Privatising education, privatising education policy, privatising educational research: network governance and the ‘competition state’

TLDR

The study examines how education businesses participate in public sector education services in the UK and abroad, mapping the various forms of privatization occurring within education and its policy-making. It analyzes these privatization processes across institutional, national, and international policy layers, tracing the roles of education businesses in each context. The analysis reveals a growing diversity and reach of education businesses, showing how partnership rhetoric is framed by corporate expansion, diversification, integration, and profit motives.

Abstract

This paper explores some particular aspects of the privatisation of public sector education, mapping and analysing the participation of education businesses in a whole range of public sector education services both in the UK and overseas. It addresses some of the types of privatisation(s) which are taking place ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘through’ education and education policy, ‘in’ and ‘through’ the work of education businesses. This entails a traversal of some of the multi‐level and multi‐layered fields of policy: institutional, national and international. Such an approach is important in demonstrating the increasing diversity and reach of some of the education businesses and their different kinds of involvements with different institutions and sectors of education. It also makes it possible to set local rhetorics, such as ‘partnership’, within the context of corporate logics of expansion, diversification, integration and profit.