Portugal’s education progress from 2003 to 2015 has been praised as one of the most successful cases in OECD countries. This chapter describes the main factors of this evolution, highlighting policy measures taken on the aftermath of the 1995 TIMSS and 2000 PISA shocks. These policy measures include a more detailed curricular development, the improvement of standard assessment and the disclosure of schools’ results. These changes acted against the background of an experienced teacher body and counted with a discreet, but powerful factor: the reliance on quality textbooks. This chapter describes the recent evolution of textbooks’ role and their part in keeping both stability and improvement in the taught and assessed curriculum. It concludes with an account of how these apparently successful reforms were halted after years of bipartisan support.

This chapter presents a special instance of education reform in which South African students presented a compelling case for curriculum change under decolonization. At first, it appeared that all conditions for successful change were in place – receptive university leadership; compelling educational rationale; pressing political demand; and widespread support among academic teachers. A massive colonial statue was toppled of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town campus. For a short but powerful moment (2015–2016) academic faculties refocused their energies on critical concepts such as decoloniality, what it might mean and how it could be implemented. Special seminars, invited speakers, funded projects, senate authorizations, and commissioned task teams sprung into action to “decolonize the curriculum.” Five years later, little had changed both for the disciplinary curriculum (e.g., sociology or chemistry) or the institutional curriculum (i.e., the rules and regulations that govern legitimate knowledge). Why? Based on interviews with more than 200 academic teachers across 10 universities, this case study demonstrates how exactly institutions temper radical ideas. This is a specific case of radical reform in a broader struggle to decolonize knowledge from Cape Town and Bristol to Antwerp and South Carolina.

One reason for assembling another collection of essays on examples of how education reforms were implemented is to see if different resource levels and different political and national histories produce and demand different reform strategies. Another is to highlight the tension between rational approaches to education reform and the participatory or democratic approaches which emphasise context and the views of practitioners and stakeholders. A third reason is to highlight some of the assumptions about individual behaviours embedded in the rational and participatory approaches to reform. The ten cases presented here have been chosen and shaped by these three rationales. They also highlight some of the themes drawn from the first set of cases about continuity, consistency and coherence, adding to the stock of knowledge about models and approaches to the design and enactment of reforms including logic models and gradualism.

In 2019, the Ghanaian Ministry of Education set forth a new curricular framework for pre-primary education, which specifies a child-centred approach to learning and highlights the importance of creative and play-based learning. Despite being a significant event in the history of pre-primary education, teacher-centred didactic classroom practices are still prevalent after two years of implementation. Research shows that the lack of resources is one of the reasons for teachers’ inability to adopt play-based activities. However, evidence also strongly points to the fact that the majority of teachers do not possess the pedagogical skills to support children’s learning through play. The author of this chapter has been involved in researching teachers’ attitudes and perceptions to play-based learning in Ghana anddraws out the reasons why teachers are unable to successfully integrate play into their activities, focusing on teacher development (i.e. teacher training) and how this can interact with other factors to improve teacher performance in adopting play.

This chapter examines Kazakhstan’s efforts to reform its teacher compensation system and investigates whether the substantial salary increase for teachers in Kazakhstan between 2020 and 2023 has improved the quality of teaching and educational outcomes. The traditional “Stavka system” of teacher remuneration, where pay is based on teaching hours, is explored along with other limitations of the system, such as income instability and reduced motivation for non-teaching tasks. The reform aimed to address these issues by introducing a new wage system with a hierarchy of teacher qualifications, providing incentives for complex teaching, and acknowledging the role of special working conditions. However, this system faced challenges in incentivizing non-teaching tasks and addressing disparities in teachers’ workload. The reform’s impacts are then evaluated. Initial observations suggest a rise in the profession’s prestige and interest among school graduates, but issues remain. These include insufficient financial incentives for extra-lesson activities and the new system’s limited effect on young teachers’ pay. While salary increases are vital, they alone are insufficient to enhance educational outcomes. The need for nuanced policies, transparency, and professional consensus is emphasized to ensure that reforms effectively incentivize high-quality teaching.

Context, time scales and communication continue to be significant factors in designing and enacting reform but the cases highlight some new and complex features around the shortcomings of managerialist models of public policy and the challenges of divisiveness and intolerance in public policy debate. We identify the need to update the concept of education policy implementation from the dominant managerial model. The second major change is the intensified educational policy arena. It shows increased polarisation and ideological policy making and less respect for democratic processes as well as evidence and research in many settings. The final section of the chapter discusses what forms of knowledge do and could drive the implementation of educational reform. The task of having constructive dialogues about differences in education is a necessary challenge to be faced.

This chapter explores how Estonia became Europe’s top performer on PISA, without that being the goal. It unpacks social and education policies and practices and interventions that have helped build a high-equity high-performing education system. These include policies and initiatives fostering equity, inclusion, learner autonomy, teacher and school principal professionalism, autonomy and responsibility. Stakeholder engagement has led to longstanding cross-party agreements on the purpose of education. Thanks to investments into evidence- and results-based planning those agreements have been generative-productive. Eighteen months of paid job-protected parental leave encourages early responsive parenting. High levels of investment into preschool education help give children a good start in life. There are national curricula, but schools reinterpret those, creating their own curricula. Stakeholders and government took bold decisions such as the digitalisation of education at a point when the idea seemed utopian. They invested in free school meals, support for students in difficulty and voluntary formative assessment systems. No less important was a shift to favouring school self-evaluation over external inspections. In addition, the system generates substantial easily accessible and user-friendly data, including perceptions of well-being, autonomy and connectedness, not just examination results. This builds internal and external accountability and contributes to stakeholder collective efficacy.

This chapter reviews the development and implementation of English school education policy following an exploratory report by the Department for Education and Skills on the future of primary school collaboration and three major Blair (Labour) government initiatives focused on inter-school collaboration: the New Labour Academies; the Secondary Leadership Incentive Grant programme; and the Networked Learning Communities programme (and their further evolution under Brown (Labour)) until 2010. It traces the dramatic intensification of these policies under the Conservative–Liberal Coalition including incentives to create new academies and Teaching Schools. The Conservative policy also revolutionised school administration and performance by removing the remaining state schools from local government control. The stated aim of a 2016 White Paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’ was that, by 2022, every English state school would be in a multi academy trust. It is now past 2022 and, while this goal has not been attained, there is no doubt that ten years of a combination of policy and austerity have transformed England’s state school systems.

Critical stances towards English Medium Instruction (EMI), and to a lesser extent the similar use of French, Portuguese and Spanish Medium Instruction in former colonies of European states, have been growing since ‘independence’ in the 1960s. This discussion contextualises ‘Southern’ critiques of EMI within early decolonial debates, ‘southern multilingualisms’ and ‘transknowledging’ (reciprocal translation and exchange of knowledge), which are often invisibilised in EMI. This is illustrated through critiques in two former British territories: the first, with critiques that circulated in Southern Africa from the 1960s; the second, with critiques that surfaced four decades later in Australia. Whereas EMI is readily recognised in South Africa (with 8 per cent L1 English speakers), Australia (with 250 Aboriginal linguistic communities at colonisation and 250 years of in-migration from all continents) is an EMI context for 23–30 per cent of citizens. Aggressive marketing of Australia as an educational destination for students from the Asia-Pacific amplifies its multilingual and EMI reality in higher education. The critique of EMI includes a history of cognitive capture, debt-trap diplomacy and educational failure. Included are key agents that advance EMI, invisibilise multilingualisms and perpetuate coloniality despite the claims of social justice and access that accompany EMI rationales.