The imagined public of schooling

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: (En)countering the pre-owned future of public education

Proposal

The ways that governments in the Western world think about the ‘public’ in the context of public policy, especially regarding health and education and their public institutions, lays a particular claim to the future of these systems. The emergence of new private actors, and indeed networks of actors, work in partnership with governments through public policy. Think-tanks, Not-For-Profits, Inter-Governmental Organisations, venture philanthropists, lobby groups and corporations with educational interests are just some of these actors involved in setting the policy agenda, proposing policy solutions and offering services that often lay claim to a radically different structuring of these services. The reliance on public/private partnerships to fund infrastructure and provide services and the emergence of what Ball (2007) has termed the Education Services Industry (ESI) that deliver services in schools and systems highlight that education has become an important field for profit making by private organisations. In these systems that are allowing greater private investment and involvement, it is not that private interests replace governments, rather they work for them so that the state functions as a procurer and manager of these new private actors (Burch, 2009). There has been a blurring of the distinction between public and private interests in education, with a resultant concern that perhaps these categories are no longer fit-for-purpose (Gerrard, 2015).

One example of blurring is the emergence of ‘alternative provision’ of public schooling. There are many reasons for this emergence - from concerns regarding education outcomes with regards to certain disadvantaged groups; to ‘education for all’ arguments that support the establishment of low-fee private and for-profit schools in countries like Ghana; to the school choice movement in countries like the United States and England and their academy schools, free schools and charter schools. In Canada these alternative provisions include ‘alternative schools’ in Toronto and charter schools in Alberta. Many advocates of these alternative schools lay claim to a radically different system for the future; agile, devolved, autonomous and open to private actors yet remained convinced that they are still offering a public education. What, then, is the future of public education?

In this paper data will be presented from interviews (n=61) with principals, politicians, education bureaucrats and union officials in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia and the North East of England. These interviews focused on the ways that participants characterised the ‘publicness’ of their education system in the context of changed provision such as academies, free schools or opening up public systems to greater parental choice. Using Anderson’s (1991) notion of the imagined community, the paper will show that while publicness is still a value in a school system that is much admired and defended, it is difficult to clearly define the characteristics of a public school for those working in systems opened up to private interests and alternate provision.

Authors

• Greg Thompson, Queensland University of Technology

• Kalervo Gulson, University of New South Wales

• Bob Lingard, University of Queensland