By the end of the twentieth century, there was concern about the low levels of achievement in many English schools -- particularly those in London -- and this acted as a catalyst for change, a key remedial initiative being London Challenge. While there is much to celebrate about the improvements that have been made over almost two decades, the…

This paper explores two Australian school education policy documents and the inputs they describe to boost student achievement. The paper suggests that current reform efforts in schooling like others previously configure student achievement in input-output terms confining school education policy to predictable inputs that sideline broader…

The implementation of moral and national education (MNE) in Hong Kong came to a stand-still when in 2012 anti-MNE student protests triumphantly saw it being shelved. Many perceived MNE as indoctrination and politically motivated by the leadership. Five years have gone by since the demise of the MNE. Ostensibly, the struggle for hegemonic control…

Education became a rallying cry in Luxembourg's general elections of 1974. For the first time in the country's post-war history, the Socialists and Democrats entered the government, with new plans for education. The unbroken rule of almost 30 years by the Christian Democrats was over. New "global" educational concepts were employed to…

In September 2015, the Australian Federal Government endorsed the final version of the Australian Curriculum arts framework a document resulting from nearly seven years of consultation and development. "The Australian Curriculum: The Arts Version 8.0" comprises five subjects: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. This article…

This article considers a recent policy initiative in assessment in English primary schools (ages 5-11 years) in which curriculum 'levels' used by teachers to judge pupils' attainment were suddenly removed. Previous work has largely focused on assessment of pupils, but we examine assessment as an activity through which teachers reproduce their…

In 2013, the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (Pre-school to Post-Secondary Education) was launched. Section 3 focussed on ensuring that, in Islamic Education for Muslim students and Moral Education (ME) for non-Muslims, students will be strengthened through understanding values that promote unity and foster good relations among students.…

Much of the scholarship around the workings of education policy has focused on the global West and has taken for granted the state's limited abilities in the control of policies as both text and discourse. Drawing upon policy texts from the Singapore Ministry of Education and ethnographic data collected in a Singapore school, this paper explores…

Since 2008, secondary school English teachers have been at the receiving end of contradictory advice on how to best prepare their students for the literacy component of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). On the one hand, Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) asserts that the 'best…

One of the fundamental pre-requisites for Industrialisation is its stupendous availability, in a country of skilled-manpower. In this regard, Zimbabwe has sought to leverage human resources, such as these, in order to accelerate the process of socio-economic transformation. In March 2012, for example, the Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) pronounced…

In early 2014, a group of senior high school teachers initiated a series of campaigns to fight against the government's imposition of a revised history and citizenship education curriculum, an unprecedented display of opposition in the history of public schools in Taiwan. They rose above the traditional stereotype of the schoolteacher common…

This paper problematizes the interplay between curriculum textbooks and national identity constructions. Drawing on data from Bangladesh's school-textbooks, and students' and teachers' perspectives, the study identifies factors shaping Bangladesh's national identity in the textbook discourses and discusses students' experiences of these in an…

Historically, for a period of a hundred years or more from the 1860s to the 1960s, assessment developed as an educational technology for selecting and certificating small numbers of individual students. This process was largely focused on excluding the majority. Over the last 30-40 years, the focus and purpose of assessment has changed. The…

This article traces the development of a new National Curriculum in England following the general election of 2010. The prevailing political ideology of an approach based on securing "core knowledge" in a limited range of preferred "academic" subjects and its deleterious impact on the arts in schools is described. The vigorous…

This paper accepts that the OECD's PISA has become influential in policy terms globally, but analyses the ways that the main PISA and PISA for Schools tests are positioned differently in Australia and the USA because of contrasting educational federalisms in the two nations. Our argument is that while PISA is undoubtedly influential, its effects…