This paper uses Fraser's (1999) concept of social justice as comprising both redistribution and recognition as a frame to interrogate two "Area-Based Curriculum" projects running since 2008 in Manchester and Peterborough schools. It argues that historic concerns about working with "the local" in cross-curricular activities has…

This article considers the relationship between policy and practice in the early childhood mathematics curriculum for reception-class (RC) children of five years in England. It explores what the policy requires RC teachers to do in terms of curriculum implementation; what RC teachers' views and understanding of the early childhood mathematics…

While school decentralisation policy in Nepal has been taking effect for more than 8 years with the financial and technical assistance of the World Bank, confusion and controversy have been prevalent in relation to its goals, outcomes and sustainability. This article explores the issues of school decentralisation in Nepal by relating the Bank's…

America is on the precipice of ruining its foundation for success. The movement toward a centralized education system through federal mandates and common curriculum and testing is threatening the very system that has contributed to America's success and that holds the potential for its future success: that is a decentralized, diverse, largely…

In the light of the global trends towards international assessment, inter-country comparison and policy convergence, this article critically discusses the contextual factors that influence educational success in Shanghai and Singapore. Focussing on the structural and cultural frames, this article maintains that the educational achievement in…

The aim of this article is to analyse the circulation of discourse in the global educational field and its relation to local-specific education policies and practices. The first section examines the logic of networks and relates it to the specificities of the networks of interaction that, it is argued, constitute "global policy spaces"…

The paper opens with a discussion of some of the methodological difficulties inherent in comparative educational research, and outlines ways in which systemic inequalities in doing comparative work can be reduced. The social circumstances in Thanet and Lille are delineated, and the paper then considers structural differences in denominational…

This article examines education policy on curricular integration and interdisciplinary practices in primary and secondary education (K-11) in Colombia. It presents an overview of institutional and teachers' discourses and practices concerning this subject, based on empirical work that was done in Bogotá. Finally, it presents a cooperative research…

Using a global-local dialectic approach, this paper traces the rise of the basic education programme in the 1980s and 1990s in Botswana and its subsequent attenuation in the 2000s. Amongst the local forces that led to the rise of BEP were Botswana's political project of nation-building; the country's dire human resources situation in the decades…

This article takes up the issue of the internationalisation of Vocational Education and Training (VET) reforms, expressed in the way policy instruments such as National Qualifications Frameworks (NQF) are introduced in the European Training Foundation's (ETF) partner countries. There is an international debate and different perspectives regarding…

Open educational resources (OER) have become new buzzwords in the glocalization of education. While OER are often espoused as enabling educational equity, the reality is not always the case. Looking only at the positives of new educational methods can mask perpetuating challenges, which makes the open aspect of OER a misnomer. Taking an…

Scholars have recently explored the relationship between local democracy and education from two distinct perspectives. The first views local democracy as inherently good and offers suggestions for deepening the practice of democracy. The second perspective questions the merits of local democratic control of schools. Contributors to this…

This article analyzes the implications of a particular conception of social justice in education for the policies that have led to significant political controversies in contemporary communities in the United States. Many of these controversies have arisen from the collision between the increasingly multicultural reality in those communities and…

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…

The purpose of the study is to thoroughly examine a school district's plan for developing, implementing, and monitoring a strategic plan for adequately preparing students with twenty-first century skills or the marketable skills students will need in order to contribute to the dynamic twenty-first century workplace while meeting federal and state…