Globalisation and education: a review of conflicting perspectives and their effect on policy and professional practice in the UK

Abstract

Many disparate groups have written about the effects of globalisation on education. Some have promoted its benefits; others have warned against its ill‐effects. This paper is an attempt at coalescing and juxtaposing the respective arguments as they relate to schooling policy and practice in the UK. The growing international pressures of globalisation affect practitioners in unpredictable and different ways, so the development of national policy is tied to the process of translating global trends to local contexts. The current political environment has enabled policy‐makers to drive education in large measure using economic imperatives and to devolve liability for ineffective schooling outcomes to a supplicant teaching profession. Whether or not these approaches are justified, there has been precious little debate around the core issues: what is the purpose of education, what is the role of schooling in safeguarding democracy and what obligation does the state have to the individual beyond encouraging economic well‐being? This paper seeks to illuminate the background to such a debate in a non‐judgmental way; to examine why the skirmishes between opposing factions have instead been had on the periphery – in areas like value‐added measurement and performance‐related pay – and why the teaching profession has so often been a spectator incapable of challenging or mediating the emerging hegemony.

Keywords:

• school choice
• globalisation
• education policy
• political economy

Notes

1. A less simplistic definition follows.

2. The UK raises substantial revenues from exporting education, especially to China and other Asian countries with big market potential. For example, Nottingham University has branded extensions in China and Malaysia, as does Shrewsbury (private) School in Thailand.

3. A full account of which can be found in Riley (1998).

4. Such Conservative policies, particularly the decision to charge foreign students for education in Britain, later caused the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to be refused an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Oxford University; an unprecedented rebuke for a sitting UK prime minister. Boris Johnson (2006) maintains that a close study of the record reveals that the Conservatives were in fact implementing a policy conceived by Shirley Williams as education secretary in the previous Labour government.

5. Leading sponsors in the UK include: Oracle, the software company; HSBC, the high street bank (sponsoring schools that teach Mandarin and Portuguese, and providing a governor for each school it sponsors); Sir Peter Green, owner of retail chains ‘British Home Stores’ and ‘Arcadia’; Sir Peter Lampl, through his Sutton Trust; and Vosper Thornycroft, the shipbuilder.

6. For example, synergising vocational education and employment policy.

7. Though more training and better headteachers do not of themselves make for better education (West 2001) and may even stifle creativity (Gunter 2001).

8. In 2001, 75% of the 15–19 age group participated in some form of education and training in the UK, compared for example with 90% in Belgium and Germany.

9. For example, income inequality in Japan (as measured by the Gini index) has ‘risen significantly since the mid‐1980s from well below to slightly above the OECD average and the rate of relative poverty in Japan is now one of the highest in the OECD’ (OECD 2006, 7). In the UK, income inequality rose ‘dramatically’ in the 1980s to ‘a peak in the early 1990s’ and is still rising ‘significantly’ (Brewer et al. 2008, 2–3).