'education excellence' or 'educational excellence'?

The Longman dictionary has an example with 'educational reform'.

What about 'education excellence'?
Should it be 'educational excellence'?
Or, perhaps, 'excellence in education'?

Anonymous
The Longman dictionary has an example with 'educational reform'.
"Education reform" and "education excellence" sounded more like what media and journalists would use.

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Anonymous

It seems that there is no dictionary stating that the noun 'education' alone can be used as an adjective.
It is possible in a phrase like 'the local education authority'.

But also no dictionary lists 'excellence' among nouns being used with 'educational'.

However, the search engines show that 'education

Hi Anon,
I followed your logic which seem reasonable. However, a noun can be used as "attributive" modifier, i.e. a steak house.
Also if you just used "excellence" alone as a search query, you will find many entries with "excellence" being preceded by attributive modifiers.

Anonymous1) the use of 'excellence' as a noun in 'educational excellence' is rel

Thanks, dimsumexpress, so it seems that both 'education excellence' (with noun adjunct as an adjective) and 'educational excellence' are grammatically correct and can be used interchangeably.

After consulting a colleague, I was told that if the noun can form an adjectival form with -al, like education - educational, then the use of noun adjunct should be avoided in general as it is grammatically incorrect and sounds alien, and it may be justified only in specific private cases. Is that correct?

CliveHi, Broadly speaking, that sounds true. Clive

Thanks, Clive. Let's consider some exceptions.
Why 'grammar rule' is in use instead of 'grammatical rule'?