Researching education elites twenty years on: Sex, lies and… Skype

This chapter focuses on the role of knowledge in the evolution of education elites: if there was a time that policy elites were formed on the basis of their social status and intuition, what has changed with new policy elites whose good grasp of evidence and international networks have become the preferred tools for decision-making? How are the epistemic and the political enmeshed in this knowledge and policy relationship and what does the rise of transnational education governance suggest about the fate of previously powerful national policy elites? As this chapter shows, it appears that the primary capital contemporary education elites hold is not state power, upheld through traditional, bureaucratic and legislative tools, but the ability to move swiftly in and out of national and transnational policymaking spaces, armed with the epistemic and symbolic capital that they skilfully master.