The COVID-19 pandemic has caused great disruption in schooling around the world. This has triggered me to reflect on educational change in Singapore and some related issues the pandemic has raised. Using "Timely Change, Timeless Constants" as an organizing framework, this paper examines the educational changes that are happening in…

Teachers and school administrators in Hong Kong have had to cope with more work and performance pressure as they strive to implement educational reforms aimed at deepening students' life-long learning skills. Management systems, which save time and transfer ideas, experiences, and knowledge more efficiently could help schools meet reform goals and…

This article discusses the initiatives for out-of-school children in Tajikistan. The Tajik government has published two blueprint documents, namely, the "National Strategy for Education Development 2006-2015" and the "National Strategy for Education Development until 2020," which outlines a national vision for universal access…

School leadership is an important factor in educational reform and school transformation. This article aims to examine the challenges of school leadership in Singapore through the lens of the Fourth Way. In particular, this article makes reference to three messages in the Fourth Way and examines the paradoxes and challenges faced by school leaders…

Policy makers are often looking for solutions to develop their educational systems in today's highly competitive knowledge-based economy. Hargreaves and Shirley's Fourth Way provides a useful approach in analysing policy trends, successes and pitfalls, based on an observation of practices and research evidences in the west, particularly, the USA…

Hargreaves and Shirley's "The Fourth Way" offers a valuable framework for considering the challenges and dilemmas that confront education change practitioners. In this article, I consider how well their framework fits the evolution and more recent changes in Singapore education. History, context culture and aspirations are seen as…

This article explores the discourse of international educational reform that aims at meeting the various challenges of globalisation and a knowledge-based economy and preparing students for a better future in the twenty-first century. Specifically, it reviews the dominant themes, trends and goals of modern education. It does so by exploring the…

In recent years, education systems around the world have been keeping a keen eye on rankings of student achievement as measured by internationally benchmarked tests. This has led to considerable attention being paid to teasing out success factors that may account for countries that have emerged top of the ranks or those that have shown the most…

This article has two main objectives. It first outlines the first three waves of change termed by Hargreaves and Shirley (The Fourth Way: The inspiring future for educational change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, "2009") as the First, Second and Third Way that defined global educational policy and practice since the 1960s. It then…

Sultanate of Oman is one out of many developing countries around the world which have valued English as a very important international language and a tool for achieving multiple purposes. When His Majesty the Sultan came to power in 1970, the government accepted English as the only official foreign language and allocated huge budgets and resources…

Talks of education transformation to improve the quality and outcomes of education in Malaysia culminated in the articulation of standards for teachers. The all new Malaysian Teacher Standards (MTS) launched in 2009 is to establish "high competency" standards for the teaching profession and to increase the status of teachers in Malaysia.…

In 1983, after over 10 years of working on mathematics education reform in the Philippines, I wrote a paper for a Tokyo conference arguing that education reform in developing countries such as the Philippines should begin by working on macro-problems, namely the social, political, and economic environment of the schools, as a context for the…

In 1985, the Chinese Mainland introduced a policy of decentralization in order to help facilitate the spread of basic education. By looking specifically at the developmental experiences of Shanghai and Shenzhen, we can gain an in depth understanding of the specific circumstances incurred under new education reforms. While undergoing…

State Universities and Colleges (SUC's) in the Philippines are usually established by converting technical/vocational high schools into a full-blown university through legislative fiat to satisfy political agenda. Political influence appears to be inevitable particularly in the areas of jurisdiction and governance. Three (3) state universities in…

Building a strategic direction for education ultimately rests on the extent, to which we resolve the key issue addressed by UNESCO's International Commission on Education for the 21st Century (the Delors Report): what kind of education is needed to create the kind of world, we want to emerge in the future? Certainly, globalisation brings with it…