This paper seeks to offer a more nuanced understanding of national policy-making in education by problematizing a specific topos of the field of global education policy. It specifically argues that in an attempt to identify new forms of power in education and their effects, ‘the topos of governing by comparison and numbers’ overlooks the co-existence of permeological and immunological responses to international comparative numbered data in localities as well as the unintended effects of this uneasy co-existence on national policy and reform. To illustrate this argument, the paper explores the controversial timetables reform initiative in the Republic of Cyprus during the period 2014–15.