New Forms of Education Governance and their Implications for Social Justice in a Globalising World

• In Event: Citizenship and Democratic Education SIG Highlighted Session: Critical scholars/activists in education: current challenges and possibilities

Abstract

The structures, processes and practices of education governance frameworks matter, because they shape the form, pattern and scope of education policies and practices, the opportunities they provide, and the outcomes they enable. Education governance frameworks therefore, both intrinsically and necessarily, have social justice implications in that they structure, and are ‘strategically selective’ (Jessop, 2005) of, some interests, life chances and social trajectories over others. This paper will explore the social justice implications of two, ‘linked’, governance developments which have been instrumental in reshaping many education systems throughout the world: the ‘privatising’, and ‘globalising’ of education (Klees, Stromquist and Samoff, 2012). To do this I draw upon Iris Marion Young’s concept of ‘the basic structure’ and her ‘social connection model’ of responsibility (Young, 2006a; Young 2006b) to develop a relational account of justice in education governance frameworks. The paper will be developed in the following way. I begin by outlining a relational approach to social justice drawing on the work of Young. I then suggest a way of looking at education governance as a set of distributional/relational, practices and the selectivities that are promoted as a result of neo-liberalism as a political project. The final section of the paper explores the social justice implications of several different forms of privatisation in education governance frameworks as a means of illustrating what a relational account might offer.

Author

• Susan Robertson, University of Bristol