Policy Transfer and Educational Change by David Scott, Mayumi Terano, Roger Slee, Chris Husbands and Raphael Wilkins

Stephen Ward

For the last twenty years educational policy transfer and educational borrowing have been high on the agenda of many countries. Comparative international performance data such as PISA have made the prospect of importing policies and pedagogical methods irresistible to governments across the world. The work of David Reynolds (1996) on mathematics teaching in Taiwan was a good example in its influence on the New Labour government’s policy on the National Mathematics Strategy in England and Wales. The combination of pedagogical and political issues makes policy transfer an ideal topic for Education Studies.

This book reports on a major policy transfer project in India with the aim of improving the quality of education in India’s schools, in particular to make education and schools more inclusive. From the outset it is explained that the project ended largely in failure. A list of bullet points on pp.118-9 list the achievements, they are all along the lines of systems which were set up to gather data and to make improvements, but none actually records improvements in schools.

Ward, S.(2019) Review of Policy Transfer and Educational Change by David Scott, Mayumi Terano, Roger Slee, Chris Husbands and Raphael Wilkins. Educationalfutures, [online] Vol. 9(2). Available at: https://educationstudies.org.uk/?p=10211 [Accessed 18 Apr, 2024].

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Volume 9(2) 2018

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