This paper discusses the rationale underlying "PENTA", an EU funded Erasmus Mundus project. In doing so, it explores the challenges of internationalising and standardising European environmental assessment (EA) practice and education to a third country audience, looking at India as a case study. It is argued that the EU EA Directives are…

Education markets have spread worldwide over the past few decades. Frequently, the expansion of markets in education is presented by their promoters as a means to improve the opportunities of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged students. However, the evidence available shows that market-oriented policies that enhance competition and choice…

Market and accountability educational reforms have proliferated around the globe, along with high expectations of solving countries' school quality deficits and inequities. In this paper I develop an analytical framework from a critical sociology angle for analyzing the effects of these policies within schools. First I discuss conceptually the…

The marketisation of education in England began in the 1980s. It was facilitated by national testing (which gave objective and comparable information to parents), and by the New Public Management (which introduced a posteriori funding and competition among providers). Now a new complementary phase of marketisation is being introduced:…

Increasing attention on quality assurance, a decentralisation of responsibilities and need for quantitative data in accountability and decision support led to the development of a student satisfaction monitoring instrument at Utrecht University (UU). Initially marketing worked as a catalyst activity to prove the added value. At a later stage the…

The literature on school commercialism, despite a number of successes in battling advertising and marketing in schools, has often seemed to only scratch the surface of corporatization of K-12 education. While condemning corporations who seek to sell brand-name products to kids in schools is a relatively straightforward matter, critiquing corporate…

Over the past few years, marketisation-focused public policies have significantly transformed higher education systems worldwide. In developing countries that do not have public universities, there has been a reduction of public financing and the expansion of private institutions. In Brazil, one of the main developing countries in the world…

The aim of this paper is to analyse the changes in Australian higher education policy over the past two decades. Using frame analysis, two shifts in higher education policy are identified. The first is in the late 1980s where the view of higher education as having a broad social, economic and cultural role was changed to one that emphasised…