Governing Education in Europe: A ‘New’ Policy Space of European Schooling

Abstract

European Schools are a particular type of school that are not integrated into any national education system but are nonetheless official educational establishments that constitute a European Schools System (ESS) governed jointly by the Member States of the European Union. This positioning creates particularly interesting issues of governance that mirror aspects of governing education in Europe, albeit on a smaller scale. This article makes the argument that the ESS, like the European Commission (EC), operates within and across formal national boundaries in a ‘new’ Policy Space of European Schooling. It suggests that analysis of this ‘space’ as a microcosm of European governance of education is enabled through integrating interdisciplinary concepts such as re-spatialisation with attention to new approaches to governance that stress fluid and mobile relations in analysing Europeanisation. The article argues that the ESS is an interesting policy case in itself, but also suggests that it has value as a microcosm of the extremely complex and novel forms of policy relations in education in Europe, in which elements of the local, the national and the European are merging and emerging in different ways.