Conference Agenda

Nationally and internationally, the leadership and organisation of education have altered significantly through the provision of market technologies and rationalities in the form of competition, choice or performativity, and managerialism (Gunter et al., 2016). At an organisational level, technocracy is privileged concurrently with the hollowing out of traditional stakeholder school governance models to make way for private management takeover of public entities (Verger and Curran, 2016). In England, these trends are illustrated by the rise of academy trusts, akin to Friskolor in Sweden (Simkins et al., 2019): publicly funded legal entities controlled by boards of trustees with discretion over strategy and finance. Furthermore, the professionalisation of school governance, perfecting technologies of rational self-management (Wilkins, 2019a), alongside the marketisation of education, promulgated by successive national Governments, have placed democratic principles, empowerment and participation, secondary to market principles. Thus, creating a democratic deficit, with a focus on skill-over-stake (Allen, 2018). The active removal of stakeholders denigrates localism and its voice (Simkins and Woods, 2014). These policy changes disadvantage social groups, such as parents or community members of low socioeconomic status, women and non-white Others (Hetherington and Forrester, forthcoming). While academy trusts operate independently of local government, in England, expansion, and acquisition opportunities, for example, are determined by their performance and subsequent, position in a notional hierarchy (Hetherington and Forster, 2023). Therefore, corporatised entities, such as schools nationally and internationally, have strong incentives to model themselves in the image of businesses to maximize precision governance. This includes limiting the practice of deliberative democracy by restricting who gets to perform and engage in governance (Hetherington and Forester, 2023). However, some schools do maintain a commitment to both technical-managerial and democratic priorities owing to their sponsorship model and develop tensions and contestation in achieving both (Wilkins, 2019b).

Those restricting access to governance, to secure brand advantage, are referred to by Puwar (2001:652) as the somatic norm. The somatic norm is “the corporeal imagination of power as naturalised in the body of white, male, upper/middle-class bodies”; naturalised in the neoliberal inculcation of institutional leadership with power, knowledge, and capability. With an embodied somatic norm model of educational leadership, comes expectations of civility and social norms. The standards of civility are set by the somatic norm, which also determines breaches or not, of the bounds of civility, by those who engage in practices (Calhoun, 2015), such as governance. For powerless or excluded groups, the disenfranchised, such as women, refugees, those who are from an ethnic minority or whose first language is not English or who are from a low socio-economic group, the bounds of civility are founded on a ‘contract’ whether that be racial (Puwar, 2001) or gendered (Caravantes and Lombardo, 2024), which has demarcated spaces for those corporealities. For Puwar (2001) and others, there are choices, to remain silent with the burden of invisibility or incivility.

In this research, complex issues are empirically and conceptually explored through an investigation of the Co-operative Academies Trust (CAT), an edu-business sponsored by the Co-op Group, with a specific focus on how democracy is performed, transformed, and translated in the power dynamic between governance and the parent body as participants in decision-making. The CAT is legally bound by its sponsor to adhere to international values of co-operativism (ICA, 2020), including a commitment to democracy. Conceptually, political theories demonstrate how power is configured within these relations to privilege certain positions and discourses over others.

The research is significant internationally, given the tension between the neoliberal imperative and the democratic deficit associated with governance currently (Hardin, 2014), and the concurrent tension with democratic practices associated with co-operative values (Wilkins, 2019b).

As one of several organisations jostling for influence in the global governance of education, UNESCO is not only aptly positioned to promote its ideal global education landscape, but also holds a vested interest in doing so. In recent years, the organisation has advanced a vision of education predicated on the idea of the commons. In this view, education serves a global common good and should thus be protected by institutional arrangements that bind peoples and communities closer together (UNESCO 2015, UNESCO 2021). In its publications, UNESCO advocates for a commoningapproach, supporting the emergence of modes of collectivity and social relations around shared values and a perceived common future. While rooted in the ideal of shared values and requiring collaborative participation, the commons remain, as Means et al. (2019) describe it, “always a divided and contested terrain”. The global governance of education is itself contested, with various organisations vying for influence and legitimacy in this space (Robertson 2022). UNESCO’s promotion of a global common good perspective on education thus occurs in a complex and competitive landscape of ideas, actors, and interests.

This paper critically examines UNESCO’s construction of a commons approach to global education through a multivocal analysis of its 2021 report “A new social contract for education: imagining our futures together”. Through this novel form of analysis, we show how UNESCO constructs the commons by referring implicitly to a specific addressee, what we call the “global reader”, articulated as part of a global community bound by shared values, collective futures and faced with a common set of global crises. A particular subjectivity is thus implied by the text through the construction of a “we”, an undefined community which readers are expected to relate to. We question to what extent this community of global readers exists and consider its implications for a global commons approach to education.

With the migration of education policy beyond state boundaries and the increasing engagement of international organisations in education agenda setting, a “global project of education reform” (Ball Junemann and Santori 2017) has developed. Studies have explored how and under what conditions global education policy and reform travel to different domestic contexts. While promoted as a “global” endeavour, the norms and agendas of international organisations like UNESCO are ultimately distributed and implemented unevenly in local policy contexts (Mundy et al. 2016). By highlighting how policy ideas are received and interpreted by the report’s addressees, this study shifts attention from national or local policy to a more affective, individual perspective. The collaborative analysis and shared critique bring to light how the report is interpreted by its readers. Ultimately, the report is addressed to readers making up the ‘global community’- it is directed towards a “we”- intended to represent individuals and communities making up a common humanity. Hence, an inquiry into how addressees of the report take in its language and ideas is important. Our policy analysis moves beyond the study of how global education policies are received and implemented by relevant governments and policy stakeholders to underscore how they are digested and interpreted by individual readers irrespective of national, regional borders and differences.

Under neoliberal educational governance, many schools are subject to the global discourse of school choice and competition, and thus market themselves (DiMartino & Jessen, 2018). Schools aim to persuade potential customers (parents and students) of the value of their education. Greater enrollment of students can yield higher income, while inadequate enrollment can force the school to lose income or close. For instance, UK schools with low inspection scores risk further downgrades or school closure, so they publicise themselves to avoid losing their students. While it is understandable that schools need to consider their survival and prosperity, such entrepreneurial acts, and resultant hierarchy among schools, often have a negative impact on schooling and students, e.g., reproducing the existing inequitable structure, marginalisation of disadvantaged students, or mission drift (e.g., pursuing profit at the cost of genuine student learning) (Chiu & Walker, 2007; You & Choi, 2023).

School competition and marketing occur across the globe, especially in the contexts of change and uncertainty. Some leaders of state-funded schools (aided schools) in Hong Kong partly in response to the public’s equation of the private with quality, turned themselves partly private collecting fees (e.g., Hong Kong’s direct subsidy schools) (Zhou et al, 2015). In Nepal, private schools teach in English, which parents perceive to be superior to public schools’ lessons in native Nepali, and became more popular than public schools (Choi & Poudel, 2024). Schools in both regions use social media to build their image and recruit potential students.

However, past studies have not documented schools’ marketing strategies on social media, their effectiveness or impact on schooling. Nor did they investigate their interactions with socio-historical contexts (Choi, 2022; Takayama, 2012). So this study begins to address these research gaps. Informed by privatisation studies (e.g., You & Choi, 2023), marketing studies (e.g., Khan & Qureshi, 2010), and a comparative thematic analysis of Facebook posts of 18 case schools in Hong Kong and Nepal in the 2022-23 academic year, this study examines how the schools appeal to the potential local customers. Using the contrasting case contexts of Hong Kong (epitome of neoliberal educational system) and Nepal (democratic polity that prioritises social justice in governance), we explicate localised enactment of school privatisation via marketing.

Past studies categorised schools’ marketing activities by audience and directness (Khan & Querishi, 2010) or audience and marketing aspects (Chen, 2008). While such studies provide a good foundation of broader marketing, they lack in-depth understanding of schools’ online marketing, which differs to other face-to-face marketing, e.g., immediate responses from the stakeholders, unbound by time or space, but mediated by digital literacy and resources. Nor did they study their potential impact on schooling as public good. To shed light on these phenomena, this study analysed Facebook posts (most widely used by schools) by schools and by parents. The following research questions guided this study:

1. What contents are prioritised in schools’ online marketing via Facebook posts?

2. To what degree do schools’ Facebook posts show neoliberal ideology (e.g., school choice, entrepreneurialism)?

3. What other factors affect their posting type and content?

Understanding the answers to these questions will help understand the political manoeuvres in which schools engage in this digital era in order to take the delicate balance between the neoliberal entrepreneurship and providing education as a public good.