Federal and highly decentralized political systems open different spaces to interpret, adapt, and enact international policy trends and ideas within the same territory. Spain, a country with a highly decentralized educational system and contentious territorial politics, is a very suitable case to analyze these dynamics. Spain and its different…

The New Education Policy (NEP), 2020, adopted by Government of India, envisages significant and far-reaching reforms in higher education sector in India. In this article, I foreground certain peculiar features of the process of massification of higher education in India, including privatisation and fragmentation. I locate the political economy of…

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same…

Privatization of education has become a prevalent global trend, representing a significant shift from viewing education as a public good to considering it as a private commodity. This transformation is closely tied to the modernization of the state under the principles of neoliberalism. A comprehensive analysis, as presented in this book using…

Symbolic of the rise of neoliberal principles in Irish education policy, there is now a move towards advancing school autonomy and decentralizing decision-making to individual schools, possibly emulating the academy model that has become widespread in England. Increasing the freedom and independence of schools may involve using private actors to…

Controversy is intensifying with the rapid spread of charter schools and their domination of the education reform agenda. As charter enrolment increases in the USA, inequities in education worsen. This article contributes to the debate on contemporary education policy by critically examining charter issues from the US literature and stakeholder…

This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the…

This article examines the impact of academisation on English Sixth Form Colleges through the lens of the Principals and Governors who lead such organisations -- those who have decided to opt for academisation, and those who have not. A comprehensive survey of the Principals or Chairs of 35 Sixth Form Colleges, representing all regions of England,…

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

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 paper explores perceptions of work intensification around the world. Underpinning this analysis is C. Wright Mills' (1959) argument that many personal troubles are public issues, and the notion that a significant dimension of the privatisation of public education, a concern of public education advocates worldwide, is the ways in which school…

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…

The education system in England, along with the leadership and management of its schools, has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, heavily influenced by key features of the private school sector. However, in this article, it is argued that the strong policy focus on autonomy and diversity was in fact an accentuation of the historical…

Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper…