The global expansion of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in primary and secondary education has fostered the emergence of private education institutions publicly funded in all world regions (Verger et al. 2016). In the European context, despite the historical presence of publicly subsidised private providers in a few national educational systems, education PPPs have also experienced an important expansion over the last decades, even in countries previously dominated by a strong public provision. The increasing involvement of non-state providers in education has been frequently accompanied by the adoption or expansion of market mechanisms such as school choice and competition between schools (Hogan and Thompson, 2017; Gingrich, 2011). Despite the popularity and global spread of policy reforms oriented to increase the engagement of private actors in basic education via PPPs, available evidence shows that these policies tend to affect equity negatively. As a response to these equity concerns, different international and national actors have called to adopt regulations and accountability mechanisms to address these equity challenges without undermining the supposed benefits of market-oriented policies (see, for instance, OECD (2017) or World Bank (2018)).

Many agree with the fact that the impact of PPPs over equity depends largely on the characteristics of their regulatory frameworks and accountability policies. Nonetheless, the different policy options and regulatory instruments available to address equity concerns within PPP frameworks have been less systematically examined. Indeed, much of the research on the impact of educational PPPs shows that the negative effects on equity of these policies go far beyond their policy design and are explained by how educational actors enact these policies (Ball, 2003; Waslander et al., 2010). At the same time, regulatory reforms oriented to address the equity challenges posed by education PPPs and the presence of private subsidised schools need to take into account and deal with the capacity of these policies to alter the nature of education and the culture, values and dispositions of a broad range of educational actors (Cribb and Ball, 2005). Finally, it should be noted that policy-design and regulatory efforts do not occur in a vacuum – the regulation of subsidised schools needs to be understood in relation to the institutional, political and ideational environment in which education systems are embedded (West and Nikolai, 2017). In light of this evidence, the capacity of PPPs regulatory frameworks and policy designs to deal with equity challenges is, at least, open as a relevant empirical question and an area to continue inquiring. This symposium aims to analyse the capacity of education PPPs regulatory instruments to inhibit opportunistic behaviours and to improve equity. With this objective in view, the symposium puts together researches that analyse PPP regulations from a comparative approach and by focusing on ongoing policies and debates in different national realities.

The symposium consists of four presentations. The first presentation examines, from a comparative perspective, the models and policy reforms of PPPs’ regulatory frameworks in OECD countries, with a particular focus on European education systems. The second presentation analyses, with a particular focus on equity effects, the regulation of private subsidised schools in OECD countries regarding three domains: selective admissions, add-on tuition fees and for-profit schools. The third presentation explores the policies and the politics of financing private subsidised schools in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Finally, the fourth presentation analyses how middle-class families have responded to the transition from a deregulated to a centralised school admission system in Chile. The complementarity and the diverse range of approaches and national cases included in the symposium will provide valuable insights not only regarding the academic research on the regulation of PPPs, but also in terms of policy implications.

-Ball, S. J. (2003). Class strategies and the education market: The middle classes and social advantage. London, UK: Routledge. -Cribb, A., & Ball, S. (2005). Towards an ethical audit of the privatisation of education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 53(2), 115-128. -Gingrich, J.R. (2011). Making Markets in the Welfare State: The Politics of Varying Market Reforms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. -Hogan, A. & Thompson, G. (2017). Commercialisation in Education: Defining Key Terms. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. -OECD (2017). School choice and school vouchers: An OECD perspective. Paris, France: OECD Publishing. -Verger, A., Fontdevila, C., & Zancajo, A. (2016). The Privatization of Education: A Political Economy of Global Education Reform. Nueva York: Teachers College Press. -Waslander, S., Pater, C., & Weide, M. van der. (2010). Markets in Education: An Analytical Review of Empirical Research on Market Mechanisms in Education. (OECD Education Working Paper Series, No 52). Paris: OECD Publishing. -West, A., & Nikolai, R. (2017). The expansion of “private” schools in England, Sweden and Eastern Germany: A comparative perspective on policy Development, regulation, policy goals and ideas. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 19(5), 452-469. -World Bank. (2018). World Development Report 2018: Learning to realize education promise. Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank.