“If anyone sells British education to the Chinese, it will be the Swedes”- Mapping Education Policy Retailers on the Move

Author(s):

Linda Rönnberg(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 04 B, Networks, Privatisations and Governance

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

09:00-10:30

Room:

418.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Anna Tsatsaroni

Contribution

Education has become a ‘commodity’ that can be ‘exported’ and Sweden plays a role in this global competitive game. The first part of the title is a quote by Fraser Nelson (2013), editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, pointing to the Swedish system of school choice that was used as a policy justification by the Conservatives prior the 2010 election and the subsequent English free schools policy (Walford, 2014). Indeed, it can be seen as quite a puzzle why ‘social democratic Sweden’ became a reference society (Sellar & Lingard, 2013) on marketization of public welfare to liberal England (Baggesen Klitgaard, 2008; Hicks, 2015; c.f. Erixon Arreman & Holm, 2011) and thus, in the words of Fraser, how come Swedes will be the ones selling British Education to China.

In Sweden, far-reaching choice reforms were initiated in the early 1990s, turning the Swedish school system into “one of the world’s most liberal public education systems” (Blomqvist, 2004, p. 148). Swedish parents are free to choose any school for their child free of charge, public as well as tax-funded free schools. The independent education providers are even allowed to withdraw profit. As a result, for-profit school chains have flourished and they have also gone abroad to sell and market their services and Swedish school chains now operate globally in for instance England, USA and India. Even if both the political left and centre-right contributed to making these reforms happen, the non socialist government in office 1991-1994 took considerable measures to break the state monopoly in Education (Lundahl, 2002). Since then, several actors that worked at or close to the Ministry of Education at that time have been quite active in setting up their own for-profit school companies and school chains: They have acted as ‘policy retailers’ for the Swedish model (and their companies) abroad (Rönnberg, 2014).

As pointed out by for instance Ball (2012), national and global flows of ideas, actors and organisations, including profit-making companies, all help sustain and reinforce the ever expanding global edu-business. New actors become engaged in creating and implementing policy, embedded within larger governance networks. They become carriers of different ideas, also across national borders. They act as policy brokers as they move in different policy spaces and their expertise is shared, promoted or even sold (c.f Grek et. al., 2009) – they are acting as ‘policy retailers’ - also on a global scale.

This paper is interested in the work and doings of actors of and in the borderless and international flow of policy, exploring how policy retailers carry agendas of educational marketisation and their attempts to ‘export’ such ideas. The aim is to describe and analyse the connections, movements and exchanges of education policy retailers, often with commercial interests, in the transnational flows of policy ideas and services. This is done by empirically studying how a number of Swedish policy retailers market policy ideas about free schools and related services.

The paper draws on theoretical resources from the education policy literature conceptualising the changing and borderless nature of the growing ‘edu-business’ (Ball, 2012; 2009; 2007; Ball & Junemann, 2012; Junemann & Ball, 2013; Lingard & Sellar, 2013), as well as work on policy borrowing and travelling policy (McCann & Ward, 2013; Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2012; Grek et. al., 2009; Ozga & Jones, 2006).

Method

The paper seeks inspiration from the “method of network ethnography”, a qualitative and thick mapping by following actors, relations and networks (Junemann & Ball, 2013, p. 424; Ball & Junemann 2012; Ball, 2012). In particular, the ways in which policy retailers travel with and through policy are of interest here; to map their actions, connections and locations - how they carry and market policy, capital and ideas. This paper makes use of the full-text media database Factiva as a way of collecting relevant material about the policy retailers’ moves. The database includes over 30 000 sources such as newspapers and journals, but also radio transcripts, etc., worldwide in more than 30 languages, also those with a pay-wall. It is also possible to include blog posts etc. and other social media related outlets in the searches. The database will be searched by keywords such as ‘Sweden’ and ‘free school/s’, but also the names of identified retailers (see the preliminary empirical illustration in the conclusions/expected outcomes section). An initial and pilot-oriented search has concluded that it is possible to find relevant material on both persons and places in the media texts generated from Factiva. The material collected from Factiva is then, if necessary, also complemented by other internet database searches as well as other secondary sources for instance scholarly literature and government reports etc.

Expected Outcomes

This paper wants to highlight the role and doings of actors in the making, remaking and assembling (McCann & Ward, 2013) of policy. In particular, a number of Swedish educational policy retailers have been mapped and analysed – thereby highlighting how the original free school ‘architects’ on the ‘domestic arena’ later travelled as ‘transnational missionaries’ retailing not only certain policy solutions but also their own commercialized education services. For instance, and as a brief empirical illustration, Anders Hultin was one of the designers behind the Swedish free school reforms when he worked at the Ministry of Education. Together with other colleagues at the Ministry, he then founded the profit-making school chain Kunskapsskolan in 1999. He then went to England to market the policy idea of Swedish for-profit free schools as well as to establish the company on the English and then on other foreign educational ‘markets’. Other and similar examples include former government official Odd Eiken and political PR consultant Peje Emilsson. Previous research on the puzzling nature of the far-reaching Swedish marketization in education has tended to turn to structural, institutional and/or party political considerations and contexts (Baggesen Klitgaard, 2008; Hicks, 2015). This paper has argued that the actors and their moves and embeddedness within networks also are important pieces of the puzzle when understanding and analyzing the extensive marketisation in the Swedish case. In addition, the paper has highlighted the importance of mapping policy retailers and their domestic and global moves as they go on trade routes – thereby carrying, influencing and (trans)forming the growing global edu-business.

References

Baggesen Klitgaard, M. (2008) School vouchers and the new politics of the welfare state. Governance, 21(4), 479–498. Ball, S. J. (2012) Global Education Inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. London: Routledge. Ball, S. J. (2007) Education PLC. Understanding private sector participation in public sector education. Abingdon: Routledge. Ball, S. J. & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press Blomqvist, P. (2004) The choice revolution: Privatization of Swedish welfare services in the 1990s. Social Policy & Administration, 38(2) 139–155. Erixon Arreman, I. & Holm, A.-S. (2011) Privatisation of public education? The emergence of independent upper secondary schools in Sweden. Journal of Education Policy, 26(2), 225–243. Grek, S., Lawn, M., Lingard, B., Ozga, J., Rinne, R., Segerholm, C., & Simola, H. (2009). National policy brokering and the construction of the European Education Space in England, Sweden, Finland and Scotland. Comparative Education 45(1), 5-21. Hicks, T. (2015). Inequality, Marketization, and the Left: Schools Policy in England and Sweden. Accepted for publication in European Journal of Political Research. Junemann C. & Ball, S. J. (2013). ARK and the revolution of state education in England. Education Inquiry 4 (3), 423-441. Lingard, B. & Sellar, S. (2013). Globalization, edu-business and network governance: the policy sociology of Stephen J. Ball and rethinking education policy analysis. London Review of Education, 11 (3), 265-280. Lundahl, L. (2002). Sweden: Decentralisation, deregulation, quasi-markets – and then what? Journal of Education Policy, 17(6), 687–697. McCann, E. & Ward, K. (2013) A multi-disciplinary approach to policy transfer research: Geographies, assemblages, mobilities and mutations, Policy Studies, 34(1), 2–18. Nelson, F. (2013). Will Michael Gove’s schools revolution be just another false start? The Daily Telegraph 18 April, 2013. Ozga, J. & Jones, R. (2006) Travelling and embedded policy: the case of knowledge transfer. Journal of Education Policy, 21(1), 1–17. Rönnberg, L. (2014). Marketisation on Export. Swedish Free Schools as Global Edu-business? (Paper presented at the European Conference of Educational Research in Porto, Portugal, September 2-5, 2014. Sellar, S. & Lingard, R. (2013). Looking East: Shanghai, PISA 2009 and the reconstitution of reference societies in the global education policy field. Comparative Education, 49(4), 264–485. Waldow, F. & Steiner-Khamski, G. (Eds) (2012). World Yearbook of Education: Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education. London: Routledge. Walford, G. (2014). Academies, free schools and social justice. Research Papers in Education, 29(3), 263-267.

Author Information

Linda Rönnberg (presenting / submitting)

Umeå University, Sweden

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