Various practices of privatisation in education can be seen globally, facilitated and complemented by state restructuring and in some cases the devolution of state authority to schools (Ball & Youdell, 2008). In critical educational policy studies, there is now a well-established literature documenting the practices of education privatisation introduced in education systems around the globe since the 1980s (e.g., Ball, 2007; Lingard, Sellar, Hogan, & Thompson, 2017; Verger, Fontdevila, & Zancajo, 2016). Ball (2007) talks of privatisations in the plural, arguing that while there have always been some commercial aspects to public schooling (e.g., textbooks) what we are witnessing are new and more substantial. For example, educational ‘restructurings’ (Rasmussen, Larson, Rönnberg, & Tsatsaroni, 2015) involve non-educational actors in educational matters, as well as the ‘importing of ideas, techniques and practices from the private sector’ to the public systems and schools (Ball & Youdell, 2008, p. 14). Many governments have recently adopted a new line of privatisation, allowing for third parties’ participation in curriculum delivery in public schools funded by public monies, i.e., New Education Privatisation (NEP) in Burch’s (2009) definition. Within-country NEP, as well as its cross-national development at the government/supranational level, has rightly attracted scholarly attention. However, the conditions which enable its infiltration into individual schools in the complex nexus of global/local relations, and across educational contexts with geo-political as well as economic differences, have not received due attention.

NEP in teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL), an area overlooked in the privatisation research, deserves special attention, as it has a unique relationship with the phenomenon. English language capacity is a crucial, but not readily accessible, social capital to enhance life chances for marginal groups of students and there are social justice implications in provision of this service. It is also the area that the NEP starts or is intensively happening. This symposium, drawing on findings from a comparative, mixed-method research project funded by (blinded for review) will provide an overview of NEP processes in ESOL in the four contexts of Greece, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong.

The papers identify factors that shape the processes and illustrate how global pressures and/or globally circulating ideas interweave with local path dependent factors, leading to adoption of particular forms of privatisation at the school level. Each case is positioned very differently geo-politically, linguistically, and in the motivation, reception, development and practice of educational privatization in delivery of ESOL. Understanding the structural conditions enabling privatisations in each national setting, as well as the different drivers, is an important first analytical step to understanding the phenomenon of privatisations in the specific contexts, at school level. 

Starting with the Chair's brief introduction of the global, educational privatization, each paper will discuss the conditions and ideas that have allowed instances of NEP to enter ESOL at the national, subnational and school levels. The presentations will draw on policy documents and interviews with policymakers. In analysing the structural pathways, Choi’s (2019) categorization of the structure, i.e., time/history, culture, physical space, and discourses – developed drawing on David Block’s (2012) work – will be used. Thematic content analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014) and/or critical policy discourse analysis tools (Fairclough, 2003) are adopted while processing the data inductively, allowing for emerging themes.

The presentations will address the following questions:

1. What NEPs in ESOL have been promoted at the national, subnational and school level, and who are the main players in policy making therein?

2. What structural conditions and motivators have facilitated the involvement of private (or third party) agents in the public schools?

3. What are the discourses that sustain and legitimize NEPs in the school system?

Ball, S. J. (2007). Education plc: Understanding private sector participation in public sector education. London: Routledge. Ball, S. J., & Youdell, D. (2008). Hidden privatisation in public education. Report, Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Block, D. (2012). Unpicking agency in sociolinguistic research with immigrants. In S. Gardner & M. Martin-Jones (Eds.), Multilingualism, discourse, and ethnography (pp. 47-60). Oxon, UK: Routledge. Burch, P. (2009). Hidden markets: The new education privatisation. New York, NY: Routledge. Choi, T. -H. (2019). Structure, agency and the “Teaching English in English” policy: The case of South Korea. In J. Bouchard & G. P. Glasgow (Eds.), Agency in language policy and planning: Critical inquiries (pp. 214-236). Oxon: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London; New York: Routledge. Lingard, B., Sellar, S., Hogan, A., & Thompson, G. (2017). Commercialisation in public schooling. Sydney: New South Wales Teachers Federation. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Rasmussen, P., Larson, A., Rönnberg, L., & Tsatsaroni, A. (2015). Introduction. Policies of ‘modernisation’ in European education: Enactments and consequences. European Educational Research Journal, 14(6), 479-486. Verger, A, Fontdevila, C., & Zancajo, A. (2016). The privatisation of education: A political economy of global education reform. New York: Teachers College Press.