Representing Your Country: Scotland, PISA and New Spatialities of Educational Governance

Abstract

This paper focuses on the rescaling and re-spatialization of policy and governance in education, including the constitution of a global education policy field. It deals with the changing education policy work of the OECD, particularly the influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We argue that PISA has become the most successful OECD ‘product’ and as such has become the prototype for other OECD developments, including PISA-Based tests for schools, PISA for development, PIACC and AHELO. These developments help constitute a global education policy field and contribute to the production of a global data infrastructure in education. At the same time, they also have impacts on other spatial relations, including sub-national and local effects in schooling. For example, the PISA-based test for schools programme can be used directly by schools and sub-national systems as part of the new policy spaces in education. In this paper, we document the role of the OECD’s education work in respect of these matters. We focus specifically on a video, PISA 2012 - Representing Your Country , produced by the Scottish Department of Education and anchored by the Scottish National Party Minister for Education. The aim of the video is to inspire the participation and strong performance of Scottish students in the 2012 PISA sample. As we will show, using a ‘videological analysis’, this video demonstrates how Scottish independence and nationalism involve reaching out to draw on the expertise of supranational organisations such as the OECD, while at the same time the OECD is reaching in to nations to shape policy agendas in sub-national spaces.