The relentless advance of a neoliberal reason continues to undermine education as a social good (Apple, 2013; Giroux 2011). The systematic withdrawing of the state is replaced by undeterred entrance of private actors and organisations in public education, undermining equal opportunities and access to services based on principles of universalism (Carter, et alii, 2010). In many OECD countries, education is being rethought as an individual investment according to the competence paradigm (Biesta, 2015) and ableist assumptions (Beauchamp-Pryor, 2012; Dolmage, 2017), competitiveness between schools, teachers, and students increasingly stimulated by cyclical austerity policies and finally, education workforce reshaped by discourses of performativity (Ball, 2003, 2015). In such a scenario, the role of unions has being increasingly weakened, in the name of individualised injustices that are dismembering the once united school community (Cini & Guzmán-Concha, 2017; Compton & Weiner, 2008; Stevenson, 2015). 

In these shifting conditions, unions operating across different countries and educational levels see traditional models of industrial actions and strategies of collective bargaining perishing under increased managerial control and demands of neoliberal performativity of the school community (Verger et alii, 2016). This raises questions about how have unions across different contexts and educational levels been shaped by these processes of privatisation in education? How have their practices of resistance been changed and moulded by the neoliberal drivers in schools’ governance?

This panel attempts to provide answers to these questions by presenting European and international case-studies encompassing the perspective of students’ unions, unionised teachers and representatives from schools’ unions. By exploring the different forms, and changing patterns in practices of resistance, the three papers, all drawing on interviews with directly implicated, and affected, education subjects, expose the working of processes of privatisation in education and the tensions between individualised and collective struggles of Chilean teachers, English disabled students, and Italian education unionists.

It aims to open a discussion on the role of politics and the renewed meaning of resisting education privatisation by exploring i) how processes of decentralisation and discourses around school autonomy in Italy have engendered a pervasive culture of evaluation and managerialism, which triggered processes of decollectivation and individualisation of the school community and brought to the emergence of local loci of mobilisation and renewal of forms of industrial action and social dialogue; ii) how new forms of activism have emerged within teacher unions in Chile, which focused their struggle in the pedagogical field as a site to resist the deep privatisation of the Chilean education; iii) how disabled students unions’ resistance builds on the crucial role of the community in counter-attacking the pervasive financial cuts in disabled students’ allowances in English higher education, exposing the intersected power of in situ and online activism which simultaneously borrows from the neoliberal toolbox of practices, resists and trespass it by means of lobbying, exploitation of existing hierarchical structures, and online and offline cooperation.

The panel aims to discuss the workings of neoliberalism and managerialism in education and the effects that years of corrosive processes of privatisation and managerialisation had on the strength of collective actions and on state’s commitment to public, socially just education and fair working and studying conditions. By enabling critical reflections on the role of politics, collectivity and on the meaning of resisting, it strives to open a debate on renewed strategies and cross-fertile contaminations across European and international teachers, students, and unions to rethink the present and the future of public education and what it means to thrive collectively (Moe & Wiborg, 2017).

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