Research
My research focuses on how education policies shape equity and opportunity. While I have worked across several areas — including vocational education, educational inequalities, and education and development — my primary research focus has been privatisation and marketisation policies in education. Below, I outline my main research lines together with selected outputs and projects.
This line examines how and why education privatisation and marketisation reforms emerge and consolidate. Beyond structural drivers, this research explores how ideational factors — narratives, paradigms and policy discourses — contribute to triggering, shaping and legitimising these reform processes in different national contexts.
- Multiple paths towards education privatization in a globalizing world
- What are the role and impact of public-private partnerships in education?
- The Privatization of Education. A Political Economy Approach to Global Education Reform
- Drivers and Resistances to Regulation of Education Markets: The Political Economy of the Chilean Reform
- The political economy of education privatization (Education International, 2015)
- Is it Possible to Decommodify Education? (British Academy, 2019–2022)
- Public-Private Partnerships in Educational Governance (EU FP7, 2013–2017)
This research strand analyses how schools respond to competitive incentives introduced by market-oriented policies. It has involved developing new analytical frameworks to examine under-theorised phenomena such as schools' marketing strategies, enrolment practices and mechanisms of exclusion.
- Schools in the Marketplace: Analysis of School Supply Responses in the Chilean Education Market
- Educational providers in the marketplace: Schools' marketing responses in Chile
- Education markets and schools' mechanisms of exclusion: The case of Chile
- Examining pro-equity redesigns of educational quasi-markets: a mechanism-based approach
- Is it Possible to Decommodify Education? (British Academy, 2019–2022)
- New quasi-market reforms in Latin America (Spanish Ministry of Science, 2012–2015)
This strand focuses on the relationship between families' increasing capacity to choose schools, competition among providers and the distribution of students across schools. It analyses how choice policies shape segregation patterns through demand- and supply-side mechanisms, and how desegregation reforms can reconfigure these dynamics.
- Redesigning choice to tackle school segregation
- Education markets and school segregation: a mechanism-based explanation
- Opting out of neighbourhood schools: The role of local education markets in student mobility
- Student mobility and school segregation in an (un)controlled choice system
- Residential segregation and school segregation of foreign students in Barcelona
- Making poor choices? Demand rationalities and school choice in a Chilean local education market
- School desegregation policies in Barcelona (Municipality of Barcelona, 2022–2024)
- Effects of Gentrification on Education Inequalities (Spanish Agency of Research, 2023–2026)
- Equivalence criteria in Barcelona's educational planning (Barcelona Education Consortium, 2017–2018)
This line analyses how education markets are problematised and how regulatory reforms are adopted to improve equity outcomes. It examines models of public subsidies for private schools, the governance of non-state providers and international trends in the regulation of public-private partnerships in education.
- Research Handbook on Education Privatization and Marketization
- The instrumentation of public subsidies for private schools
- Catholic Schools in the Marketplace: Changing and Enduring Religious Identities
- Regulating Public-Private Partnerships, governing non-state schools: An equity perspective
- La educación concertada en España
- Regulating PPPs, governing non-state schools (UNESCO, 2020)
- The model of private subsidised education under debate (Fundació Bofill, 2019–2020)
- Educational Inequalities and PPPs in Colombian Education (OSF, 2015–2016)
This line analyses the political economy of vocational education and training (VET) policies, with a focus on Chile and Catalonia. It explores the institutional configuration of VET systems, their relationship with labour market outcomes, and how development paradigms shape policy reforms in this field.
- Understanding aspirations: why do secondary TVET students aim so high in Chile?
- Development paradigms in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile (1964–2005)
- TVET policy reforms in Chile 2006–2018: between human capital and the right to education
- The coordination of skill supply and demand in the market model of skill formation
- Governing educational and labour market trajectories of secondary TVET graduates in Chile (RCUK Newton Fund, 2016–2019)
- TVET and Employment in Catalonia (Fundació Bofill, 2012)
This research area examines how educational policies and institutional arrangements shape inequality in educational outcomes and trajectories. It includes work on educational differentiation, school dropout, and the impact of socio-spatial dynamics on educational opportunity, with a particular focus on Catalonia and Spain.
- Educational differentiation policies and the performance of disadvantaged students across OECD countries
- L'abandonament al batxillerat i als cicles formatius de grau mitjà
- L'abandonament a 4t d'ESO: les desigualtats en la transició a l'educació postobligatòria
- Regional policy trajectories in the Spanish education system
- Effects of Gentrification on Education Inequalities (Spanish Agency of Research, 2023–2026)
- Teacher attraction, retention, and stratification (Fecyt, 2024–2026)
- PISA 2012 in Catalonia (Fundació Bofill, 2014)
This line addresses the intersection of education, development agendas and global governance. It examines the role of international organisations in promoting education reform, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on education systems, and the formulation of global education indicators and frameworks.
- Digitalization and beyond: the effects of Covid-19 on post-pandemic educational policy and delivery in Europe
- Education Policies amid Covid-19. Long-Term responses in Europe
- The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education. Rapid review of the literature
- Indicators for a Broad and Bold Post-2015 Agenda
- The measure of educational development (UNESCO-IIEP, 2011)
- Formulating Potential Indicators for a Broad and Bold Global Education Agenda (OSF, 2015)