This symposium will highlight the role of European policy elites (experts, consultants, advisers, etc.) by showing that they wield significant power and legitimacy in shaping educational reforms during last decades at global level, while at the same time its  illustrates the social and political features of these reforming groups and networks in national spaces. By charaterising these European elite groups and networks by their positions within the State and/or International Organizations, the symposium will display the circulation of ideas and knowledge, beliefs and assumptions, between individuals and groups, but also their relations of dependence as well as their technocratic and/or ideological connivance that shape a doctrinal puzzle.

Often referred to as neo-liberalism versus welfarism, these ideas, discourses, and prescriptions are more a complex combination of personal experience, adoption of scientific and expert statements, formulation of values or principles of justice, but also political expediency in front of public opinion and interest group pressures. Far from considering educational reforms and decision-making as linear, sequential, or incremental processes, the symposium will emphasize authoritarian, sometimes nationalistic stances, but also uncertain dimension of power facing the uncertainty and complexity inherent to policy-making at global scale. It will underly the incoherence and cognitive dissonance of decision-making, the tacit and shared knowledge on which justifications are based, or the story-telling that legitimizes changes in political rhetoric

Therefore, the symposium will help to better understand ongoing and endogenous transformations of the educative State, in characterizing interactions within national, European and global elites, but also their resources and capacities for action in framing public action programmes and delivering political discourses, through games of competition and rivalry, according to specific professional, administrative, managerial cultures and ethics.

Beyond mapping national, Europaen and global links, which demonstrate also some affinities and proximities between these elites, the symposium also will intent to characterize the more or less structured, more or less formal policy networks that shape the European reformist agenda in education through recommendations and prescriptions leading to lasting and relatively irreversible changes in policy-making.

Based on the comparison between several European countries, bringing together different authors specialized in education policies, the symposium will seek to answer the following questions  

- How do these elites exercise their power, their authority, by mobilising different resources and capacities to influence the decision-making process?

- How are these elites structured in networks or groups, epistemic communities or coalition of causes, in relationships that facilitate the sharing of knowledge, ideas, representations and beliefs on educational policies at national and global level?

- What is the role of cognition, values, beliefs, representations and the strategy in these alliance games and power relationships? What is the impact of public action instruments and their interpretation (laws, indicators, data, etc.)?

- How is it possible to characterize the type of proximity or affinity maintained by these elites within State, in other institutions or networks, or in International Organizations?

From a methodological perspective, policy makers will be chosen for their membership in a ministerial cabinet, as heads of a ministerial directorate or as experts/advisers for the Ministry of Education, or for their relationships with global networks and organisations, etc. Whenever possible, their socio-professional career and their various positions in education or elsewhere will be established. Analyses would developed from the study of different expert groups, national conferences, representative institutions, and parliamentary hearings in which this elite has intervened with important effects on implementing reforms.

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