This chapter explicates the ways that written and visual texts are circulating inside and outside the domains of education field to contour the formations of policy, practice and everyday life in shaping the popular construction of educational and future success. Taking a critical perspective to investigate the taken-for-granted construction of success, this chapter highlights and selects educational policies, curriculum and syllabus examples from education department websites from each of the three global cities where the study was conducted. Foregrounding the ways that policy intersects with perceived individual, family and community aspirations on behalf of children, we expand our discussion by bringing in discussion of popular images, advertisements and discourses concerned with education and success. We contend that business and in particular, edu-business, also harness these ideas to promote particular orientations to, and opportunities for, participation in learning experiences designed to maximise selected perceived sociocultural imaginations as the potential for children's successful and promising futures. Additionally, our qualitative data from children's learning dialogues in which they responded with both written comments and illustrations, to four prompts, provides particularly interesting insights into the ways that children themselves make use of the visual modality to construct and express their own versions of what is valued about their everyday learning, and of what goals and visions of future success animate their ideas about school as well as aspirations of their own futures. Together with these examples, we contend, function in the production of policy cultures in which orientations to educational and future success are taken up, re/produced and contested in the everyday lifeworlds of children.

This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual and methodological framework of the Global Childhoods research project. Situated in three global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore, this project explores connections between policy contexts, school experiences and everyday activities of children and the shaping of their orientations to educational success. In order to better understand the intersections of education policy, practice and everyday life for children, we draw on the concept of “lifeworlds”, which has a rich history in social research as a framework for examining how people and groups experience the world. Moreover, instead of focusing on whose education system is more efficient, or better at producing better outcomes, this research seeks to gain deeper understandings about children’s lived experiences, academic performance and orientations to success by investigating children’s everyday lifeworlds (in and out-of-school experiences).

There has been much discussion about the high performance of East Asian students in international high stakes testing, but little attention has been paid to their lifeworlds beyond school. In this article we explore findings from a survey of 627 Year 4 children (nine and ten years old) in three global cities (Hong Kong, Singapore, and Melbourne), focusing on their out-of-school activities as one aspect of their lifeworlds. The findings indicate that the most common activities in each location were comparable. Since the activities in the three locations were largely similar, the findings problematise East/West binaries which have been a feature of research and discussions in this area.