Educational innovation is a ubiquitous term when speaking about education and a key concept in the reform processes developed globally to adapt education systems to the needs of 21st century societies (Caldwell & Spinks, 2013; Greany, 2016; Hallgarten & Beresford, 2015; Leadbeater & Wong, 2010). It has become so central that it has come to be described as an ‘imperative’ by international organizations as the OECD (OECD, 2016), who insists on the need to modernise education systems and point to innovation as the most appropriate tool to do so. That imperative nature of educational innovation is frequently justified through a vague relationship with an improvement in the quality of education (Rodríguez & Zubillaga, 2020). However, despite the taxing nature to which it relates, the meaning of the term remains unclear (Hill et al., 2022). The lack of a clear definition of the term innovation may allow discourses to permeate through its use that promote values that may be contradictory to the aims of equity and quality that should guide the function of education systems (Miles et al., 2007). 

One possible indicator of the use of innovation to imbue educational imaginaries with the aims and values of other fields, namely the market, may be that more and more private actors offer innovation programmes for schools. Talking about schools is no longer just about public education systems, but about an industrial network that finds in schools a market niche (Verger et al., 2016). These programs may point to privatization processes masked under the guise of supposedly improving education systems (Ball & Youdell, 2007; Burch, 2021). In order to identify the meaning that is being addressed to innovation within this programs, under the umbrella of the IMPNOVA project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education (Generación de Conocimiento 2022 call), we are carrying out the analysis of innovation programmes being developed in the Spanish educational system by energy or technology companies or private banks. The main activity of the companies selected for this study doesn’t belong to the educational field; however, they invest a large part of their corporate social responsibility in education. The programs that they propose point to specific needs of the Spanish educational system, and offer what they understand as the most suitable answer to them. Thus, the conversation about what needs to be changed or improved and the most appropriate strategies to do so is shifted from the school to the business arena. Companies act inside schools as a matter of fact, which begs the question of the role played by education administrations in enabling the influence of private companies in the public education system. The problem posed by the innovation programmes of private companies is not the mere presence of the corporate body in education, but the lack of transparency in the mechanisms of public-private collaboration; a collaboration whose line of work currently revolves to a large extent around the vague concept of educational innovation. 

According to that, the analysis of the innovation programs addresses the following research questions: a) how is educational innovation addressed and justified within the programas; b) on what elements of schools do they operate (organization, teaching practices, teaching resources, etc.); and c) in what measures and actions do the programs specify their understanding of innovation. 

The methodology used is based on the content analysis of nine innovation programmes developed by energy and technology companies and private banks operating in Spain (Endesa, Vodafone, Telefónica, COTEC, Samsung, Orange, Banco BBVA, La Caixa and Abanca). The main criteria for the selection of the programmes are their direct relationship with educational innovation and their implementation in the educational centres of the Spanish educational system. In accordance with the research questions outlined above, the content analysis has followed a deductive and inductive process (Gläser-Zikuda et al., 2020) through the following categories: definition of innovation; justification of innovation (problems or needs on which the need to introduce changes or improvements is based, actors that they take as a reference -international organizations, policymakers, academic literature, etc.-); aims of innovation (objectives of the programmes, solutions offered); measures introduced (curricular content, methodologies, technological resources, assessment techniques or instruments, etc.) and agents targeted (principlas, teaching staff, students, etc.). In order to frame the content analysis, ten exploratory interviews have been carried out with private educational agents (seven) and with representatives of the public administration (one representative of the Spanish Ministry of Education and two of the Regional Ministry of Education of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, as it is a decentralised system and Madrid is the region with the highest level of privatization). In both cases, the aim of the interviews has been to identify the reasons for the participation of private companies in the public education system. The questions focused on how the interviewees justify the presence of private companies in the field of education, what needs they claim that innovation programs respond to and what solutions they offer, what objectives they pursue and what actions they carry out.

The lack of clarity about what innovation means articulates a set of pedagogical imaginaries and discourses that facilitate the reception from the part of schools of a series of programs designed by private enterprises that lack an educational nature. The permeation of innovation is accepted because in the collective imaginary it is related to positive outcomes (Godin & Vinck, 2017). This imaginary is identified both in the private agents promoting innovation programmes and in the public agents interviewed. The content analysis of these innovation programmes shows that private actors deploy different strategies to influence the public education system: activities for pupils, resources and training for teachers, and training and support for families. These strategies find a laissez-faire attitude from the part of public administration and a fragile public legislative apparatus that both facilitate public-private collaboration. This factor, together with the supposed benefits of innovation, makes it possible, without public dialogue in educational communities, to rely on private resources that have not undergone the assessment and supervision that are. Supervision that, on the contrary, is applied in the public system, as for example to teachers, who must go through competitive examinations and are subject to educational inspection; or curriculum, approved by the educational administrations and subject to educational inspection as well. This lack of supervision allows private companies to interfere in central elements of the public education system, such as curricular content, methodologies and classroom activities (Turienzo et al., 2023). This interference is supported by educational administrations that claim not to have resources enough to adapt to the new social and educational scenarios, so that private collaboration is articulated as a requirement for the proper functioning of the education system. This acceptance shifts decision-making on teaching and learning from public mechanisms to private actions (Lubienski, 2016).

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