In the past thirty years, education systems have experienced a burgeoning of policy initiatives aimed at improving education quality and students’ performance worldwide. This shift is primarily attributable to multiple forces reshaping the educational landscape, including the imperative of aligning educational systems with the demands of economic globalization; the rapid digitalization processes sweeping through societies; the influence of international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) in educational debates; the urge to standardize and measure every educational dimension under the reigning datafication imperative (Grek et al., 2021). In response to these multiple forces, certain policies have been articulated as somewhat coherent narratives capable of addressing these demands. Scholars have termed these policies either the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2016) or school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) reforms (Verger et al., 2019). On the one hand, autonomy embodies managerial and decentralization policies that transfer decision-making to school-level agents, argued as ‘best practices’ to drive school improvement (Woessmann et al., 2009). On the other hand, assessment and accountability instruments lie at the heart of these reform packages, including large-scale standardized assessments, school inspections, peer evaluations, or self-evaluations, as pivotal policies to monitor schools and enhance quality.

Grouped under a quality assurance paradigm for education, autonomy, assessments, and accountability policies have widely circulated among different countries. In part, their global spread is explained to the multiple purposes, rationales, and uses that these policy instruments can uptake in different settings. However, beyond an apparent global convergence towards the widespread adoption of autonomy, assessments, and accountability policies, there are significant variations among countries depending on the governance structure –i.e., Federal vs. unitary countries–; the political ideology of governing party, administrative traditions of state bureaucracies, or path-dependency dynamics emerging from pre-existing policies (Gerrard and Savage, 2022). Put differently, while several countries might have adopted large-scale assessments, the associated stakes or how governments or schools use them can vary widely.

This panel explores reforms of autonomy, assessments, and accountability from a multi-scalar perspective, addressing crucial questions for understanding their dissemination and effects among different school systems from a policy instrument approach (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007; Béland et al. 2018; Capano and Howlett 2020). Combining the theoretical contributions of political sociology in education, and theories of enactment, the panelists collectively unpack the dynamic vernacularisation of these reform packages, illustrating (I) how policy instruments are adopted and operate within unique cultural, political, and institutional landscapes, (II) the relevance of the filtering and enactment processes in the reconfiguration and calibration of the newly adopted policy instruments.

Some papers will explore the interactions between newly adopted and existing policy instruments, and the dynamic 'policy mixes' created, with unforeseen combined effects. Others will examine the centrality of specific instruments -i.e., large-scale learning assessments- and their uses and effects at different scales, ranging from policy design to school-level practices. All contributions will address the interplay between the reform goal and the policy instruments to achieve it, and the role played by key stakeholders and constituencies. In doing so, this panel extends beyond conventional analyses by shedding light on the complex dynamics that unfold in the selection and application of policy instruments and their interaction with pre-existing arrangements in diverse settings. Through theoretical contributions from political sociology and enactment theories, this panel enriches the field of policy studies in education by exploring the configuration of quality assurance policy instruments and their effects in increasingly complex and multi-layered policy landscapes. 

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