Comparative higher education is arguably lagging behind its sister field of comparative education. It has been developed more recently, lacks in institutional structure, its intellectual debate is marginal, and its political construction is incomplete. Yet, despite the pitfalls of comparative higher education research, this article argues that…

In many developed countries over the past two decades, there have been new standards, new monitoring systems, new course and fieldwork requirements for teacher candidates, new accreditation criteria, and/or new auditing procedures for colleges and universities that offer initial teacher preparation programmes. However there has also been enormous…

During the last decade, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of Syrian asylum seekers, including forced displaced academics (FDAs), in Turkey. Along with providing essentials, there is the issue of social integration for these people. To efficiently deal with this problem, Turkish authorities have developed both educational…

This paper examines the positioning of the Welsh education system within contemporary policy debate and analysis. It begins by outlining some of the ways in which education policy and provision in Wales differs from that of its neighbour, England, and then goes on to critique how these differences have been represented in both the media and by…

The ways in which examination standards are conceptualised and operationalised differently across nations has not been given sufficient attention. The international literature on standard-setting has been dominated by the psychometrics tradition. Broader conceptualisations of examination standards have been discussed in the literature in England,…

This paper seeks to contribute to recent comparative discussions about the shift of traditional referential points as a result of new global governance by the OECD through PISA. In doing so, the authors investigate whether the lower PISA rankings of the US have resulted in the shifting of its referential status in South Korea. For the purposes of…

This paper examines the roles of research in teacher education across the four nations of the United Kingdom. Both devolution and on-going reviews of teacher education are facilitating a greater degree of cross-national divergence. England is becoming a distinct outlier, in which the locus for teacher education is moving increasingly away from…

This article concentrates on the policy reforms of schools in England, Germany, France and Italy, from 1988 to 2009, with a focus on the introduction of market accountability. Pressing demands for organisational change in schools, shaped by the objectives of "efficiency" and competition, which were introduced in England in the 1980s,…

The article is a comparative analysis of the policy and practice of professional learning communities (PLCs) in primary schools in England and Finland. The concept of PLC has become a globally fashionable one and has been explicitly advocated in policy documents in both countries. Drawing from a database of qualitative semi-structured interviews…

Only since the 1990s has the impact of globalisation on education drawn scholarly attention, primarily due to the impact of international school achievement surveys. This study argues that the globalisation of education began much earlier, with the establishment of intergovernmental agencies, such as UNESCO and the OECD, and the adoption of…

This article suggests that the academic field of study called comparative education must always deal with the intellectual problems produced by the concept of context (the local, social embeddedness of educational phenomena) and transfer (the movement of educational ideas, policies and practices from one place to another, normally across a…

Drawing on examples from England and Russia, the author discusses three issues involving politics and education: 1) what proportion of society's resources are to be allocated to education, 2) how and by whom shall this allocation be determined, and 3) should control be centralized or decentralized once resources are allocated. (Author/RM)

British publications have been using the German term Technik. A comparison of the historical roots of the 19th-century education of engineers in Great Britain and in Germany shows differences in the origins of higher technical education in the two countries. The term Technik has a different meaning in Germany. (Author/RM)

The notion of policy "borrowing" in education has been a consistent theme in comparative inquiry in education from the early decades of the 19th century. While there were many countries that benefited from adopting the educational policy of other countries, there has been many cases wherein such action has earned a lot of negative…

Reviews the history of educational borrowing and exchange between England and Germany. Cites specific instances of adaptations which resulted. (JDH)