The modes of institutional regulation of an educational system can be considered as the set of all mechanisms of orientation, coordination, control and balancing of the system set up by educational authorities. Thus, it is one of the activities of "governance" of the system alongside those related to the financing of education or the "production" of education service (Dale 1997). Our purpose is to enquire about the evolutions of the modes of the institutional regulation of the education systems in five European countries (francophone Belgium, England, France, Hungary, Portugal). More precisely, we ask whether the education policies of the past 20 years have contributed to constructing a certain convergence of the institutional regulation of the systems and, simultaneously, what important divergences remain. This analysis is derived from the European research Reguleduc (Maroy 2004, 2006). Our analysis of the evolution of modes of institutional regulation is founded on studies of the principal morphological and institutional characteristics of the school systems of the five countries and analysis of the education policies they have applied over the last 20 years, in particular those affecting the modes of regulation of secondary schools. Each team synthesised the literature dealing with its national situation. Subsequently, a transverse synthesis (Bajomi and Barroso 2002) was done. Our thesis is that these policies partially converge around "postbureaucratic" governance models and regulation. Depending on the country, we can link education policies to two post-bureaucratic models promoted by transnational agencies: that of the "evaluative state" and the "quasi-market" which are largely combinable and combined. They share their opposition to the "bureaucratic- professional" model which has prevailed to varying degrees and in different versions in these countries (Barroso 2000). Still, these partial convergences in the baseline models do not necessarily imply completely identical policies, on the one hand because the policies refer to these models to different extents and on the other hand because these policies developed on the basis of different contexts from the outset. In fact, these "transnational models" are recontextualised and hybridised, according to political, cultural or national specificities and constraints. In other words, there is a "path dependency" that constrains the policies in each national context. We first present the principal characteristics of the bureaucraticprofessional model and its importance in each national context during 1960s and 1970s. Second, we look at the convergences observed and we refer them to the models of evaluative state and quasi-market. In conclusion, we discuss briefly the factors of convergences and divergences that lie behind these evolutions. © 2008 Springer.
CITATION STYLE
Maroy, C. (2007). The new regulation forms of educational systems in Europe: Towards a post-bureaucratic regime. In Governance and Performance of Education Systems (pp. 13–33). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6446-3_2
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