Privatising Education Policy: Pearson and the rise of edu-business

• In Event: The Global Education Industry (2): Consultancy firms and edu-business selling education reform packages

Abstract

This presentation will document and analyse an increasingly significant aspect of the privatisation of education, namely the rise of edu-business in education policy production and practice, including the quasi-privatisation of the education policy community. We focus here on the case of Pearson and the reworking of its business strategy to reposition the company as an edu-business and as an increasingly influential education policy actor. Here we see Pearson helping to constitute policy problems to which they can putatively sell solutions through their for-profit commercial activities. We focus on the appointment of Sir Michael Barber as Pearson’s Chief Education Adviser, a ‘boundary-spanner’, who having originally worked in the public sector has brought his influential network capital to the education policy work of Pearson. We examine Pearson’s new Efficacy Framework and also The Learning Curve initiative, which constitutes one element of the Framework and represents a new policy genre. The methodology we adopt is network ethnography, where we reflect on the concept of researcher as ‘cyberflâneur’. A series of network diagrams and data from four interviews with Pearson staff are analysed to document the changing role that businesses are playing in education policy processes nationally and globally. We show how changes in the structure and modus operandi of the state and moves toward network governance have enabled this partial privatisation of education policy in the context of globalization. Given these developments, the paper illustrates the necessity of new approaches to critical policy analysis today: approaches that look beyond the national to take in the global, and look beyond the state and international organisations to include a focus on edu-businesses and their emerging capacity for education policy work.

Authors

• Sam Sellar, University of Queensland

• Robert Lingard, University of Queensland

• Anna Hogan, University of Queensland