The paper will construct a short history of education governance in Europe from the late 70s up to the Horizon 2020 agenda, in order to chart the trajectories of education policy travel in Europe; it will explore different imaginings of ‘Europe’, perspectives, forecasts and ‘scenarios’ -depending on how different actors view and describe these developments. The paper will use the concepts of Europeanisation, translation and policy learning to show both the continuities as well as disjunctures of education policy development in Europe and beyond. It will pay particular attention to the role of the OECD in shaping this history and build on previous research (Grek 2014) which showed how the OECD became a major Europeanising actor, having not only entered the European education policy arena but in fact monopolising the attention and policy influence within it. The paper will take the argument one step further; it will examine how the OECD became a dominant education policy actor as a result of its deliberate and systematic mobilisation by the European Commission, which found in the OECD not only a great resource of data to govern (which it did not have before) but also a player who would be pushing the Commission’s own policy agenda forward, albeit leaving the old subsidiarity rule intact. 

Sotiria Grek (2014) OECD as a site of coproduction: European education governance and the new politics of ‘policy mobilization’, Critical Policy Studies, 8:3, 266-281, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2013.862503