Since 2003 children in England have been formally assessed at the age of 5 after their first year in school, and their numerical scores reported to parents and analysed at school and national levels. The use of statutory assessment for this age group is unique in the UK, where other regions use less formal methods of assessment. It is also unusual…

Since the late 1980s, education systems have increasingly moved to allocating funding for general education by means of a per-student formula. The trend started with developed economies and moved to transition and developing economies, where the World Bank has promoted the adoption of per-student funding (PSF). But promoting a particular reform,…

One of the primary goals of Freirean theory is the achievement of a higher level of political and social consciousness amongst participants in educational programming. Freire himself only loosely defined this sense of consciousness, and interpretations of how this abstract concept might look vary widely. In some organisations, the politically…

What happens when standardised literacy assessments travel globally? The paper presents an ethnographic account of adult literacy assessment events in rural Mongolia. It examines the dynamics of literacy assessment in terms of the movement and re-contextualisation of test items as they travel globally and are received locally by Mongolian…

This paper explores the nature and quality of the participation that characterises the Bank's consultations with external actors and examines the extent to which the Bank is responsive to such feedback when it comes to defining its policy preferences and strategies in the education domain. It draws on a case study of the participatory process…

This study examines how textbooks in the Republic of Korea incorporate liberal, Western notions of diversity and multiculturalism. Through a systematic analysis of 60 civics textbooks over time, this study shows that ideas of multiculturalism and diversity have dramatically increased in the South Korean intended curriculum. While in the past,…

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…

The last decade has seen a growing recognition amongst international donors, development agencies, non-government organisations and academics of the vital role education can play in bringing about recovery following violent conflict, natural disaster and other crises. This has led to the development of increasingly targeted and sophisticated…

This paper describes how the way the concept of learning is identified and managed in a societal context can provide a crucial clue to explaining how a form of culture as a complex mental organism is constructed and interwoven. Specifically, I argue the point by illustrating that the discourse of Confucianism has fabricated a specific form of…

A decade has passed since participants in the World Education Forum committed themselves to achieve, by 2015, the six Education for All (EFA) goals under the Dakar Framework for Action. Despite significant progress, some of the goals are likely to be missed by a large margin. Besides the absence of a well co-ordinated multi-donor approach in…

This article examines the differential development of higher education governance in two Central and Eastern European countries since 1989. In current discourse, the market-oriented model of higher education governance has established itself as an anchor point towards which systems are gradually converging. At the same time international…

In many industrial nations, the processes of transition from education or training to employment are very important. Using Japan as a case study, this article considers these processes from an external perspective. The main criterion used is the issue of stratification within the education and training system. A detailed analysis of the transition…

In spite of numerous definitions of quality, consensus on what constitutes quality is less clear and contested. Using South Africa as a case study, this paper explores the current conceptual thinking and debates about education quality. Specifically the paper reviews selected South African policy texts to identify how some of the global dimensions…

This article examines Minzu University of China (MUC), the nation's leading ethnic minority university, relative to faculty perspectives regarding initiatives to strengthen MUC as a comprehensive university. Based on a case-study approach, and employing organizational culture as a theoretical lens, the authors identify three narratives of…

This article discusses admissions policies to higher education during the Communist regime in Bulgaria (1946-89). It argues that under the conditions of the Bulgarian Communist regime, admissions policies were not only a component of the higher education system--viewed as an institution--but part and parcel of the process through which power was…