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This article aims to show the value of the concept of policy trajectory to compare, from a long-term perspective, the transformations of education policies in the context of globalisation. After discussing the scope and limitations of the analyses of the concept in the literature -- descriptive, sequential, metaphorical and building on the works of Stephen Ball --, we propose, our own conceptualisation. This regards policy trajectory as a double shift in time and space and understood as the result of different processes of path dependency, translation and bricolage. The forms of this trajectory depend on the educational orders at work at different levels of school systems, and not only at the global level. To illustrate this approach, we draw on a study which compared performance-based accountability policies in France and Quebec. Despite some challenges, this approach has the merit of proposing a fruitful theoretical framework for studying and comparing policy implementation.

The article argues that there is no single globalisation of education systems, but rather multiple globalisations of each system taken in its individual context. We propose three explanatory factors to account for these vernacular globalisation processes, that is, for individual policy trajectories in each national context: path dependence on earlier policy choices and institutions, education policy-making through bricolage, and finally the translation by national actors of international-level ideas or tools as a function of the debate, institutions or national power dynamics in question. The research design is based on the study of a most-likely case: accountability policy in two school systems--France and Quebec--which show strong variations. Document analyses and semi-structured interviews were conducted in both cases. In the two countries, distinct vernacular globalisations are at work leading to different neo-statist accountability policies. In Quebec, the reinforcement of state power through a growing vertical accountability and the systematic development of regulation tools between policy actors and levels lead to a "centralisation by institutional linkage". In France, we rather witness a "globalisation by discursive internalisation" in which transnational imperatives are integrated in official discourses on the regulation of the education system, but without radically questioning the mainstays of this regulation.