Written by two leading international experts, "Early Childhood in the Anglosphere" offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services, and parenting leave, across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of 'childcare'…

This study discusses the impact of neoliberalism on legal education in England and Wales and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Neoliberalism is characterised by a focus on economic efficiency, competition, and individual responsibility, which can result in the commodification of education. The adoption of neoliberal policies in legal…

In Anglophone countries, narratives of public schooling tend to emphasise generic hopes about schooling as central to the idea of a public good, including fostering community, delivering equality and protecting broad notions of democracy. However, as public systems become more open to privatised logics, these hopes sit alongside fears for the…

With the rise of network governance, and its concomitant fragmentation of public education systems across Europe, international studies have recommended teacher collaboration as a means to bring educational stakeholders together. Yet, despite some agreement over the potential benefits to student, professional and organisational learning, there is…

Since the late 1970s, Britain has moved from a Keynesian welfare state model toward a mode of governance where economic reasoning replaces politics. Education in England has not escaped this shift from government to governance described as neoliberalism. This shift toward a new governing rationality has taken shape within the English education…

In the light of the government's recent White Paper, we outline the history of the academisation programme, positioning it as part of the neo-liberal privatisation drive which has been sustained since the 1988 Education Reform Act under governments of all stripes. We contest central claims made for the supposed benefits of academisation, and call…

This article identifies new arrangements between the state and non-state actors in the public sector, one that extends current understandings of education privatisation, the transformation of public services 'by substitution' and, specifically theories of the 'shadow state'. Drawing on data from the Political Economy of Teacher Education (PETE)…

This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the…

Education reform under the modernisation agenda both in England and internationally has signified the restoration of the 'private' and the decline of 'public' education. Deploying Arendtian thinking on assimilation and identity, we argue that these ongoing reforms are indeed dark times for education professionals. We examine what 'new dark times'…

This article examines the impact of academisation on English Sixth Form Colleges through the lens of the Principals and Governors who lead such organisations -- those who have decided to opt for academisation, and those who have not. A comprehensive survey of the Principals or Chairs of 35 Sixth Form Colleges, representing all regions of England,…

This article addresses the question: how do a new cadre of teacher education providers in England, imbued in the discourses of the Global Education Reform Movement, construct the problem of a supposedly "failing" existing teacher education system associated with universities; what solutions to this problem do they propose and on what…

Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic…

As the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) spreads, key questions that attempt to identify both the nature and the increasing scope and scale of this phenomenon become empirically significant. The concern of this article is to highlight some of the complexities of measuring one key element of the GERM: the privatisation of public education…

This paper explores perceptions of work intensification around the world. Underpinning this analysis is C. Wright Mills' (1959) argument that many personal troubles are public issues, and the notion that a significant dimension of the privatisation of public education, a concern of public education advocates worldwide, is the ways in which school…

The education system in England, along with the leadership and management of its schools, has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, heavily influenced by key features of the private school sector. However, in this article, it is argued that the strong policy focus on autonomy and diversity was in fact an accentuation of the historical…