In an era of increasing access to secondary education in the Caribbean, it becomes critical that we understand the effect that Universal Secondary Education (USE) has had on our education systems in order to inform current educational reform efforts and future educational planning. This study explores the experience of the country of Grenada with…

This research aims to explore the development of private higher education and related policy changes in China in the light of Foucault's notion of governmentality in neoliberal China. Essentially it is a synthesis of macro-level and micro-level analysis. The researcher examines policy development in combination with wide social, political and…

Improving all aspects of the quality of education is dependent on preparing teachers to become critical citizens. The social reconstructionist approach to teacher education is essential to transforming an education system defined by inequity, issues of quality, and issues of access. How do pre-service teachers perceive the mission of quality…

Germany has relied on its well-established tradition of preparing the workforce through the so-called dual system of practical in-firm training (apprenticeships) and theoretical foundations conveyed by vocational schools. Believing in the high quality of academic school programmes that prepare a small elite for university studies, the German…

In the past 25 years, the English education system has experienced a substantial growth in alternative provision, that is, publicly funded schools that accept students from the general population without selection, but provide an educational setting different to the traditional, locally provided schools. Introduced in 2000 by the Labour Party,…

The two-year community college model has historically been a uniquely US phenomenon. Increasingly, however, this model and adaptations of it are growing internationally, both through partnerships with community colleges in the United States and as adaptations to existing postsecondary vocational-education systems in developing countries. In this…

In England, since the 1980s, neo-liberalism has dominated political discourse, and its effects have been extending into the higher-education landscape, challenging traditional conceptions of the university as serving the public good and driving them towards becoming corporate entities selling private commodities. This change has created an…

Drawing on the conceptual work of externalisation in comparative education and multi-accentual signs in cultural studies, this article examines how the print news media accentuate "Finnish education" in the process of inserting this external reference into the domestic political discourses around education reform in Australia, Germany…

The aim of this article is to analyse the direct and indirect effects that PISA generates in the orientation of educational policies and reforms in Spain and the ways in which PISA data and results are used in political discourses, at both national and sub-national levels. The main hypothesis of the article is that PISA results have played a key…

In 2003, UNICEF-Kenya and the Kenyan Ministry of Education introduced the "Child Friendly Schools" initiative to encourage educational policy makers and practitioners to look for alternative ways to measure the quality of primary schools beyond pupils' test scores. In 2009, Kenyan government officials distributed the Child Friendly Schools…

This article analyses the relationships between different notions of education quality and policies on primary and secondary schools implemented in Argentina during the last two decades. The authors focus on three moments: (1) the emergence of the discussion about quality (at the end of the 1980s) in Latin America and in Argentina; (2) the…

This article concerns the impact of educational reforms on young people in Bolivian society as they transition into adulthood, against the backdrop of globalisation and far-reaching structural changes. Ethnicity and cultural capital are linked in complex ways with social stratification in Bolivia. In a pluricultural society, the language of…

This article reviews the role of guidance and counselling in Malawi in reducing dropout and easing the transition of students to tertiary education, as well as in helping them during their time in tertiary education. It begins by identifying key success factors in guidance and counselling services for learners in both developed and developing…

This article explores secondary school transitions from a comparative perspective. It focuses on a stage at which a major institutional transition takes place in two different educational systems. Over the years a number of international studies have explored different learning environments and their impact on student educational outcomes. Much of…

This article elaborates one approach to conceptualizing and investigating international processes of education policy formation (IPEPF), which are dynamic, multi-level and processual in nature. This contribution is important because, although research is increasingly conducted on phenomena with such characteristics, extended discussions of how…