Privatizing Education Policy: Pearson and the Rise of Edu-Business

• In Event: The Global Education Industry: Emerging Edu-Businesses and Education Markets

Abstract

Drawing on research interviews, network ethnography and document analysis, this paper will outline and analyse an increasingly significant aspect of the privatization of education, namely the rise of the role of edu-businesses in education policy production and practice, including the quasi-privatization of the education policy community (Au and Ferrare, 2015). The analysis is situated within policy sociology in education and draws on the education policy literature that suggests a move in the mode of educational governance to network or heterarchical governance (Ball and Junemann, 2012), a transition from New Public Management. This mode witnesses a combination of hierarchical and horizontal network relationships stretched globally, so that international edu-businesses, along with international and regional organizations of various kinds are involved in policy processes, alone with more traditional state actors. The enhanced involvement of edu-businesses in these processes is evidence of a move from the privatization of education to privatization in education.

Methodologically, the paper draws on semi-structured interviews, network ethnography and thematic document analysis. In utilizing network ethnography to construct network maps of the relevant policy players within heterarchical modes of educational governance, we also reflect methodologically on the concept of network researcher as ‘cyberflaneur’. The empirical focus is the world’s largest edu-business, Pearson. We focus on the way Pearson has reworked its business strategy through an analysis of their annual reports and media releases to show the repositioning the company as an edu-business with a global reach and seeking, as the company itself articulates, to help constitute a global education policy agenda.

We see Pearson helping to constitute policy problems for education systems to which they can putatively sell solutions through their for-profit commercial activities. We note the complementarity between Pearson’s strategy in the Global North linked to top-down, test-based accountability and in the Global South in support of low-fee for-profit private schools with the potential for these agendas to put in place across the globe. We also note how Pearson has clearly articulated its stance on corporate social responsibility, which it has sought to ‘mainstream’ across all pf its education activities. We also focus on the significance of the appointment of Sir Michael Barber, former senior public servant in the Bair New Labour government in the UK as Pearson’s Chief Education Adviser. We see Barber as a ‘boundary spanner’, who has brought his powerful, wide and influential network capital to the education work of Pearson. This is also apparent in our network maps. Against the backdrop outlined to this point, we then focus on analysis of Pearson’s new Efficacy Framework and also The Learning Curve initiative, which constitutes one element of the Efficacy Framework and represents in our account a new policy genre. Given this analysis, the paper argues the necessity of new theoretical and methodological approaches to critical analysis: approaches that look beyond the national to take in the global, and look beyond the state and international governmental organizations to include a focus on edu-businesses and their emerging capacity and strategy for education policy work.

Authors

• Sam Sellar, The University of Queensland

• Robert L. Lingard, University of Queensland

• Anna Hogan, University of Queensland