The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has become a globally-influential voice in the field of education reform (Grek, 2009, Martens and Wolf 2009). Yet its influence is not always direct and readily apparent, but exercised through an ongoing process of collecting, manipulating and diffusing data and ideas to its member (and non-member) countries. International large-scale assessments such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are a particularly prominent example of the use of data for ideational promotion. However, there are other influence routes taken by the OECD, such as processes of ‘multilateral surveillance’ in which supra-national and state-level actors interact, with the latter encouraged to internalise global norms and policy models in what has been referred to as policy learning and socialisation (Marcussen 2004, Grek 2017). In this paper, we analyse the OECD national policy reviews from the perspective of multilateral surveillance. These reviews provide countries with policy advice and guidance on education. They usually adopt the form of peer reviews that are produced through the interplay of actors operating at different scales in which key policy issues are identified and recommendations put forward. Given this interplay, OECD policy reviews are particularly interesting instruments to analyse, and can be done so from the perspective of soft power. This paper investigates how such reviews are created, who is involved and who is excluded, and how norms and ideas are constructed, negotiated and diffused between actors and institutions throughout the review process and beyond, into the domain of national policy making. More concretely, the paper sheds light on these issues by focusing on the case of the Netherlands and the recent publication of two OECD national policy reviews (OECD, 2014 and 2016). These reviews promote test-based accountability, outcomes-based evaluation and the use of achievement data in education decision-making. The infiltration of OECD ideas into national discourse and policy documents will be explored from a multi-scalar perspective, i.e. how are OECD ideas communicated and asserted within the reviews themselves, to what extent are these ideas present in national policy spaces, and what are the political and institutional conditions contributing to their adoption (or lack thereof) into national discourse and policy. Methodologically, as well as a content analysis of the policy review documents, data is based on a number of interviews with actors (civil servants and OECD employees) who played a key role in the research and production of the reviews.

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