The principles of the United Nations and UNESCO have a great impact on global agendas for national development, and education is often expected to play a leading role for poverty reduction. This reflects a broader policy context globally that tends to emphasise a narrow concept of development, focused primarily on measurable economic growth, and de-emphasising other aspects of social and cultural change that education can promote. The critical question is how education can contribute to reducing poverty and delivering social, cultural and economic development for all people. Clearly, the complex relationship between education and development needs further exploration. This paper critiques how the notion of education is constructed in the global policies of education and development in terms of delivering national development. Using discourse analytic approach, this paper examines how multilateral agencies have articulated the relationship between education and development in the global policies for Least Developed Countries since 1990. More particularly, how the official links between school education and development, which includes expected outcomes of school education in relation to development is imagined directly or indirectly in the policy is the core interest of the paper. In what ways the dominant global logic of expanded mass schooling for individual upward mobility and national development reflected in global policy is discussed critically.