Outsourcing education services in South Korea, England and Hong Kong: a discursive institutionalist analysis

ABSTRACT

The outsourcing of education services has been widely adopted across international contexts as a ‘tested solution’ or panacea to meet various educational problems including school management, curriculum design, teaching and student discipline. Contracting third-party providers, it is argued, enhances organisational goals such as efficiency, quality and school improvement. However, the outsourcing of education services has also impacted on established notions concerning the boundaries around teachers’ work. This paper deploys the framework of discursive institutionalism to offer insight into how the idea of outsourcing has been activated and circulated by discursive communities in three diverse international settings. Despite its problem-solution logic, the institutionalisation of outsourcing creates its own problems, not least the undermining of teacher professionalism, the ‘businessification’ of schools and a diminishing of their educational mission.

KEYWORDS:

• Outsourcing
• discursive institutionalism
• education reform
• NPM
• teacher professionalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Outsourcing’ is a broad umbrella term for arrangements that include ‘public-private partnerships’, ‘private finance initiatives’ or ‘contracting out’ the delivery of educational services (Rivera 2018).

2. As Wahlström and Sundberg (2018) point out, discursive institutionalism has not yet been fully utilised in educational research, even though it offers a multifaceted set of concepts for exploring policy borrowing at transnational, national and local levels.

3. The arrangements for sponsorship were later changed, allowing sponsors to establish an endowment fund rather than contribute to capital costs. In 2007 the sponsorship requirement was abolished for high-performing schools (Long 2015).

4. By comparison, expenditure on education in Hong Kong rose to 7.6% of the GDP between 1980 and 1990 (Tilak 2002).