Commercial actor interests in education, producing and delivering a variety of educational goods and services has gained prominence and impacted on how we perceive education. The Global Education Industry (GEI) has been facilitated by policies of economisation, marketisation and privatisation and the drive for innovation, modernisation, and development (Parreira do Amaral et al., 2019; Verger et al., 2016).  As GEI actors move across the globe, they carry and promote certain ideas of, for instance, what constitutes, ‘successful pedagogy’ or ‘quality education’ - they have a performative role in what education have been, is and should be. This is especially visible through the school improvement and quality assurance industry of audit, accountability, performance measures (Hogan & Thompson, 2021; Lingard, 2011).

Within early childhood education and care (ECEC), focus has mainly been on structural quality (group sizes, education level of ECEC staff, children/adult ratio etc.) whereas so called process quality (the play and learning environment, intensity, and structuration of child-teacher interactions etc.) has received less attention within both research and the wider global discourses on quality (de la Porte et al., 2022; Yerkes & Javornik, 2019). However, with the OECD’s (2022) recent review of process quality in ECEC, this is now changing. But ECEC services, as a sub-segment in the GEI, has not been as much researched as other sectors of education such as compulsory or higher education. Nor has the Scandinavian actors been in focus (for important exeptions Andersen, 2020; Falkenberg, 2022) despite their growing influence of these actors on the global market, especially in northern Europe (Carlbaum & Rönnberg, under review).

In this paper, we explore the quest for preschool quality and the ideational foundation it builds on by using a Swedish for-profit education company, delivering preschool services internationally in four countries as an empirical case. The aim to analyse the flow and use of ideas on preschool quality to understand how edu-businesses draw on global discourses and use them for commercial interests in the context of preschool export. More specifically, we examine the ideas and logics of action in the (commercial) circulation of quality assurance systems between Swedish and Norwegian subsidiaries to the Swedish based edu-business ‘EducaCorp’ (a pseudonym). As such, the paper seeks to facilitate a discussion on the different manifestations and functioning of the GEI in the preschool ‘segment’, holding, we argue, important implications for conceptions on what preschool quality is and should be.

Cross-national flows of policy and ideas in the wider context of marketisation have been the focus in education research in different ways (Ball, 2012; Parreira do Amaral et al., 2019; Robertson et al., 2012; Steiner-Khamsi, 2018; Verger et al., 2016). In this literature, the international flows of ideas and their local manifestations are highlighted, along with how they are carried and enabled by a range of both public and private actors, including commercial companies, that are working to advance and promote certain ideas and products. This links well to our research interest in exploring how certain ideas on quality and QA is mobilised and legitimated across national borders through the work by a commercial actor. With this literature as an important starting-point for our study, we turn to discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008, 2011) in acknowledging not only the important role of ideas, but also to draw attention to three dimensions of ideational power (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016); the ‘power through ideas’ (involving persuasion through ideational elements); the ‘power over ideas’ (how certain ideas make their way in the QA offer) and the ’power in ideas’ (how QA ideational elements contribute to define and constrain (hegemonically) what can be considered, is desirable etc.).

This paper is part of the research projects Going Global (Rönnberg, 2018) and Preschool on export and import (Carlbaum, 2021). Since far-reaching marketisation and privatisation reforms were introduced in Sweden in the 1990s, a for-profit education industry has emerged and some of the largest Swedish free school companies have also started to export their services abroad. One of these is EducaCorp, positioning itself as the largest edu-business in northern Europe. This is a corporate group with a multi-brand strategy with several subsidiary companies providing education from ECEC to adult education as well as selling education goods and services. The company’s international expansion goes back almost a decade with the ‘ambition to create a new Nordic export industry’ (EducaCorp, 2017, p. 7), primarily within the ECEC market. It currently operates 300 ECEC centres in four countries (Sweden, Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands) making it a suitable case for exploring the flow of ideas on quality assurance through Scandinavian corporate actors as part of the GEI. Empirically, we study the circulation of ideas of quality in the setting of preschool export by analysing a variety of materials from EducaCorp and two of its subsidiaries, the Swedish preschool company Manikin and the Norwegian preschool company Seedling Inc. (pseudonyms). We have collected data from the parent company, as well as the subsidiary company websites, including general information, marketing material, annual financial and quality reports, special section reports, and publicly available videos and online seminars etc. Furthermore, we have interviewed 13 representatives from different levels and with different responsibilities within the parent- and the two subsidiary companies focusing on relations, connections, development, cooperation and influence between the different national contexts and preschool practices and ECEC centres in the two national settings. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, and the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, 2017) ethical guidelines were carefully followed. The material has been analysed thematically (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) focusing on the articulations of the need for quality assurance, the described work practices of quality assurance, and how it contributes to, limits and frames ideas on what ‘good quality ECEC’ is and should be in relation to global QA discourses.

Our preliminary analysis indicates that through EducaCorp’s takeover of Seedling Inc, ideas embedded in a global QA discourse came into play and the idea of ‘process quality’ entered quite forcefully, legitimated by and drawing on a previous system used in the Swedish ECEC company Manakin. Drawing on these ideas, Seedling came to assemble its ‘own’ quality system based on, for instance, instruments such as Seedling preschool staff peer-review assessments and external evaluations every second year, etc. Interestingly, the set up and organisation of the Seedling QA system is publicly accessible and available. Rather than to be commodified as an educational good to be sold for potential short-term profit, it is commodified as a competitive market advantage in recruiting children and staff – and to secure their position as a legitimate actor in the ECEC market. Seedling Inc represent itself as ‘the Actor’ driving preschool development and improvement, as a means to position themselves and to legitimise their own existence as a commercial preschool operator in a context where such actors are increasingly questioned in both Sweden and Norway. In fact, the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training is currently developing a national process QA system for all Norwegian preschools – with the Seedling Inc system as the model. We argue that such private-public interdependencies between and across organisational and national boundaries (c.f. Ball, 2012) is illustrative of how ideas travel in the GEI and come to influence what is perceived as good quality education as well as how ECEC is to be assessed and improved. We finish by discussing how this can be understood in relation to the three dimensions of ideational power (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016).

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