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.

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 is an introduction to the research and writing undertaken by those who have researched the reshaping of the education system. It begins by giving a recent history of the country and particularly the disruptive events of 2022. The argument is that Kazakhstan is at a pivotal moment in its culture and development as an independent, post-Soviet state. The introduction also outlines the key aspects of the education system, previous research by this team plus the major themes and structure of the book.

Chapter 12 is a brief chapter that sets out the research aims, design and processes of several collaborative research projects conducted by a large team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and Nazarbayev University. It covers the three-year period from 2018 to 2020 to describe the rationales and methods used for data collection alongside the philosophies of reporting applied in forming three regional case studies. It ends by signalling how the case studies and earlier research findings from 2018 combine to allow for contrasts between regions and layers in the educational system that inform on the variations and commonalities found pursuant to systemic educational reform.

This chapter describes two major action research projects undertaken with teachers in Kazakhstan. The aim was to promote teachers’ engagement in curriculum reform and teacher professional development through action research in schools. The two settings were very different and both researched using multiple sources of evidence to explore what we have learned about the conditions for and blocks and facilitators to action research in Kazakhstani schools. A key learning was that the political task of providing the enabling conditions is a top priority if action research is to fulfil its huge potential, and this will determine whether it becomes embedded or not.