Comparative Education

7PE519
Session 3
 Session Objectives
• To consider the role of educational policy in comparative research

• To explore what is meant by policy borrowing

• To understand the benefits and limitations of policy borrowing

 Activity 1: Public Educational policy

1. What is a policy?
3.What do you need
to consider
when analysing policy?

2. Is policy a product or a process?

 Local

Regional

National
Policy Context
International
Bereday (1964)
• Phase 1: the period of ‘borrowing’

• Phase 2: the period of ‘prediction’

• Phase 3: the period of ‘analysis’

 Activity 2: Policy borrowing/transfer
Why borrow?

What are the benefits of borrowing?

What are the challenges with borrowing?

Activity 3: What are the stages of policy
borrowing that countries go through?
The article in the pre-reading by Phillips & Ochs (2003) put forward an
answer to the question above. If you have read the article, can you
remember the stages? The next slide shows a diagram of these.
If you haven’t read the article, can you think about what stages a
country would go through logically to borrow policy from elsewhere?
Then compare your answer to thiers.

Be critical- what are the limitations of the stages proposed by them?

Source: Phillips & Ochs, 2003, p. 452
 Activity 4: Case study
Educational Borrowing in China 1949-1966
 References
• Bereday, G. (1964) Comparative Method in Education, New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston
• Phillips, D. & Ochs, K. (2003) Processes of Policy Borrowing in Education:
some explanatory and analytical devices in , Comparative Education, 39:4,
451-461
• Phillips, D. & Schweisfurth, M. (2014) Comparative and International
Education: An Introduction to Theory, Method, and Practice (2nd ed),
London: Bloomsbury
• Rui, Y. (2007) Comparing Policies, in Bray, Adamson & Mason (Eds) (2007)
Comparative Education Research: Approaches and Methods, Hong Kong:
Springer