Philanthropy and charity are increasingly positioned as efficient means to ‘solve’ a variety of public health and public education ‘crises’. This is a new type of neoliberal “social capitalism” (Ball, 2012, p. 66) where ‘new’ philanthropists (including individuals, ‘not-for-profits’, and corporations) collaborate and use business strategies to increasingly shape school-based solutions to public health imperatives. One such public health issue that has captured the interests of philanthrocapitalists is children’s mental health. This has resulted in a diverse range of mental health programmes and resources being implemented in schools across the globe, such as a mindfulness programme in New Zealand, resilience teaching resources in the United Kingdom, mental wellbeing tracking software in Australia, an app-based emotion education programme in Ireland, and numerous others forms of intervention and ‘education’.

In this paper I draw on Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality and Li’s (2007a) practices of assemblage to shed light how a number of organisations employ charity and philanthropy as a means to govern themselves and others. Specifically, I demonstrate how disparate organisations, including charities, local businesses, multinational corporations, social enterprises, government agencies, and philanthropic foundations, have been able to forge alignments through a shared interest in children’s mental health. This is a profitable process for those with the ‘will to improve’ (Li, 2007b), especially when these authorities are simultaneously able to (re)produce the notion of a mental health ‘crisis’ and propose their own solutions. However, even though these types of multi-sector partnerships are becoming commonplace in education and are seen to be a ‘win-win’ for multisector players, they may also be ‘dangerous’ for schools, public education, and democratic social change.

This paper demonstrates how the boundaries between multiple sectors continue to be re-drawn as new forms of governance, in particular philanthropic governance, re-shapes the provision of mental health programme in schools. This makes the work of charities and philanthropists highly visible (and acceptable, even desirable) in public education, while “surreptitiously embedding forms of privatization in education systems” (Srivastava & Baur, 2016, p. 434). As Bloom and Rhodes (2018) argue, “Philanthrocapitalism is about much more than the simple act of generosity it portrays itself as, instead involving the social inculcation of neoliberal values” (p. 192). The ‘gift’ of mental health programmes to schools represents new forms of ‘hidden’ and ‘creeping’ philanthropic privatisation in education (see Ball & Youdell, 2007; Powell, 2014) – yet another chapter in “the broader assault on public and critical education and the aspirations of a critical democracy” (Saltman, 2010, p. 13).

Drawing on data collected from a range of sources, including empirical investigation, academic commentary, government reports, media releases, and curricular materials, this theoretical paper conceptualises school-based mental health programmes and resources in line with Michel Foucault’s (1991) description of the nature and function of governmentality. The notion of governmentality enables us to view government as not the sole preserve of a repressive, coercive, controlling state, but rather a modern form of government that employs various techniques in order to work ‘at a distance’ on citizen’s conduct (Rose, 1999). Using governmentality as a theoretical lens, I cast children, as both current and future citizens of advanced neoliberal societies, as specific targets of this type of governmental intervention. Foucault (1991, p. 102) argued that government is undertaken by an ‘ensemble’ of institution, authorities, and agents, using a range of technologies, strategies and discourses, in an attempt to ‘conduct the conduct’ of individuals towards definite, albeit unpredictable, ends (Dean, 2010). Following Li (2007a) and the work of other governmentality scholars (e.g. Miller & Rose, 2008), I employ the concept of the ‘governmental assemblage’ as an analytical device to explore philanthropic governance (Ball & Olmedo, 2011) and the (re)shaping of mental health programmes in schools. To analyse this governmental assemblage, I also draw on Li’s (2007a) ‘practices of assemblage’: forging alignments, where I interrogate “the work of linking together the objectives of the various parties to an assemblage, both those who aspire to govern conduct and those whose conduct is to be conducted” (p. 265); rendering technical, which encompasses “extracting from the messiness of the social world, with all the processes that run through it, a set of relations that can be formulated as a diagram in which problem (a) plus intervention (b) will produce (c), a beneficial result” (p. 265); and, anti-politics. This latter practice is critical, and a key danger of philanthrocapitalism, where vital political questions are reimagined as simply “matters of technique” (p. 265). By critically examining how the governmental assemblage ‘works’ in the philanthropic provision of mental health programmes, I am able to demonstrate how interconnected notions of charity and philanthropy bring together an array of organisations and actors that are enabled to govern both the ‘problem’ of children’s mental health and market-based ‘solutions’.

One of the significant ‘dangers’ of philanthropy and charity in the shaping of mental health programmes in schools is that essentially political questions are reduced to ‘simple’ matters of technique as non-political solutions. Drawing on Ferguson (1984), Li (2007b) refers to this practice of assemblage as anti-politics, a practice that may work to enable authorities to “exclude the structure of political-economic relations from the diagnoses and prescriptions” (Li, 2007b, p. 7). In the case of philanthropic mental health interventions in schools, socio-political forces (such as the determinants of children’s mental health) are rendered technical. This further ensures that any failures of proposed philanthropic solutions can be re-imagined by teachers, principals, students, external providers, CEO’s, charitable trusts, and children as superficial issues, rather than fundamentally political ones (see Li, 2007b). By rendering the problem of children’s mental health both anti-political and technical, authorities are able to close down challenges to dominant discourses of mental health; discussions about the place of charities (and their private ‘partners’) intervening in public education; and resistance against powerful determinants of children’s (ill)health, such as poverty, social inequities, consumerism, and capitalism, As James Davies argues, this is a "process by which suffering is conceptualized in ways that protect the current economy from criticism—namely, as rooted in individual rather than social causes, which means we must favor self over social reform’" (Garson, 2023, para. 12). Indeed, a main conclusion of this research is that the philanthrocapitalist efforts to ‘teach’ children about mental health acts as a new form of 'mental healthism' that is deployed to protect key authorities from critique. This disguises the social forces and processes that systematically promote ill-health ‘often for private advantage’ (Crawford, 1980, p. 368), and shifts the responsibility and blame for ill-health onto individuals, including children.

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