Education International
Introduction and context This report was commissioned by Education International and funded by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. The aim was to investigate trends in privatisation in education in the Caribbean. Privatisation has been a focus of education research for many years, particularly in western liberal democracies (e.g. Anderson and Donchik, 2016; Ball, 2007; Lingard, 1998; Ozga, 2016; Smyth, 2011; Verger, Fontdevila and Zancajo, 2016), but also increasingly in the Global South, for example in Ghana (Riep, 2014), Liberia (Riep and Machacek, 2020) and India (Srivastava, 2010). This incomplete mapping of the Global South reveals that privatisation is often interplayed with other structural and/or historical features, such as colonialism and poverty, such that power relations enabled or reproduced through the former may intensify experiences or consequences of the latter. In other words, depending on the location and interests of the ‘private’, privatisation in formerly colonised lands may amount to neo-colonialism (see e.g. Adam, 2019). This is in addition to more widely experienced societal harms caused by privatisation in education, such as the reduction of understandings of education and its goals to the instrumental and economically oriented (Saltman, 2015); the increased deployment of managerialism as a mechanism to achieve it (Gewirtz and Ball, 2000; Hall, 2013); and the purposeful creation of losers in a marketised landscape of provision, amongst schools, their leaders and the pupils who are hierarchically sorted (or who sort themselves) to fit (Courtney, 2015c). The need to explore privatisation in the Caribbean is therefore pressing and little research has been conducted to date. Croso and Magalhães’ (2016) article on education privatisation in Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, did not report on any Caribbean Island states. However, Jules (2013) traces the development of a regional policy space concerning education, arguing that the failures of socialism in Jamaica, Grenada and Guyana prompted CARICOM to look at market solutions to the problem of skills shortages. The region therefore moved together to embrace entrepreneurialism as a mandatory feature of the ideal Caribbean person, and Human Resource Development as the primary lens for conceptualising education and its outcomes. This has arguably paved the way for Caribbean-wide susceptibility to privatisation in multiple forms. Our objectives in light of this were to enable deeper understanding of the extent, intensity and impact of privatisation trends in the Caribbean 8
