Policy Making in Educational Frameworks: A Critical Review

Educational policy-making has increasingly been shaped by globalization, decentralization reforms, technological innovation, and ethical imperatives. This critical review synthesizes recent empirical and conceptual studies between 2022 and 2025 on policy-making in educational frameworks across early childhood, school, higher education, and professional education contexts. Drawing on qualitative, mixed-methods, and documentary analyses, the review critically examines dominant themes, methodological patterns, and conceptual contributions. Findings reveal persistent tensions between global policy discourses and local cultural contexts, limited empirical evaluation of policy implementation, and an overreliance on document-based analyses. While emerging frameworks address inclusivity, ethics, artificial intelligence, and person-centredness, the literature remains fragmented and weakly connected to classroom-level outcomes. The review concludes by identifying theoretical, methodological, and practical gaps and proposes directions for future policy-oriented educational research.