Higher education privatisation,internationalisation and marketisation: Singaporean versus Malaysian models of Asian education hub policy

The metaphor of an ‘education hub’ was initially promoted as also a policy concept for reversing cross-border student flows to the West in both Malaysia and Singapore. The Singapore version of ‘Asian education hub policy’ represents a distinct economic policy model of higher education which has since also influenced the very Western contexts it was derived from. However, it appears the Singaporeans might have actually borrowed the policy concept from the Malaysians whose aspirations to reverse international student flows to the West was rather aligned to related national capacity development plans as still something of a public good. This paper will use a Malaysia-Singapore contrast to compare distinct developing country (national/regional) vs. developed country (globalised) conceptions of the Asian education hub model. On this exemplary basis, it will also outline an integrated framework to better make sense of the related yet also often conflicting imperatives of privatization, internationalization and marketization.     

Imagining school autonomy in high-performing education systems: East Asia as a source of policy referencing in England

Education reform is increasingly based on emulating the features of ‘world-class’ systems that top international attainment surveys and, in England specifically, East Asia is referenced as the ‘inspiration’ for their education reforms. However, the extent to which the features identified by the UK Government accord with the situation within East Asia is problematic. This paper examines the relationship between the English representation and the ‘reality’ of East Asian education systems, using school autonomy as an illustrative example. We focus on Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, which are cited extensively to legitimate policies providing greater autonomy for schools in England. We argue firstly that the English representation has been largely discursive and inaccurate; has failed to recognise the variations across the region; and has been selected to endorse the Government’s ideological preferences. Secondly, the scope, form and nature of school autonomy vary markedly, and are operationalised in each society in ways reflecting the prevailing sociopolitical priorities.     

New partnerships and education policy in Asia and the Pacific

Forming more effective partnerships with national governments in the Asia-Pacific region has been an important policy focus for the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) since 2006. AusAID is increasingly engaging in sector-wide approaches and working through partner government systems. This paper explores how new partnerships are impacting education policy in the vastly different contexts of Lao PDR, Vanuatu, Indonesia, and the Philippines from 2006 to 2009. Conclusions are that policy discourse and current practice indicate an active effort to develop partnerships in education with donors and partner governments. But the reality in the field is that while sector-wide approaches are outlined in policy discourse, practice indicates loosely harmonized arrangements with like-minded donors, and slow progress toward sector-wide involvement.     

Fair access to higher education and discourses of development: a policy analysis from Indonesia

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between fair access policies and discourses of development through a policy analysis of higher education reform in post-authoritarian Indonesia (1998–present). The method was document analysis of five laws/regulations, using the criteria of accessibility, availability, and horizontality to identify the extent of fair access for students from (1) lower socioeconomic backgrounds and (2) under-developed regions of the archipelago. The analysis demonstrates how neoliberal, human capital, inclusive development and Pancasila discourses have been called upon in the making and un-making of a higher education market, with ultimately favourable outcomes for the fair access agenda.     

Madrasa education in South Asia and Southeast Asia: current issues and debates

Madaris (plural of madrasa) face a multitude of challenges in preparing students for life in rapidly modernising societies and emerging globalised knowledge economies. The complexity of the role and tasks of madaris, which are caught in the interface of modernity and tradition, the challenges they face, and the strategies they develop to address these challenges, suggest the need for a very cautious approach when attaining a clear picture of madrasa education and making conclusive statements about them. The literature has contributed more to confusion than clarity about the number of madaris, their rationale, purpose, pedagogy, curricula, funding, administration, relations with the state, and global violence. This paper presents an account of current debates of madrasa education and reform focusing on madaris within the diverse Sunni schools of thought and denominations located across South Asia and Southeast Asia. Based on an extensive review and analysis of over 90 articles, an overview of madrasa education and an examination of the issues and challenges facing Islamic schools that struggle to uphold tradition, and those that have begun to embrace modernisation and integration in the global process of change is given. The extent that some Islamic education systems are willing to collaborate with non-Muslims and in the process potentially enrich their circle of interest while engaging with the rest of the world in dialogue offers promising glimpses and a sense of hope for religious-based education in Muslim communities in the 21st century.     

Knowing Asia: creative policy translation in an Australian school setting

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enactment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to ‘know Asia’ creates space to imagine localised narrative possibilities that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobilisation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school leaders to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for ‘like-minded’ futures.     

Balancing basic and post-basic education in Kenya: National versus international policy agendas

The article traces the policy history of Kenya over more than 40 years (1963–2006) in order to tease out the tensions between the key themes of its own national agenda and the priorities of its principal development partners. The national concerns with the education-and-employment connection and with the orientation of schooling towards skills for work in the formal and informal economies can be contrasted with the aid agency priorities on quality and on education-for-poverty reduction. Equally, national preoccupations have been with the whole of the education and training system—from early childhood, to technical, to university. By contrast, external donors have frequently prioritised a particular sub-sector such as primary schooling. In the most recent period, 2002–2006, the paper identifies the emergence of common ground between the national and external agendas. Thus the international education agenda, as marked out by the UN Millennium Project, the Commission for Africa, and the World Bank's most recent education policy paper, is not dissimilar in its priorities to the latest Kenyan education agenda, as expressed in the Kenya Education Sector Support Programme. There is also an agreement that the education sector, on its own, cannot deliver the many benefits so often associated with schooling; rather, there needs to be an enabling environment in other sectors of the economy, if the investment in education is to be most productive. The one area where there is serious divergence, between the Government of Kenya, and, at least, its principal Western donors is on the treatment of corruption. At the point of writing, the extent of corruption remains a major threat to the external funding so necessary to Kenya's large educational ambitions.     

Networks in action: new actors and practices in education policy in Brazil

This paper focuses on the role of networks in the policy-making process in education and discusses the potential of network analysis as an analytical tool for education policy research. Drawing on publically available data from personal or institutional websites, this paper reports the findings from research carried out between 2005 and 2011. Through document analysis, we investigated the composition, activities and strategies adopted by an important policy network in Latin America and traced its developments in Brazil. We adopted the categories – texts, technical artefacts, human beings and money – proposed by Callon to identify the links between the main actors and organizations in that network and drew our conceptual framework from the work of Gramsci in order to analyse the struggle for hegemony and the role of business interests in education policy-making. The findings show that the expansion of networks does not replace the State in education, but rather the State constitutes a strategic node in these networks.     

Pre-service education for primary school English teachers in Indonesia: policy implications

Although English is only an extra-curricular subject at primary level in Indonesia, expectations over the improved quality of the teachers are exceptionally high . This is the case in the past few years in which the low proficiency of primary English teachers and their lack of teaching competencies have repeatedly been pointed out as major constraints. Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether this problem is attributed to the delivery of pre-service education in preparing primary school English teachers. This paper gathered data from teachers, language teacher educators, primary school principals, members of educational boards, and educational consultants. The data were analysed using Grounded Theory in order to examine the adequacy of pre-service education in Indonesia to prepare primary school English teachers as well as factors that contribute to its efficacy or lack thereof. The findings of the study demonstrate the need for specific preparation for primary school English teachers as well as further training for teacher educators. This present study is highly relevant to Indonesia and other Asian countries where teacher efficacy is a major concern.     

Fallacies affecting policy and practice in the teaching of English as a foreign language in state primary schools in Asia

This article discusses the impact of the worldwide trend to introduce English as a foreign language (EFL) into primary schools at ever younger ages. This trend has gained momentum in recent years, affecting millions of children in countries throughout Asia. A policy decision of this kind has far-reaching implications but it is often made without consideration of the availability of human and material resources for its implementation. The result is that children may end up learning little or no English, frustrating the intentions of national governments to develop English proficiency amongst the wider population which is, in turn, supposed to contribute to economic development. Drawing on evidence from India and Thailand, this article questions the economic rationale for introducing English into primary schools and argues that decisions on the starting age at which to teach English should, instead, be considered from an educational perspective, taking into account system constraints.     

Neither confirmed nor denied: special school provision in New Zealand's Special Education 2000 policy

Special Education 2000 (SE2000), New Zealand's first official special education policy, declared the aim of achieving a ‘world class inclusive education system’. It would seem that, by implication at least, the intention of the policy was to achieve full inclusion of all disabled children in mainstream educational settings and thus, consequentially, the demise of separate special school provision. Given this, it would be fair to expect that intentions with respect to special school provision would feature prominently in the policy. However, surprisingly, this was not the case; only brief references to special school provision can be found in the policy material and certainly nothing that would constitute a clearly articulated policy objective for this type of provision. In this article, Trish McMenamin of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, argues that a plausible explanation for this somewhat curious absence is that the differing ideological premises of inclusion and neoliberalism that underpinned SE2000 served as boundaries to what could be said and thought in that context and at that time. This, it is suggested, led to a policy position in which a role for special schools could neither be confirmed nor denied.     

Global citizenship education in context: teacher perceptions at an international school and a local Israeli school

We apply semi-structured interviews to conceptualise perceptions of global citizenship among teachers at an international school and teachers at a local public school in Israel, revealing discrepancies between theory and practice in global citizenship education (GCE). We find that teachers perceive global citizenship differently along three major axes: boundaries of global citizenship, practical aspects of GCE, and through the effect of Israel’s context. This study offers a comparative perspective that discerns the differing impacts of school context and student background on teacher perceptions at different kinds of schools and highlights the importance of teacher agency in GCE.     

Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: examining policy,practice and school positioning

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where ‘enactment’ refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south‐east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school‐based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own ‘take’ on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities.     

Discussing terrorism: a pupil-inspired guide to UK counter-terrorism policy implementation in religious education classrooms in England

My research into pupils’ perceptions of terrorism and current UK counter-terrorism policy highlights the need for more detailed and accurate discussions about the implementation of the educational aims, in particular those laid out by the Prevent Strategy. Religious education (RE) in England is affected by these aims, specifically the challenging of terrorist ideologies and improving community cohesion, but many RE teachers feel ill-equipped in dealing with the issues that might arise from terrorism discussions. Therefore, I suggest that clarification could help alleviate some of the teacher’s concerns and help provide routes by which critical RE teaching and learning can take place.     

Back to school in Afghanistan: Determinants of school enrollment

One of the first achievements of post-conflict Afghanistan was to bring almost 4 million children back to school. Issues remain daunting, however, with low primary enrollment especially for girls and in rural areas and very weak learning achievements. We review some key features of the education system in Afghanistan. By matching household and school data, we assess the impact of various factors on enrollment. Overall, the analysis indicates that further increasing supply alone is unlikely to lead to higher enrollment. The analysis confirms the importance of demand factors such as the education of parents, the family language, and other community and ethnic factors.     

Rising from the ashes: how the global education policy of community-based management was born from El Salvador's civil war

This paper explores the relationship between the emergence of global education policies and conflict-affected contexts by analysing the trajectory of community-level education decentralization within and beyond El Salvador from the 1980s, during the country's civil war, to the 2000s, by which point this approach to education governance was being widely promoted and adapted around the world. The findings – based on two years of data collection – demonstrate not only the way these contexts can be particularly susceptible to intervention by foreign governments and international organizations but also how, in certain historical-structural moments, those contexts can be transformed and leveraged to experiment with and to entrench certain policies.     

Crossing borders: Research in comparative and international education

Published articles permit mapping international and comparative education research. We reviewed 605 articles published 2004–2008 in four major journals. Using title, abstract, and entire text we explored thematic focus, geographic focus, level/type of education studied, method, and funding. The economic, political, and social context of education receives far more attention than its content. Comparative and international education research reflects more diversity than convergence in approach, theory, and methodology. The research community moves in multiple directions simultaneously, insisting that understanding education requires studying not only what happens within schools but also where the schools sit and who enters their doors.     

Education collaboration to promote school participation in northern Ghana: A case study of a complementary education program

This study explores the perceived benefits and challenges of the collaboration model of a complementary education program which operates in marginalized communities in northern Ghana. The scope of the paper includes the background, collaboration as a transformative process, research methodology, findings, and discussion. The study revealed that: (a) the collaborative partners’ “shared values” were a major drive of the collaboration; (b) the collaboration model was fluid, contextual, and an unstructured process; (c) the process provided new strategies promoting school participation in northern Ghana; and (d) the collaborative partners’ idiosyncrasies posed a major challenge to the collaboration.     

Substantiating a special cultural emphasis on learning and education in East Asia

Claims of a special cultural emphasis on learning and education (SCELE) in East Asia versus the West – the United States in particular – are legion in the research literature. The evidence is, however, largely anecdotal, severely geographically limited, or reflects an unrepresentative selection of respondents. We review the evidentiary strategies of earlier studies, situate the assumed SCELE in a theoretical framework, and compare the prevalence of learning and education words in general-interest newswriting samples from across East Asia and the United States (N = 61). Our findings confirm earlier unsubstantiated claims, provide new insight into the strength of the difference, and illustrate a novel means of quantifying the difference in magnitude of SCELE in East Asia in comparison to the United States.     

Analysing the national and institutional policy landscape for foreign academics in Thailand: opportunity,ambivalence and threat

While academic expatriation is a longstanding global phenomenon, Thailand has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The objective of this article is to identify current policy dispositions towards foreign academics at the national and institutional levels in Thailand. The article finds that within Thai higher education policy discourse, foreign academics are framed in three primary ways: as opportunities, as absent or unimportant, and as threats to Thailand. While foreign academics are often cast as experts who might accelerate the economic development of the nation and enhance the competitiveness of the Thai higher education sector, they may also be presented as threats to Thai culture, values and security. However, the most prevalent disposition found in this study was one of absence and marginality, suggesting a high degree of ambivalence toward foreign academics. The article concludes with implications for future researchers and policymakers to consider.