Educationalisation has been a useful way to understand pressures brought to bear on modern education systems across the world, but especially in Europe. As a concept, educationalisation has widespread intentions and uses. Whilst the broader sub-concept ‘educationalisation of the modern world’ points to an idea of education as the engine of modernity, the more narrow sub-concept ‘educationalisation of social problems’ conceptualises the mode of thought of ‘assigning education the task of coping with perceived social problems’ (Tröhler, 2016: 698). A slightly different way of pointing out its widespread use is to highlight its somehow dual opposite processes, which is, on the one hand, importing school forms and ideas of schooling shaping other spheres and, on the other hand, formal schooling ‘solving’ non-school problems (Scott, 2013). This wide scope of educationalisation enables a variety of uses, but it also requires careful specification of what it can explain. In this paper, we have a particular interest in aspects of the concept that come under the banner ‘educationalisation of social problems’ (Smeyers & Depaepe, 2008; Labaree, 2008).

Sometimes included in this package of ‘social problems’ is the welfare state, or more specifically problems associated with the decline of the welfare state (Kanton and Lowe, 2013). While this is a welcome, and also rational, development, approaching the welfare-education relationship via educationalisation demands a more critical interrogation and a more exacting account of what this relation entails, especially in a neoliberal age of trenchant attacks on welfarism. The purpose of this paper is to engage with this analytical process, by exploring the concept of educationalisation in relation to the concept of the ‘welfaring of education’. The latter concept refers to the process whereby education has more and more taken on not only the goals of the welfare state – economic redistribution, social mobility and the equalising of opportunity – but also the values and philosophy that underpin it – care, solidarity, publicness as well as justice.

An argument made in a forthcoming publication (Murphy, 2025) is that some European nations are currently experiencing some form of welfaring of education, a policy transformation that has significant implications for both welfare and education policy. This shift has helped to ‘sanctify’ education as a policy priority while also positioning education as the placeholder for traditional welfarist values such as solidarity and care, publicness and economic justice. This has in turn seen significant pressure on schools in particular to not only act as conduits of social mobility and opportunity, but also to provide forms of social protection in the shape of safeguarding policies alongside a range of other welfarist agendas (inclusion practices, resilience and empathy building, for example).

The concept of welfaring of education and educationalisation share some characteristics and on the surface appear to overlap considerably. Closer inspection reveals some important differences. In this paper, we aim to explore some of these similarities and differences, specifically related to the following topics: Methodological concerns (how the different theories speaks to the policy agendas of welfare as well as education); relation to educational change (their capacity to account for transformations in education governance, such as teacher professionalism and curricular practices); political economy of education (how to account for market and statist drivers of reform and transformation); and the role of social class (their conceptual capacity to comprehend educational change in the context of capitalist modernisation, social stratification and economic justice).

This comparative exercise across conceptual domains will be used in the paper to draw out some conclusions regarding the changing relation between welfare systems and education, while also aiming to contribute to developments in critical policy analysis and education theory. 

The methodological stance adopted in this paper is shaped by the authors’ normative stance on the wider public policy domain and the pressures brought to bear on public education reform. Neoliberal and market driven transformations of the sector in many European countries demand stronger conceptual frameworks to critically assess these transformations, especially when it comes to the purpose of education vis-à-vis other public policy domains. This stance provides a normative foundation for the paper’s interrogation of the efficacy and viability of concepts such as educationalisation and welfaring; the intellectual discussion of similarities and differences between them, while significant in itself, is primarily geared towards contributing to current and future forms of critical policy analysis and debate in educational studies. In terms of sources used, there is a range of material on educationalisation published over the last two decades, and the paper critically engages with this material, especially from a political economic and welfarist perspective (Hooge, Honingh and Langelaan, 2011; Padovan-Özdemir, 2016; Sullivan, 2018). The analytical approach adopted here is conceptually sympathetic to the notion of educationalisation while also maintaining a level of critical detachment in order to assess more broadly its efficacy in accounting for the welfare-education relation. The concept of welfaring of education is used partly to assist with this critical analysis but is also worthy of its own conceptual development. This intellectual development and hybridisation is essential in a study of the education in the context of public policy as it provides a grounding for ‘theoretical multilingualism’ (Reckwitz, 2023: 94) in the analysis of a unique intersectoral policy and value space. In line with this, the arguments developed in the paper draw on a range of intellectual sources and disciplines, particularly elements of political economy, public administration, social policy, social theory and education studies. This is important as discussion of welfaring in the context of education traverses sectoral boundaries that comes with its own set of interconnected and overlapping concerns: publicness, welfarism, legitimation, authority, solidarity and care.

Expected outcomes related to the key themes mentioned above include the following: Dual-analytical methodology: Framing current policy and practice as the educationalisation of social problems may unwittingly over-emphasise the role of educational institutions, at the expense of a more meaningful interrogation of other sectors and institutions. Highlighting the issue of welfaring raises questions about the direction of public education policy, but it also raises significant questions about the direction of welfare policy, and what has happened to policies and provision related to equality of opportunity, fair wealth distribution polices, the social safety net and forms of collective shared responsibility for well-being. The impact on education: Processes of educationalisation do not necessarily demand changes to education policy and provision. Welfaring on the other hand, does by definition demand a transformation of certain aspects of governance, educational equity, teacher professionalism and school curriculum, in order to then take on the burden of welfaring (as a consequence of shrinking welfare states). This is an important difference with implications for how we think about the efficacy and worth of current policy reforms. Political economic analysis: One could possibly state that a key strength of educationalisation - its breadth of coverage - can be cast also as something of a limitation, that its generic quality can easily hide specific drivers of reform and transformation that demand their own analytical frameworks. Questions of class and capitalism: Any form of transfer between welfare and education should be a major cause of concern from a classed and democratic perspective. Educationalisation may not fuller capture this relation; welfaring, on the other hand, does not just denote a policy trend but also a wider shifting political landscape that by association at least raises important questions about class, about capitalism and the role of nation states in sustaining democratic practices.

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