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Chapter 3 examines developments in Irish education policy generally over the past forty years and how they have related to social, cultural and religious diversity and inequalities. It looks at state views of the aim of school education and the shift from Gaelic-Catholic nationalism to market-oriented views (Denis O’Sullivan’s ‘mercantile paradigm’) within an international context. It analyses the tentative and limited opening towards more pluralist conceptions of Irish society in general policy documents of the 1990s and the persistence of more traditional Christian views and values. In the 2000s education policy discourses acknowledged some discrimination issues as part of official efforts towards the ‘inclusive society’, but still largely ignored existing issues of religious discrimination. By contrast, from the mid-1990s onwards, teacher organisations and other educational actors called for a national policy that would address both sociocultural and religious inequalities and discrimination. This led to the formulation of a new intercultural discourse in education at both educational and state levels.

This chapter underscores key findings from the original analysis and argues that they strengthen a robust evidence base supporting the need to more strongly insert education onto the regional agenda. While the chapter reviews the limitations of and difficult politics surrounding metropolitan school desegregation, it offers solutions targeted toward an array of actors. The chapter showcases the need for comprehensive social policy to address the multidimensional issues that perpetuate segregation and inequality across regional spaces. These overlapping policies should confront school segregation in tandem with the housing, transportation and employment issues that are often the focus of current conversations about regionalism. The conclusion of the book also carefully highlights other communities that exemplify school district consolidation and regional cooperation today. The barriers involved should not halt the push towards educational regionalism, the chapter argues, as demographic changes and rising inequality make such efforts increasingly urgent.

This chapter carefully describes how school district boundaries help structure segregation in our highly urbanized country. Drawing upon evidence from education, sociology, political science and law, it argues that politicized, invisible walls give shape to segregation in schools and communities and makes the case for why that still matters. The ongoing link between racial and economic segregation and unequal opportunity is contrasted with the current educational policy paradigm that largely ignores the fundamental importance of such issues. The chapter contends that today’s regionalism addresses problems related to metropolitan fragmentation, but often does so to the exclusion of critical conversations about educational opportunity.

This chapter considers two trends in contemporary teaching and learning practice in the UK: citizenship education and various guises of brain training and neuroeducation. The chapter explores how these practices produce idealised conceptions of young people as simultaneously public citizens to be governed and contrastingly highly personalised brains to be trained. The chapter shows how the concepts of space and spatiality are useful in understanding the politics of schooling, but argues that educational scholars need to be more eclectic in their turn to spatial theory. Foucault's work on theorising space and power is used to develop an alternative account of how particular knowledges become legitimate and how schools shape young people. It is argued that rather than simply mirroring social relations, schools play an important role in producing new social realities.

This chapter discusses the deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity, which shows how the state has adopted a form of depoliticisation by contract as a form of risk-management-promising, where the trend is towards proactive private as distinct from public contractualism based on the binary risk of failure–success designed to secure and extend segregation. Underpinned by globally networked corporate ideas regarding education as a site for investment, the identification of success and the eradication of failure has become policy in school reform. Importantly, the pursuit of child and school failure as public policy is integral to this process, where schools and children do and, indeed, have to fail in order for segregation to be effective.

This chapter describes the policy initiatives of the Modi Government such as the appointment of the Hari Guatam and Kaw Committees to review the functioning of the UGC and AICTE respectively and of the work so far on developing a new education policy. It critiques the process adopted for policy development and the salient features of the report of the TSR Committee and MHRD’s discussion draft, the Input Document. It also critiques the far reaching judgment of the Supreme Court mandating a National Eligibility and Education Test (NEET) for admission to undergraduate medical and dental courses of all colleges including minority institutions. It outlines the controversy over teaching German as a third language in Classes VI–VIII of Kendriya Vidyalayas, and the establishment of world class universities. It outlines the measures taken by Modi Government to carry forward the initiatives taken by the UPA Governments to promote skill development.

This chapter considers the role of knowledge mobilisation in Korea. It starts by describing the process of policy development in Korea, highlighting the contribution of the media and the general public, as well as educational researchers. It then goes on to look at the history of education policy since 1948, dividing it into four distinct phases. Next it follows three education policies from their ideas to inception to impact to show the close association of research and policy in the field of education. Then it looks at the funding of research by the government and concludes with a discussion of how to get research into schools.

This chapter briefly narrates the great hopes aroused by Rajiv Gandhi’s accession to power and his dashing initiatives such as the reorganization of Central Government ministries and critiques the formation of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. It outlines other policy initiatives such as the establishment of Navodaya Vidyalayas and the Indira Gandhi National Open University, and describes the process followed for the formulation of the National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986, and its Programme of Action (POA). It narrates and critiques the key policy postulates of NPE, 1986, such as the a large and systemic programme of non-formal education being a pre-requisite for universalizing elementary education, and vesting the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) with statuary powers to regulate technical education. It highlights the fact that NPE, 1986, skirted burning issues of higher education as it not anchored in policy analysis. In the praxis of education policy, there is often no realistic assessment of the problem which needs to be addressed, no realistic identification of the various alternatives, no rigorous evaluation of alternatives, and no roadmap offered for realization of the policy objectives

This chapter provides an overview of coalition government education policy, focusing on compulsory education in England. It also highlights the relationships between coalition policy and that of the Conservative government elected in 2015. The chapter notes areas of both continuity and change with the direction set under new Labour, with the coalition both building on Labour’s policies but also shifting the rhetorical and discursive problem-space of policy. It examines education policy in relation to areas such as the curriculum, academisation and free schools, and the Pupil Premium, as well as performance management, and concludes that Conservative education policy rests on a ‘messy’ combination of regulation, competition and performance management.

Chapter 1 examines the influence and legacy of Gaelic-Catholic cultural nationalism on the Irish education system, showing that its main characteristics (Church control and denominational structures, patronage system, religious segregation, importance of religion in educational aims and contents up to the 1971 curriculum) reflect both 19^th c. developments and the Irish Free State’s Catholic-cultural nationalism (post-independence education policies, 1937 Constitution, ‘fabricated cultural homogeneity’). It also shows that, contrary to popular belief, the denominational nature of the system itself and the ‘legality’ of religious discrimination within the system only date back to changes introduced in official education policy documents in the 1960s.

This chapter outlines the exceptional composition of the landmark Kothari Commission, and its blend of idealism and realism. It offers a succinct account of the recommendations of the Kothari Commission, and the ferocious opposition to its recommendations regarding elementary and higher education, language policy, and the establishment of world class universities. It presents a candid critique of its recommendation that has become a hardy perennial of Indian educational discourse, namely that Government allocate at least 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to education. It gives a crisp account of Independent India’s first National Policy on Education (1968). It also outlines the Constitutional Amendment of 1978 which made education a ‘concurrent subject’, and the educational initiatives of the short lived Janata Government (1976–8), India’s first non-Congress Party Central Government. It also outlines the key role played by J.P Naik in the Kothari Commission and Janata Government and evolution of his thinking.

In the high stakes context of biopolitical distinctiveness, what matters appears to be selecting data and using it to make performance claims by smoothing a narrative. This chapter examines how this is integral to segregating the system using Hannah Arendt's (2003) thinking about responsibility and judgement, where she identifies what happens when people are rendered thoughtless, particularly in how a situation is framed and understood through fabricated myth-making. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the creation of ‘data-rich’ schools in England enables an examination of a form of depoliticisation by calculation where the interplay between standards, numbers, and school leadership is deployed to change identities and practices. The state has been able to make contractual alliances with elite individuals, companies, and networked knowledge producers who have used particular ideologies in order to present a seductive, trainable, and measurable model for the modern professional.

This chapter begins to advance the book’s main argument: that we should regard the education that prepares individuals for equal citizenship as a fundamental right that is shielded from majoritarian politics far more than existing practices permit, and far more than most theory recognizes is necessary. Concern for this right is motivated by the worry that leading accounts of democracy often fail to protect the interests of marginalized students. In this and subsequent chapters, arguments about a right to education are located in a deliberative democracy. As education scholars and reformers increasingly look to deliberative ideals to improve the education policy process, it is especially important to consider how well this approach to policy-making serves less advantaged students. The chapter first calls attention to the opportunities and challenges that deliberative theory presents for advancing just education policies. It next shows how leading conceptions of deliberation fail to ensure that all students receive a high quality education due to the wide discretion they give democratic bodies to determine public provisions for education. Finally, it discusses the unique relationship between educational opportunity and political equality, which underscores the need for a right to education that is set above democratic decision-making.

This chapter outlines how knowledge is mobilised – produced, mediated and applied – to improve education practice and policy in Singapore. It begins with an introduction to Singapore's education system. It then describes how the problem of knowledge mobilisation theory is framed and how Singaporean researchers have developed a Research, Development and Innovation programme. The chapter ends with a discussion of how the Singapore experience may contribute to the international education research community's drive to increase its impact on policy and practice.