Free schools were a flagship policy of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (2010-15), aligned with the broader academisation programme, yet both consolidating and transcending New Labour's educational narrative between 1997 and 2010. Driven by political 'modernisers' such as Prime Minister David Cameron and his Education Secretary Michael…

Drawing on a historical case study, this article focuses on the ways in which the Greek Government (2015-2019), through involving the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), managed to modify the education conditionalities laid down by the third Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) negotiated with the 'Institutions' (the…

This article examines the causes and outcomes of two university reforms during the single-party era in Turkey (1923-1946), focusing on the implications of the reforms in terms of higher education governance models--the state-control and academic self-governance--that are ultimately characterized by the balance between the type and degree of…

Education is often considered a particularly polarised area of policy -- with much unnecessary chopping and changing as governments and ministers come and go, wanting to make their mark. Yet, while there has been a lot of surface area turbulence the broad trends in policy have been remarkably stable for 35 years. The English school system has…

The decades from the 1960s to the 1980s were prolific in the emergence of a significant and diverse movement of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Latin America. In the case of Chile, grassroots educational organisations navigated various political contexts. Initially, they played an active part in the process of social mobilisation and the…

Religious matters have traditionally been considered as a sensitive subject in French state schools. Since 1989 and the first 'Muslim headscarf affair', faith-related conflicts in those institutions have been the subject of a relatively opaque counting policy. Mobilising several state institutions- which alternatively cooperate or compete- this…

The Zimbabwean crisis, which began around 2000, had serious ramifications for the teaching of history in the country, especially in high schools. This study investigated the impact of Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis on the production of syllabi for teaching history at high schools. It analyses the hurried changes in the secondary school…

The nature of the New Policies in China (1901-1911) has been hotly debated for decades. While scholars doubt the sincerity of the Qing government in their pursuit of constitutional reform, there is a general agreement on the high quality of their educational reform. Some even consider their educational innovations as "genuine reform" but…

Yali College, a four-year institution operating under the aegis of Yale University, offered a US-style undergraduate education in China's Hunan province from 1914 to 1927. It developed a robust curriculum and an impressive physical plant but collapsed after a little more than a decade. This paper, drawing on new archival research, focuses on the…

Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors' priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and…

This article builds upon Robert Cowen's (1996) work on educational coding in transitological settings and post-spaces by deciphering the efficacy of political and economic compressions in Tunisia from the French protectorate period to the 2011 post-Jasmine revolution. First, I diachronically decrypt and elucidate the specific experiences and…

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an…

At the time of African independence, the concept of higher education for development took hold in the programmes of the new African governments and in the aid projects of the former colonial powers, the United States, the USSR, and international organisations. All agreed on the need to place higher education at the service of Africa's development…

In 1932, with the help of the League of Nations, the Chinese government sent an educational mission consisting of five scholars to Europe, in order to investigate education in different countries as reference points for ongoing Chinese educational reform. This article argues that educators in the mission used foreign examples to support their…

National education policies reference a representation of an imagined subject of schooling derived from a broader social imaginary that underpins the projects of the state, in a process which I refer to here as 'the logic of policy'. I offer an account of how this representation is derived and propose three conceptual elaborations of this view. I…