Education reform is increasingly portrayed as a means to improve a nation's global competitiveness as measured by its performance in international league tables of pupil achievement. This has created a demand for comparative research which identifies 'what works' in highperforming school systems. A diverse array of consultancies, thinks tanks, and entrepreneurs has emerged to satisfy that demand, portraying their approach as a pragmatic and objective form of evidence-based policymaking. However, the attempt to translate complex conditions into straightforward solutions (i.e. 'what works') leads researchers into a basic paradox. This paper identifies the strategies used to address the core issues and to advocate reforms. We demonstrate that, though they are persuasive, the strategies fundamentally fail to overcome the problems inherent in the enterprise.

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Educational institutions have been among the most active social organisations responding to and facilitating processes associated with globalisation. This has primarily been undertaken through the attempts of schools and universities to 'internationalise' their student intake, staffing, curricula, research, and assessment systems. Amongst the many benefits associated with the promotion of 'internationalisation' is that it will provide students with attributes labelled as Global citizenship, skills or competencies, that will contribute to improving tolerance, respect and harmony between nations and cultures. Various nations and global agencies actively promote such goals and Global Citizenship was included in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Positioned as a response to the SDGs, the OECD has developed a metric to compare the 'Global Competency' of 15-year-old pupils, which was incorporated into PISA 2018. We analyse the rationales for this decision, the conception of 'Global Competence' adopted by the OECD and how these have changed since its inception in 2013. We also explore how it will be measured and how the OECD deals with what they describe as 'the most salient challenge affecting PISA'. We argue: (i) the official conception of 'Global Competence' finally adopted was strongly influenced by the OECD's quest to position itself as the agency responsible for monitoring progress on the SDGs, and then amended to match what could be easily measured; (ii) although the OECD presents its Global Competencies using a humanitarian discourse, it is framed by its economic mission.

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The year 2015 was significant for the arena of international development, as UNESCO's Education for All agenda was replaced by Education 2030, which would identify minimum standards of education quality. The OECD had been working on extending its existing PISA assessment into low-and middle-income countries through PISA for Development (PISA-D) and positioned the new assessment as a means of tracking progress on the post-2015 goals. The organisation maintains that PISA-D was introduced primarily in response to the demands of the international community, especially low-and middle-income countries, and that the assessment was developed in partnership with them. This paper investigates those claims through an analysis of the arrival of PISA-D in Cambodia, situating the analysis within UNESCO's shifting agenda, and the strategic visions of the OECD and World Bank that first emerged in the 1990s. The result is a very different picture to the portrayals of local agency, demand, consensus and partnership that adorn the official websites and pamphlets of global agencies and much academic research, raising serious doubts about education governance post-2015.