This article opens with two contrasting accounts of the provenance of Oak National Academy before tracing Oak's controversial development as a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Education as a means (it is argued) of extending control not only over what teachers teach but over how they may teach it.

This paper explores social inclusion approaches implemented by ten secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, to support refugee students' well-being, as articulated in their policies, reports, and other published documents. Using an exploratory, qualitative research design, we found that all schools employed a holistic approach to implementing…

With evidence of global climate change and ongoing ecological degradation, there is an urgent need to give more attention to sustainability within VET to ensure that VET does not remain complicit in reproducing the unjust and unsustainable trajectories of current economic and development pathways. At present, the VET literature does not adequately…

This study compares two linguistic landscapes and the concurrent language policies of two scenarios where minority languages coexist with Spanish. On one hand, in the Archipelago of San Andres, Colombia, Spanish is in contact with an English-based Creole (Raizal Creole). Similarly, Valencian (Spain) coexists with Spanish as a national language.…

As state legislatures increasingly turn their gaze to education and school policy, one intervention that is particularly concerning is the proposal to arm civilian school personnel. Under the guise of school safety, these policies suggest that allowing teachers, who often have little if any training, to carry weapons on school grounds may deter a…

The Australian "National Indigenous Reform Agreement" (Closing the Gap) aims to address inequalities in various aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' lives. Scholars have repeatedly critiqued its failure to tackle structural inequalities. The agreement was revised in 2020. The current study adopts Carol Bacchi's…

This study examines the ways that school policies are understood and taken up by teachers. A review of the relevant literature suggests that much school policy, even that which is explicitly designed to ameliorate inequities that exist within schools and school systems, often have an inverse effect. It is also established that teachers, for many…

Do international large-scale assessments influence education policy? How? Through scripts, lessons, or incentives? For some, they all produce similar outcomes. For others, different assessment data, shaped by different designs, and mediated by international organizations' (IOs) policy directives, prompt different policy decisions. For some,…

The German school system is known for its stratified secondary school system following the four-year elementary school. While access to grammar schools was strictly regulated in German school history, most federal states have now strengthened the will of parents and abolished the tradition of binding elementary school recommendations. New in the…

This article presents an analysis of the Dutch field of education by drawing on interviews and observations from long-lasting relationships with experts in the field. Studying how these "key players" discuss the educational field, we explore how the lack of effective solutions may be related to the ways in which leading educational…

This study expands on our previous research focusing on provincial educational policies to support students' academic resilience during the pandemic, with the current focus being on the "recovery phase" of the pandemic (January 2022 to December 2023). Our analysis identified 46 provincial documents that addressed one or more of the three…

The paper argues that the racist underpinnings of the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism require radical exposure as a first step in turning around this discourse to serve democratic ends. As a key pedagogical element in this vision of renewal, insights from ignorance studies are employed to illustrate how teachers might integrate…

State and local government decisions about how school funding is raised and allocated have profound impacts on American public education, and in recent years, experts have documented large increases in one type of spending in particular: public pensions. Because most data on school district pension expenditures are at the state level, it has so…

This paper estimates the effects of a school accountability policy on year-to-year teacher mobility in publicly and privately managed low-performing schools in Chile. As school ranking depends on the institution's relative position according to a set of variables and their corresponding thresholds, we use a multivariate regression discontinuity…

Despite a high level of interest and investment in "gold standard" evaluations of interventions in education, the gap between teaching practice and the latest research on learning appears wider than ever; likewise, persistent attainment gaps between certain groups remain. This report summarizes the presentations and discussion from a…