Session Information
23 SES 09 B, Privatisation and Public Education
Symposium
Contribution
Contracts are a feature of public education, embedded across education institutions, in texts in schools and universities and in practices from leadership, policy to teaching. There is a small but growing body of research that considers the use of contracts in education (see Gibson 2013; Gobby 2013; Rawolle, Rowlands and Blackmore, 2015). The turn toward using contracts as a central mediating mechanism for governing public institutions such as education, known as contractualism, is new, and points to a reshaping of the links between government and public education, and to the kinds of relations within public institutions. In some forms, the turn to contractualism is viewed as a kind of soft privatization, providing a way to hollow out and break apart public education into its constituent services and processes amenable to contracts while arguing that the central direction of the shell of public education is maintained. The move to encouraging public-private partnerships by trans-national actors such as the World Bank illustrates the soft end of the process, where non-core services are tendered out to private companies (Patrinos, Barrera-Osorio and Guaqueta 2009). At the cutting edge of reforms, contracts associated with charter schools in the US, academies in the UK and independent public schools in Australia highlight the wide ranging potential for whole-sale reshaping of education through contractualism. In it most virulent forms, the use of contracts can be seen as an insidious way of rewriting the social contract for education without the need for wider public debate, and of reshaping expectations about what is public about education and deserving of Government support. As such, contractualism seems a technique well suited to political manoeuvring. Outline of the argument This paper considers the links between privatisation and contractualism, building on our previous work theorising contractualism in education (Rawolle, 2013), exploring the link between responsibilisation and contractualism (Rawolle, Rowlands and Blackmore, 2015) and methodologies suitable to the study of contractualism in education (Rowlands, Rawolle and Blackmore, forthcoming). Drawing on this research, this paper considers the connections between privatization and contractualism in relation to three different kinds of contracts: individual contracts, institutional contracts and inter-institutional contracts. The argument explored in this paper is that the spread and impact of contractualism in education hold profound implications for the way people relate and hold themselves accountable, and holds a complex relationship with privatization.
References
Rawolle, Shaun, Rowlands, Julie and Blackmore, Jill 2015, The implications of contractualism for the responsibilisation of higher education, Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.