Commercialisation and privatisation have a serious impact on students, communities and public education systems. We use research as a guide to inform the campaign and create an accurate picture of trends, tendencies and outcomes.
Over the last few decades, pro-privatisation policies have taken a central place in many processes of educational reform on a global scale. In Latin America, these policies have assumed a key role in educational reform processes, especially since the 1990s.
This research provides an overview of the trajectories and forms of education privatisation in Nepal, with a special focus on low-fee and chain schools. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the ongoing, critical debate about the relationships between students’ rights to quality education, teachers’ rights to quality working...
The objective of this literature review was exploratory in nature, and because of the depth of the literature (both academic and non-academic) available on standardisation, personalisation and privatisation, this review focuses primarily on scholarly articles and books published in the past decade.
This report reviews and analyses documents related to the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) pilot. The analysis focuses on three key areas: transparency and accountability, students and teachers, and scalability and sustainability.
Since the 1980s, the debate on school vouchers has been prominent along with the more general efforts to institute market forces, school choice, and privatisation in education sectors in many countries.
Pearson, the British-based mega-publisher, testing company, and Third World edu-entrepreneur, has inordinate influence over education policy around the world, yet it also has serious vulnerabilities. Corporate over-reach generates inefficacies that alienate its customer base and contributed to “blowback” campaigns against the company. This essay explores the Pearson and neo-liberal threats...
While education in emergencies has risen as a policy priority in the mandates of international organizations (Menashy and Dryden-Peterson, 2015), the share of total overseas development assistance to education has declined sharply in recent years, with funding persistently low in conflict-affected states (UNESCO, 2015; 2016).
The European Union has answered to the economic and financial crisis, adopting the Europe 2020 Strategy plan for sustainable, smart economic growth. Education, employment, fighting poverty and social exclusion are at the hearth of the Europe 2020 Strategy and the EU-policy making, coordinated through the European Semester.
Bridge International Academies (BIA) is a large and expanding business that provides for-profit private education in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and India. With support and investment coming from global edubusiness Pearson, the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and high profile actors such as Mark Zuckerberg and the...
The study reveals the operations of BIA in Uganda where it sells its version of ‘education,’ or its standardised ‘Academy-in-a-Box,’ to an estimated 12,000 fee-paying students in 63 schools.
The report co-authored by Kamat S., Spreen C.A. and Jonnalagadda I. lays out the broad underpinnings of the corporate interests in for-profit education and how these efforts undermine public education as a fundamental human right.
During the last few decades, the World Bank has become a central actor in shaping the global education policy agenda and is increasingly involved in education to the point of becoming the largest supplier of external funding to the sector. Its growing capacity to shape policy goes far beyond its...
This paper examines how, why, and with what consequences, corporate-led privatisations in Philippine education are taking shape, through an analysis of Affordable Private Education Centers (APEC).
In their latest work, renowned researchers Carolina Junemann and Stephen J. Ball present a compelling read for anyone concerned about the right of every child to a free quality public education. They reveal that there is an ever-growing concern associated with the continual rise of the commercialisation and privatisation in...
In an era of stretched public budgets and reduced taxation revenues, the involvement of private resources is increasingly seen as a strategy to sustain expansion of education opportunities both in quantity and quality. This view is shared not only by governments and industry, but also by many unions.
The trend towards privatization of public education is hidden. It is camouflaged by the language of “educational reform,” or introduced stealthily as “modernization”.