Educational Review

ISSN: 0013-1911 (Print) 1465-3397 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cedr20

Global education reform: understanding the

movement

Kay Fuller & Howard Stevenson

To cite this article: Kay Fuller & Howard Stevenson (2019) Global education
reform: understanding the movement, Educational Review, 71:1, 1-4, DOI:
10.1080/00131911.2019.1532718

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2019.1532718

Published online: 03 Dec 2018.

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EDUCATIONAL REVIEW
2019, VOL. 71, NO. 1, 1–4
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2019.1532718

EDITORIAL

Global education reform: understanding the movement

It is several years since Pasi Sahlberg used the term Global Education Reform Movement,
or GERM, to describe the emergence of a new global orthodoxy in education policy. The
acronym-as-analogy worked perfectly to describe a phenomenon that Sahlberg identi-
fied as both spreading and destructive, behaving “like an epidemic that spreads and
infects education systems through a virus” (Sahlberg, 2012, no page). The power of such
acronyms lies in the extent to which they take hold in the social imaginary and act as a
signifier for a complex amalgam of policies and practices that students and educators
experience as an education system that feels “cracked” (Ball & Olmedo, 2013, 85).
Sahlberg has identified the principal features of the GERM as increased standardisa-
tion, a narrowing of the curriculum to focus on core subjects/knowledge, the growth of
high stakes accountability and the use of corporate management practices as the key
features of the new orthodoxy.
The early indications of the policies that have given rise to this orthodoxy can be traced
back at least three decades and became visible in the education reforms introduced in the
United States, Chile and the UK. The development of the GERM in these three countries was
no coincidence because the political leaders of the countries that have acted as a laboratory
for the GERM were all intimately connected in the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey, 2007). It was
during this time that the ideological work undertaken by New Right think tanks on both sides
of the Atlantic was able to secure expression in the political programmes of Premiers Pinochet,
Reagan and Thatcher. This was not, however, a battle of political ideas that was disconnected
from wider developments. Rather, it was an ideological agenda that emerged from the crisis of
capital in the late 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent abandonment of Keynesian economic
orthodoxy. As faith in Keynesian demand management diminished, so too did confidence in
welfarism as affordable and sustainable. At this time of crisis and uncertainty, it was the
political right that was on hand to offer the solutions. As Milton Friedman asserted:
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic
function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until
the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. (Friedman, 2002, p. xiv)

It was at this time that the ideas underpinning the GERM assumed practical expression
in Pinochet’s school privatisation programmes, A Nation at Risk in the USA and the 1988
Education Reform Act in England. Since that time, the policies that emerged in Chile, the
USA and England in the 1980s have become increasingly common around the world,
hence Sahlberg’s adoption of the term GERM, with all its connotations of something
malignant – spreading apparently uncontrollably. However, this is a GERM that has
mutated in different forms – assuming different features and developing at a varied

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2018 Educational Review
2 EDITORIAL

pace. Some parts of the world have appeared more resistant to the GERM than others,
although such patterns have not always followed the form book – see, for example,
Sweden’s development of for-profit Free Schools. Although the notion of the GERM
works well as a shorthand for a set of linked policies and practices, the danger is that the
label hides the nuance and complexity that is the reality of neoliberal restructuring of
public education systems which looks different in different jurisdictions and which is
propelled forward by myriad drivers, many of which are contextually specific.
In this special issue of Educational Review, the contributing authors seek to deepen
our understanding of the GERM as it has developed and as it is experienced by students
and educators. The various articles explore different features of the GERM, but also
analyse its existence in different jurisdictions and in different phases of education. The
scope of the articles allows for a more nuanced understanding of the GERM in its
contemporary form, but also raises methodological questions of analysis and
measurement.
The opening article by Toni Verger, Lluís Parcerisa and Clara Fontdevila focuses on testing
and the central role that National Large Scale Assessments (NLSAs) play in the global spread
of the GERM. The authors’ analysis demonstrates how standardised testing has often acted
as the vanguard of global education reform, in which comparison, ranking and competition
have provided the foundation on which other elements of reform have been built. The huge
testing machine has not only provided substantial opportunities for private actors to further
penetrate the education “market”, but the competitive pressures that testing fuels have
often acted as a spur to wider privatisation and marketisation of education systems.
In the face of such powerful global pressures it is easy to become pessimistic about
the possibilities for resistance and the opportunities to create counter movements. Two
of the articles address precisely these issues and seek to understand where there are
opportunities for agency and resistance in relation to the neoliberal restructuring that is
so widespread. Kay Fuller’s article explores issues of resistance in school leadership and
focuses on a section of the educational labour force whose apparent co-option and
mobilisation by those driving reforms has often been seen as central to bringing about
change on such a substantial scale. Fuller rejects a simple dichotomy between compli-
ance and resistance and argues that our understanding of how school leaders “resist”
needs to be more nuanced and more sympathetic. In her study of school principals in
England, she argues that resistance is common, but it is not always clearly visible.
Drawing on post-colonial theories, she presents an alternative approach to understand-
ing what school principal resistance looks like and the forms it can assume.
The article by Guopeng Fu and Anthony Clarke is also concerned with questions of
agency and resistance, with a focus on classroom teachers in China. The extent to which
the policies associated with the GERM have spread in China highlights that this is a
phenomenon that can develop in very different contexts. However, despite the degree
of system centralisation, and the lack of autonomous worker organisation, Fu and Clarke
still find evidence that classroom teachers in China are able to create spaces in which
they are able to challenge the logic of a harsh external accountability system and assert
the primacy of students’ interests.
There is no doubt that privatisation, in its myriad forms, is a defining feature of the
GERM and several of the articles highlight this. The contribution by Alessandro Carrasco
and Helen Gunter focuses on Chile, which has already been identified as one of the
 EDUCATIONAL REVIEW 3

countries where the GERM can be considered to have been developed. Recent political
reforms offer some reason for optimism, but the country’s education system remains
one badly disfigured by aggressive policies of privatisation and marketisation. The article
by Carrasco and Gunter focuses on the specifics of how the market for school education
functions, and how the interaction of supply and demand pressures are privatising the
decisions of both parents and the private providers of “public education” in Chile. The
article demonstrates how decisions that were previously collective and democratic have
been largely removed from the public sphere, with a concomitant impact on inequalities
in the system.
Emily Winchip, Howard Stevenson and Alison Milner are similarly concerned with
system privatisation, but argue that researchers need to draw on a broader range of
research methodologies in order to address key questions in the field. Critical scholars
have tended to eschew quantitative methodologies when researching phenomena like
privatisation, arguing that such approaches are unable to reflect the complexity of the
issues under consideration. In this article, the authors argue there are quantitative
methodologies that can provide critical scholars with useful tools of analysis and
which open up the possibility of providing measures for complex phenomena such as
privatisation.
Viv Ellis and Sarah Steadman focus on a critically important, but often neglected
aspect of the GERM, which is teacher education. Many of those who have driven
neoliberal reforms in education have recognised the role of independent teacher
educators in promoting ideas considered as antithetical by GERM reformers. As a
consequence, in many jurisdictions, teacher education has found itself in the eye of
the storm as powerful policy actors have sought to re-engineer the teaching profession
as one that is more favourably disposed to the new educational landscape and which is
less willing, and less confident, to push back. The authors analyse these developments in
England and show how new privatised institutions are being developed to spearhead
change and challenge traditional notions of university-based teacher education.
The final article by Matt O’Leary and Philip Wood argues that key features of the
GERM have long been evident in higher education, but largely in relation to the
datafication of research activity. They argue that such approaches are now becoming
increasingly evident in the management of teaching and demonstrate how the UK’s
“Teaching Excellence Framework” further embeds GERM practices in the higher educa-
tion sector. They highlight how these developments threaten the quality of provision in
universities and also pose a threat to academic freedom and the notion of the university
as a site of independent and critical thought. They conclude by offering an alternative
framework which provides a much more optimistic analysis of how teaching and
learning might be developed in higher education institutions.
All of these articles deepen our understanding of how neoliberal restructuring of
public education systems continues to have a huge impact on the institutions where we
study and work. Differences are significant – whether between different countries, or
different education phases within countries. Appreciating difference and nuance is
essential and this collection of articles seeks to shed light on these differences, but it
is also important to recognise the unifying aspects of forces that are shaping public
education systems across the world. However, this collection of articles is not only
intended to deepen our understanding of the world, but also to help change it. Many
4 EDITORIAL

of the articles point to the possibilities of hope and resistance as students and educators
seek to speak back to a system that is visibly “cracked”. From the student movement in
Chile, to the “Red States” strike waves of teachers in the USA, the Global Education
Reform Movement discussed in these articles is being challenged in many of the sites
where it has been most deeply embedded. We hope that this collection of articles can
make a modest contribution to building that movement of hope and possibility.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

References
Ball, S. J., & Olmedo, A. (2013). Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal
governmentalities. Critical Studies in Education, 54(1), 85–96.
Friedman, M. (2002). Capitalism and freedom (40th anniversary ed.). Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sahlberg, P. (2012). How GERM is infecting schools around the world? Retrieved from https://
pasisahlberg.com/text-test/

Kay Fuller
University of Nottingham, UK
Kay.Fuller@Nottingham.ac.uk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5531-7553
Howard Stevenson
University of Nottingham, UK
Howard.Stevenson@nottingham.ac.uk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5172-1807