In both Britain and France, evaluation has been seen as one element of national strategies to internationalise higher education (HE), with the spread of evaluation indicating policy convergence. However, there are dangers in describing the cross-national adoption of evaluation as an instance of policy transfer in higher education. This article…

The aim of this article is to analyse political rationales for promoting student mobility in Europe and discuss these in the light of individual experiences of mobile students. Since the creation of the ERASMUS programme in 1987, student mobility in Europe has been the subject of unusual political promotion. More recently, in the context of the…

The theoretical premise of this article is that policy is constructed and presented discursively. The Bologna process presents us with an example of such a policy construction process where the quality policy goals are set jointly in transnational settings, requiring different kinds of negotiations and discursive strategies. Discourse analysis of…

A self-assessment model was developed for the Portuguese higher education institutions (HEIs) which was based on an empirical study aiming at better understanding their strategic and quality management and innovation practices and tools and on the study of several quality assessment models developed both for HEIs and business organisations. From…

This article analyses the implementation of market-type mechanisms in the management of universities. The question of which cultural biases have been used in the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) in Norwegian universities is discussed. Cultural theory, institutional theory, and public policy studies are applied to the analysis of a…

This article traces the Lisbon strategy back to the White Paper issued by President Jacques Delors in 1993 on "Growth, Competitiveness, and Jobs" as the launching point for the structural reform agenda needed to turn around the massive unemployment crisis and proposing a combination of policies for the structural reform of the labour market and…

This article summarises the main conclusions of the "Maastricht study": Achieving the Lisbon Goal: The Contribution of VET ( Leney etal., 2004 ), which the UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), in collaboration with the Institute of Education and other international partners, prepared for the European Commission's DG Education and…

Greater transparency improves the understanding and interpretation of qualifications and competences. This article asks whether transparency of qualifications has become a reality in Europe. It begins by outlining the three main strategies that were adopted at Community level between 1957 and 1999 to address the problem of transferring…

This article deals with the process in the field of education and training that the European Union has put forward to tackle the main challenges it is facing: globalisation, ageing and the ICT revolution. In order to take advantage of the opportunities brought by these three forces and to counteract their potential negative impact, the European…

This article presents and discusses a perspective on the implications of the Lisbon Process for education and training in a selected group of partner countries of the European Union -- the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro). It presents the reflections of a…

When achieving long-term sustainable growth, the key role is assigned to knowledge-based competitiveness. The new EU Member States therefore face a double challenge on the Lisbon road. On the one hand, higher expenditure is required to improve the quality of research and education input and infrastructure, and on the other, innovation system…

The UN Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality, an expert advisory group commissioned by the UN Secretary-General, was asked to examine how dramatic improvements in education can be achieved in the developing world. The task force investigated the problems of low enrolment, early drop-out and poor learning outcomes that so…

The purpose of this study, the first part of a recently concluded project, is to describe and analyse the perceptions that European university students have of European citizenship and to offer some insight into the term. Before describing our findings, we offer a brief review of the concept of citizenship, attempting to define it in the European…

The OECD's recent research initiative, Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers (OECD 2002), has highlighted teacher supply and demand as an area of international concern. Using data collected in this area as part of a wider OECD initiative (the PISA 2000 study) an individual-level analysis was conducted on the views on teacher…

This article discusses professionalism in early childhood education through the analytical tool of a research-based multi-level perspective that sees this as a cultural, communal, organisational, and individual phenomenon. Starting from an understanding of professionalism derived from a model of professional expertise, the article discusses the…