Describing various demographic characteristics of disadvantaged students, the programs they study and their employment outcomes is a significant area of research interest in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. This article offers a preliminary exploration of how groups are problematised and the consequent influence on VET research…

Education governance networks are increasingly common and very diverse. In a strategic case study, we apply a new social network analysis method to evaluate the sustainability of a public-private education governance network. We examine the balance of satisfaction across public and private sectors and the network's fairness in terms of whether…

Despite widespread commitment to inclusive education as government policy, global progress in the last two decades has been slow and uneven. This article explores the relationship between policy and its enactment to examine what conditions make inclusion available as a course of action within education systems. Focusing on learners with additional…

Few notions seem to capture the imagination of education policymakers today as completely as digitalization and leadership. Through these two, schools are believed to become transformed, and in turn, these transformed schools will transform people and society. This paper critically analyzes a Swedish official digital policy instrument that…

This article presents the findings from an interview study with 12 subject teachers and special educators in three Swedish lower secondary schools. The purpose of the study was to explore how school professionals perceive and respond to dilemmas related to inclusive education that require prioritizations between conflicting values, principles or…

Foucauldian critical studies are cornucopian in illustrating how policy as discourse normalizes and yields human beings into made subjects in modern societies. However, Foucault's own slide from the 'terminal stage of discourse' pays little attention to the linguistic elements, and thus weakens the theory's potency in explaining the reality.…

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the…

The issues that social researchers study and policymakers address are partly determined by how they think about the world around them. Their view of the social world often depends on their position within it. What their research reveals and their policies propose are, in part, a reflection of where they choose to look and how they interpret the…

Teach for Australia was announced by the Australian Government in 2008, at a corporate dinner sponsored by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, hosting New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Conceptualising Teach for Australia as a polycentric policy network anchored in venture philanthropy, this paper examines how networks mobilise major…

As the privatisation of the public sector has grown rapidly in Sweden in the last decade, private companies have become an imperative part of education. Private companies sell and deliver consultancy, hardware, software, services, etc. to schools and municipalities. This study examines a growing rate of activities from companies and businesses…

Using a theoretical framework of policy assemblage, we analyse current primary mathematics teacher professional development in England, in the context of a transnational policy of mastery in mathematics influenced by East Asian practices. As well as the increased discourse of marketisation, and school and teacher autonomy, there has also been a…

This paper interrogates and elaborates on the fabrication of teachers' subjectivity who work in school contexts governed by neoliberal policies. Theoretically, the conceptual metaphor of "bonsai pedagogy" is proposed to understand teachers' processes of subjectivation enacted by neoliberal discourses, policies, and practices. The article…

University institutional policy is poorly understood. While policy is required by law for universities to accept funding and is revered for articulating values, mitigating risk, and guiding practice, policy is frequently considered absurd and resisted in practice. This is the policy-practice divide. To gain a better understanding of this divide…

Student performance data is increasingly used to monitor and evaluate teachers. This study examines whether the turnover intentions -- if teachers would change schools given the chance -- of teachers in socioeconomically disadvantaged classrooms are moderated by teacher appraisal practices based on student academic performance data at the school…

The crisis of teacher shortages in Anglophone nation states can no longer be ignored as this long-term issue has been compounded by the pandemic. Growing evidence of the challenges of attracting and retaining a teaching workforce is now foregrounded in education policy internationally. This issue provides increased impetus for studying teacher…