Educational policies in the Netherlands reveal that the current mainstream participatory approach to citizenship education jeopardises students' autonomy. Especially in Dutch post-secondary vocational education, citizenship education has been shown to be mainly aimed at socialization: initiating students into tradition, internalising rules,…

Purpose: This paper aims to understand the debate about what constitutes good education in the Netherlands. The meaning of the concept of democracy in these public debates is divergent and rather diffuse. If teachers, citizens, advisory councils, and the Dutch government agree that democracy ought to be anchored in future education, we first and…

Based on the findings of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement notes in 2010 that the development of citizenship education is stagnating. In response to this stagnation, some countries, including the Netherlands, are tempted to act more prescriptively in…

This article explores how the development of mother-tongue instruction (MTI) policies in the Danish welfare state have created varying notions of difference and sameness in the schooling of migrant students and how they experience these notions locally in practice. Based on an analysis of MTI's policy history and oral history interviews with…

Governments continuously design and redesign higher education policies, and governmental capacities are the pillars for undertaking these tasks during the formulation stage. This paper considers the assumption that different governmental political and technical capacities shape different spaces for action and thus different types of policy design.…

The movement of students across borders has had profound impact on higher education policy development. This article seeks to unpack international student mobility through a discourse approach, using five policy documents on international student mobility from well-established recruiters of international students. Eight headline findings are…

The concepts of citizenship and citizenship education can have different meanings. We analyse changes in concepts, policy and practice of citizenship and citizenship education. In our theoretical and empirical research we conceptualised three different types of national citizenship: adapted, individualised, and critical-democratic. Our research…

This paper investigated a policy-making debate in Chile, by examining the construction of the Netherlands as a new "reference society". It focused on a reform agenda that aimed at a transformation of the neo-liberal school governance model. Based on the analysis of government documents, parliamentary debates, and media materials, the…

The overall aim of the study was to gather evidence on effective policy reforms for broad competence development in school education, including better achievement of basic skills. The six key objectives are: Objective 1: To understand the key features of policy design and implementation of reforms for broad competence development and achievement…

To enhance student success, a growing number of vocational education and training institutions in the Netherlands are nowadays implementing new career guidance practices in their competence-based approaches to learning. Based on individual-level data of undergraduate first-year full-time students from a Dutch university of applied sciences, this…

Background: The Netherlands traditionally has a strong civil society. This has had an impact on the education system through the relatively high degree of autonomy for schools on moral and didactical choices as well as on the curriculum. Such freedom provides ample room for citizenship to develop at a local level. The large degree of curricular…

This article contains an analysis of policies aimed at increasing the participation of adults in higher education (HE) in seven countries (NL, DK, SE, UK, BE Flanders, DE and the state of California in the USA). In order to maintain their economic competitiveness, many countries have developed policies to increase the participation of adults in…

This article presents a comparative analysis of two country-specific cases. The comparative analysis is situated within the broad domain of the changing knowledge economy landscape for educational policy. The two cases examine the transfer, embedding and enactment of policies during the interactions between supranational, national, institutional…

This paper looks at eight comparative case-studies on academic entrepreneurs in life sciences conducted in Europe in 2008. The interviewees were selected from the KEINS database that lists all academic inventors from Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands who have one or more patent applications registered at the European Patent Office,…

This paper studies the optimal allocation of resources--in terms of school management, teachers, supporting employees and materials--in secondary schools. We use a flexible budget constrained output distance function model to estimate both technical and allocative efficiency scores for 448 Dutch secondary schools between 2002 and 2007. The results…