Alison Milner

• PhD in Education
• Professor (Assistant) at Aalborg University

School autonomy with accountability (SAWA) reforms have developed in diverse forms in Northern Europe. Following processes of decentralization to the municipal and school levels, quality assurance and inspection became key to the test-based accountability agendas of Denmark and England respectively. With an abductive approach, we explore the episte...

This report provides an insight into how ETUCE member organisations are engaging with ideas that were initially presented in the 2020 Your Turn! report and framework. It first presents findings from a survey of ETUCE member organisations and focuses on three key themes drawn from the framework. This is followed by three short case studies of FSLI,...

Trade union collaboration on issues of social justice connects workers to each other and to their wider communities and is therefore considered a strategy of union renewal. Prior to their amalgamation on 1 January 2023, Lärarförbundet (Swedish Teachers’ Union) and Lärarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Teachers in Sweden) collaborated intermittent...

Students with low socio-economic status (SES) often have lower levels of academic achievement. In England, various UK governments have sought to address this disadvantage gap through reforms to national large-scale assessments, school accountability mechanisms, and educational governance structures. While scholarly research highlights the important...

Twenty-first century problems have forced international policymakers to consider how education might be reimagined so that citizens have the knowledge and skills to respond to the known and unknown challenges ahead and take an active role in the creation of future societies. While it has been suggested that problem-oriented curricular and pedagogic...

There is increasing recognition of growing teacher supply problems across Europe. Although not a recent phenomenon, the European Commission has attributed the current teacher 'crisis' to the low attractiveness of the profession, arguing that systemic efforts need to be made to improve teacher recruitment and retention. This report examines the scal...

This chapter aims to demonstrate how students are “made” and “re-made” through the various assemblages of policy and practice. We achieve this by connecting the ideational explanations for, and theoretical underpinnings of, policies of assessment and inclusion with empirical analysis of stakeholders’ perspectives on how their enactment in schools a...

This chapter focuses on the national and local education system and school organisational structures in which the assessment and inclusion agendas are embedded and to which these agendas are responsive. Employing Bacchi’s (Bacchi, C., Open Journal of Political Science, 5, 1–12, 2015) concept of problematisation, we begin with an analysis of shifts...

In this final chapter, we perform a transversal analytical movement through discussion of our findings alongside those of the wider research landscape in the intersections between assessment and inclusive education. The aim is to bring our analysis into dialogue with key themes in the various research fields engaged in educational assessment and/or...

This chapter focuses on the role of school leaders as they work with and between the assessment and inclusion agendas. Highlighting first the complex governance arrangements in our case countries, we analyse leaders’ latitude as “policy remakers” in their own school contexts. With Deleuze and Guatarri’s (A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizoph...

This chapter focuses on the key accountability mechanisms through which the agendas of assessment and inclusion work at the national and local scales. We first describe the historical development of these mechanisms then, drawing on sociological theories of professionalism and accountability and the philosophical concept of “simulacrum”, analyse th...

This chapter takes an exploration of current empirical and theoretical research on assessment and inclusive education as its starting point to highlight the key issues which have arisen in the intersections between these two research fields. Informed by their analyses, we will position our research and its methodological approach within this broade...

In the midst of a range of unprecedented global events, geopolitical developments, and health, climate, socio-economic, and humanitarian crises, which have challenged assumptions about the nature and purpose of education, this chapter frames the book as an attempt to engage with a window of opportunity for shaping educational trajectories for the f...

In this chapter, we unearth the historical and contextual development of assessment and inclusion as two discrete agendas and through their intersections in our case contexts. Building on the conceptual terminology on assessment and inclusive education highlighted in Chap. 1, we first offer an insight into the present state of assessment and inclus...

Strategic government interventions in public education have shifted and blurred the boundaries between state, market and civil society modes of governance. Within this matrix of interdependent relations, schools operate under increasingly hybrid accountability arrangements in which public accountability can both complement and compete with market a...

This report is concerned with the experiences of education trade unions in Europe as they seek to respond to significant changes both in the work of teachers and other education personnel and the wider context of trade unionism. The particular focus is on the strat- egies being adopted by education trade unions as they engage in processes of union...

Testing and inclusion are two global education policy agendas with seemingly divergent aims. While inclusion suggests that every student can make a valuable contribution to their learning environment, testing has the capacity to exclude those who do not attain the 'right' knowledge in the 'right' way. National policies of testing and inclusion ther...

With the rise of network governance, and its concomitant fragmentation of public education systems across Europe, international studies have recommended teacher collaboration as a means to bring educational stakeholders together. Yet, despite some agreement over the potential benefits to student, professional and organisational learning, there is l...

The final report of the Commission-funded EFISTU project provides an in-depth analysis of the two cycles of the European Semester from 2017 to 2019 – drawing on five case studies and desk research. It clearly shows how education and health care in particular but public services more broadly feature as central themes. This therefore poses a major ch...

Education policy is a national competence within European Union rules, and therefore the responsibility of national governments. However, encouraging education policy co-ordination across Member States, and developing a European education ‘policy space’ has always been a feature of EU activity. In this chapter we demonstrate how the EU’s economic g...

As the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) spreads, key questions that attempt to identify both the nature and the increasing scope and scale of this phenomenon become empirically significant. The concern of this article is to highlight some of the complexities of measuring one key element of the GERM: the privatisation of public education syst...

Sweden has experienced increasing educational inequity levels within its highly decentralized school system. With a reduced capacity to bargain collectively, the two Swedish teacher trade unions, the Swedish Teachers’ Union (Lärarförbundet) and the National Union of Teachers in Sweden (Lärarnas Riksförbund), have sought to extend their role in soci...

This is a book review of Erik Lidström's 2015 book 'Education unchained: what it takes to restore schools and learning'.

In this article, four teachers reflect on what it means to work in a for-profit free school in Sweden. These narratives corroborate concerns about educational inequity and academic standards within the free school system. Equally, they reveal how teachers struggle to negotiate a professional identity within a competitive school market where social...