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Introduction
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - September 2022
Education
August 2013 - June 2019
National University of Singapore
Field of study
- Public policy
Publications
Publications (37)
Getting schools to work better is a challenge just about everywhere. Many policy experts prescribe measures for strengthening school accountability either by government command and control or through alternative market and societal actors.
Against this conventional wisdom, this book examines how China and India are tackling the challenge of getti...
It is increasingly recognized that various competencies are needed for education systems in the developing world to succeed in fulfilling SDG4. However, reform efforts are often hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity regarding what these competencies are and how they matter. This article fills the gap by developing a comprehensive conception of p...
Capacity development is central to the study and practice of public policy and administration, but ensuring its effectiveness requires a substantial amount of policy capacity from government agencies tasked to design and implement it. Identifying the right mix of policy capacity that governments should possess has been made difficult due to concept...
Both China and India are adopting information and communication technologies to facilitate openness and transparency in their governments, and hence reduce corruption. Distinctive from their traditional anticorruption approaches, is the innovative e‐government approach an effective solution to corruption in these two large developing countries? Thi...
Accountability has been increasingly emphasized as a key to improving the quality and inclusiveness of basic education. However, reforms around the world inspired by this line of thinking have only generated lackluster results. The paper examines the gaps between theoretical expectations and the actual practices of individual accountability measure...
Speaking archetypically, public organizations are practical means for implementing policy interventions. In this regard, their purposeful roles include furnishing operational capacity, while also sustaining support and legitimacy for the interventions as implemented. Contributions to fulfilling these roles are made by myriad practices and systems t...
This chapter reports in detail the practice and perceptions of teacher in-service training and career advancement for teachers in government middle schools of Beijing. Thanks to the coexistence of multiple providers and the coordination and division of labour among them, respondents reported a higher coverage and a richer variety of training opport...
This chapter presents the main theoretical underpinnings of the book. It begins with a review of the two earlier generations of thinking about accountability and how they were manifested in the basic education sector. Labelled as “Accountability 1.0” and “Accountability 2.0” respectively, they are compared and contrasted on such dimensions as corre...
How can we make further sense of the empirical findings reported in the two preceding chapters and relate them back to “Accountability 3.0” as conceptualised earlier? This chapter addresses the question through three steps. First, I conduct cross-case and within-case comparisons to highlight how practice and perceptions of teacher support in Beijin...
Considering the importance of supporting teachers under the “Accountability 3.0” conception for school education developed in the previous chapter, this chapter highlights the necessity of understanding how such support is practiced on the ground to complement the more solidly developed empirical insights on conventional measures commonly adopted u...
This concluding chapter recaps the contributions of the book by highlighting how the conception of “Accountability 3.0” and empirical investigations in two of the world's largest basic education systems shed new lights on “what educational accountability is for,” “what is it about” and “how does it work” in getting schools to work better. It then b...
This chapter puts the supportive arrangements reviewed in the previous chapter into context and offers a detailed account of how in-service training and career progression are practiced for teachers in government middle schools in Delhi. After a brief recap of the teacher survey that was used as the main tool of the empirical inquiry, the chapter r...
This introductory chapter reviews the uneven global journey of getting schools to work better despite its importance as well-acknowledged in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4) specified in the United Nations 2030 agenda. It argues that the key issue lies in the unhelpful configuration of educational accountability relationships that ove...
This Appendix recounts the methodological journey of conducting mixed-method research in government middle schools in Beijing and Delhi from July 2016 to December 2017, the findings from which were presented in the main chapters. Broadly speaking, the research design follows a nested arrangement to capture how teacher in-service training and career...
On 19 May 2023, the Reserve Bank of India announced the withdrawal of its 2000 rupee banknotes from circulation with immediate effect. While framed as a ‘non-event’, this move was a clear reminder of the country’s 2016 demonetisation initiative — widely recognised as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship anti-corruption initiative.
Making online education effective and engaging has been a policy priority in the higher education (HE) sector since the COVID-19 pandemic arose in 2020. Based on an online survey and qualitative interviews, we examine experiences of HE students and teachers in Hong Kong, and provide recommendations that can enable countries/economies to leverage on...
As the emphasis of education reforms around the world has increasingly shifted from expanding schooling access to improving student learning outcomes, the policy instruments used in educational governance has accordingly proliferated in order to fulfill this more complicated and challenging policy goal. Despite a growing body of knowledge on variou...
Public administration education is traditionally known for its emphasis on interaction, discussion and experiential-learning, which require effective in-person instructions. With COVID-19 pushing many programmes across the globe to be delivered online rather than inperson, how this shift has affected student experience in public administration prog...
Speaking archetypically, public organizations are practical means for implementing policy interventions. In this regard, their purposeful roles include furnishing operational capacity, while also sustaining support and legitimacy for the interventions as implemented. Contributions to fulfilling these roles are made by myriad practices and systems t...
Speaking archetypically, public organizations are practical means for implementing policy interventions. In this regard, their purposeful roles include furnishing operational capacity, while also sustaining support and legitimacy for the interventions as implemented. Contributions to fulfilling these roles are made by myriad practices and systems t...
How can the UK government improve its education system? Research by Yifei Yan into the Chinese and Indian education systems finds that carefully managed government intervention in partnership with local stakeholders often yields the best teaching outcomes.
Le renforcement des capacités constitue un élément fondamental de l’étude et de la mise en œuvre de la politique et de l’administration publiques. Toutefois, les entités publiques chargées de sa conception et de sa réalisation doivent disposer de pouvoirs substantiels en matière d’élaboration des politiques pour garantir sa mise en œuvre effective....
Notwithstanding piecemeal measures since the end of January 2020, the UK government only launched its high-level,
strategic Coronavirus action plan in early March, and waited two more weeks to announce a national lock-down. Prioritising
the development of capabilities of NHS during this period was effective to some extent. However, inadequate under...
This paper explores corruption in global fisheries. While reducing corruption is critical for the effective management of the fisheries sector and the fulfilment of the UN's sustainable development goals (SDGs, and SDGs14 and 16 in particular), to do so, it is necessary to first have a systematic and comprehensive understanding of what corruption i...
Effective governance that ensures proper management and utilization of various resources is increasingly emphasized as a key to achieving quality and inclusiveness in the basic education sector. This chapter aims to contribute to the understanding of education governance in urban settings of two of the largest – yet relatively under-explored – publ...
Accountability has been increasingly emphasized as a key to improving the quality and inclusiveness of basic education. However, reforms around the world inspired by this line of think- ing have only generated lackluster results. The paper examines the gaps between theoretical expectations and the actual practi- ces of individual accountability mea...
Both the Chinese and Indian governments have made assiduous efforts to desecuritise their water dispute. This is puzzling, because both countries have securitised most of the disputes between them, including the border dispute, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama issue. The triggers for securitisation exist in the China–India water dispute. Both countries ar...
Lacking accountability has been widely blamed for poor performance of basic education around the world. However, reforms aiming to fix it have variously fallen short due to a lack of conceptual clarity. The dissertation advances a more comprehensive reconceptualization that re-emphasizes government role as providing stewardship and highlights suppo...
How is China’s and India’s primary education influenced by
globalization and what exactly are their policy responses? This question is important not only because globalization is perceived to have profound influences on education policies at almost all levels in all countries, but such manifestation also remains less scrutinized in two of the large...
