Sheila Aikman a and Anna Robinson-Pant b aSchool of International Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; bSchool of Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Research and policy in international education has often been framed in terms of a deficit discourse. For instance, policy debates on women’s literacy and education have begun by positioning women as a group who need to ‘catch up’on certain skills in order to become more active in development, or nomadic peoples are referred to as ‘hard to reach’with formal education and in need of being educated into sedentary ‘modern’ways of life. Rather than recognising the skills and knowledge that participants already have and practise in their everyday lives, researchers who adopt this deficit perspective on learning and education may find that the research agenda and questions will already be shaped to a large extent by the providers’/policy makers’ standpoint. In applying these deficit terms, they may sometimes unintentionally reinforce research agendas embedded in the dominant and mainstream policy that has led to discriminatory practice.