This paper focuses on an area of privatisation that has not to date received significant attention in educational research: the privatisation of infrastructure, facilities and maintenance, and in particular the labour of cleaning. Analysing the case of Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate how successive governments have defended the privatisation…

This article sets out to demonstrate the considerable extent to which the New Zealand school system has become saturated by private interests, and to explain this development over time. It is the first such overview of the privatisation of schooling in the New Zealand context. The analysis illustrates that the rise of private actors has involved…

This paper discusses the various ways privatisation processes affect Irish education. Due to the long history of considerable church involvement, the notable absence of middle tiers of governance, and more recently, the embrace of neoliberal principles, in large part due to and for economic reasons, the Irish education system represents a…

This article focuses on the relation between new public management (NPM) reforms and changing patterns of industrial relations (IRs) and social dialogue in the Italian education system. Drawing on data from the research project 'Social dialogue and industrial relations in education: The challenges of multi-level governance and privatisation in…

This study examines the changing style, scale, and scope of raising private funds to provide resources for public schools. In particular, we focus on school fundraising, especially the role of discourse in scaling up school fundraising practices to facilitate education privatisation. Drawing from Stephen Ball's policy sociology, and employing…

K-12 public education finance policy in the province of British Columbia, Canada, responsibilises school district administrators to engage in competitive entrepreneurial practices, not only to increase public funding, but also to generate supplementary funding from private sources. We focus specifically on the generation of revenue from…

Parent involvement in their child's schooling is routinely celebrated and emphasised in government education policy in many countries. We take a critical lens to examining parent involvement by investigating voluntary parent fees in public secondary schools, and how these fees are patterned by school socioeconomic status (SES). In Australia, where…

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are becoming increasingly important participants in educational programmes and implementing education policy. This study explores governmental policymakers' perceptions and reactions to NGO involvement in the implementation of education policy. We applied a qualitative research method, conducting in-depth…

This article focuses on the changes that the election of Donald Trump enables in education policy domestically and in education discourse internationally. I argue that Trump's own charismatic leadership style is a distraction from the privatisation that it is facilitating through Betsy DeVos, Trump's appointment as US Education Secretary. I draw…

This article focuses on the increasing centrality assumed by non-educational consultants in the processes of policy design and knowledge production about education in Italy. We identify the recent establishment of the National School Evaluation System as a key policy trajectory and we focus on the case of the last policies to evaluate Italian…

This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of educational governance in the Greek education system through the changes that have been introduced in the field of education administration since 2009 by the then socialist government. Our research aims to contribute to the critical policy literature on the spreading…

This paper argues that English education policy has come full-circle--from the first constitution of a state system of education in 1870 to the beginning of the end of state education in 2010--and that this circularity can be understood in relation to the reluctant state. That is, in the nineteenth century, the English state hesitantly and slowly…

This paper surveys the delivery of school education in Chile over the last half-century. It focuses on evidence provided by recent academic studies on the impact of neoliberal education policies introduced by the military regime in the 1980s, and continued by successive democratic governments. It offers insights into recent popular critiques of…

To what extent school improvement processes can be initiated and sustained from the outside has been a relevant question for policy-makers seeking to increase quality in education. Since 2008, the Chilean Government is strongly promoting the use of external technical support (ETS) services to support school improvement processes, as part of the…

Sometimes an educational idea is inexplicably adopted around the world with remarkable speed and consistency and in the absence of a proper evidence base or with little regard or respect for teachers, students or learning. This paper examines what has arguably been the most contentious and virulent educational reform of the past half-century.…