The privatisation of the provision of school places and access to those school places is based on an Education Reform Claimocracy (ERC) that is both contextually sited in national systems and is globally on tour through the crossing of borders. The ERC is rule by assertion. What is known and is worth knowing is proclaimed through what is said and done in offices and classrooms based on: first, that public service education is failing because it is public (owned, funded and based on open access by, for and about the public), where the involvement of the state gives unaccountable power to local politicians, professionals and bureaucrats who conspire to use public processes and funds for their own gain; second, that education is a private good and so the provision of school places in a diverse market and the exercise of consumer choice will efficiently and effectively meet parental requirements for their children; and third, the shift from parents dependent on the state to active traders and deal-makers in the market will revitalise educational services to improve and be more effective, and so those who are employed to provide educational services will be incentivised to supply what is demanded rather than teaching children what parents do not want them to know and what employers and the economy do not require. The talk may be about ‘standards’ and ‘good school places’ for children, but in reality the focus is on the protection, enhancement and legitimacy of hierarchy through organisational and systemic arrangements. Using the case of UK government reform of education in England from the 1980s onwards this paper will examine the unfolding and development of the ERC, whereby right wing ideologues have created a form of social justice that is based on the sovereign individual, whereby forms of taxation are regarded as theft, and consumerism can be deployed to purchase nationality and hence educational products within and external to citizenship. The paper will draw on a range of research evidence in order to focus on counter challenges to this reworking of the conceptualization of social justice, and show how the ERC is subject to question and push back based on forms of intellectual activism.

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