In recent years Norway and Switzerland have introduced local training agencies (TAs), local intermediary organisations consisting of firms involved in apprentice training. In both countries, the starting point for the formation of the TA was roughly similar: enabling more firms to participate in apprentice training. Despite similar tasks, TAs have…

The Scandinavian states have international reputations for promoting social democratic ideals, which have long been manifest in Nordic universities, e.g. legal protection for academic freedom and university studies free of charge. However, Nordic governments have made new h.e. laws, thereby changing university autonomy and management structures,…

This article argues that the worlds which comparative education has explored and is exploring are characterised by three main political patterns. The first and oldest is the competitive nation-state as the starting point of the comparison, an educationalised nation-state, one whose relative global strength in economy and military prowess is…

Climate change threatens human well-being and planetary health but is hardly addressed in education. Comparative education research has advised governments about education reforms since the nineteenth century, so what must change to sustain a liveable earth? I use the concept of 'educational space' to understand how comparative knowledge building…

The idea of the public good of higher education is closely related to the political, social and educational cultures in which higher education is embedded. It varies across contexts. However, widely used notions of the 'public' aspects of higher education, including the concepts of economic public goods and private goods, conventionally assume…

The article investigates how and when the two first movers in knowledge-based regulation -- the OECD and the World Bank -- developed policy brokerage as an instrument of global governance in the education sector. We also examine how their target clientele -- national governments -- responds to this instrument. Given the surplus of research…

In this article, I make a case for bridging what I see as the competing demands faced by teacher-scholars in higher education: our institutional orientations, our students' motivations, and our aspirations as scholars and educators. I contend that teaching about religion, broadly understood, regardless of theoretical and methodological orientation…

Digital systems are increasingly becoming central to the running of contemporary schools. A range of digital tools are also adopted by teachers to facilitate face to face teaching and learning and more recently to accommodate remote schooling. Similarly, digital technologies lie at the heart of how students support their learning but also interact…

The author argues that educators can learn more about effective classroom practices by collaborating with educators around the world rather than by focusing on misleading rankings from international tests.

Private supplementary tutoring, widely known as shadow education, has become a global phenomenon. It has a range of providers, including commercial companies, university students desiring extra pocket money, and regular school teachers who provide tutoring as a sideline activity. This paper focuses on the last category. Governments are commonly…

Humanist ideas in education have been promoted by both Western thinkers and classical wisdom texts of Asia. Exploring this connection, I examine the educational philosophy of an iconic ancient Tamil (Indian) text, the "Thiruvalluvar Kural," by juxtaposing it with a contemporary humanist classic, Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the…

Links between international large-scale assessment (ILSA) methodologies, international organization (IO) ideologies, and education policies are not well understood. Framed by statistical constructivism, this article describes two interrelated phenomena. First, OECD/PISA and UNESCO/TERCE documents show how IOs' doctrines about the value of…

Creativity has fascinated scholars for generations, and its identification as one of the key 'twenty-first century skills' necessary for economic growth has led to renewed interest. This creates two challenges for the OECD: its flagship Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) does not directly measure creativity. Secondly, the…

This conceptual paper draws on theoretical insights from the concept of discursive opportunity structure. The paper uses a summative content analysis (a comparison of historical records) to demonstrate how discursive opportunity structures shape the multi-level nature of educational governance, which operates at different scales in different…

Nobody denies that trust in schools is key to success in generating any educational outcomes. However, trust is often eroded, resulting in conflicts, alienation, and differentiation among school-level stakeholders. This book analyses school-based management (SBM) of education through the lens of relational trust in the context of Ghana, revealing…