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To cite this article: Stephen J. Ball (2009) Privatising education, privatising education policy,
privatising educational research: network governance and the ‘competition state’, Journal of
Education Policy, 24:1, 83-99, DOI: 10.1080/02680930802419474
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Journal of Education Policy
Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2009, 83–99
Journal
10.1080/02680930802419474
0268-0939
Original
Taylor
102009
24
Prof.
sjohnball2000@yahoo.co.uk
000002009
StephenBall
&ofArticle
Francis
Education
(print)/1464-5106
Policy (online)
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.
Keywords: politics; state; privatisation; policy; education business; public sector
This paper explores some particular aspects of the ongoing privatisation(s) of public
sector education. It expands and develops a set of analyses of such privatisations
begun in previous work (Ball 2007), which mapped and categorised the participation
of education businesses in a whole range of public sector education services both in
the UK and overseas.
This paper addresses some of the privatisation(s), that is, the different forms of
privatisation which are taking place ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘through’ education and education
policy, ‘in’ and ‘through’ the work of education businesses and the actions of the state.
This will entail a traversal of some of the multi-level and multi-layered fields of policy
– institutional, national and international. Such an approach is important in demon-
strating 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, and to relate
these commerical developments to changes in the state.
The privatisation(s) referred to here are complex and multi-faceted and inter-related.
They can be understood in relation to the development of a set of complex relationships
between: (1) organisational changes in public sector institutions (recalibration); (2) new
state forms and modalities (governance, networks and performance management); and
*Email: sjohnball2000@yahoo.co.uk
(3) the privatisation of the state itself and the interests of capital (public services as a
profit opportunity and ‘effective’ public service provision). I shall try to indicate how
each of these processes is embedded in the other and will return to a consideration of
their inter-relationships in the concluding discussion.
What is being argued here is that privatisation is a key strategy in education reform
and the reform of the state, but not always an end in itself, rather part of a ‘judicious
mix’ of political strategies and a changing balance of relations among different kinds
of institutions, apparatuses and agencies (Jessop 2002, 50). On the one hand, there
may well appear to be a logical inevitability to the processes of privatisations in
current political circumstances, a ‘seemingly irresistible pressure’ (Larbi 1999, 5)
towards the ‘obvious’, as I shall indicate later. On the other hand, the institutional
outsourcing market in education in the UK is virtually moribund at present and the
education businesses are pessimistic about the political will for future growth in this
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field of activity. Not all experiments in privatisation are successful or sustained. None-
theless, it is important to attend to the increasing variety of ‘business opportunities’,
including new forms of outsourcing, which are emerging as more of the business of
the education state is divested and ‘privatised’. The trends in each form of privatisa-
tion are different and need to be considered separately and together.1
I will proceed by examining briefly three inter-related layers of policy and
privatisation.
Policy researchers … need to pay more attention to the effects of educational privatization
on local school governance. The research is either silent or offers superficial treatment
of how educational privatization can open doors for outside vendors to exercise political
influence over the design and administration of local accountability reforms. (Burch
2006, 2605)
The recent White paper for schools sets out the Government’s vision for education,
including an ambitious agenda for high standards throughout the whole sector. Tribal’s
range of school improvement services is continuing to grow to meet increasing demand
for both consultancy and managed services. (Tribal Brochure)
Based on research in the USA, Burch (2006) makes a similar point, that is, state
policies can create incentives and pressures for public sector providers to use private
sector services (she looks in particular at the effects in this regard of No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) policies in the USA). She also notes, as above, that vendors of
services ‘have sought to leverage NCLB mandates as part of their marketing strategies’
(Burch 2006, 2582) and goes on to say that:
Some of the most significant developments in educational privatization are occurring out
of the spotlight of the press and academics. Across the country, urban school systems are
relying on the services and products of specialty-service providers to jump-start
compliance with NCLB. These shifts may help some school districts to support more
rapid and flexible exchange of data. However, these developments may also serve to
detract reforming districts from their commitment to improving teaching for traditionally
86 S.J. Ball
underserved students and to building collective capacity to sustain changes over time.
(Burch 2006, 2582)
She identifies four functions which are central to the new educational privatisation.
They are: test development and preparation, data analysis and management, remedial
services and content area-specific programming. US school districts historically have
contracted with outside vendors for services in each of these areas but NCLB has
accelerated this trend considerably. As a result, she goes on to point out that ‘changes
in the field of educational privatization have increased firms’ resource dependency on
the Federal government’ (Burch 2006, 2604). According to one estimate (Jackson and
Bassett 2005), the 45 million tests currently done each year in the USA as part of the
NCLB programme are worth $517 million to the private sector.
The brochures and websites of the UK education businesses present the companies
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as facing both state and schools and as having ready-made or bespoke ‘solutions’ to the
problems of policy – helping schools in ‘raising achievement’ and to ‘transform’ them-
selves and contributing to the raising of national standards. Edison’s consultants are
called ‘Achievement Advisers’ who offer ‘consultancy, coaching and innovation, to
provide a complete package of services and technologies to assist with raising achieve-
ment’. These services are represented in the company’s improvement brands: Cocentra
offers ‘Futureproofing’; Tribal will make you into ‘Pupils’ Champions’; EdisonSchool-
sUK sells the ‘Edison Design’, which includes coaching and performance management
systems; Mouchell Parkman deals in ‘enabling improvement’ and ‘collaborative devel-
opment’; Edunova has ‘Learning Led Design’ and stresses that ‘innovation can only
be effective as part of a process of school transformation if it arises naturally from a
culture that accepts change and continuous improvement as a way of life’ (http://
www.edunova.co.uk); CEA can provide ‘Leading School Improvement Solutions’.
The companies also present themselves in terms of commitments to the public good and
to bringing the public sector into ‘the new’ – saving it from itself and making education
better. ‘PlaceGroup which is part-owned by Mace, is a specialist education company
that works in partnership with its clients to transform education and raise standards in
schools’ (http://www.place-group.com). In their own terms, these companies are part
of a wholesale change in the form and style of public sector institutions and the sector
itself. Their texts are ‘breathlessly enthusiastic’ (Parker 2000, 9), energetic and bold,
they promise and sell ‘solutions’ to the ‘problems’ of the public sector.
HBS Education has a mission to support all parties engaged in raising standards and
transforming the way we learn … Introducing a bold change strategy to transform the
way we teach and learn in this century, requires new ways of looking at problems and
how we solve them … HBS is one of a new breed of solution providers in education.
(Company Brochure)
These solutions typically address what Fullan (2001) calls ‘reculturing’ and they
draw their language and methods from business models of change management .
What are being sold are the necessities of change, a new managerialist language and
a kind of self-belief and self-efficacy – new organisational ecologies and identities.
As LEA and school leaders you are faced with tremendous challenges. In a changing world
full of new ideas and innovations, we can help you develop transformational learning
organisations. (Cocentra Advert TES)
The language and especially the verbs these texts deploy convey a sense of
urgency and speed, they work ‘swiftly and efficiently’ and are ‘focused’, they deliver
Journal of Education Policy 87
… we work with schools who are not content to stand still … provide schools with potent
educational tools … consultancy, professional development and coaching support.
(Edison)
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That particular college is buying forty days, so that’s a lot, that’s three hundred and
twenty hours of our time, to address its bespoke needs. (Tribal Consultant)
88 S.J. Ball
We model best practice … [and] it’s about showing the way, demonstrating it … we’re
an intervention strategy. (Tribal Consultant)
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Edison Design
By combining elements of Edison’s school improvement programme with
McLaren’s range of performance management tools, the partnership provides an all-
encompassing and effective environment for building leadership capacity in schools.
The Department for Education and Skills has increased its spending on private consultants
from £5 million to £22 million in three years, without considering using its own staff.
In a damning report, the National Audit Office, the public sector watchdog, also revealed
that a quarter of the department’s consultancy contracts have been awarded without
being put out to tender.
The department was told by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee in 2002 that
this practice should be reduced. But the DfES has continued to allow its managers to
award contracts worth up to £250,000 without specialist advice or competitive tendering.
(Stewart 2006)
relationships and responsibilities (see Box 1 and Figure 1) as part of loosely coupled,
flexible policy-making networks. Within these diverse roles and relationships they are
at different ‘moments’ suppliers of services, commissioners and brokers.
● Produced with the ODPM, National Procurement Strategy and 4pS – the Part-
nering and Procurement Newsletter.
● DfES and Government for London report on The impact of mobility on service
delivery to London children (2006).
● Membership of the London Child Mobility Group (Alex Chard).
● Two studies, part of HEFCE Equal Opportunities Research Programme: (1)
Cross-sectoral comparative study; (2) Cross-national comparative study.
● Edward Smith, a chartered accountant and a senior partner in Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers (PWC), appointed to the HEFCE Board (2004).
● Report on a Business model for the e-University for HEFCE (2000). Develop-
ment for the HEFCE of a good practice guide on the effective financial
management of HE institutions.
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● Evaluation for the CVCP (now Universities UK) of the extent of overhead
recovery on research contracts with government departments.
● Research report for Universities UK (2007): The economic benefits of a degree .
● Evaluation for the HEFCE of its funding method for teaching.
● A project with HEFCE to develop good practice guidance for risk management
in the sector.
● Working with the Department for Education and Skills, and HEFCE on
monitoring and supporting the consortia implementing the vocationally
oriented Foundation Degree.
● Member LSC internal audit working group (Sarah Nattress).
● Adult Learning Inspectorate – Internal auditors.
● Appointed to support the LSC in developing the business requirements of the
MIAP programme and to procure suppliers to design, build and operate the new
services that will deliver it. Review of the DfES’s relationship with Ufi.
● As part of their Corporate Responsibility Programme, PWC are involved in:
Euro-traveller Challenge – a numeracy-based learning project in partnership
with British Airways and the Hillingdon business partnership with two second-
ary schools, as part of the London Challenge.
● Partnership with VRH (Volunteer Reading Help): 200 PWC staff became
trained volunteers.
● PWC is a national founding member of Cares, a BitC business-led employee
volunteering programme.
● Elsewhere, PWC sponsors the Russian Charity Maria’s Children and supports
the International Finance Corporation project ‘Chance for Success’ and
conducts special programmes at HE institutions in Moscow which help students
gain practical experience in audit and consulting.
● PWC (Singapore) has underwritten the costs of publishing a book documenting
the learning of children from the Child at Street 11 charity.
These many ‘points’ and sites, roles and responsibilities constitute a grid of
Figure 1. PWC, the state and state agencies.
power ‘above, across, as well as within, state boundaries’ (Cerny 1997, 253) through
which a particular form of discourse flows and is distributed, embedded and natura-
lised. This is a discourse of business sensibilities. Through these multiple engage-
ments the particular social and commercial relations enacted through such
sensibilities are insinuated into increasingly more aspects of the education policy and
the practices of educational organisation and control. At the same time, in many
92 S.J. Ball
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instances, the reports and recommendations which are produced create new spaces
and opportunities for influence and for profit for educational businesses . Such
discourses work by arranging and re-arranging, forming and re-forming, positioning
and identifying whatsoever and whosoever exists within its field, and the field of
business activity within education policy is continually expanding.
As at the institutional level described previously, PWC and other companies
provide and enact ‘solutions’ to policy problems which take the form of inserting into
public sector organisations generic organisational relations based on contracts, best
value, partnerships, performance monitoring, management, brokering, etc. These in
Journal of Education Policy 93
their component parts and as a whole constitute a political economy of details and
‘small acts of cunning’ (Foucault 1979, 139) which work as technologies of the
‘modernisation’ and ‘transformation’ of the public sector.10 That is, it is important to
recognise that these relationships take the form of ‘a multiplicity of often minor
processes, of different origin and scattered location across and beyond the state. These
overlap, repeat, or imitate one another according to their domain of application, they
converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method’ (Foucault 1979,
138). They become ‘totally inscribed in general and essential transformations’ (139)
– in this case the firming-up or enterprising of the public sector, and the state itself.
A reiterative stream of ‘solutions’ and ‘best practice’ and ‘evidenced’ develop-
ments are ‘offered’ through reports, ‘research’ and ‘evaluations’ which seem almost
always to privilege further privatisations or ‘business-like’ methods in a series of
moves which are ‘always meticulous, often minute’ (Foucault 1979, 139). There is a
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closed, circular logic, privatisation, both endogenous and exogenous (Hatcher and
Hirtt 1999), which takes on a meta-policy status subsuming almost every aspect of
public services under its rubric. All of this as Foucault puts is ‘apparently innocent,
but profoundly suspicious’ (1979, 139). This is not, as often presented in the traditional
literatures on the state and capital, the general exercise of business influence or
ideology on government and policy or a process of pressure from the outside-in.
Rather the private sector is now part of, and doing the work of the state, in several
respects. As a result, in terms of education policy changes both of first order and
second order interests are served – profit and product. That is, the production of a new
kind of workforce and the production of new ‘policy narratives’.
However, none of this is unique to the UK, although perhaps is more advanced
here. This work of public sector transformation is an international phenomenon, as
Larbi points out in relation to developing societies and ‘crisis’ states. He writes:
Large international management consultants, accountancy firms and international
financial institutions … have been instrumental in the increasing ‘importation’ of new
management techniques into the public sector. They have played an important role in
packaging, selling and implementing NPM techniques, as state agencies contemplating
institutional change or strengthening often enlist the services of expert consultants to
clarify available options – and recommend courses of action. (Larbi 1999, 5)
Like many other education and consultancy companies in the education business,
the reach and interest of PWC in education services now extend worldwide and along-
side projects undertaken for the World Bank, EU and DfID. They are currently involved
in education development and policy work in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Russia
and the former soviet states, and in the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East.
● Nord Anglia’s reputation and expertise with British education gives it a rare
opportunity to capitalise upon the demand in overseas markets for improved
quality in education provision (Company Annual Report 2006, 8).
The companies may or may not be increasing their risk as a result – that remains
to be seen. The increasing international activities of especially US and UK education
businesses (and others like NIIT (India) and Bennesse (Japan)) are in part made
possible by the increasing liberalisation of public services both through national
commitments to GATS and various bilateral agreements, and in the future through
appeals to WTO tribunals,11 as well as the market advocacy of the World Bank and
OECD and financial support of the IFC. We can see something of the increasing global
flow of educational services with two examples of cross-border private participation
(see Boxes 2 and 3).
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Selling services in the other direction is Edison, through its UK subsidiary Edison-
SchoolsUK.
As well as the flow of services between western states, the education businesses
are increasingly active in Asia and developing countries, for example:
China: Cambridge Education trains Beijing inspectors (BMEC)
In May Cambridge Education was invited by the Inspection Office of the (BMEC)
Beijing Municipal Education Commission to run a training course for over 200 of
Beijing’s key inspectors.
David Taylor (ex-Director of Inspection for OFSTED) and Roger Fisher, a veteran
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The training was so positively received that plans are already afoot to bring a team of
Beijing inspectors to the UK where Cambridge Education will create the opportunity for
them to shadow a (mock) inspection. The programme of training in Beijing will be
extended in 2008. (Company Website)
Indeed, Cambridge Education is currently working with:
● National Government of Thailand
● Provincial governments in China
● Education Ministry in Hong Kong
● California
● New Orleans
● City of New York
● DfiD, EC, Word Bank, ADB projects – in Papua New Guinea, Eritrea, Bangladesh,
Cambodia, etc., in partnership with Universities, NGOs and other private
companies.
These kinds of activities entail both ‘policy entrepreneurship’ and at the same time
a process of policy transfer, and perhaps a mechanism of ‘policy convergence’. The
companies are delivering ‘development and aid policy’ (for a potential profit), devel-
oping local policy infrastructures, and embedding prevailing western policy discourses,
directly or as ‘spillovers’ into the local policy systems, working with various ‘part-
ners’.12 This can also be seen as what Kelsey (2006) calls ‘regulatory re-territorialisa-
tion’, which increases the political power and regulatory influence of state, societal and
transnational agents who are able to exert control over territorial assets, as well as
producing infrastructures which are amenable to further business penetration. These
profit-seeking behaviours bring about the insertion and naturalisation of western models
of organisation, education, leadership and employment, and the extension of the
commodification and commercialisation of education, through forms of what Mihyo
(2004) calls ‘intellectual dumping’. In the development of basic educational provision
in many developing societies, private involvement is built into the systems from the
start. Here the private sector is the instrument of a form of re-colonialisation.
Concluding thoughts
What I have started to do here is to sketch in some of the multi-faceted involvements
of private providers in education policy, at different levels and on different scales,
96 S.J. Ball
is, ‘webs of stable and ongoing relationships which mobilise dispersed resources
towards the solution of policy problems’ (Pal 1997). Although as Pal goes on to say:
‘This new situation does not completely overturn conventional policy instruments, of
course, but they will have to be placed within the context of new assumptions – a new
regime’ (Pal 1997, 5, original emphasis). Increasingly, policy-making occurs ‘in
spaces parallel to and across state institutions and their jurisdictional boundaries’
(Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith 2004, 3), and in the process parts of the state and some
of its activities are privatised.
While there has been a massive outpouring of conceptualisation, commentary and
development efforts around the ideas of ‘network governance’ and ‘policy networks’,
the overwhelming bulk of this work excludes or gives only passing consideration to
the participation of private sector actors. Indeed, much of this work reads like a rather
idealistic and ‘heated-over’ pluralism. In some of this work network governance is
also presented as a process of ‘hollowing out the state’. However, these changes in
modality do not signal a thorough-going weakening of the state’s capacity to steer
policy, although internationally this clearly varies from nation to nation. The state is
vigorous within these governance processes. There is no ‘institutional void’ here
(Hajer 2003) rather the reflexive use of decentred guidance strategies like contracting
and performance management. While steering may become more complicated across
the ‘tangled web’ of policy networks (see Figure 1), with the development of an
increased reliance on ‘self-administered’ policy communities, the ‘core executive’
retains a substantial authoritative and coordinating presence over policy and in some
respects (Marinetto (2003) and certainly in education) has achieved an enhancement
of ‘capacity to project its influence and secure its objectives by mobilizing knowledge
and power resources from influential non-governmental partners or stakeholders’
(Jessop 2002, 199).
I have argued that there are a number of interwoven processes involved in the work
of the privatised state and I want to underline these. First, the selling of their retail
services by the education businesses is linked to the New Labour project of ‘transfor-
mation’ through the re-modelling of schools, colleges and universities, the instilling
of new management capacities and the arts of performance management, and the
insertion of narratives of enterprise. These ‘services’ and the work they attempt to do
on and in schools are part of the ‘recalibration’ of state organisations and their ‘organ-
isational ecologies’ (Jessop 2002, 241); they also contribute to the production of new
kinds of public sector subjectivities. In other words, this is part of a process of
enabling organisations and their actors to think about themselves and what they do,
Journal of Education Policy 97
commodification’. The state provides stability and legitimacy and acts on behalf of its
own national businesses to promote and finance educational services, and uses public
policy to stimulate the outward investment dynamic, and as a broker for social and
economic innovations, and is very active in the focused allocation of its resources.
‘There is a wide range of government support measures for exporters, reflecting the
easily identifiable benefits from increased overseas trade’ (Tavares and Young 2005,
12). Globalised capitalism needs the state, first, to restructure and then to enable its
profitable operation and expansion across borders. This is the work of what Jessop
(2002) calls the ‘competition state’. The state acts as a ‘commodifying agent’ render-
ing education into commodity and contractable forms, and ‘recalibrating institutions’
in an attempt to make them homological with the firm and amenable to the processes
of the ‘market form’ thus creating the necessary economic and extra-economic
conditions within the public sector within which business can operate. The state
‘needs a strong economy’ (Kelsey 2006, 4) and capital offers the state a means of
achieving efficiency gains in education, in terms of quality improvement while at the
same time cutting costs (Hoxby 2003), and business does the work of recalibration and
organisational change. There is a mutual conditioning and accommodation. As Burch
(2006) points out and illustrates there is no simple zero-sum process (state or capital)
here but often the emergence of new forms of public–private collaboration. The state
works to develop appropriate meta-capacities and supports the development of ‘new
policy narratives’ which in turn mobilise support behind the expansion of business
opportunities.
Privatisation and the state need to be thought together. The state works to the
extent it can manage the inter-scalar interdependencies among different sites and
spheres of action of policy and service delivery which are generated by diverse priva-
tisations and as Jessop (2002, 2003) puts it: ‘the state retains an important role
precisely because of the development of such regimes’ of governance.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Meg Maguire, Patricia Burch and Miriam David for their helpful
comments on the previous version of this paper. I would like to thank Evi Markou for her help
with some of the searches on which the paper rests.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Patricia Burch for emphasising this point to me.
98 S.J. Ball
2. All the quotations used come from company brochures or website documents and these
were accessed during 2005 – for examples of full documents see: http://www.cocen-
tra.info/gateway/uploads/panda%20leaflet.pdf; http://www.edisonschools.co.uk/; http://
www.prospects.co.uk/data_page.asp?pageID=97&mid=4
3. Patricia Burch suggested the important point to me that in these ‘reculturing’ solutions
‘there is little or no reference to the role of deliberation, collective input into the policy
process’ (personal communication 21 January 2008).
4. Some of these companies are also Inspection contractors; they derive income from both sides
of the Inspection process, in effect working for transparency and opacity at the same time.
5. Primary Review says there is no evidence to back Government claim that testing raises
standards. Children’s reading standards have barely improved in 55 years, despite ministers
spending £500 million on the National Literacy Strategy, the biggest inquiry in primary
education in 40 years has been told (TES, Warwick Mansell, 2 November 2007:
www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2456685).
6. ‘KPMG is committed to helping shape education at both the local and national level. We
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are involved in both policy discussions and implementation to ensure that employability
issues are well represented’ (Mike Rake, Chairman of KPMG International and Senior
Partner of KPMG in the UK). KPMG is Co-Sponsor with City of London Corporation of
an Academy and a Supporter of Every Child a Reader.
7. PriceWaterhouseCoopers worked with 100 primary, secondary, nursery and special schools
across England and Wales to investigate the full range of teachers’ and head teachers’ jobs.
In 2002 PWC produced a report for DfES on the costs of pupils with additional educational
needs.
8. The aim of the evaluation is to assess the overall effectiveness of the initiative, in terms of
its contribution to educational standards, and to examine the impact of key features of
Academies including sponsorship, governance, leadership and buildings.
9. The DfES contracted PricewaterhouseCoopers to produce four separate reports on five
children’s services markets. The markets are: Children’s Homes and Fostering (two
separate but very closely linked markets); Parental and Family Support Services; Positive
Activities for Young People; and Childcare. The objectives of this report are twofold: to
identify the cross-cutting issues common to the markets; and to put forward suggestions for
improvement as inputs into DfES policy thinking.
10. We need to focus here on the ‘stone-cutting’ (Foucault 1979, 139): the detail as well as on
the architecture of the system through the techniques of business accounting – and I
paraphrase Foucault here – a new object is being formed!
11. A plurilateral request on higher education has been tabled at the WTO by New Zealand
supported by 5 other countries, targeting Argentina and 13 other countries for access to the
delivery of private higher education services. The GATS rules on public services state that
once any service is delivered nationally by non-state providers then access by outside
providers cannot be denied. With private providers at higher education and school level,
Argentina and many of the other countries named would appear to have no grounds for
restricting the entry of overseas for-profit providers to their systems.
12. The complexity of these roles, relationships, models of working and underpinning
principles makes it difficult to distinguish between public and private in a simple way.
13. The new policy communities emerging within education policy are both routes of influence
and access for business organisations and business-people and new ways of realising,
disseminating and enacting policy.
Notes on contributor
Stephen J. Ball is Karl Manheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of
Education, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy and author of Education
Plc (2007) and The Education Debate (2008).
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