The expansion of private sector involvement in state-funded schooling is a global phenomenon, typified in educational policy by publicly funded charter schools in the United States, government establishment grants to non-state schools in Australia, privately governed state-funded free schools in Sweden, and the development and expansion of academy schooling in the state sector in England. In this paper I argue that relationships between public and private interests require consideration beyond recognition that such relationships represent an erosion of the public good. The reported research investigates the nature and quality of compromises made by privatised schools in pursuit of social justice. This work is significant in an increasingly privatised schooling sector where schools that have a commitment to equality must negotiate some form of compromise between their values and the prevailing competitive norms of the market. In England there are now more state-funded private ‘academy’ schools in the secondary school sector than traditional state-funded, local authority maintained schools. While there is considerable research undertaken on the new academies, existing privately-funded mostly fee-paying schools also provide a context of interest to those investigating the effects of privatisation upon the public interest. Within this sector there are well established schools where private interests are fully embedded in all operations of schooling. The research focuses upon private fee-paying schools that are committed in some sense to equality, and thus represent a compromise made between the individual and common good, drawing parallels between these established schools and the new state-funded private sector.

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