The results of international school achievement studies had major educational implications in many European countries, especially for the control concepts of education. This becomes exemplarily apparent in Germany, in which a large-scale educational reform was set in motion. Thereby, the education system was set from an input- to output-oriented…

In this article, the authors examine the development of the Swedish educational reform of 1991 from an international and European perspective, and from the perspective of what counts as knowledge in a recently implemented Swedish curriculum reform. With effect from 2011, the Swedish Government has significantly reshaped the curricula for…

The extent to which the goals and contents of (compulsory) education should to be regulated has been a complicated balancing act in the Netherlands. Against a background of a long-standing statutory tradition of freedom of education, governmental decisions about "what knowledge is of most worth" have been delicate. The purpose of the analysis…

The European Qualification Framework (EQF) is intended to transform European national qualification frameworks (NQFs) by moulding them into a learning outcomes framework. Currently adopted as an enabling law by the European Union, the EQF has now operated for several years. In order to secure widespread adoption, however, it will be necessary for…

The European Union (EU) considers the learning of entrepreneurial skills to be an essential factor in creating welfare. Therefore, in the EU, one of the latest core aspects is to develop entrepreneurship education in teacher education. However, entrepreneurship education still seems to be, across the countries, a quite uncommon theme. This article…

The European Union is concerned about the economic prospects of its member states as they have to compete against newly emerging economies with lower wages and high ambitions. Part of the strategy to deal with this economic shadow is to create a knowledge economy, but in order to achieve this, a shift to a competence-based curriculum model is seen…

The curriculum is a governance technology of knowledge production and is also itself governed by complex dynamics within European education policy space. This article focuses on how the curriculum is governed by comparative knowledge; in particular, it identifies how this facet of governance has manifested itself within the policy space of…

This article compares discourses on "Europe" in Greek-Cypriot policy, curricula and textbooks over approximately the last twenty years, from the early 1990s, when Cyprus applied for European Union (EU) membership, until 2011-12, the school year during which the recently revised curricula were gradually introduced to schools for implementation.…

This article focuses on the aim of creating a flexible and self-centred self by means of entrepreneurial and therapeutic education. It is an analysis that uses documents from project-based educational programmes as well as interviews with young adults and the people who work with them in these programmes. The data are examined using a Foucauldian…

European Schools are a particular type of school that are not integrated into any national education system but are nonetheless official educational establishments that constitute a European Schools System (ESS) governed jointly by the Member States of the European Union. This positioning creates particularly interesting issues of governance that…

The first goal of this article is to assess, for each country belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the influence of pupils' sociocultural background on educational aspirations. The second goal is to explore whether, after controlling for educational achievement, the residual influence of sociocultural…

Whether and to what extent we are in the process of reconstructing higher education following the Bologna Process orientation is the issue underpinning this article. To address this issue, the authors consider data from an exploratory survey conducted in a Portuguese university, focusing on the field of education. They take into account the…

This article is a contribution to the discourse of politics towards (for) youth, which the author defines as the "cultural politics of risk". The article begins with scientific representations of youth as a threat, as a group inclined to engage in risky behaviours. It then focuses on theoretical approaches called the "risk paradigm", providing a…

This article delves into the reactions of national institutions to various external stimuli originating from supra-national policies formulated by international organisms and other bureaucracies. The authors argue that such stimuli, when ignoring various previous arrangements developed in a given social and/or historic (national) context, may…

The article analyses the discourses underpinning formal vocational education and training (VET). More specifically, it presents three accounts of European VET with the twofold aim of reviewing them and of recommending a conceptual shift that leads to further theoretical discussion. The discussion is organised around the existence of three…