Educational discourses, practices and institutions are increasingly shaped today by forces and envoys of a globalised world. Research suggests that functional integration into a neo-liberal world economy compels many nation-states to eschew indigenous educational priorities in favour of a globally structured agenda for education. This thesis explores the emergence of new educational policy responses to this agenda, with a particular emphasis on the practice of policy ‘borrowing’. While numerous studies have explored educational issues including curricular convergence and mass schooling in the context of policy borrowing, few have explored health education from a similar theoretical perspective. This thesis applies the Globally Structured Agenda for Education (GSAE) approach to the study of Uganda’s efforts to borrow an abstinence-only educational intervention as the nation’s primary HIV/AIDS prevention strategy. Uganda is regarded by many AIDS researchers and public health professionals as one of the world’s most compelling success stories in the battle against HIV and AIDS. From the early 1990s until 2003, the Ugandan government actively promoted a comprehensive approach to HIV prevention, encouraging Ugandans of all ages to observe the ‘ABCs’ of sexual health (Abstain, Be Faithful, use Condoms). Unlike the vast majority of its sub-Saharan counterparts, Uganda then experienced a rapid and extraordinary decline in rates of HIV prevalence. In 2004, however, the government of Uganda abruptly abandoned the popular ABC approach in favour of ‘policy borrowing’ PEPFAR, the model of sexual health education advocated by the United States. This exclusively promoted the benefits of abstinence until marriage. The sudden shift in education policy and public discourse in Uganda is the focus of this research. Two forms of documentary analysis are used. The first explores the borrowing process in detail, examining the interests and motivations underlying cross-national policy attraction, decision-making, implementation and ultimately, indigenisation in Uganda. The second explores the social, educational and health consequences of an abstinence-until-marriage approach in the context of Uganda’s localised AIDS epidemic. A discourse-historical approach is utilised to examine the ways in which language and rhetoric establish a narrative correlation between premarital abstinence and HIV prevention in Uganda, and to analyse the extent to which public discourse legitimately reflects the social, economic and epidemiological conditions in-country. The findings suggest the discourse on HIV/AIDS prevention in Uganda focuses mainly on (i) the severity of the national epidemic, (ii) the scope, nature and success of the ABC approach, (iii) the virtues of pre-marital abstinence, and (iv) the prophylactic inefficiency of condom use. The various arguments in support of abstinence-until-marriage education are found to be largely motivated by the political ambitions and economic aspirations of key power elites in Uganda. This finding suggests the neo-liberal, capital-driven imperatives of a global education agenda have indeed come to supersede local health needs in Uganda. The study concludes that Uganda’s efforts to halt the spread HIV/AIDS through abstinence-until- marriage education fail to adequately address the prevention needs of the nation’s adolescents and adults. This is evidenced by the fact the largest percentage of HIV-positive persons in Uganda are married, divorced and/or widowed women. Rather than marriage being seen as – in the American model – a ‘safe haven’ from the virus, it is instead the very place where Ugandans are most at risk. This has profound implications not only for education and health policy-making in Uganda, but also raises serious questions about the efficacy and relevance of ‘borrowing’ policies whose origins, ideologies and political contexts emanate from elsewhere.

Within the disciplines of education and political science, the phenomenon of the voluntary transfer of policy ideas or practices from elsewhere, or “policy borrowing”, is often the topic of intense debate and study. The study of policy transfer also has strong links with the field of diffusion. Scholars in these fields study cases of policy transfer to understand (1) what motives and mechanisms cause policy diffusion and transfer, and (2) how policies are adapted, or reinvented, in the process of being transferred. The majority of such studies have focused on state-to-state cases of policy transfer involving predominantly government actors. Yet, a growing but still limited number of studies have considered the ways policy entrepreneurs have initiated transfer and utilized networks to bring about and implement policy ideas taken from elsewhere. Teach First provides a unique case-study through which to investigate the role of policy entrepreneurs and networks in shaping the process of policy transfer and reinvention. Teach First launched in 2002 as a non-profit organization and innovative teacher training programme based in London. The scheme, proposed and implemented by leaders within the private sector but heavily funded by the central government, was publicly linked to the U.S. programme Teach For America (TFA). Like TFA, Teach First’s purpose was to improve the schooling of disadvantaged pupils by recruiting elite university graduates to teach for two years in under-resourced schools. My research aimed to uncover how and why this policy was first conceptualized and launched as well as how it was reinvented in the process by those individuals and groups involved. Thus, through a case-study of Teach First’s emergence, this study investigates: What roles do policy entrepreneurs and networks play in policy transfer and diffusion processes? and How are policy entrepreneurs and networks involved in reinventing policy during the transfer process? To explore these research questions, I carried out semi-structured interviews with more than 50 individuals from various sectors who were involved in the creation of either Teach First or TFA. After transcribing all interviews, I used a form of narrative analysis to reconstruct the policy story of how Teach First emerged. In the process, I uncovered and accounted for the diversity of motives, institutional pressures, and contextual factors shaping Teach First’s development with a focus on the policy entrepreneurs and networks. Drawing on previous research in policy transfer, innovation-diffusion, and institutionalism to analyze the policy story, I concluded that both policy entrepreneurs and networks were responsible for bringing about transfer of TFA to England and shaping the nature and extent of its reinvention. This temporal process was furthered shaped by the highly politicized nature of initial teacher training in England, which limited the autonomy of policy entrepreneurs and forced further adaptation of Teach First in ways that its original sponsors had not intended. I also discovered that, while the TFA model played an influential role in this process, TFA was not generally used as a guiding model during implementation. Furthermore, I argue that in the process of mobilizing support for Teach First and implementing the idea in its first year, a new network emerged and represented a potentially influential new voice in education. This study aims to contribute to (1) the knowledge of the roles of policy entrepreneurs and networks in policy innovation, diffusion, and transfer and (2) the growing but still limited research on Teach First. This study also provides a foundation for further studies of Teach For All, an organization co-founded in 2007 by Teach First and TFA, which works to spread the programme globally. Through Teach For All, at least thirty-eight other countries now have programmes modeled on TFA and Teach First, though little research has examined how Teach First came about and spread in this way. Finally, the research also illustrates the value of a methodology not often used in transfer studies – narrative reconstruction – through which data is formed into a storied narrative to account for the complexities of the contexts and the socially–constructed views of the diversity of actors involved in policy-making and transfer.

Globalization has had a well-documented impact on higher education (e.g. Giddens, 1990; Ginkle, 2003; Altbach and Knight, 2007). The attendant massive expansion of higher education both globally and at national level has brought with it increasing concerns regarding quality. One context within which such concerns are evident is that of Transnational Higher Education (TNHE). TNHE, also known as cross-border education, mainly refers to education that is provided to students residing in a country other than the one where the awarding institution is located (UNESCO/Council of Europe, 2001). TNHE takes various forms and serves multiple objectives but the multidimensional phenomenon can be described as an example of Policy Borrowing (Phillips and Ochs, 2003). Oman is a country whose modern educational system was established very recently (1970) and is still expanding rapidly. As elsewhere in the ‘developing world’, the Omani government has met the increasing demand for higher education in large part by encouraging private higher education provision. However, this has been associated with an increasing desire to build capacity and assure quality of provision. In response, the Omani Ministry of Higher Education turned to TNHE for solutions: private sector providers in Oman have been required to enter academic partnerships with internationally recognized universities. In this research, I investigate the rationales, approaches and perceptions of this process from a receiver country perspective and address the implications. Most published research on TNHE focuses on providers’ perspectives and activities, and the impact of TNHE has only been studied in a small number of generally sizeable countries. However, the Gulf States, especially Oman, have not received the same attention, mainly due to the fact that TNHE is a recent phenomenon in this part of the world. Research to date in Oman thus remains very limited (Ameen, Chapman and Al Barawani, 2010; Al Barawani, Ameen and Chapman, 2011). The main objective of the research at the centre of this Thesis was therefore to explore the expectations, experiences and conclusions of a sample of staff of three private sector universities in Oman regarding TNHE, within which their university was/is active. The topic is investigated in the context of national policy and institutional TNHE strategy. Data were generated through documentary analysis and qualitative interviews. In-depth face-to-face interviews were conducted in three stages: Stage one: desk research and pilot study to set the direction for the research (8 participants) Stage two: interviews carried out over multiple visits to the three private universities selected as the cases (29 participants) Stage three: interviews with policy- and decision-makers (6 participants), to help in the process of reviewing and contextualizing the data from Stage 2. Data analysis revealed variation from the existing literature on this topic when it comes to defining the concept of affiliation, which is central to the approach taken in Oman to TNHE, as well as inconsistency across the three case universities, highlighting the complex dynamic that exists, with hugely varied expectations, numerous rationales and motivations and varying experiences being reported. Findings also reveal that, as reported by the majority of interviewees, the key rationales for engagement with TNHE are building capacity and assuring quality, alongside other rationales such as generating revenue and increasing student recruitment, which form the main driving force on the part of receiver institutions. This is consistent with the overall national imperative of increasing the number of HE places available for Oman’s young people, although the focus on volume is seen by the informants in the institutions as falling short in terms of capacity building and the enhancement of quality. Many interviewees voiced concerns that foreign partners’ approaches do not necessarily contribute to capacity building and may remain limited in scope, impacting on the quality of teaching and learning in ways that are not necessarily positive. Indeed, concerns were reported that the original overarching educational rationales of improving quality and capacity building may have been displaced by a more instrumental emphasis, for example on income generation. Some informants were firmly in favour of developing indigenized systems and reducing reliance on foreign partners. This point is taken up in a concluding discussion of the implications of the findings for Omani universities currently dependent on Transnational Higher Education, and the implications of this dependency for the Omani higher education system as a whole.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been running the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) for almost twenty years and is widely recognised as an influential actor in education policy internationally. Much research investigates the extent to which the OECD’s education policy recommendations are implemented. However, the parliamentary process that mediates the space between the PISA studies and consequent school reforms is less well understood. This thesis tracks the mention of ‘PISA’ in parliamentary debates in Sweden and Germany between 2000 and 2018 and applies content analysis to identify changes within and between the two countries over time. The data shows that in both parliaments, the PISA studies are received largely without questioning the underlying methodology or test design. Members of parliament mostly refer to PISA as an ‘objective piece of evidence’ that supposedly captures the current state of the education system. PISA is also mentioned to discredit political opponents by blaming them for poor results. Understanding how members of parliament discuss PISA is important to explaining PISA as a phenomenon and contributes to a growing body of research concerned with the influence of the OECD on national education policy borrowing and lending.

Since 2010, some private and public high schools in Eswatini1 have begun to offer the South African Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS). Demand for this increased from one school in 2010 to 13 schools in 2018. The study accordingly investigated the challenges inherent in the transferal and implementation of the CAPS Curriculum in secondary schools in Eswatini. Phillips and Ochs (2003) and Dolowitz and Marsh’s (2000) model of policy borrowing were used as a theoretical lens to steer the study. The study adopted a qualitative case study as the research design in terms of which a sample of four schools was conveniently and purposively selected. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews with 33 participants were conducted. The study identified that the curriculum transfer was initiated by parents whose demand for the South African curriculum emanated from a number of factors such as low pass threshold, cheaper access, rejection of Swazi learners by South African public schools, limited professional courses and few universities in Eswatini. The challenges to such transferal and implementation were identified as lack of contextual suitability; lack of training for educators; border immigration requirements; high tuition fees and absence of a memorandum of understanding between the two countries. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Education Management and Policy Studies / PhD / Unrestricted

Literature within the field of Comparative Education often cautions against the transfer of foreign policies from one context to another. Despite this warning, Ontario’s public education system is said to have been based on an eclectic mix of foreign examples: teacher training institutes replicating Prussian Seminaries, school financing and the role of the chief superintendent and board of education as in the states of Massachusetts and New York, and using the Irish curriculum. This study conceptualises the manner in which these foreign elements became part of the 1846 school law and the reaction of stakeholders in and outside of government. The period covered by this study, 1844 – 1876, corresponds to Egerton Ryerson’s time as Chief Superintendent of education in Ontario. Extensive archival research of incoming and outgoing correspondence from the department of education, district council meeting minutes, newspapers, and local superintendent, inspector and trustee reports revealed contrasting opinions. On the one hand, sources indicated favourable results: increased pupil attendance, number of facilities and money raised to fund schools. There is also evidence that many foreign educationalists not only requested resources from Ontario’s board but aspired to emulate features of the province’s reformed education system in their own nations. This study’s finding of a ‘reverse cross-national attraction’ is a new contribution to Canadian historical studies. However, many resented features of the school bill. Critics called the superintendent and board’s method of organisation ‘Prussian despotism’ in Canadian schools; others argued the injustice of property tax to fund free schools and the cost burden of importing Irish textbooks. An original conceptual framework has been produced to review the manner in which Ryerson defended the new bill and the internalisation of these foreign policies and practices. This framework may serve as an analytical device for those engaged in researching educational policy borrowing.

Girls’ education has been promoted by the international development community for over two decades; however, it has proven harder to promote gender equality through education than it has been to promote gender parity in education. Of significance is the global circulation and co-existence of two competing rationales for the importance of girls’ education: economic efficiency and social justice. The cost of ignoring how and why Southern governments and their development partners choose to promote girls’ education is high: an over-emphasis on economic efficiency can mean that the root causes of gendered inequalities in society remain unchallenged, and more social justice-oriented reforms become marginalized. This thesis uses a critical feminist lens to qualitatively investigate the role and significance of human capital, human rights, and human capabilities policy models in the context of the production and enactment of gender equality in education policy knowledge in The Gambia, a small, aid-dependent Muslim nation in West Africa. The purpose of the study was to assess the scope education policies provide for positive change in the lives of Gambian women and girls. Towards illuminating relations of power in and the politics of gender equality in education policy processes, the study compares and contrasts written texts with the perspectives of state and non-state policy actors. The study is based on data drawn from interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis. The findings suggest that different gender equality in education ideas and practices have been selectively mobilized and incorporated into education policy processes in The Gambia. At the level of policy talk, girls’ education is framed as important for both national economic growth, and “women’s empowerment”. However, the policy solutions designed and implemented, with the support of donors, have tended to work with rather than against the status quo. Power and politics was evident in divergent interpretations and struggles to fix the meaning of key concepts such as gender, gender equality, gender equity, and empowerment. Religious beliefs, anti-feminist politics, and the national feminist movement were identified as important forces shaping gender equality in education knowledge and action in the country.

Girls’ education has been promoted by the international development community for over two decades; however, it has proven harder to promote gender equality through education than it has been to promote gender parity in education. Of significance is the global circulation and co-existence of two competing rationales for the importance of girls’ education: economic efficiency and social justice. The cost of ignoring how and why Southern governments and their development partners choose to promote girls’ education is high: an over-emphasis on economic efficiency can mean that the root causes of gendered inequalities in society remain unchallenged, and more social justice-oriented reforms become marginalized. This thesis uses a critical feminist lens to qualitatively investigate the role and significance of human capital, human rights, and human capabilities policy models in the context of the production and enactment of gender equality in education policy knowledge in The Gambia, a small, aid-dependent Muslim nation in West Africa. The purpose of the study was to assess the scope education policies provide for positive change in the lives of Gambian women and girls. Towards illuminating relations of power in and the politics of gender equality in education policy processes, the study compares and contrasts written texts with the perspectives of state and non-state policy actors. The study is based on data drawn from interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis. The findings suggest that different gender equality in education ideas and practices have been selectively mobilized and incorporated into education policy processes in The Gambia. At the level of policy talk, girls’ education is framed as important for both national economic growth, and “women’s empowerment”. However, the policy solutions designed and implemented, with the support of donors, have tended to work with rather than against the status quo. Power and politics was evident in divergent interpretations and struggles to fix the meaning of key concepts such as gender, gender equality, gender equity, and empowerment. Religious beliefs, anti-feminist politics, and the national feminist movement were identified as important forces shaping gender equality in education knowledge and action in the country.