Despite a growing emphasis in education policy on 'what works for whom and in what circumstances', there is still considerable attention to decontextualised 'best practices' that emerge from cross-country comparisons of student achievement. Also, while operational and even political aspects of context are increasingly incorporated into policy…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

The PISA survey influences educational policies through an international competitive process which is not wholly rationally-oriented. Firstly, PISA league tables act normatively upon the definition of formal educational aims while the survey tests cannot evaluate the educational systems' relative strengths with regards to such aims. We argue that…