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This paper provides a contextualised and critical policy analysis of the Rudd government's national schooling agenda in Australia. The specific focus is on the introduction of national literacy and numeracy testing and the recent creation by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority of the website 'My School', which lists the results of these tests for all Australian schools, including school performance against averages and against the performance of 60 other socio-economically 'likeschools' across the nation. It is argued that we are seeing the emergence of a national system of schooling (including national curriculum) as part of the reconstitution of the nation in the face of globalization and related economisation of education policy. This is the case despite Australia's federal political structure with the States holding the ostensible Constitutional responsibility for schooling. The analysis locates these and associated developments (a national schooling policy ensemble) within considerations of new accountabilities, the restructured state, neo-liberalism, globalized education policy discourses and policy borrowing and learning. The analysis also suggests that, despite the Prime Minister's swingeing critique of neo-liberalism in the context of the global financial crisis and enhanced state intervention in the economy, this national schooling agenda (the government's so-called 'education revolution'), is a hybrid mix of the neo-liberal with social democratic aspirations to do with social justice and schooling.

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This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful 'products' and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policymakers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.

Educational policy is no longer, if it ever was, the product of the nation state alone. In Europe, significant policy actors in education are working today face to face and virtually in joint governmental projects and networking translating, mediating and constructing educational policies. The existence of this new social sphere of work, in which the construction of Europe is paramount, served by the regular communications and intimate work relations of a new European class of educational system actors, is deserving of further research. They appeared to constitute a form of policy elite in education, which has not surfaced into view in the study of education, either in studies of the national state or of Brussels: in the latter's case, it may be because education does not have the same regulatory or legal framework as key aspects of governance in European law. The power this group wields by acting as shapers of the emerging discourse of educational policy, expressed in reports, key committees, funding streams and programmes has to be examined and recognized within studies of educational policy.

This paper provides an account and a critique of the rise of the contemporary policy as numbers phenomenon and considers its effects on policy and for educational research. Policy as numbers is located within the literatures on numbers in politics and the statistics/state relationship and, while recognising the longevity of the latter relationship, it is argued that the governance turn and neoliberalism have strengthened the role of numbers in contemporary education policy. This phenomenon is situated in the contemporary 'structure of feeling', which sees politics reduced to managing the everyday and the evisceration of a progressive imaginary. The paper then documents the impact within education, focusing both on the emergent global education policy field and on the national agenda in Australian schooling and the related rise of 'gap talk', both globally and nationally. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications for educational research, suggesting that we as educational researchers are also being positioned by policy as numbers.

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