England, Sweden, and Italy: the presence of features of the Global Education Reform Movement in the policy reforms enacted from the 2000s and the consequences on equity

The role of national education systems is changing, and many drivers of this phenomenon have been identified (Green, 1997). On the one side, there is a growing convergence in global education policy developments given by globalisation processes, on the other side, a political and ideological discourse has spread that promotes education as essential to the achievement of a model of economic productivity and competitiveness (Ball, 2013). The current research aims to shed light not only on the degree to which national education policy in the last two decades have been influenced by this movement, referred to as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) by Sahlberg (2016), but also on its possible consequences on equity. In order to do so, three western and European countries have been chosen: England, Sweden, and Italy. Through a mixed-method approach, in which the analysis of policy reforms is combined with PISA secondary data, each country’s specific political landscape and variation in socio-economic inequalities in the period between 2000 and 2020 is discussed. The final comparison between the countries allows seeing that even if all three countries present features of the GERM in the policy reforms enacted from the 2000s on, the consequences on equity are ambiguous. While the three countries present divergent trends both in PISA results and indicators of socio-economic inequalities, one common phenomenon worth deepening considering the increasing focus on standards is the steep increment in scores’ variation