So Equal yet so Different: Comparison of Accountability Policies in the Global Education Reform Movement—The Case of England and Spain

Abstract

This chapter analyses the trajectory of accountability policies in education as a subset of neoliberalization processes. Neoliberalism is understood to be a mobile technology resignified through processes that travel and mutate in a contingent manner. Analysing its sociohistorical and cultural contexts is important as this allows the contingencies to be identified in the processes of accountability policies within the global education reform movement (GERM). GERM is characterized by the introduction of privatization, accountability, and evaluation; seeing how these have been materialized in different scenarios will be revealing. In the case of the United Kingdom, accountability policies were introduced in the early 1980s through Thatcher’s neoconservative policies and have been expanded by successive governments to the present day. In the case of Spain, they were integrated later in the 1990s and have formed part of the more discursive elements and convergence strategies with the European Union for modernizing the education. The Spanish conservative party has followed the liberal line of accountability to develop an educational quasi-market. Spain does not identify with the discourse on continuously implementing accountability policies through the parties in government.KeywordsEducation policyComparative educationAccountabilitySpainUnited Kingdom