Europeanisation' has shifted in meaning from a cultural strategy aimed at creating a common identity or 'imagined community' through cultural symbols and exchange, to the creation of a space of required knowledge and competences, demonstrated through agreed qualifications and measurements of performance, in an integrated field of action linking education to employment, economic growth and social inclusion. This field requires the standardisation of data collection and of data categories. QAE emerges from this situation as a dominant discourse in the fabrication of the European education space. This paper will offer a brief overview of the main developments in QAE and European education since the Lisbon council meeting of 2000, identifying key issues in relation to the nature of indicators, the construction of categories and the meanings of QAE for the governance of education in Europe. Methodology: the research is based primarily on textual analysis of key policy documents, with interview data obtained from key informants working in the design of processes of data construction and use in/on behalf of the European commission Conclusions: the research is still in process at the time of writing, but we anticipate drawing attention to (a) the fluidity of benchmarks and indicators, and the reworking of political priorities that change suggests; (b) the shift to active demonstration of engagement in the categorisation of performance in education (c) the implications for governance of education of the QAE discourse.