The increasing presence and influence of international schools is a “well-kept secret” (Hayden & Thompson, 2008) hiding the influence of private organisations on global education policy and outside of national boundaries (Waterson, 2015). The international school sector has increased the non-state actors in global governance of education through privatisation of social service provision with new norms tied to business interests and non-state actors shaping education policy (Gunter & Fitzgerald, 2015). The result of this increasing presence of for-profit education management organisations as authorities on education policy has been significant normalisation of marketisation in education reform around the world. International schools are chronically under-researched, particularly the social processes and influence (Tarc & Mishra Tarc, 2015).

The marketisation of schools occurs in various forms where the lines between public and private provision are blurred (Ball, 2018). With such variety, marketisation may be just one of many interacting influences on schools and teachers’ work. This makes it potentially difficult to research when many confounding factors of governance and operation exist. International schools provide an excellent context in which to research teachers’ work where marketisation is a clear guiding force for school work.

For advocates of creating a market for schools, a competitive market of free enterprise is seen to revolutionise education (Friedman, 1997). The principles of competition, efficiency and accountability structural conditions of markets reinforce principles of rationality, efficiency and accountability. In schools, the market conditions are believed to boost student and school performance as well as the overall quality of education through competition and incentives to satisfy customers while striving to achieve profitable scale (Vander Ark, 2012). While a marketised system of schools is defended as potentially revolutionising education and benefitting teachers, the mechanism for how marketisation affects teachers and their work to obtain this outcome are often unclear. Understanding the work of teachers and schools as workplaces is a necessary step to recognising the process.

Schools are not simply a learning environment housed inside a building, they are workplaces structured by systems, resources, relationships and practises that shape what teachers are able to do and, in turn, what students can learn (Biesta, 2011). An important aspect of research about teachers’ work is the emotional experience of teaching. Teachers’ descriptions of the fulfilment they receive from their work may include pride in their students’ achievement scores or feelings about the events in their teaching career but also key is how teacher’s experience emotions related to the context of their work. In the literature, many different types of emotions are described like hope, passion, emotional labour, burnout and demoralisation among other terms. Within the context of marketisation, it becomes even more important to understand teachers’ work and their workplace. In this research, the marketisation of schools and the implications for teachers’ experiences are the focus. 

Previous research has noted the necessity of finding out the relationship between marketisation and teachers’ experiences at work. Specifically for international schools, Bunnell et al (2016) call for research to focus on the “impact and effects not just ideology and existence” (p. 556) of international schools. In the international school sector, the marketisation of schools and its influences on teachers becomes a prominent feature of any discussion. As all kinds of schools are becoming increasingly marketised, it becomes necessary to see teachers as a vital part of the education process and understand how the effects of marketisation impact their work. We must ask: What are teachers’ experiences in marketised contexts? How are the influences on their work related?

The data analysis of this project included three stages of semi-structured interviews to create themes of teachers’ work, a mixed-method pilot of the items created based on those interviews and, finally a large scale quantitative data collection and analysis using Rasch analysis (Rasch, 1960). While the overall project was a mixed-methods investigation, only the quantitative results of two of the scales are included. To include as many international school teachers as possible for the quantitative data collection, a time-location sampling strategy was used (Magnani, Sabin, Saidel & Heckathorn, 2005). International hiring fairs for international schools occurring in Bangkok, Thailand; Dubai, UAE; and London, England allowed for access to current and prospective international school teachers. A total of 204 responses were collected with 87 (43%) collected at two hiring fairs in Bangkok, 66 (32%) collected in London and 51 (25%) collected in Dubai. The sample included teachers working in many different kinds of schools from around the globe. The questionnaire items were created based on the main themes of the interviews and to be answerable with Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree. The questionnaire was piloted and analysed with Mokken Scale Analysis using the software MSP5 (Molenaar & Sijtsma, 2000) to reduce the number of items. The final scales were analysed with Rasch analysis to find the overall pattern of the items, to investigate differential item functioning based on demographics and find misfitting items. The relationship between a participants’s ability and difficulty on a set of related items then allows us to calculate a measurement on that scale for each participant that can be used in further analysis (Bond and Fox, 2015). Winsteps was used for the analysis (Linacre, 2023). Path analysis was used as the final step of the analysis as an extension of multiple regression to look at more complicated relations among the variables (Streiner, 2005). Path analysis was chosen because it could be used to create the structural model between the Rasch-calibrated measures for each person on each scale. The strength of path analysis is that variables can act as both predictors of other variables and be predicted by other variables. Where multiple regression constricts variables to being either dependent or independent, a variable can play both roles in path analysis. The path analysis was conducted in SPSS AMOS (Arbuckle, 2014).

Overall this research demonstrated the patterns related to marketisation of teachers’ work and how it interacts with teachers’ experiences at work. The complexity of the relationship between buffering and fulfilment as well as the importance of control over work are described. The nuance of the patterns of marketisation for teachers across contexts, types of schools and other factors have demonstrated a range of negative effects on teachers within a model of influences on their work. Marketisation could only be assumed a neutral force if teacher fulfilment and professional autonomy are not valued. The humanity of the people working in schools, the quality of their work life, and their perceptions are valuable when we see teachers as integral to the complex process of education in schools. The oversimplification of schools as an industry that can deliver a product of education ignores that teacher fulfilment, control and participation in decision making are vital for successful student outcomes. This research demonstrates that a marketised school may have successful teachers who feel control over their work, but this potentially is due to the strength of the buffering they receive from business influences, and is unlikely to be a result of market forces improving education. This means that excellent education may be happening in private and marketised schools despite market influences rather than because of them. While the findings of this research apply to teachers from a variety of types of schools, the understanding of how marketisation affects teachers seems especially pertinent to international schools. With the dramatic growth of international schools and increasing number of students in private, for-profit schools world-wide, school governors must think carefully about the threats to teacher fulfilment and control that come with subjecting teachers to the business influences that inevitably pressure them in a marketised school environment.

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