All European states have a primary obligation to establish and maintain governmental schools everywhere, but as the result of political struggle and constitutional guarantees, they have also allowed and often financed non-state schools based on special pedagogical, religious or philosophical ideas. Depending on the level of state grants for…

Although international student assessments and the role of international organisations (IOs) in governing education via an evidence-based educational policy discourse are of growing interest to educational researchers, few have explored the complex ways in which an IO, such as the OECD, gains considerable influence in governing education during…

In the context of low-income countries, the role of donors in public policymaking is of great importance. Donors use a combination of lending and non-lending instruments as pathways of influence to shape policy directions in aid-recipient countries. This paper reports some findings from a doctoral study on the role of the World Bank in the recent…

This paper revisits the question of the importance of a historical dimension in comparative inquiry and reflects on some problems in what is termed "comparatography", the writing of comparative education.

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

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…

This paper examines the outstanding performance of Shanghai, China on PISA 2009 and its effects on other national systems and within the global education policy field. The OECD's PISA is helping to create this field by constituting the globe as a commensurate space of school system performance. The effects of Shanghai's success are…

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…

Comparative research on education in small states has attracted international attention since the mid-1980s when the Commonwealth sponsored a number of seminal meetings and publications, and became a key advocate for the advancement of such work. This article considers the place of different dimensions of scale in comparative research; re-examines…

The Chinese government is pouring resources into building vocational education at all levels of the Chinese educational system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three vocational secondary schools in 2007-2012, this article compares rural and urban schools to highlight the persistent urban-rural divide in implementing vocational…

This article develops a critical discourse analysis of Australian youth and community policies, examined through a discussion of theoretical debates about citizenship and vulnerability. Informed by a Foucauldian genealogical approach, it explores citizenship, not in terms of rights and universal categories, but in terms of relational, situated and…

Public school districts in Buffalo, USA and Toronto, Canada reviewed their safe schools policies in 2008. Revised Codes of Conduct are compared to earlier versions and each other, and a conceptual policy web is used to understand how local, state/provincial, national, and international influences affect local safe school policies. The comparison…

Drawing on work in epistemology and the philosophy of science, this paper seeks to provide very general reasons for why a comparative perspective needs to be applied to the inferential procedures of research methodologies where these concern the issue of justifying knowledge claims. In particular, the paper explores the role of culture on a number…

This self-reflexive essay teases out the predicaments that I have encountered through my past publishing experience, while situating them in a critical review of the existing English-language studies of Japanese education. Drawing on postcolonial theoretical insights and recent critical sociology of academic knowledge production, I use my personal…

Chinese and Russian universities are increasingly drawn into center-periphery repositioning, as they compete for symbolic, financial, and intellectual resources locally and globally. However, their strategies on national and institutional linkages differ with regards to the individual scientist's powers in knowledge production. As global…