Although international organisations (IOs) are recognised as important actors in education, their involvement in vocational education and training (VET) remains underexamined. This article reviews the current state of research on IOs in VET, focusing on the ILO, OECD, UNESCO, and the World Bank, through an integrative literature review of 174…

Purpose: School leaders are critical to organizational change and school improvement, particularly through their role in facilitating teacher development. Yet the literature is thin regarding the extent to which various sources of evidence influence school leaders' decisions and regarding conditions that may shape differences in school leader…

Across the United States, there is an increased interest in improving school climate, reflecting a deepening understanding of the foundational role that school climate can play in supporting students' well-being, learning, and development. School climate is constructed from norms, expectations, and interpersonal relationships that come together to…

This systematic review examines the extent to which educational policy and practice in Turkey are informed by research evidence. Drawing on national and international literature, the review explores the theoretical foundations of evidence-based policymaking, the current status of research-informed policy in Turkey, and the challenges faced in…

This volume centres the notion of "chance" in education as a key concept in contemporary education -- relating to aspects like accountability, datafication, or international large-scale assessments -- and discusses the impact that the historical desire to "tame" this notion has had on present-day educational policy and…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

Evidence-based policymaking can transform the delivery of education services, restore public trust in schools, and improve outcomes for students. It can cut through the noise of political and cultural divisions and give decision makers clarity on how to prioritize the use of limited resources. And it can help build a shared understanding of where…

Using research evidence to guide higher education policies and practice may help to promote rich learning experiences and long-term success for all students. This essay explores paths for research on the use of research evidence in higher education and proposes three considerations for researchers engaging in this work. First, to improve the…

The purpose of this report, which was commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) in September 2023, is to set out options for making use of graduate earnings data to support the Office for Students' (OfS's) regulation of the higher education sector. Our aim is a measure of graduates' earnings outcomes that would be as informative as…

Learning analytics promise significant benefit to online education providers through improved, better-targeted student services. Much has been written about the potential of analytics and how they might be technically implemented, and various ethical considerations are published highlighting the significant potential risk of gathering,…

From a new institutional theoretical perspective, this article explores school actors' sense-making linked to data-based decision making (DBDM) policy in general and processes of data analysis in particular. The study revealed how actors' interpretation of and response to DBDM pointed to strong and weak couplings between and within the local…

The use of data for governance purposes has been widely recognised as a way for national authorities to coordinate their activities across administrative levels and improve educational quality. This places the mid-central authority--in many countries the municipal level--in the midst of modern education governing. This article reports a case study…

Speculative reform jumps the gun on notions of data-driven reform, requiring administrators to anticipate and act to ensure problems (and the data that would show them) do not materialize. Speculative reforms are incapable of delivering the outcomes they promise, as they are fueled by a fear of the future that their reforms do not extinguish. In…

Despite increasing calls to build equitable data infrastructures, the education field has yet to have a shared guideline around equitable education data management and stewardship. To address this gap, we propose one framework from the data governance literature: the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data management principles…

We present a historical case study of "data-driven" general education policy reform at the City University of New York, where within-system transfer issues prompted the need for curricular reform that was debated and eventually implemented from 2011 to 2017. Through an empirical examination of artifacts such as meeting minutes, internal…