The Programme for International Student Assessment has become an important policy tool that has affected educational practices in many countries. Despite some remarkable results in PISA's global ranking tables from China's Eastern provinces, China's distinctive policy response has not been well documented or understood. We systematically examine…

In response to declining results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, the then governing Swedish coalition in 2010-2014 introduced earlier grading, more extensive national testing and a new standards-based curriculum. These reforms coincided with a greater emphasis on inclusive' education understood in the 'narrow'…

The OECD is a key player in global education policy advice and part of the edu-business network. This network comprises of companies, philanthropies, consulting agencies and think tanks profiting from educational governance reforms and large-scale testing. This article investigates the structure of the OECD global policy network and its capability…

This paper examines competency-based educational policy-making in a global context. Specifically, it explores how the thinking around competency, spearheaded by international organisations and experts, has led to the development and deployment of a particular notion of global competency. Drawing on critical policy research, I examine three…

Standardised International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) have gained prominence in global and national educational discussions. ILSAs claim to offer valuable insights for improving education systems, but their impact on educational policy varies and has become a contested arena. This article analyses how these assessments fed educational…

This article investigates the failure of introducing comprehensive schooling in Austria, one of few 'conservative' outliers in the European post-war reform trend where early selection survived reform attempts in the 1970s. In particular, the focus is on the most recent attempt to postpone tracking from the age of 10-14 in the wake of Austria's…

The global diffusion of outcome-based accountability in education is contested, with accounts of universal convergence being challenged by perspectives emphasising heterogeneity across different national or local contexts. This study uses data from PISA to explore, firstly, the spatial and temporal diffusion of accountability across OECD…

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…

This paper addresses emerging modes of educational governance constituted through new online platforms for teacher professional development. Specifically, I focus here on the OECD's "PISA4U" ('PISA for you'), an online professional learning platform comprising structured assignment modules and peer-to-peer collaborative activities based…

The year 2015 was significant for the arena of international development, as UNESCO's "Education for All" agenda was replaced by "Education 2030", which would identify minimum standards of education quality. The OECD had been working on extending its existing PISA assessment into low- and middle-income countries through PISA…

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 OECD's PISA programme has been portrayed as central to the emergence of a regime of global educational governance and the subsequent convergence of policies towards a standardised model. Whilst there is an extensive literature describing PISA's impact on education policies, there is a paucity of analysis of how PISA data is presented to the…

This paper examines the development and administration of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools--a new testing instrument of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development--to demonstrate the relevance of heterarchical processes to educational governance. Drawing suggestively across new "relational"…

This article analyses the public responses in China to Shanghai's performance in the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Based on data obtained from media accounts and other materials published between 2013 and 2016, the research findings show that the responses in China are generally reflective, measured and self-critical.…

Singapore's remarkable performance in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has placed it among the world's high-performing education systems (HPES). In the literature on HPES, its "secret formula" for education success is explained in terms of teacher quality, school leadership, system characteristics and educational…