Introduction to the Special Section. Educational Pro- fessions: New Challenges and Changes.

This issue of IJSE presents some contributions reflecting on changes of educational professions, inside and outside the ‘formal’ educational field, as consequences of the deep reconfigurations that educational systems and institutions have witnessed during the last decades, since the ‘80s of the last century. The most striking transformation of education is undeniably the one ‘ir- reversibly’ affirmed by the end of the golden age of the welfare state at the turn of the 1970s-1980s with the irruption and consolidation of neoliberalist policies in the western economies with the privatisation of public services and/or their adoption of a managerialist logic (mainly through New Public Management).