Policy debates about charter schools are often dominated by polarizing emotional narratives. However scholarly attention on narratives in education policy, and especially narratives about charter schools in local contexts, has been limited. The recently developed Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) approach offers guidelines to systematically study…

In the post-Mao era, the Chinese government carried out a series of education reforms to modernise education provision. This paper explores two related aspects of these reforms through comparative case study research in three different school locations within the same region in China. The first focus is upon system reform initiated through…

Rural areas in both developed and developing countries are being increasingly marginalized through structural changes. Furthermore, the disinvestment in state-provided supports and services means that rural people are left to their own devices to cope with these changes. Numerous authors argue that the most effective way of dealing with these…