LIST OF WORKSHOPS

Introduction

Education systems are understood as central in securing individual, collective, national and global progress. Indeed, education systems have long been recognised as serving multiple purposes, ranging from preparing a skilled workforce to social inclusion, social cohesion and nation-building efforts. In addition, in a contemporary world riven by mounting and intersecting crises (from climate degradation to conflict and authoritarian populism), education systems both in the Global North and the Global South are increasingly posited as critical in addressing such wicked problems. However, their capacity to do so remains an open question – more so as it has been long recognised that such benefits and purposes are unequally distributed between and within national states, and that inequities are amplified for those in contexts more directly impacted by such crises.

The extent to which education systems can meaningfully respond to this polycrisis scenario is ultimately a public policy question. While not inherently incompatible, the multiplicity of expectations placed on education systems tends to create tensions and trade-offs, often exposing the limits of existing governance arrangements at different scales, and the competing rationalities underpinning them. This workshop is premised on the notion that such tensions call for analytical attention as to the policy ideas, instruments and capacities through which education stakeholders mediate or adjudicate among different goals and address interrelated and interconnected challenges. Similarly, reflection is needed on the impacts of such arrangements, from a social justice and equity perspective, paying attention to those who are most impacted and affected by these polycrisis.

This workshop aims to advance insights on how education systems reconcile a growing diversity of expectations in a changing world. To this end, the workshop is organised into two separate sections, each examining such tensions from a different angle. The first section will address the policy challenges derived from the combination of crises affecting the education field; while the second section will focus on the governance and regulation of education quasi-markets.

Section 1:  Rethinking education policy in turbulent times: Understanding challenges, navigating solutions

The contemporary crisis context in which education science finds itself in make us imperative for academics, practitioners and policy makers to think and act differently.  And requires conversations across disciplinary boundaries and sectoral priorities (Sayed 2025; Yan 2025).  And it is this acknowledge urgency and cross-disciplinary fertilisation that this workshop will consider to address some of questions which requires a different policy imagination: what do these new policy thinking and actions look like? In particular, how do these policy responses address equity and social justice and the needs of citizens and communities in the Global South who are most disproportionately impacted by the effects of these contemporary global challenges while being least responsible for them? To shed light on these questions, we also need to understand better how the abovementioned aspects of this polycrisis are concretely – and disproportionately – challenging the education commitments, processes and outcomes in different parts of the world.

This workshop is convened with the specific aim of addressing the overarching and interrelated research questions specified above. In doing so, the workshop hopes to create a rare yet much-needed space for deepening the interdisciplinary dialogue between educational studies on the one hand and public policy and administration scholarship on the other. To realise these potentials, we invite scholars from diverse geographical backgrounds and methodological orientations to join this workshop. Empirical, theoretical and/or methodological submissions are all welcome and can focus on any of the local, regional, national and international levels. We look forward to receiving submissions that can advance our understanding of the drivers, manifestations and consequences of education system crises, as well as how they can be effectively tackled in these settings through more effective policy design and implementation. Questions of particular interest include but are not limited to the following:

-          What are the implications of these contemporary global challenges for public policy and education policy studies? How can the dialogue between specific streams of educational studies and policy studies literature help us better understand these challenge(s) and the solutions?

-          How might the field of public policy and education policy studies address these challenges in conflict affected contexts centring the needs of the most marginalised and impoverished and who disproportionately bear the effects of these crises?

-          What is the role of education policies in mitigating as well as exacerbating one or more of the abovementioned crises? For the latter case, does the problem lie in their implementation or design (or both)?

-          How have these crises been successfully overcome in education systems? What are the various aspects of policy capacity that underpinned their exceptional performance? How has such capacity been developed and strengthened over time?

-          To the extent that solving these crises should be a collective endeavour, what should be the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders? How do we ensure equitable and just partnerships among stakeholders for addressing these contemporary global challenges?

-          In light of the funding cuts and constraints faced at both national and international levels, how can education financing system be redesigned and reconfigured to positive and sustained impact on student learning?

In addressing these and other questions, we are particularly looking for contributions that centre equity and social justice, foregrounding the needs of the most marginalised and disadvantaged and who disproportionately bear the brunt of the effects of these global challenges. We welcome contributions from scholars whose work centre the Global South, especially conflict-affected contexts which are under-explored in both scholarships of public policy and educational studies. The workshop is planned to take a hybrid format to facilitate inclusiveness, especially in cases where scholars from the Global South may not be able to come to Ottawa in person due to resource constraints, among others.

References

Sayed, Y. (2025). “A field in crisis: disrupting education policy for transformation during challenging times.” Keynote address at the UKFIET 2025 Conference (Unpublished).

Yan, Y. (2025). Advancing decolonization of public administration—Experiences and lessons from East Asia. Public Money & Management, 1-3.

Section 2: The governance of education quasi-markets: Policy tensions and regulatory challenges

In an increasing number of countries, education is delivered through quasi-market arrangements in which public and private subsidised provision coexist, and user choice plays a central role. Yet, despite the entrenched nature of education quasi-markets, recent years have been marked by the diversification of the policy configurations taken by such arrangements, as well as of the expectations placed on them. While private subsidised providers have historically been expected to maintain a degree of differentiation, they are increasingly required to align with system-level goals, often relative to equity. Similarly, school-choice systems are now expected to balance parental freedom with equity objectives (Zancajo et al., 2023).

This section of the workshop is concerned with the tensions arising from competing demands within contemporary quasi-markets, particularly regarding the interplay between public and private forms of provision and spheres of interest. This diversity of expectations is approached as a public policy challenge requiring an understanding of the varied origins of education quasi-market arrangements and the policy instruments underpinning them, and the policy design choices shaping their governance and reform.

These issues require closer examination, given the growing complexity of education quasi-markets and the various research challenges this has revealed. First, existing arrangements are frequently analysed by reference to loosely defined categories that obviate important variations in goals and design, limiting causal explanations. Second, research on the influence of political philosophy paradigms on the adoption and redesign of market policies (e.g., Wilson, 2017) remains largely fragmentary. Third, attention has tended to concentrate on specific countries (e.g., the US, UK, or Chile) and on post-1980s reforms, neglecting other contexts and prior developments. Finally, the effects of recent equity-oriented regulatory reforms remain under-examined, with evidence on the effectiveness of various policy redesigns still emerging (D’Agostino et al., 2017).

We invite submissions analysing topics related to the following research questions:

1) What are the conceptualisation and operationalisation challenges posed by the public and private provision categories in education? Particular attention will be given to how different definitions and measurements help capture and interpret the tensions posed by contemporary education quasi-markets.

2) How do mixed provision and school-choice arrangements vary across contexts and over time, and what specific governance challenges stem from such different policy configurations? The workshop will examine the policy dilemmas arising from different institutional settlements among providers, families, and governments.

3) What regulatory approaches and policy instruments are used in different contexts to address emerging policy challenges? The workshop will pay particular attention to examining how policy problematisation dynamics shape such strategies and the outcomes and impacts of different policy choices.

4) What values and political rationales underpin current policy debates around private provision and choice in education? The workshop will address how competing notions of social justice are negotiated in ongoing reform processes, and how such normative considerations influence their legitimacy and impact.

We invite both theoretical and empirical contributions. Empirical papers employing quantitative, qualitative or mixed-method approaches are welcome, including case studies and comparative analyses.

References

D’Agostino, T. J., Vernimmen, J., & Feldman, A. (2024). Reforming school choice systems to reduce segregation in schools: A comparative political economy study of education reform in Belgium, Chile, and the Netherlands. Peabody Journal of Education, 99(5), 596-620.

Wilson, T. S. (2017). Philosophical understandings of American school choice. In R.A. Fox, & N.K. Buchanan  (Eds), The Wiley Handbook of School Choice (pp. 81-95). Wiley Blackwell.

Zancajo, A., Fontdevila, C., & Verger, A. (2023). Markets in Education and School Segregation: Paths of Problematization and Reform. In V. Dupriez et al. (Eds.), Educational Markets and Segregation (pp. 81-101). Springer.

Education systems are understood as central in securing individual, collective, national and global progress. Indeed, education systems have long been recognised as serving multiple purposes, ranging from preparing a skilled workforce to social inclusion, social cohesion and nation-building efforts. In addition, in a contemporary world riven by mounting and intersecting crises, education systems both in the Global North and the Global South are increasingly posited as critical in addressing such wicked problems. However, their capacity to do so remains an open question – more so as it has been long recognised that such benefits and purposes are unequally distributed.

The extent to which education systems can meaningfully respond to this polycrisis scenario is ultimately a public policy question. While not inherently incompatible, the multiplicity of expectations placed on education systems often create tensions, exposing the limits of existing governance arrangements. This workshop is premised on the notion that such tensions call for analytical attention as to the policy ideas and instruments through which education stakeholders mediate among different goals and address interrelated challenges – as well as on the impacts of such arrangements from a social justice and equity perspective. To this end, the workshop is organised into two separate sections, each examining such tensions from a different angle.

The first section addresses the policy challenges derived from the combination of crises affecting the education field. It seeks at advancing our understanding of the drivers, manifestations and consequences of education system crises, as well as how they can be effectively tackled in these settings through more effective policy design and implementation. Key questions include:

-          What are the implications of these contemporary global challenges for public policy and education policy studies?

-          How might the field of public policy and education policy studies address these challenges in conflict affected contexts centring the needs of the most marginalised and impoverished and who disproportionately bear the effects of these crises?

-          What is the role of education policies in mitigating as well as exacerbating one or more of the abovementioned crises?

-          How have these crises been successfully overcome in education systems?

-          To the extent that solving these crises should be a collective endeavour, what should be the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders?

-          In light of the funding cuts and constraints faced at both national and international levels, how can education financing system be redesigned and reconfigured to positive and sustained impact on student learning?

The second section will focus on the governance and regulation of education quasi-markets. Specifically, the section is concerned with the tensions arising from competing demands within contemporary quasi-markets, particularly regarding the interplay between public and private forms of provision and spheres of interest. Key questions include:

-          What are the conceptualisation and operationalisation challenges posed by the public and private provision categories in education?

-          How do mixed provision and school-choice arrangements vary across contexts and over time, and what specific governance challenges stem from such different policy configurations?

-          What regulatory approaches and policy instruments are used in different contexts to address emerging policy challenges?

-          What values and political rationales underpin current policy debates around private provision and choice in education?

Education systems are understood as central in securing individual, collective, national and global progress. Indeed, education systems have long been recognised as serving multiple purposes, ranging from preparing a skilled workforce to social inclusion, social cohesion and nation-building efforts. In addition, in a contemporary world riven by mounting and intersecting crises (from climate degradation to conflict and authoritarian populism), education systems both in the Global North and the Global South are increasingly posited as critical in addressing such wicked problems. However, their capacity to do so remains an open question – more so as it has been long recognised that such benefits and purposes are unequally distributed between and within national states, and that inequities are amplified for those in contexts more directly impacted by such crises.

The extent to which education systems can meaningfully respond to this polycrisis scenario is ultimately a public policy question. While not inherently incompatible, the multiplicity of expectations placed on education systems tends to create tensions and trade-offs, often exposing the limits of existing governance arrangements at different scales, and the competing rationalities underpinning them. This workshop is premised on the notion that such tensions call for analytical attention as to the policy ideas, instruments and capacities through which education stakeholders mediate or adjudicate among different goals and address interrelated and interconnected challenges. Similarly, reflection is needed on the impacts of such arrangements, from a social justice and equity perspective, paying attention to those who are most impacted and affected by these polycrisis.

This workshop aims to advance insights on how education systems reconcile a growing diversity of expectations in a changing world. To this end, the workshop is organised into two separate sections, each examining such tensions from a different angle. The first section will address the policy challenges derived from the combination of crises affecting the education field; while the second section will focus on the governance and regulation of education quasi-markets.

Yusuf Sayed is Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Specialising in global education policy and development focusing on equity, inclusion, and social justice, Yusuf has over 40 years’ experience in international education as a scholar, policy practitioner and education rights activist across diverse academic, institutional and development contexts His scholarship is informed by an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, drawing on diverse epistemologies and critical theoretical framings spanning education, international development, sociology, history and critical policy studies. Yusuf engages with the nexus between the development and implementation of policy at different levels of the education system. His scholarship focuses on the implications for national and global education policy goals of efforts to achieve equity, inclusion and empowerment in countries of the Global South in particular and the reasons why these may not achieve their emancipatory goals.

Yifei Yan is Lecturer in Public Administration and Public Policy at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton. She is Co-Editor of Teaching Public Administration and also an expert associate with the National Foundation for Educational Research in the UK and the Expert Network on Economics and Sociology of Education and Training under the European Commission. Her research interests lie at the intersections of comparative public policy and administration and educational studies, with non-Western contexts including China, India and Brazil as the main empirical focus. She is the author of Getting schools to work better: Educational accountability and teacher support in India and China which is published with Routledge under the series Critical Studies in Asian Education, and has recently served as the co-convener of the System Thinking subtheme of the Education and Development Forum (UKFIET) 2025 Conference.

Clara Fontdevila is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research focuses on the interaction between education policy and politics, exploring how education systems change and with what consequences. To explore these themes, her work has focused on two main topics: the restructuring of education markets and the evolution of learning assessments.

Adrián Zancajo is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Department of Sociology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research primarily examines the privatisation and marketisation of education. Currently, his main research focuses on desegregation policies within market-oriented education systems, as well as other reforms related to education market policy instruments.