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The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of secondary school food policy (SSFP) across the devolved nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to offer insights into a growing area of policy concern. The selected context of research is school food policy (SFP), an area of research which has received little attention in terms of policy approaches. The review is focused on 2010 to 2022.

This work combines interdisciplinary perspectives spanning across food policy, public health, psychology, education and sociology. This combination has merit as it offers different perspectives in terms of understanding SFP. The study was conducted between August 2021 and March 2022, using a desk-based review, analysing policies on food in secondary schools. Data collection was conducted through the Web using key search terms. The READ (Read, Extract, Analyse, Distil) approach was used as a systematic procedure to analyse policy and evaluation documents.

To all levels of government, it is recommended that a coherent policymaking approach be used to tackle SSFP improvements, to progress a whole school approach to food, supported by long-term dedicated resources while engaging children in SSFP development. For education departments, it is recommended that a food curriculum review, connected to school meals alongside a refocus on school food standards monitoring and reporting is crucial in serving the future generations. The current economic crisis has had an impact on public spending. Universal Free School Meals has been said to make an enormous difference to well-being.

The current findings suggest that researching SFP across nations has merit. There is a relative lack of focus on secondary schools, in light of England’s focus on the National Food Strategy (focus on children), post-pandemic, economic crisis – together this makes school food and food policy a topic of real urgency and importance. Lessons can both be learned, particularly in promoting healthier and more educationally inclusive school food practices. Research in this area can inform curriculum design and school food environment and system changes from the perspective of learnings around taking a whole school food approach to education.

This chapter presents empirical results of an analysis of the content of education reform globally in nine policy areas during the recent wave of neoliberal reforms between 1970 and 2018. It draws on data from the World Education Reform Database (WERD), the most comprehensive database to date of education reforms around the world. The results show a dramatic increase in policy reform discourse on improving educational quality compared to reforms in other policy areas between 1970 and 2018, with the pace accelerating from 1990 onwards. Expanding access to education remains an important priority. Access reform discourse slightly increases during the peak period of education reform from 1992 to 2009, before leveling off. The results also show a significant rise of reforms in policy areas related to accountability discourse. Overall, the descriptive trends presented in this chapter complement case study literature on neoliberal education reform and suggests directions further cross-national research.

This policy review paper is an analysis of the Double Reduction Policy (DRP) of China that was promulgated in July 2021. It looks into its rationale as well as different stakeholders' early reactions to the policy.

Critical policy analysis (CPA) method was used to identify (1) the artefacts, such as language, objects and acts, that were significant carriers of the DRP; (2) communities of meaning, interpretation, speech and practice that are relevant to the DRP and its implementation; (3) the local discourses relevant to the DRP; and (4) the tension points and their conceptual sources (affective, cognitive and/or moral) by different DRP stakeholders. As per the comparative education field, this paper compares the pre-DRP and post-DRP periods to tease out how the policy affects different stakeholders of education.

The DRP in China could be attributed to diverse factors such as demography, socialist economic and developmental visions and manpower structure. The implementation of the DRP has generated uneven reactions among different stakeholders and geographical regions both in speed and scale. While education stakeholders have no choice but to adopt the policy, they face challenges derived from a sudden halt of private educational resources and subsequent increased duties of parents and schools.

The significance of this early policy analysis lies in offering an insight into education development in China by analysing and deliberating the DRP from different perspectives.

The aim is to assess how a policy of tertiary education for all affects the shape of the unconditional earnings distribution.

The paper discusses the quantile-regression literature looking at the link between education and wage inequality, also proving new evidence based on unconditional quantile regressions.

The findings support the idea that a policy of tertiary education for all increases the overall level of wage inequality.

The research has implications for public policy and administration. Among the limitations, the paper does not deal with distributional aspects related to other outcomes (e.g. health outcomes) of the policy of interest.

The analysis highlights a series of potential government interventions aimed at reducing the wage-inequality externalities of the policy of interest.

A policy of tertiary education for all, by itself, is not useful to fight wage inequality.

This paper belongs to the small group of studies using unconditional quantile regressions to study the link between education and wage inequality. It is the first study specifically looking at the distributional effects of a policy of tertiary education for all.

The purpose of this paper is to understand US federal government policy during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the connections to graduate education. Using the multiple streams framework, the paper outlines these actions through various streams (problems, policy and political) and perspectives (defining problems, articulating options and mobilizing responses).

The primary sources of data collected for this study were US federal government policies from March 2020 through May 2021. Policies were examined through introduction, implementation and alteration (when possible) within the specific time period of the study. The policies outlined in this paper were connected to the US Department of Education, and to a lesser extent, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. Data analysis was a two-fold process. First, the individual policy was considered as a single case and second, a cross-case comparison occurred across the multiple cases.

Analysing the study’s data in the problem stream provides a strong indicator of how the pandemic was perceived as a challenge for US graduate education. The pandemic served as a focusing event and illuminated the connections of graduate education to key institutional functions, including research and teaching. Broadly, US federal policy actions in this area focused on giving institutions resources and flexibility to support graduate students and allow them to continue their academic work while also seeding funding and incentives to continue the movement of knowledge, activities and people in the research pipeline. Actions in the policy stream aligned with the decentralized nature of the US higher education system and allowed for choice by academic institutions within the parameters of options.

This paper extends extant literature related to policy-making and graduate education to consider policy-making during a time of crisis. The paper offers methodological and conceptual ideas for consideration in future research.

Given that a large proportion of refugees and forced im/migrants today are school-age, schools are widely assumed to be sites where integration will happen. How this integration will occur and whether education policies facilitate social cohesion is unclear. Focusing on California and Berlin as examples of politically left-leaning states that receive immigrants in substantial numbers, this chapter seeks to examine their immigration, integration, and education policies. Using an original conceptual framework, this chapter analyzes how relevant federal and state policies have evolved since the 1980s in these two contexts. This chapter considers integration to be the process by which immigrants identify with the receiving country (RC) and their previous contexts, provided that the RC is supportive and accepting. The goal of integration is less inequality along ethnic or cultural lines. By analyzing policies in terms of immigrant students’ identity formation and conceptions of equality, this chapter argues that the evolution of such policies in Berlin and California has not always been linear. Moreover, while both states consider diversity to be positive, their policies do not extend to facilitating a new culture that productively operationalizes the diversity of immigrant and non-immigrant students.

A new High School Equivalency (HSE) policy was developed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in response to a shift toward a knowledge-based economy and a transformation toward STEM education. The purpose of this study is to explore and understand the stakeholders' perceptions and experiences in implementing the new HSE policy in a school that follows a US curriculum in the UAE. The study was conducted before the COVID-19 lockdown. The phenomenological approach was used to shed light on the implementation of the HSE policy in an active learning environment and the challenges facing the school's stakeholders. The study results reveal the challenges that stakeholders face in implementing the HSE policy and their experiences in offering students the courses they need. All stakeholders agreed that the transformation toward STEM education requires proper implementation of the high school equivalency policy in an active learning environment that help in developing students' twenty-first-century skills and prepare them to meet the job market needs.