ABSTRACT
In most high-income countries, a public system of compulsory education existed for many decades before neoliberalism’s rise to power in the 1980s, with an acknowledged public responsibility for providing a service for all children and with well-established institutions and professions. Neoliberalism and compulsory education have been the subject of a large literature, far more than for early childhood education and care. With public education systems, their schools and teachers, on the defensive, the way was opened for neoliberal market and business style education policy ‘solutions’ and reforms, advocated to hold so-called ‘self-interested’ teachers and schools to account and to make them more efficient. Accompanying marketisation has been the privatisation of education, not only through the growth of schools operating as essentially private entities, autonomous businesses competing in the education market place, but through the sub-contracting of services to businesses and the insertion of private finance to fund the provision of basic educational services.
