from educational governance reforms and large-scale testing. This article investigates the structure of the OECD global policy network and its capability…

This paper examines competency-based educational policy-making in a global context. Specifically, it explores how the thinking around competency, spearheaded by international organisations and experts, has led to the development and deployment of a particular notion of global competency. Drawing on critical policy research, I examine three…

This paper focuses on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) "PISA for Schools" assessment. Our first substantive focus is a descriptive and analytical account of changes and developments in the functioning of this ground-breaking assessment since its creation in 2012. These changes include an expansion of the…

The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance…

Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational…

This paper identifies OECD's shifting agendas and approaches to education since inception and distinguishes three time periods. Each of these periods reflects shifting geopolitical and economic realities that shaped OECD's priorities and modes of operation. They also demonstrate the adaptive capacity and expansionist nature of OECD's education…

This study compares the literacy and numeracy proficiencies of higher education (HE) degree holders in 21 OECD countries based on primary analysis of the national data sets collected via the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012 study. The differences in the graduates' average literacy and numeracy…

We examine the disparities in educational outcomes for high-income countries as they are reported by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with a specific emphasis on a more nuanced exploration of SES-based achievement gaps. To explore differences in the educational inequality and disadvantages associated with SES-based…

This article investigates the failure of introducing comprehensive schooling in Austria, one of few 'conservative' outliers in the European post-war reform trend where early selection survived reform attempts in the 1970s. In particular, the focus is on the most recent attempt to postpone tracking from the age of 10-14 in the wake of Austria's…

The global diffusion of outcome-based accountability in education is contested, with accounts of universal convergence being challenged by perspectives emphasising heterogeneity across different national or local contexts. This study uses data from PISA to explore, firstly, the spatial and temporal diffusion of accountability across OECD…