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Abstract

As the largest country in Central Asia, Kazakhstan offers a strategically important site for analysing how global curriculum agendas are recontextualised in national policy. It shows how international reform ideas are translated in a post-Soviet context. Finland was selected as the comparative case because it is a Nordic country with a well-established curriculum tradition, a contrasting governance architecture, and strong performance in international large-scale assessment. The aim of this study is to compare how lower-secondary curriculum and assessment-regulation documents in Kazakhstan and Finland formulate educational expectations, link them to assessment criteria, structure thematic emphases, and align with global educational discourses. The lower-secondary level was selected because it provides a comparable stage of compulsory education in which foundational expectations and assessment rules are formally articulated before upper-secondary differentiation reduces cross-national equivalence.

National curricula regulate educational expectations and assessment through the statement genres they employ and the tightness of linkage between expectations and criteria. This study uses an NLP-based comparative document analysis design operationalized through computational text analysis (text-as-data). Using cross-lingual semantic similarity methods based on multilingual embeddings, it quantifies alignment between curriculum expectations and assessment criteria across countries. The analysis encodes atomic statements from official documents (Kazakhstan: 25 expectations, 56 criteria; Finland: 210 objectives, 62 criteria) and estimates coupling through directional best-match similarity, threshold coverage, one-to-one matching, and size-matched bootstrapping.

Both systems exhibit strong internal coherence, but with different architectures. Kazakhstan shows near-isomorphic alignment between outcomes and criteria (0.9479), indicating that assessment criteria closely mirror intended learning outcomes. Finland reflects an anchored-breadth pattern, with strong links from objectives to criteria (0.8351) and even stronger links from criteria to objectives (0.9401), suggesting that criteria are tightly anchored in objectives while the objective layer remains broader. Cross-system convergence is higher for expectations and objectives than for criteria, indicating that evaluative phrasing is more system-specific than curricular intentions. Alignment across thematic dimensions and global discourses is also patterned: Finland is stronger on literacy, civic and social learning, sustainability, and inclusion, whereas Kazakhstan is comparatively stronger on digital competence in practice; STEM salience is broadly similar across both systems.

The study contributes a replicable statement-level framework for measuring curriculum-assessment coupling across national systems, shows that apparent convergence in curricular aspirations may conceal divergence in regulatory design, and suggests that cross-national comparability is more feasible at the level of curricular intentions than at the level of evaluative rules.

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This study analyzes the reform aimed at enhancing the status of public servants in Kazakhstan, specifically teachers. The 2020 reform led to an increase in teachers’ salaries and provides an opportunity to examine the dynamics of wage growth across different contexts.

Over the past decade, teacher salaries have become one of the key elements of education policy in Central Asian countries. Salary increases have been viewed as a tool for improving the quality of human capital, as well as a measure to attract and retain personnel in the public sector and to reduce regional disparities in the availability of qualified specialists.

Designing incentive systems for public sector teachers remains a major challenge, and contemporary public sector reforms are often characterized by the introduction of business-oriented incentive mechanisms, particularly pay-for-performance schemes in public institutions. At the same time, a number of studies have shown that such reforms do not always produce clearly positive outcomes for public servants in the social sector.

Kazakhstan has followed a path of maintaining centralized control and the stavka-based system, while achieving a significant increase in the average salaries of school teachers through the introduction of a qualification system and a range of additional payments linked to subjects taught and working conditions.

This paper is primarily empirical in nature. It uses panel data on individual teacher salaries for 2019–2024, based on de-identified data from the Bureau of National Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The study documents how teachers’ salaries evolved over a five-year period that included a major policy change. In addition, it takes into account structural characteristics of schools in 2022 and 2024, including distance to the regional center, the number of students and teachers, and other factors.

By shifting the focus from teachers as a professional group to wage reform as a governance mechanism, the paper contributes to debates on state capacity, inequality, and policy implementation. The findings highlight the importance of context in shaping the actual effects of seemingly universal social reforms.

Although discussions often emphasize the common structure of such reforms, less attention has been paid to how wage dynamics vary across contexts after their implementation. This article contributes to that discussion by providing an empirical analysis of post-reform wage trajectories using individual-level administrative data.

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This paper examines Flagman Online, a Kazakhstani digital school, a case of how distance education can transform education in conditions of uncertainty and rapid changes. Distance education is regarded as a temporary and technical approach to education. However, the study demonstrates that distant education can serve as a full-fledged education along with offline education and not only imparts knowledge but also engages students within the social contexts of the school, community, and global society.

Flagman Online was established for students who are citizens of Kazakhstan residing abroad, fostering their link to their homeland and roots while teaching the Kazakh language and culture. These students, in turn, become ambassadors for Kazakhstan and represent Kazakhstan globally through sports and other fields.

The study presents the findings of surveys conducted among students and their parents, focusing on remote education experiences over the past two years. The survey reveals students' perspectives regarding distance education, teaching quality, assessment and feedback, mentorship, career counselling, and psychological assistance. Special emphasis is placed on student satisfaction, support, and sense of belonging, especially their feelings of inclusion within the school community.

This study used a case study design with a mixed-methods approach. It combined a descriptive analysis of answers from a closed-ended questionnaire with a thematic analysis of open-ended responses, and also included focus group interviews with students and parents.

The research indicates, using Flagman Online as an example, that distance education in modern Kazakhstan can address several important issues. These include providing consistent, high-quality education and development for schools in remote areas, allowing students studying abroad to access the national curriculum, and helping students focus on sport and other fields continue their training and prepare for competitions.

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Competency-based learning and transversal skills have become central themes in global education policy discourse, promoted through international organizations and transnational policy networks. Yet the integration of these reform agendas raises important questions in education systems historically structured around centralized governance and high-stakes examination regimes. Rather than assuming straightforward policy convergence, this study examines how competency-based reform agendas are negotiated within institutional contexts shaped by inherited governance architectures and assessment structures.

Focusing on Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Türkiye, the paper analyzes how these systems have engaged with competency-based reform in compulsory education between 2005 and 2025. Drawing on historical institutionalism (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010; Pierson, 2000) and policy mobility scholarship (Ball, 1998; Steiner-Khamsi, 2014), the study conceptualizes reform as an institutionally mediated process in which global policy scripts encounter historically embedded governance arrangements. The analysis examines national curriculum frameworks, reform strategies, and assessment policies to trace how reform agendas are articulated and incorporated within existing institutional structures.

To capture these dynamics, the study adopts a multi-layer institutional framework that distinguishes between discursive, assessment, and governance dimensions of reform. The discursive layer reflects the circulation and reinterpretation of global competency-based policy narratives within national curriculum discourse (Anderson-Levitt & Gardinier, 2021), while the assessment layer examines how examination regimes function as governance technologies that mediate reform trajectories (Evans et al., 2019; Ozga, 2009). The governance layer addresses the institutional arrangements through which reforms are enabled, constrained, or layered within historically embedded systems.

The findings suggest that competency-based reform does not simply replace established institutional arrangements. Instead, reforms are selectively adapted and layered onto existing governance and assessment infrastructures, producing hybrid trajectories in which global policy agendas coexist with established institutional practices. By examining how reform agendas interact with historically embedded systems, the paper contributes to debates on education governance, policy diffusion, and institutional transformation in Central Eurasia.