With the dismantling of the welfare state, we have witnessed a significant retrenchment in the provision of educational, social and health services, and a shift towards a patchwork of providers across European nation states (Ball 2012). The global financial crisis gave a new impetus to the retraction of social protection systems and the dismantling of public education (Lawn 2013; Jones and Traianou 2019). European governments typically responded to the financial crisis by introducing austerity regimes in public services and by increasingly transferring the delivery of services to a competitive market of non-state providers (Youdell and McGimpsey 2015; Jones and Traianou 2019).

A characteristically different mode of governing public services has developed in the wake of the financial crisis and the political victory of right-wing populism in Hungary. This political project, discursively framed as an exemplar of Christian democracy, as key public officials have repeatedly stated, is substantiated by the ‘strategic partnership of the church and the state’. In exchange for providing ideological resources, political support and legitimacy to the nationalist populist government, historical, ‘recognized’ churches are administering a growing share of publicly financed services in welfare and education services (Ádám and Bozóki 2016), including schools and kindergartens, early childhood education services, after-school programmes, foster care and child protection services. Hence, instead of opening up towards market providers or the civil society, legislative and budgetary changes offered favourable conditions for recognized churches to take over public services.

This governing strategy had twofold structural effects. On the one hand, in many localities, church-run schools serve the separation demands of the non-Roma majority and thus contribute to the exacerbation of educational segregation and inequalities of access to quality education. On the other, with generous government support, Christian churches have taken over a significant number of ethnically segregated schools and have become invested in running after school and early childhood development programs in disadvantaged communities. Moreover, lately the Order of Malta has been entrusted with launching a model community development program in the 300 most deprived communities of the countries. This presentation focuses on the latter process asking how this specific model of outsourcing welfare and education services has reshaped relations between the state, church and citizens, and how it enacted the government of disadvantaged children in particular.

The analysis will concentrate on the discursive shift in Hungarian education policy in contrast to the previous policies and also aims to reconstruct important shifts in the policy discourse over the last decade. The social-liberal government in power between 2012-2010, aligning their policies with EU guidelines and their discursive framings of social inclusion and Roma integration, had introduced policies aiming at the desegregation of the school system and at creating socially inclusive communities in schools. The neoconservative education administration in power since 2010 has abandoned this approach and instead, following a separate but equal principle, have been arguing for individual development and compensation on the one hand and the benefits of ‘caring segregation’ in ethnically segregated schools run by church maintainers on the other. Church policy makers and policy documents frame educational activities in disadvantaged and Roma communities and ethnically segregated schools as missionary and pastoral work. Both of these discursive framings fundamentally reconceptualise the relationship between welfare and educational service providers and recipients, the criteria of deservingness, as well as the meanings attached to schooling and learning.

This presentation is part of a broader postdoctoral study exploring the increasing involvement of the Christian churches in education provision in Hungary. The method of analysis for this presentation is discourse analysis and document analysis. On the one hand, in order to reconstruct the national education policy discourse, I will analyse key speeches of the educational administration and education policy documents issued by the government. On the other, I will analyse key national and regional policy documents issued by the relevant churches focusing on their work in disadvantaged communities and in schools in particular. Since the next phase of the research will consist of in-depth interviews with education policy makers at the church administration and three local case studies, the sample will involve the education policy documents issued by the five most active denominations (Catholic, Greek Catholic, Calvinist, Baptist church and the Order of Malta) and the documents and websites of the institutions at the three local sites.

We are currently witnessing a decisive shift from a civic model of welfare provision to a spiritual or caritas model of governing disadvantage communities and children. The presentation aims to theorize this unfolding model of spiritual governing and the new relationship between the state and the church in Hungary. The presentation also aims to contribute to the existing but not particularly extensive scholarship on how neoconservative educational governments problematize and address educational disadvantage (Jones, 2014; Buras and Apple 2008; Apple, 2009; Buras, 2008; Neumann et al., 2020). While some findings about the transfer of neoconservative discourses and policies can be related to this scholarship which mostly discusses Anglo-American contexts, in terms of the changing relations between the state, the church and the citizens, Hungary characterizes a distinctively different model of neoconservatism and coopting religion in education, which may be more similar to the transformations we are witnessing in Turkey (Yabanaci and Taleski, 2017) and Poland (Cervinkova and Rudnicki, 2019).

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