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The article compares the educational policy trajectories of four societies in the South-west Indian Ocean: Madagascar, Mauritius, Ile de la Reunion and South Africa. The main purpose is to trace the political pathways and differing educational policy trajectories of former colonies of Britain and France. Five metaphors are invoked in this paper to describe the political and economic forces that shape the educational policy trajectories of developing countries. Together they form a conceptual model which provides the basis for comparative analysis of the post-colonial educational policy choices between countries and allows for a more detailed examination of one or a cluster of policies. The methods employed in the research reported here draw on the discipline of comparative history and the resultant trajectories seem to offer a good heuristic device for generating, recording, and graphically illustrating data.

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Over the last 45 years, two major trends have characterised French educational policies: a voluntary move towards widening access to upper secondary school and a related diversification of the diplomas available at the end of it, especially through the creation of the technological baccalaureat in 1968 and the vocational baccalaureat in 1985. In the context of educational expansion, to what extent are these successive reforms of upper secondary education curriculum associated with changes in classed and gendered trajectories through the system? Our empirical evidence is derived from four large-scale longitudinal surveys, which have never been analysed together yet: the 1962-1972 [Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques] INED survey (N=15,154), 1980-1990 Panel study (N=19,701), 1989-2001 Panel study (N=20,524) and 1995-2006 Panel study (N=17,157). We use advanced log-linear and log-multiplicative models on contingency tables. We find that, when baccalaureat is measured as a dichotomy between holders and non-holders, class inequality has decreased since the 1960s. However, when subtler differentiations between baccalaureat types are taken into account, the strength of class inequality is shown to be constant over time, supporting Lucas's (2001) 'Effectively Maintained Inequality' hypothesis. Further results related to change in the pattern of inequality at the baccalaureat level, especially gendered class inequality, are also presented and discussed.

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Only since the 1990s has the impact of globalisation on education drawn scholarly attention, primarily due to the impact of international school achievement surveys. This study argues that the globalisation of education began much earlier, with the establishment of intergovernmental agencies, such as UNESCO and the OECD, and the adoption of American educational models after the Second World War. The neo-Weberian perspective I propose focuses on knowledge producers and education global networks and incorporates an analysis of the specific national context and their peculiarities without losing sight of the globalisation process and its homogenising character. Knowledge producers constitute a status group that increases its social and academic capital through advancing global education models locally. The analysis of reforms in the education systems of France and Israel after the Second World War shows how the diffusion of global educational models that stress equality of opportunity enhanced local transformations and affected national policies. Such an analysis elaborates the process whereby knowledge producers, linked to global networks, constructed ‘social problems’ according to the education knowledge production institutionalised in each country and the socio-politic conditions of each society, and how their alliance with highly ranked functionaries brought about structural reforms aiming at the ‘democratisation of education’ in France and Israel.

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This paper describes the process and findings of a multinational study of the characteristics of sail training for young people. The study used a structured qualitative method and involved ‘indigenous practitioner-researchers’ who collected the majority of the data. Our findings show that participation provides an opportunity for learning in the practical and cognitive domains in relation to skills and knowledge, and in the affective domain in relation to social confidence. The data collected provide evidence that sail training has positive benefits in terms of participants’ social confidence and their self-perceptions of capacity to work collaboratively with others. It is argued that while sail training experiences are generally positive and beneficial, some appear to be more effective than others in developing social confidence. We also show that it is not principally the seamanship dimension of the experience, but the combination of a structured purposeful programme with the unique character of the seafaring environment that provides the basis for that learning. The more effective experiences in this respect appear to be those where there is a greater emphasis on specific programme activity. Sail training should therefore be understood not solely as adventurous recreation but as a powerful educative experience.

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