Built policy: school-building and architecture as policy instrument

ABSTRACT

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces.     

National Qualification Frameworks: from policy borrowing to policy learning

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 NQFs. These perspectives have largely talked past each other. The article brings together these perspectives and highlights the issues at stake in this field. Through the analysis of ETF interventions in different regions, the article makes a case for new approaches of intervention, namely policy learning, that aim at enabling national stakeholders and that are conducive for home-grown VET policies. The discussion is broad in scope, not only because the article reviews developments in qualifications frameworks across-regions, but also because it highlights the complex interaction of the global and local development when introducing NQFs and the impact of such reforms on VET systems.     

外部冲击频发期的宏观经济政策空间

宏观经济治理现代化,首要任务是与经济发展阶段相匹配、与经济现实相适应,持续不断地服务于经济现代化进程。一定时期的相对稳定和关键时期的转型创新,以及相应的法治约束和理论支撑,是各国宏观经济治理现代化的共同特征。中国宏观经济治理经历了相对稳定和转型创新相互交替的三个发展阶段,表现出目标多元化、工具多样化和理念系统化的鲜明特征。中国宏观经济治理的基本经验是,既要尊重经济现代化的一般规律,又要尊重本国经济的初始条件,创新的同时也要有所继承。在新的历史时期,中国宏观经济治理面临严峻挑战,需要统筹和协调多重冲击下的多目标多政策系统,因此,一方面要加快宏观经济治理立法,尽快进入下一个相对稳定期,以更好应对“新三期叠加”;另一方面要加快理论创新和理论构建,凝聚共识,增加透明度,减少对政策的误解和政策实施中的摩擦。