This paper examines emerging discourses and practices of quality assurance in English Further Education (FE), a sector currently undergoing significant change. Using a broadly ethnographic approach and Foucauldian theories of power, we discuss how 'documentisation' contributes to governance techniques in a specific institutional context.…

This paper critically analyzes gap discourses in student learning, starting from the achievement gap, education debt, and opportunity gaps, applying the lens of coloniality, racial-capitalism, and modernity (CRCM). Gap discourses are the prevalent rationale behind educational policies and school reforms globally. Specifically in the United States,…

The article provides an explanatory critique of the engagement of Education International in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), a programme coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Drawing on research interviews, I adopt the framework advocated by Isabela and Norman Fairclough for analysing…

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where 'progressive' privileged parents choose 'diverse' schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education…

Educational researchers need to pay more attention to understanding the perspectives of implementers as a means to preventing future implementation failures. In an attempt to elucidate the reasons for resistance to the implementation of the 2013 education reform in Mexico, qualitative methods were used to explore the lived experiences of…

Drawing on a Foucauldian theorisation and an in-depth study with eight disabled student activists in England, this paper explores how persistent marginalisation and ableism in higher education has triggered a wave of activism among disabled students, who, just before the advent of the pandemic, had organised a structured movement, Disabled…

In the United States, schools are expected to navigate the political climate of anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ + discrimination, where white identity politics herald white knowledge as the invisible standard against which racial, gender, and sexuality differences are constructed. State policies that facilitate the removal of diverse…

School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) has received growing attention in policy and practice over the past decade, increasingly attended to in national and international contexts. Yet we need to understand more fully the processes and actors through which this policy enactment takes place. This article analyses the understanding of SRGBV by…

There has been a global convergence of policies attempting to standardize the practices and competencies of school leaders. This policy convergence highlights a similar set of leadership practices that are expected for effective school leaders, and contributes to the constitution of a global dominant discourse on school leadership. This study is a…

This paper critically examines competing demands placed on teachers, with reference to recent inclusion policy in England and Australia. The authors draw on Michael Foucault's analysis of power, neoliberalism(s) and biopolitics to explore the ways in which teachers are "responsibilised" into negotiating and fulfilling demands related to…

Situated in an understanding of contemporary US education as heavily influenced by a neoliberal technocracy we conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis of the 2010 and 2016 National Education Technology (NETP) plans released by the US Department of Education. Our investigation was also guided by a cyber-archaeological excavation of digital…

This article examines the 'Teaching Excellence Framework' (TEF) for UK universities through the lens of Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. I argue that the TEF is a hyperreal simulacrum, a sign which has no traceable genealogy to the practice of learning and teaching.

This article considers a conflated ontological space where national projections named Koreanness are conjoined through national educational reform discourses associated with "excellence" and "equality." It focuses on the shifting educational reform narratives that made appeals to notions of crisis before and after the IMF…

Over the past two decades, the percentage of American students with disabilities educated in general classrooms with their nondisabled peers has risen by approximately 50%. This gradual but steady policy shift has been driven by two distinct narratives of organisational change. The social justice narrative espouses principles of equality and…

The scale of English language education in China is astounding, but recent research has shown that the latest national English education policy for Chinese schools has not been implemented successfully due to various reasons. One reason given for the lack of success is the impracticability of the top-down policy itself excluding teachers'…