ABSTRACT
Educational research has been rather slow to absorb the implications of the ‘spatial turn’ that has been so influential across the social sciences (and the humanities) in recent years (for example, Warf and Arias 2008). To be sure, there is a long and distinguished tradition of scholarship in comparative education, which has been concerned overwhelmingly with comparisons between different states (Crossley, Broadfoot, and Schweisfurth 2007). More recently, interest has begun to grow in the analysis of educational issues at the supra-national level (for example, Ozga et al. 2011). However, the more complex geographies of spatial variation within national states, whilst implicit in much educational research, have much less frequently been analysed systematically (Taylor 2009; Thiem 2009).
