Since the early 1990s, lifelong learning has become a major policy concern for the European Union, being seen as a means for enabling individuals to be more competitive in social and economic contexts that are continually changing. After a series of white papers and strategies in the field of lifelong learning, the EU launched the Lifelong…

We explore how the opt-out movement has responded to the combination of a stringent federal policy with weak and often variable implementation among the states. Gaps between federal expectations and states' understandings of just how to make NCLB's demands a reality have created policy ambiguity. Parents who oppose standardized testing have…

Internationalization processes are at the fore of university strategic plans on a global scale. However, the work of internationalization is being performed through the connections between many actors at different policy levels. Our purpose here is to ask, what is happening with internationalization of higher education at the Canadian national…

This article reviews the idea of contextualising applicants to higher education in order to widen access. First, the meaning of contextualised admissions (CAs) is discussed before laying out the rationale for contextualising applicants and the beneficiaries of the policy. The final sections discuss key critiques of CA and conclude by arguing that…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to gather descriptive data on the professional use of social media in public rehabilitation settings and to analyze existing social media policies in those agencies through content analysis. Methods: The authors sent a survey to all state administrators or directors of these agencies (N = 50) in the United…

John Stuart Mill thought higher education should not tell us what it is our duty to believe, but should "help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings." He added that "there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine," regardless of…

In this article, we interrogate the policy assumptions underlying a significant South Australian public education re-engagement initiative called Flexible Learning Options, formulated within South Australia's social inclusion policy agenda, beginning in 2006. To this end, we applied Baachi's 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' policy analysis…

A number of papers have focused on UN policy formulation processes, but little is known about how particular issues come to policy-makers' attention in the first place. This very early stage of policy formulation, called agenda setting, remains under-researched and more so in multilateral contexts. Applying Kingdon's multiple streams model to the…

What evidence supports the call for discipline reform? How might alternative strategies affect students and schools? In this article, the authors describe the critiques of exclusionary discipline and then examine the research base on which discipline policy reform rests. They also describe the alternative approaches that are gaining traction in…

This chapter reviews how the impact of WIOA on adult education provision in the United States may be limited because of persistent structural problems within adult education policy and practice.

This article presents the results of a study of the understanding and implementation of the concept of strategy in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. Recent research has indicated that management functions in ECECs have changed and that we are now, in addition to an emphasis on the administrative function, seeing a stronger…

In this Policy Memo, the author considers the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's newest effort, focused on "Networks for School Improvement," and how this initiative can learn from the Foundation's own past initiatives as well as from research evidence more generally. The author worries that in K-12 education, the Foundation has…

This paper explores how equity and access are achieved in the post-apartheid South African higher education landscape. I argue that access should refer to both physical (access as a student to an institution) and epistemological access (skills to understand, interpret academic work). I use conceptual analysis in this study to analyse relevant…

This paper presents a critical analysis of a report by the Office for Standards in Education in England based on a survey of practitioners' perspectives of play, focusing on children age 2--5 years in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). The report, 'Teaching and play in the early years -- a balancing act? A good practice survey to explore…

This article is an analysis of the meaning of context in implementing curriculum reform. It uses an analysis of two Kosovo curriculum reforms in the previous two decades to elaborate on how education systems engage in the transfer of transnational ideas as well as how they face challenges in making those ideas succeed. The article uses Discursive…