Paul Morris

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• D.Phil., MSc & BEd
• Professor of Comparative Education at University College London

We explore the literature on internationalization in higher education and distinguish between the mainstream and radical approaches to critical scholarship. We argue that the mainstream approach continues to steer internationalization towards socially progressive and equitable aims, while growing concerns have surfaced especially with regard to its...

This paper identifies and analyses the legitimation strategies used by the OECD as it expanded its role in global educational governance. Whilst the literature recognises the mainly discursive sources of legitimacy which the OECD derives from its testing regime, especially PISA, what remains unexplored is how exactly it has created the legitimacy t...

The nature of accountability within education has been fundamentally altered by the influence of new public management (NPM) and, more recently, by the increased dominance of large sets of comparative data which perform a governance role in local and international contexts. We focus on the OECD's PISA program which, despite not delivering on its pr...

Creativity has fascinated scholars for generations, and its identification as one of the key ‘twenty-first century skills' necessary for economic growth has led to renewed interest. This creates two challenges for the OECD: its flagship Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) does not directly measure creativity. Secondly, the increase...

Framed by the mantra of ‘Building back Better’ (BBB) the Covid-19 Pandemic has inspired myriad proposals to transform education systems for the future. We interrogate the phrase ‘building back better’, focusing on its origins and application within crisis narratives. We analyse responses to the pandemic published by influential global agencies focu...

Whilst Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 has influenced education in various ways, major reforms perceived as promoting mainland control have been resisted. For two decades, Hong Kong’s educational autonomy under the ‘one country, two systems’ formula was thus largely maintained. This changed radically with the response to the prote...

This Commentary reflects upon the articles in this Special Issue to provide an overview and discussion of their core arguments.

We analyze the policies of China and Israel towards students from Hong Kong and East Jerusalem respectively. We demonstrate that they are treated as International students and subject to a form of 'internationalization' designed to consolidate national forms of identity and extend state control over 'troublesome' minorities within the nation state....

This paper applies insights from narrative theory to analyse the OECD’s transition to providing humanitarian large-scale assessments under the SDGs, situating this within the evolving dynamics of a global development complex. The perspective is guided by the thematic interests of the special issue, with the goal of enriching understanding of both t...

In 2018 the OECD published the findings of its PISA for Development (PISA-D) pilot project which was undertaken to make the regular PISA framework more accessible and relevant to low- and middle-income nations. This would encourage such nations to join PISA as part of the OECD’s Learning Framework 2030 and provide them with ‘contextualised’ policy...

The increased movement of people coupled with the rise of communications technology has made it possible for ever larger groups of mobile people to maintain contact with their homelands over vast distances. The term 'diaspora' is increasingly employed to describe these relations and it is used widely by academics, policy-makers, and national and su...

The 2nd Forum on Diaspora and Internationalisation in Higher Education follows the 1st Forum held on May 10, 2019 at UCL London. The 1st Forum was co-convened by Annette Bamberger, Terri Kim, Paul Morris, and Fazal Rizvi. The 2nd Forum is put together by Annette Bamberger, Terri Kim and Paul Morris. Both events feature speakers of diverse backgroun...

A recent IOE Blog (https://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/should-england-continue-participating-in-pisa/) asks whether England should continue its involvement with the triennial PISA tests and concludes that we should, as it provides a wealth of unexplored data for analysis. The question is timely as the outcomes of the 2018 PISA exercise (...

This paper analyses the approach to systemic educational reform in the Arabian states of the Gulf and the central role within that of the Global Education Industry (GEI). Initially the authors identify the commonalities of their approach; subsequently they compare the approaches in Bahrain and Qatar. They demonstrate how the GEI is embedded in all...

Funded by BAICE and co-hosted by UCL Institute of Education and University of East London, this Forum will explore the role of diaspora and how this intertwines with internationalisation in higher education. We aim to: examine diverse theoretical perspectives on diaspora and how they inform the theme of diaspora in internationalisation; critically...

Forum Programme 10 MAY 2019

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has unveiled plans to move into the field of early childhood education through the introduction of the International Early Learning Study (IELS), a new comparative test of five-year olds that is being piloted in three nations. This article explores the dynamics of this new project an...

We explore the role of neoliberalism within portrayals of internationalisation in higher education (HE). Through an analysis of four features of internationalisation, we suggest that they embody a complex entanglement of neoliberal categories and assumptions with other, primarily progressive humanitarian ideals. This framing of internationalisation...

Educational institutions have been among the most active social organisations responding to and facilitating processes associated with globalisation. This has primarily been undertaken through the attempts of schools and universities to ‘internationalise’ their student intake, staffing, curricula, research, and assessment systems. Amongst the many...

En las últimas tres décadas, ha surgido una red influyente de proveedores contemporáneos de educación comparada, compuesta por organismos globales, consultores, empresas multinacionales y «think tanks». Su objetivo es detectar las mejores prácticas en los sistemas con un alto rendimiento para, posteriormente, recomendar su adopción en otros con uno...

The year 2015 was significant for the arena of international development, as UNESCO’s Education for All agenda was replaced by Education 2030, which would identify minimum standards of education quality. The OECD had been working on extending its existing PISA assessment into low- and middle-income countries through PISA for Development (PISA-D) an...

Internationalisation in higher education is often portrayed as a value-neutral intervention driven predominantly by economic motives yet advocated and prescribed for humanitarian purposes. In this study we investigate how internationalisation takes shape in an institution which is characterised by political controversy that hinders and shapes its i...

The EU plays a dominant role in coordinating the responses to the massive inflow of refugee-migrants into Europe; consequently, the conceptions of citizenship and future integration which are embedded in its policies are significant. We explore and analyse the key EU education policy documents that refer to immigrants to identify the forms of citiz...

The OECD’s PISA programme has been portrayed as central to the emergence of a regime of global educational governance and the subsequent convergence of policies towards a standardised model. Whilst there is an extensive literature describing PISA’s impact on education policies, there is a paucity of analysis of how PISA data is presented to the pub...

As políticas educacionais no mundo todo estão cada vez mais dirigidas por um desejo de emular as “melhores práticas” de países que têm bom resultado em exames internacionais de desempenho de alunos, tais como o Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) e o Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Este artigo traz u...

Since the mid-1980s, a number of East Asian societies have consistently performed well in international tests, and their education systems have emerged as models of ‘best practice’, including Hong Kong, which has been extensively referenced by politicians and their advisers in England. In parallel, local dissatisfaction with the education system in...

Singapore has been assigned the role of a ‘model’ nation state primarily for two reasons: its rapid rate of economic growth and its outstanding performance on cross-national tests of educational achievement, such as PISA. This has resulted in advocates of reform citing it as illustrating ‘best practices’, especially in the field of education, and i...

Background: This paper analyses the role of, and approach to, policy referencing and borrowing in Hong Kong’s recent reforms that culminated in the creation of its New Academic Structure and the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education. Main argument: It argues that Hong Kong has gone further than most jurisdictions not just in responding to global...

Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a means to improve a nation's global competitiveness as measured by its performance in international league tables of pupil achievement. This has created a demand for comparative research which identifies ‘what works’ in high-performing school systems. A diverse array of consultancies, thinks tanks, and...

Educational reforms are increasingly presented as a technocratic exercise designed to emulate the features of educational systems that have performed well on cross-national tests of pupil achievement, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). That process has been facilitated by the emergence of a form of comparative educat...

Education reform is increasingly based on emulating the features of ‘world-class’ systems that top international attainment surveys and, in England specifically, East Asia is referenced as the ‘inspiration’ for their education reforms. However, the extent to which the features identified by the UK Government accord with the situation within East As...

Since Hong Kong's retrocession, the government has endeavoured to strengthen local citizens' identification with the People's Republic of China - a project that acquired new impetus with the 2010 decision to introduce ‘Moral and National Education’ (MNE) as a compulsory school subject. In the face of strong local opposition, this policy was withdra...

Since the country’s independence from America in 1946, numerous studies have highlighted the relative weakness of Filipino national consciousness. As Jose Rizal lamented more than a century ago ‘a man in the Philippines is only an individual, not a member of a nation.’ This has been attributed to the failure to establish a strong modern state follo...

Education reform in England is increasingly portrayed as a quest to create ‘world class’ schools through the transfer of features of ‘high performing’ school systems. The demand for evidence to support policy borrowing has been serviced by an influential intermediary network, which uses international data banks to compare education systems, and to...

This chapter examines the construction of national identity in Singapore through an analysis of the changing portrayals in Singapore's school textbooks of the role and suffering of the different ethnic groups during the Japanese Occupation. This analysis is used to assess the explanatory power of the prevailing theories which distinguish between ci...

In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predomina...

Many stakeholders in education undertake comparisons of curricula. Governments compare their states' curricula with overseas models when searching for new initiatives and when attempting to enhance international competitiveness; parents compare the offerings of schools in order to choose suitable institutions for their children; students look at th...

All states are interested in the political education of their young people, and it ismainly through citizenship education that they attempt directly to socialise youngsters into the norms, values, and conduct expected of citizens. We understand ‘citizenship education’ in the broadest possible sense, that is, as referring to those aspects of school...

The promotion of ‘Global Citizenship’ (GC) has emerged as a goal of schooling in many countries, symbolising a shift away from national towards more global conceptions of citizenship. It currently incorporates a proliferation of approaches and terminologies, mirroring both the diverse conceptions of its nature and the socio-politico contexts within...

The Philippines has been occupied three times, but the narrative of the Spanish colonization has always been filtered by Catholic scholars, whilst the Americans are still portrayed as a benign visiting power that liberated the country from the Spanish and the Japanese. As part of this selective and depoliticized approach to their national history p...

After WWII, the economic prospects of the Philippines, then the second-largest economy in Asia, were viewed positively, but by the mid-1970s it had become Asia’s developmental puzzle for its failure to sustain economic growth. In contrast during the same period, regional neighbours, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, achieved previously...

Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a quest to achieve a ‘world class’ education system through a process of identifying and adopting the practices of those systems whose pupils perform best in league tables of achievement. This is the rationale for the range of new policies proposed by the coalition government in the schools White Paper...

The promotion of ‘critical citizenship’ has become a key objective of official school curricula around the world. Using an analytic framework developed by the authors, this paper identifies the diverse conceptions of critical citizenship that are promoted, by comparing the official school curricula for citizenship in England and France. The analysi...

Problems of measuring and public recognition of women's work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co-performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneou...

In 2007, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry was established by the Government of Hong Kong to investigate allegations that senior officials had interfered with the academic freedom and institutional autonomy of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). It concluded that a former minister had requested the President of that institution to curb the...

Increasingly, countries around the world are promoting forms of ‘critical’ citizenship in the planned curricula of schools. However, the intended meaning behind this term varies markedly and can range from a set of abstract and technical skills under the label ‘critical thinking’ to a desire to encourage engagement, action and political emancipatio...

The development and status of both teacher education and the teaching profession are strongly interlinked because, as Furlong et al. (2000) has argued, the key elements of teacher professionalism and the fundamental nature of teachers’ work can be most directly influenced by changing the knowledge, skills and values required of new teachers. Accord...

Chinese history (a subject entirely separate and distinct from ‘history’) has long been the most politically sensitive subject in Hong Kong's school curriculum. Previous studies have analysed the policies of the colonial and postcolonial Governments towards this subject. Here, we examine the role played by the Chinese history subject community (com...

Many stakeholders in education undertake comparisons of curricula. Governments increasingly compare their states’ curricula with overseas models when searching for new initiatives and when attempting to enhance international competitiveness; parents compare the offerings of schools in order to choose suitable institutions for their children; studen...

This article traces the processes for encouraging and/or ensuring the accountability of teachers in Hong Kong. It is argued that, if examined historically, the nature of teacher accountability has been determined by the government, whose approach has been ambivalent and paradoxical. Up until the mid‐1980s, through inertia and non‐decisions, the low...

Writers on colonial education have generally assumed that colonial curricula were tools of metropolitan political and cultural 'hegemony'. In particular, it is alleged that colonial history curricula neglected or ignored the histories of indigenous populations. Through analysing the case of Chinese History in Hong Kong, this article demonstrates th...

The Hong Kong government, in common with many others around the world, has experienced major difficulties in implementing educational reforms. The nature of the constraints on implementation, however, have differed significantly between the pre- and post-1997 periods. During the transition to Chinese sovereignty, the colonial government sought to a...

This article explores the changing educational landscape in Hong Kong prior to and following its transition to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It does this through an analysis of the rise and fall of a specific curriculum reform, the Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC), which straddled the political reunification. The article draws on a range of publishe...

This chapter describes the study as it was conducted in Hong Kong in two case study schools. The first is a new school located in a recently developed area close to the mainland border. The second is a long established school, operated by the Anglican Church. The results suggested that the goals promoted by the government were not a strong feature...

This chapter lays out the research questions that guided the study and the methods used to conduct the study. The study was conducted in 17 secondary schools in six countries: Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States. The first research question related to the school's policies with respect to civics education. The secon...

This final chapter provides a comparison of the portrayals of civic education across the six societies focusing on three levels: the nature of policy intentions; its operationalization in school curricula; and implementation in schools. A continuum of minimal-maximal interpretations is used to interpret the overall results.