Education policy, cross-national tests of pupil achievement, and the pursuit of world-class schooling

An Inaugural Professorial Lecture Educational reforms are increasingly presented as a technocratic exercise designed to emulate the features of educational systems that have performed well on cross-national tests of pupil achievement, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). That process has been facilitated by the emergence of a form of comparative education that identifies and promotes transferable policies. This lecture analyses and critiques how this approach operates.