P

Summary

Partnership

The impetus to engage in partnerships in education can be interpreted as a rational response to the demands, constraints and effects of neoliberalism and globalisation. This is first because neoliberalism constructs the ideal agent as perpetually self-actualising an entrepreneurial and corporatised subjectivity. Substantive engagement with the commercial world and its actors through varied forms of partnership is an obvious way to operationalise this work and realise its product (Hay and Kapitzke, 2009). Partnership working exemplifies neoliberalism in a second way too. When the state privileges knowledge about education and its leadership and management that is generated by partners at the ‘chalk-face’ or ‘service-user’ level of practice, it implicitly marginalises expert knowledge generated in universities and local authorities or districts. Such expertise may be disregarded as overly bureaucratic or as representative of so-called ‘producer capture’. This thinking arguably underpins much of the recent turn to so-called system leadership (see Courtney and McGinity, 2022). Here, as in other products of partnerships, the outcome may be constructed as ‘an “organic” development initiated at the grassroots level’ (Griffiths et al, 2009, p 197), yet in fact differs little from that desired by the state. Third, some partnerships are explicitly a function not just of neoliberalism but of privatisation. These arrangements, called ‘public-private partnerships in education (ePPP)’ (Verger, 2012, p 110), are the preferred mechanism of the World Bank and other supranational organisations for increasing privatisation in education systems internationally for purposes including enhancing provision and access, raising learning outcomes and introducing incentives (Verger, 2012). ePPP function, on the one hand, exogenously through providing a mechanism through which private-sector actors occupy roles and provide services in education. On the other hand, they function endogenously through privileging corporatised ways of acting and thinking, as well as corporatised understandings of educational purposes in those already working in education.

Globalisation also tends to produce partnerships. It does this first through invoking a deterritorialised relationship between abstract policy concepts, for example, between global competitiveness and education. Second, globalisation discursively privileges the attainment of a relationship between such concepts in policy and practice.