Contemporary vocational education and training (VET), both initial and higher, is strongly market oriented, and governments shape systems with significant roles for employers. The study presented in this article aims at examining how employers are positioned in the practice of VET provision in such a system. Specifically, it recognises and…

On 3 May 2023, the first mass school shooting occurred in Serbia, positioning children as a particularly vulnerable group in need of further support. Subsequently, the government needed to create policies to help restore a sense of security, stability and trust in the community. The main dilemma was regarding the questions: Should we continue…

Established in 2009, Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE) gives employers an opportunity to initiate state-funded but locally conceptualised and managed training programmes. This article investigates the system, the ideas used in policy to mandate this arrangement of vocational education and training (VET) and the institutional relations of…

Research and practice regarding politics within and for the educational management administration and leadership community are well established. The 50th anniversary issue of the journal educational management, administration and leadership is an opportunity to examine knowledge production where I have developed a new conceptual framework based on…

Multiple direct observations suggest that community college board governance exists today, very much as it has for many decades, often encumbered by outmoded, unchecked, ineffectual practices, and absent clarity of purpose. The absence of a routine assessment of a board's own governance style and efficacy foretells a future inability for…

This targeted, qualitative study examines language attitudes, educational language policy, and literacy in an underrepresented segment of Haiti's multilingual society. Drawing on decolonizing theory, we take a critical stance, arguing that colonial language ideologies that privilege French and disempower Kreyol are reproduced in the…

This article explores the role of affect in influencing whether and how education policy on sustainability is circulated, adopted or resisted. Drawing on empirical data from K-12 education across Canada, the paper examines the mobility of sustainability in education policy in relation to i) collective affective conditions, ii) the mediating…

Principals are confronted with an exceptional degree of difficult decisions. One of the key challenges that school principals are facing in many parts of the world today is how to maintain a balance between professional discretion and accountability with the legislative and policy framework in which they must perform their duties. Every judgement…

This article seeks to provide a new paradigm for questioning how quality and excellence in teaching practices are understood and evaluated. By combining ideas from complexity theory and Michel Foucault's conception of polymorphous correlations, I argue that a shift away from the forms of thought that engender reductionist evaluations can become a…

In Myanmar, with languages and dialects of one hundred and thirty-five national races officially recognized by the government, language is highly politicized. The country is still struggling to get a peace agreement to end the seventy-year long civil war between the Burmese-speaking majority group and the ethnic minorities and to establish a…

As we tentatively emerge from the imposed isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and as the status quo reasserts itself, it seems timely to consider the current state of teacher professionalism. This task seems critical, given the wider backdrop of the neoliberal policy pandemic that has driven the commodification and instrumentalization of education…

This article is based on the author's autoethnographical research on leading practices of Steiner school principals over a period of major change and crisis in a Steiner school's life. This research included the use of the theory of practice architectures to uncover unsustainable contradictions in Steiner schools which constrain the full promise…

This paper utilizes a conceptual framework uniting neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and poststructuralism to examine four education bills from the Kansas state legislature proposed in 2023. Utilizing critical discourse analysis to frame policy documents as forms of text and discourse, this paper unpacks language-in-use, structures of power, and…

This paper performs a critical examination of the Ofsted Education Inspection Framework (EIF), which was accompanied by an Inspection Handbook for Further Education and Skills, and argues that this policy document reinforces the neoliberal project in education. Drawing on concepts from Michel Foucault's analysis of the nature and effects of…

Framed by Homi Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and the third space of enunciation, this study explores postcolonial relationships conceivably enacted through policy borrowing processes of learner-centred pedagogy (LCP) in Ghana. Nine Ghanaian and nine foreign stakeholders were interviewed. Conscious of the power imbalance implicit in traditional…