EVENT: Accomplished Education Researcher Seminar Series

In Australia over the last five years, the Federal Government has thrust a policy couplet of ‘quality’ and ‘equity’ to the forefront of education agendas in both schooling and higher education sectors. This couplet reflects and refracts dominant education discourses around the globe. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has played a significant role in forging these educational priorities for a global knowledge era, and at the same time contributed to heightened competition between countries as they strive for ‘world class’ education systems and institutions. The Australian Federal Government has taken the approach of increasing central control of education in order to enhance both quality and equity, and hence Australia’s competitive positioning in the global arena. But educational quality and equity are amorphous ‘chameleon’ concepts; what are they, how do we measure them and are they comfortable bedfellows? Together, they might be described in terms of a Gordian knot; that is, they have become inextricably interlinked and they potentially create intractable problems. This presentation begins to untie the Gordian knot of quality and equity in education and asks if increasing central government control is the best solution to the policy problem. In so doing, it draws on concepts of ‘policy pandemics’, international ‘policy learning’ and ‘glocalisation’ to emphasise the importance of critical analysis of education trends from global to local levels in an emerging global knowledge society.