This paper explores uses of comparative numerical data in the 2015 reform proposal for new school timetables in the Republic of Cyprus. The use of such data to describe and learn from foreign educational systems is traced back to nation-building projects and the rise of compulsory schooling in the nineteenth century (Lawn, 2013). Under conditions of globalisation and Europeanisation, comparative numerical data have been increasingly employed and manipulated in national policy making, to the point that they are said to constitute an influential political tool for the governance of systems of national education in Europe and beyond (Grek, 2009; Grek & Ozga, 2010; Kotthoff & Klerides, 2015; Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012; Verger, Lubienski & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). 

Using the reform proposal for new school timetables in Cyprus as a case study, the current paper seeks to problematise this key point emerging out of the international literature. It is specifically argued that it is problematic on the grounds that it does not sufficiently accommodate the possibility of a local context’s resistance – or immunity – to certain transnational policy priorities, which are often embedded in and diffused via comparisons and numbers. That is, while comparative numerical data are used in the Cyprus reform proposal in a way to scientifically substantiate the reduction of the taught time of certain school subjects and appease reaction from corresponding teaching specialties associations, in relation to other subjects, especially the teaching of language, history and religion, they are determinedly ignored. Their selective use, it is further argued, is defined by the political and educational ideologies that have shaped the historical trajectory of education in Cyprus and that are believed to be in danger today by globalisation and Europeanisation.

To capture the complexities of using comparative numerical data in this policy text, the current study employed triangulation as a data collection technique (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2000). In particular, a content analysis of the 2015 reform proposal document was applied, aiming at unfolding how comparative numerical data are used, as well as the rationales and justifications for their specific uses. For a deeper understanding of the logics shaping the specific ways in which comparative numerical data were used, semi-structured interviews with the six members of the scientific advisory committee that prepared the proposal, were conducted. As the interviewees were academics, presidents of teacher unions and associations, and top-level officials of the Education Ministry, parameters and strategies necessary for conducting elite interviews were taken into consideration during the development of the interview protocol. To further unfold the experiences and personal views of committee members about education and society that may have shaped the specific uses of these data, opinion articles published by them in the popular press within a period of five years before the publication of the reform proposal, were also compiled and scrutinised. Equally important for understanding the uses of comparative numerical data and the logics underpinning these uses, was finally a close examination of official announcements of the various teaching specialties associations and teacher unions. These announcements, putting pressure on the advisory committee for certain policy priorities, were made also public in the popular press and the website “paideia-news” during the workings of the advisory committee (November 2014 – March 2015).

The overall conclusion emerging out of the analysis is twofold: first, we cannot continue to simplify local experiences and trajectories of education, assuming that they are subject to rather than part of a co-articulation or blending of policy priorities (transnational and local); and second, we may be seeing a more chaotic, ambivalent and contradictory policy assemblages of reason, desire, fear and seduction, where supra-national and local educational agents invest one another with new understandings of the purposes of education in relation to citizenship and identity formation. The systematic study of policy assemblages along these scholarly lines ought to form part of our research agenda of attention in the making of the global/European education policy studies.

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