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Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of global campaigns on girls' and women's education, including major global policy initiatives such as the MDGs and the SDGs. While scholars have critically analysed the conceptualisations of gender, equality and development in such campaigns, and their significance for national level policy and practice, less has been written about why and how girls' education came to be such a high profile feature of international policy frameworks. This paper draws on perspectives from transnational social movement theory, which has been used by gender scholars to explore the activities and significance of non-governmental organisations for agenda-setting at the global level. In this paper these perspectives are applied to the field of global education policy, through an analysis of evidence from international conferences, data on aid flows and interviews with key policy actors, to explore the factors behind rise of the global agenda on gender equality in education. In doing so, it suggests that the current dominant framing around girls' education, access and quality, may be explained by the relatively weak involvement of non-governmental women's groups in proportion to the strong involvement of multilaterals, bilateral agencies, national governments and more recently, private sector organisations.

By 2000, girls' and women's education was a priority for international development organisations. While studies have examined the impact of recent campaigns and programmes, there has been less exploration of ideas about girls' and women's education within development thought in the immediate post-colonial period, and the political mechanisms through which this came to be a global concern. Through a study of policy documents, this paper investigates how the education of girls and women came to be prioritised within the two principle UN agencies involved with education since 1945, the World Bank and Unesco. A shift in priorities is evident, from ensuring formal rights and improving the status of women, to expanding the productive capacities of women, fertility control and poverty reduction. While the ascendance of human capital theory provided a space for a new perception of the role of women's education in development, in other policy arenas women's education was central to exploring more substantive, rights-based notions of gender equality. Ultimately, the goal of improving girls' and women's education fitted into diverse development agendas, paving the way for it to become a global development priority. (Contains 2 tables and 15 notes.)

This paper reports on a research project investigating the role of universities in South Africa in contributing to poverty reduction through the quality of their professional education programmes. The focus here is on theorising and the early operationalisation of multi-layered, multi-dimensional transformation based on ideas from Amartya Sen's capability approach. Key features of a professionalism oriented to public service, which in South Africa must mean the needs and lives of the poor, are outlined. These features include: the demand from justice; the expansion of the comprehensive capabilities both of the poor and professional capability formation to be able to act in "pro-poor" ways; and, praxis pedagogies which shape this connected process. This theorisation is then tentatively operationalised in a process of selecting transformation dimensions. (Contains 4 figures.)

This paper offers a theoretical exploration of the impact of diversity in schools on attitudes to inequality in students’ later life. Reflecting on recent changes on the school system in England, and building on work on how values are formed and how inequalities between groups may be either perpetuated or changed, it seeks to investigate the development of values and agency goals relating to the reduction of poverty and inequalities, particularly between groups. School education has the potential to foster civic participation and moral values, and formal schooling can be seen as a unique site for the development of such values at a formative period of individual development, through processes such as collective reasoning and encounters with difference and inequality. While these issues have been explored with regard to educational content, most notably through citizenship education, it is equally important to consider the social context within which formal learning takes place, particularly the diversity of the school body itself, and how this is managed. This paper draws on existing literature on education, values and school diversity to examine how the capability approach can provide insights into the development of social justice values through education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]