There are countries that treat Education as a chapter of public expenditure.
And there are countries that treat it as an instrument of power.
The United Kingdom has just made it clear which group it is in. Its new International Education Strategy (The UK’s International Education Strategy 2026) is not a sectoral document, nor a rhetorical exercise on academic cooperation. It is a strategic policy text. Education understood as economics, diplomacy, science, influence and international projection.
There are no ambiguities. Education is seen as an exportable national asset, as an integral part of foreign policy and as a central piece in the global competition for talent, research and prestige. The discourse is direct, the objectives are quantified and the political coordination is explicit. Education, commerce, diplomacy and science speak the same language.
The contrast with Portugal is uncomfortable.
Among us, Education continues to be treated mainly as an internal problem: system organization, rules, administrative balances, recurring ideological disputes. Rarely as a strategic lever for the country. Much less as part of a coherent vision of international projection.
In the United Kingdom, talking about Education is talking about exports, institutional presence abroad, transnational teaching, global recognition of qualifications, structured attraction of students and researchers. We talk about power without naming it excessively. And maybe that’s why it works.
Here, the debate remains trapped in an unresolved tension between Education as a public good or as an economic sector — as if one thing canceled out the other. This conceptual blockage has costs. It prevents planning, inhibits ambition and pushes the system towards a reactive logic, always correcting, rarely anticipating.
There is one particularly revealing point: transnational teaching. For the United Kingdom, it is a strategic axis. Taking British Education to the world, with quality control, institutional branding and diplomatic framework. For Portugal, it remains practically absent from the political agenda, despite us speaking a global language and having historical relationships that many countries would envy.
This is not a resource problem. It’s a vision problem.
The UK does not ignore the debate about quality, equity or public interest. It simply doesn’t turn them into a pretext for immobility. It manages to articulate institutional pluralism, regulatory requirements and international ambition without falling into caricatures. It does not confuse public interest with state exclusivity, nor quality with uniformity.
In Portugal, this maturity has not yet fully reached the political debate. Defensive reflexes, old mistrust and a certain difficulty in accepting that Education today is, inevitably, a field of international competition persist.
The point is not to copy models. It never is.
The question is to understand what the way we talk about Education reveals about our idea of a country.
In a world where science is geopolitics and Education is influence, continuing to treat this issue as a minor issue is not neutrality. It’s choice.
And choices, sooner or later, come to fruition.
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