Reforms in initial teacher education in Australia have been driven by several interconnected global trends in education: standardisation, measurement, and processes of accountability. An increasing emphasis on standardisation in the global education reform movement (GERM) has led to the development and enactment of teacher professional standards, benchmark standards for literacy and numeracy, and national curriculum standards (Singh et al., 2021). Standardisation has been coupled with another trend, that of a growing determination to measure outcomes and to create publication league tables based on such measurements. We propose that these global policy trends, initiated by policy agencies such as the OECD, are a continuation of the colonial project of education. In this paper we outline key debates and intellectual trajectories that have shaped the field of decoloniality studies in education for the purposes of synthesising these concepts with the discipline of critical global policy studies. Decoloniality has been linked to the triad modernity /coloniality/decoloniality, which Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe as the colonial matrix of power (CMP). The CMP commenced with the project of European expansion and imperialism, often described as modernity from the 1500s onwards, and was integrally connected to colonialisation of other lands and peoples. Despite the different trajectories of scholarship within decolonial studies, emanating from different disciplinary fields and geographic spaces, we identify the following key concerns within this corpus: (1) L/land, Lore, and Country and Relationality of Epistemology-Ontology-Axiology (see Tuck & Yang, 2012; Moreton-Robinson, 2020); (2) Situated Strategic Universalisms as Movements of Solidarity (Haraway, 1988; Kapoor & Zalloua, 2022); and (3) Anti-Racism including projects around Racisms/Sexisms against the resurgence of white supremacy (Garba & Sorentino, 2020; Le Grange, 2023). We suggest that a threshold of disciplinary knowledge around the above three concerns is central to any decolonising project in teacher education (Moodie, 2019). Such a project calls for the deconstruction and reconstruction of disciplinary knowledges, and the inclusion of marginalised voices and knowledges from the global South. We ask - what contributions can decoloniality studies make to the critical policy studies literature on quality teaching, standardisation and measurement, all core to the OECD’s policies and part of the global education reform movement? We review literature in decoloniality studies to outline key debates and emergent concepts relating to teacher education. In addition, we illustrate how we have made use of decoloniality concepts in our own teacher education program work in Australia.

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