In this chapter, the central theme is the consequences of an individual country turning to an intergovernmental organisation, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), to have its school systems assessed by an authoritative educational policy actor. This analysis adheres to current comparative research policy borrowing and lending, where national policy-makers project their policy agendas into ‘international standards’ and international judgements to justify their own educational policy reform agenda. The assumption is that national policy-makers with lengthy conflicts in a policy field such as education are likely to turn their attention to another country’s educational system to legitimise their national policy; that is, they use another country as a ‘projection’ for their internal debates (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012; Takayama et al., 2013 ). In this case, the OECD instead uses its transnational policy as a ‘projection’ for a good and ‘evidence-based’ policy that is applied to a long-debated national school system. However, when a transnational reform agenda works as the lens through which an individual country’s school system is to be judged, it might be quite difficult to catch sight of the local/national school system. Instead, the transnational perspective tends to dominate and obscure the character of the national school system that is under the magnifying glass. In the present analysis, two different approaches are brought together in a common framework: curriculum theory (CT) and discursive institutionalism (DI).