Description: Quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) is increasingly important nationally and transnationally in education. It may steer policy and practice at all levels and in all sectors of education in national systems, and may be understood as a form of governance of education. The objective of the study is to contribute to finding solutions to a key problem in Finnish education: that of maintaining its high and equal levels of educational performance while responding to global pressures to modernise education in order to enhance competitiveness in the international marketplace. QAE has the potential to operate as a means of policy convergence but it may also have a significant role in developing a distinctive Finnish approach that best suits the needs of the national system. The research project will therefore ask, first, is there evidence of a distinctive Finnish model of QAE in education? Secondly, what effects, intended and unintended, does QAE produce at the grass roots level? And finally, how does the Finnish context receive and mediate the global pressure for QAE? The Finnish project is a part of the collaborative research project "Fabricating Quality in European Education, a compartive research project on effects of quality assessment in Danish, English, Finnish, Scottish and Swedish basic schooling", funded by the national research funding agencies and part of the European Collaborative Research Program (ECRP) organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The collaborative project focuses on the governance of education through investigation and analysis of the extent of policy convergence and divergence in QAE across the systems in the project, the extent of Europeanisation of education across the different systems, and evidence of policy learning, differences and similarities in the operation of QAE at different levels across systems and impacts of QAE processes on teachers in the different systems. It draws on detailed individual multi-level studies that share a common design. These studies enable the collaborative project to identify and analyse, through a variety of theoretical approaches, the ways in which education is controlled, managed and governed through QAE. The collaborative project will, through this work, contribute to the development of comparative methodologies that are sensitive to the influence of trans-national pressures for QAE on national systems, while also recognising the importance of context in shaping responses to these pressures. The overarching aims of the project are to: first, to develop understanding of QAE as a form of governance of education, through empirical investigation and theoretical work that draws on current social science approaches to the relationship between evidence, data and governing; second, to develop new methodological and theoretical approaches to comparative education in Europe, which combine perspectives on emergent global policy development with critical approaches to meaning-making through comparison and with attention to the mediating effects of national and local practices.