Session Information
23 SES 09 B, Privatisation and Public Education
Symposium
Contribution
In this paper, I draw on a recent mapping of school types and a discussion of their recent massive and purposive diversification and expansion in England (Courtney, 2015) with two aims. First, I seek to argue that the policy goal of privatisation is driving much of this agenda such that England now constitutes an internationally unique test-case of privatisation through school-type diversification. Second, I aim to describe the structural mechanisms through which this is to be achieved. I trace the evolutionary development of the academy template from its status as a species to its contemporary iteration as a genus, with multiple sub-types such as the studio school, alternative provision academy and University Technical College. Importantly, all these construct and target different groups of pupils as markets and so facilitate the entry of a range of private-sector actors into education to meet this ‘consumer demand’. I show also how new multi-school groupings follow a corporate model of acquisition and merger to enable corporate or corporatised actors to increase their portfolio of education provision. Over 400 primary and secondary sources were used to construct and/or inform the typologies which underpin this analysis. Examples of the former include Acts of Parliament, ministers’ speeches, policy texts, White Papers, materials from non-departmental public bodies such as Ofsted, the National College, and academy trust/sponsor websites; secondary sources include scholars’ interpretations of these; and legal and education blogs. The findings presented here are significant in their forensic empirical contribution to scholarly understanding of the relationship between the structural reform of schooling provision and a neoliberal policy framework. In locating the analysis in the pioneering English case, the findings provide early and vital insights to scholars internationally, where neoliberalism is being enacted in diverse forms but with similar objectives of moving capital to the private sector and removing “publicness” from education.
References
Courtney, S.J. (2015). Mapping school types in England. Oxford Review of Education, 41(6), 799-818.
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