The paper examines the case of education policy learning in Europe and argues that, contrary to dominant assumptions, education is a fruitful area for the analysis of Europeanising processes. More specifically, an examination of the case of the Scottish school inspectorate's European exchanges is useful in relation to the study of international policy communities, their formation and particular workings, as it signals a new level of "political work" (Smith, 2009): that of exporting, internationalising and then importing afresh one's local/national knowledge, once it has successfully gone through the international "test", and is therefore still relevant and future-proof (to the nation).