Like many other nations globally, Armenia is currently undergoing a process of education system reform to enhance educational processes and outcomes as well as to increase the relevance of educational services through innovation and change.

In doing this the Armenian government is keen to take cognisance of what other countries have done and learn from positive experiences and successful outcomes elsewhere. However, the government is not adopting an approach of direct policy borrowing, i.e. “a conscious and deliberate attempt to reform an educational system through the introduction of a policy plan that originated in a different context” (Nir, 2019, p. 1).

Instead, it has adopted an approach we call ‘international co-development’ here, which is focused on capacity building through working with carefully selected international experts – in this case a team from UCL Institute of Education which also comprises experts from the universities of Cambridge  and Oxford –  to provide context sensitive technical advice that takes cognisance of important aspects of national identity in the context of a distinctly post-Soviet education and research tradition.

Such an approach can be seen to be important in so far as it provides the opportunity to seek to avoid potentially deleterious homogenising influences of globalised neoliberal policy imperatives inherent in the playbooks that tend to be used by transnational policy and funding agencies.

Whilst the importance of quality and efficiency in a context of finite financial and human capital resource is fully understandable and there is legitimacy of a concern with productivity and accountability – provided it recognises the importance of professional agency, provided that performance and is not narrowly measured by metrics, which are often at best poor proxies for what they seek to measure, and provided it does not in and of itself become the raison d'être of educational institutions (see e.g. Tolofari, 2005).

This symposium will explore these, and related issues, with specific reference to the establishment of a so-called ‘Education Cluster’ as part of the ‘Academic City’ initiative (https://www.acarmenia.am/en), which has the strategic goal of providing access to graduates to internationally recognised professional qualifications – with a central focus on teacher education and education research – to strengthen their contribution to individual professional satisfaction and societal economic productivity and the common good as well as to promote the quality, efficiency and internationalisation of the higher education system and, through its focus on professional learning, strengthen education in Armenia.

The approach adopted by the government of Armenia is in keeping with a growing policy focus internationally on teacher education reform as a perceived lever for wider education system reform. In Menter’s words (2019): “dominant values within any society may be manifested in the shaping and reshaping of teacher education”.

The symposium will draw of Menter et al.'s factors (2025) to describe and evaluate the particularities of teacher education provision, which he calls ‘vernacular globalisation’ – and which have elsewhere been termed ‘glocalisation’ (Tatto, 2025) – by drawing attention to how national and global influences interact in particular contexts. As such the symposium, whilst focusing on (teacher) education reform in one country and underpinned by an initial phase of data gathering in Armenia comprising documentary study and focus group interviews, will have a very strong international dimension in its theoretical positioning and data analysis inter alia through an in-depth engagement with  international literature on teacher education with a focus on Anglophone, post-Soviet and BRICS countries. The team of researchers brings together colleagues with extensive first-hand experience as teacher educators and researchers from England, Armenia, Austria, and the Lebanon and the discussant will add a perspective from Australia. 

Nir, A. (2019, May 23) ‘Professional political and contextual considerations of policy borrowing.’ In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Tolofari, S. (2005) ‘New Public Management and education.’ In Policy Futures in Education 3(1), pp. 75-89 Menter, I. (2019) ‘The interaction of global and national influences.’ In Tatto, M. T. and Menter, I. (eds.) Knowledge, policy and practice in teacher education: a cross-national study. Bloomsbury, pp. 268-279 Menter, I. and Valeeva, R. (2025) Educational reform in post-Soviet space. In Menter, I. (ed.) The reform of teacher education in the post-Soviet space: a comparative analysis of fifteen independent countries. Routledge, pp. 23 -46 Tatoo, M. T. (2025) ‘Afterword: the BRICS countries present and future: Glocalisation, culture and fragmented transformations.’ In Menter, I., Valeeva, R. and Prata-Linhares, M. (eds.) Globalisation and teacher education in the BRICS countries: the positioning of research and practice in comparative perspectives. Routledge, pp. 188-201