I am an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Before joining UAB with a Ramon y Cajal grant in 2011, I was a researcher and lecturer in IDS at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, I coordinate the ERC-funded project Reforming Schools Globally: A Multiscalar Analysis of Autonomy and Accountability Policies in the Education Sector, and I am one of the directors of the Erasmus Plus-awarded GLOBED Master's.

With a cross-disciplinary training in sociology and education studies, I publish in comparative education, sociology of education and development studies journals. I have edited several books on global education policy, and I am one of the lead editors of the Journal of Education Policy and the World Yearbook of Education series. Beyond academia, I regularly collaborate with international organisations, governmental agencies and international NGOs to inform their policies and strategies in education.

Research interests

My research examines the relationship between globalization, governance institutions and education policy – i.e. how education policies are internationally disseminated and enacted in different institutional settings, and how this impacts education quality and equity.

In the last years, I have applied this perspective to the study of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and new public management (NPM) reforms in education. These are two policy models that, after decades of continuous educational expansion, countries in both the Global North and the Global South are adopting in an attempt to improve the performance of their education systems cost-efficiently. Currently, in the context of the REFORMED project, I study the transfer, enactment and multiple trajectories of school autonomy and performance-based accountability policies in a sample of European and Latin American countries.

 

Keywords

global education policy; educational reform; comparative education; multi-scalar governance; public-private partnerships; accountability in education; international organisations