The corporatisation of education

Yesterday I had a conversation with a colleague at the Ministry of Education who has been working there for some time now. We discussed lots of the changes being made at present, and shared thoughts on how much has changed – and is changing – in terms of the internal processes and leadership demonstrated. As we did so we became aware of discussing how the Ministry appears to be adopting many private-sector logics, structures, and practices in their approach – something my colleague referred to becoming more corporate in its approach.

This got me thinking about the changes I’ve seen in my career, and of other conversations I’ve had with those in my generation who entered teaching imagining it was a career – a life-time decision to contribute to the ‘common good’, and to realising the future potential of the young people in our care. It also got me thinking about how, in these sorts of conversations, it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing these corporate approaches as ‘bad’ and what we had (or think we had) in the past as ‘good’.

I say this because that’s exactly the feeling I had at times during our conversation. Yet as I reflected afterwards, as someone who has been involved is establishing and running a professional services company, and who has also worked (as a contractor) on several MoE projects, I’ve at times been one who has argued for some of these ‘corporate’ approaches – particularly where I’ve seen lapses in accountability, inefficiencies in areas such as procurement, or lack of effective data management and reporting for example.

So it’s back to the issue of balance – the issue of adopting corporate approaches isn’t a case of good versus bad. It is far more nuanced and needs more careful examination.

So I set of to spend some time trawling through articles on the internet to see what others have to say about the corporate structures that have become prevalent in our public systems. There’s no shortage of opinions and ideas – so I have summarised what I found in the table below, comparing the features of a corporate system with the features with the features of a non-corporate, professional oriented public education system.

Non-Corporate Professional System	Corporatised System
Trust-based autonomy	Managerial oversight
Career public service ethos	Contractual, mobile workforce
Relational accountability	Metrics and KPIs
Collective professional culture	Hierarchical enterprise culture
Stewardship & continuity	Strategic performance management
Low surveillance, diverse evidence	High surveillance, standardised data
Ministry as support partner	Ministry as regulator/contract manager
Community-grounded	Centrally controlled or outsourced
Values-driven	Efficiency-driven
Slow/reflective change	Rapid, cyclical reform

Now again, I need to emphasise, this table is not to illustrate one side good and the other bad, or even one side the view of what used to be and the other where we are headed. It’s merely a representation of ideas to help stimulate some thinking about what out of either side we might find useful, and at what times and in which contexts etc. As with anything like this – the dangers or risks inevitably lie in the ‘over-reach’ of any of these things rather than whether they are used or not.

While useful, the summary in the table above is rather simplistic, and doesn’t really contain the depth of ideas that I encountered, so I have expanded this in the table below:

Non-Corporate, Professionally Oriented Public Education System	Corporatised Public Service System
Professional Autonomy as the Operating Principle Teachers and leaders are trusted experts. Decision-making sits close to the learner. Professional judgement is primary.	Managerial Oversight and Control Decision-making flows downward through hierarchies. Standardised processes, KPIs, and compliance systems drive practice.
Career Public Service Ethos Long-term commitment; staff grow deep expertise over decades. Institutional memory is valued. Working in education is a vocation grounded in service.	Contractual, Mobile Workforce Shorter cycles of employment; generalist managers rotate frequently. Institutional memory is thin. Employment is framed as deliverables rather than vocation.
Relational Accountability Accountability flows through conversation, professional dialogue, and mentoring. ERO evaluators or advisors support growth rather than audit performance.	Metrics and KPI-Based Accountability Dashboards, quantified indicators, and reporting cycles measure performance. Schools and professionals are “held to account” rather than supported.
Collegial, Community-Based Professional Culture Strong subject associations, regional networks, and collaborative decision-making. Knowledge circulates through professional communities.	Hierarchical Enterprise Culture Information flows upward; decisions are made centrally; expertise is overshadowed by managerial authority. Competitive procurement replaces collaborative networks.
Stewardship Orientation Policy reflects long-term public good, system stability, and continuity of purpose. Educational philosophy anchors decision-making.	Strategic Performance Management Orientation Short-termism: rapid reform cycles, strategic plans, risk registers, output targets. Value defined through efficiency, performance, and measurable outcomes.
Low Surveillance, Broad Purposes Assessment and data used formatively to understand learners. Success framed as holistic development, citizenship, and wellbeing.	High Surveillance, Narrow Metrics Data used for accountability and monitoring. Success reduced to standardised measures (achievement data, attendance, thresholds).
Ministry as Professional Support Partner Regional advisory services, curriculum officers, inspectors, and subject experts provide coaching, not compliance. Strong relationships between Ministry, schools, and communities.	Ministry as Regulator/Contract Manager Monitoring, auditing, procurement, and policy enforcement dominate. Relationship with schools framed through contracts, deliverables, and risk management.
Community-Embedded, Locally Relevant Decision-Making Local needs, values, and contexts shape curriculum, pedagogy, and school direction. Families and whānau are genuine partners.	Centrally Controlled or Outsourced Decision-Making One-size-fits-all frameworks; rigid compliance expectations; external vendors and consultants replace local expertise. Engagement is transactional rather than relational.
Values-Driven System Identity Education is seen as a moral endeavour: care, equity, human development, and social mission are central.	Efficiency-Driven System Identity Education framed as an economic lever: workforce readiness, productivity, and performance outcomes shape direction.
Slow, Reflective, Culturally Grounded Change Reforms are co-designed with educators, piloted, iterative, and anchored in evidence from practice. Change builds over time.	Rapid, Cyclical, Politically Driven Change Reforms implemented quickly, often without deep consultation. Innovation often driven externally or politically rather than from practice.
Expertise-Led Policy and Implementation Curriculum, pedagogy, and professional learning shaped by experts in the field with long-term experience.	Technocratic or Consultant-Led Reform Policy often developed by generalist managers, external providers, or consultancy firms with limited teaching experience.
Trust-Based System Culture Assumes professionalism, goodwill, and shared purpose. Emphasises learning, improvement, and relationships.	Risk-Managed, Compliance Culture Assumes vulnerability, risk, and the need for control. Emphasises financial probity, governance, and reputational risk management.

Reviewing these lists helped me understand a little more of the tensions we see playing out in our current system, and the level of ‘talking past each other’ that is occurring as we seek to resolve these tensions – whether at a local school and community level, or at the national level.

We mustn’t see this as a binary issue

It all comes back to the problem with how we binarise these issues (an argument that could be levelled at the representation I’ve created in the table above – although I’d argue that is intended as a thinking tool to give clarity to various drivers etc. rather than a positioning strategy).

It’s important here to consider why we’ve gotten to this point. As I reflect on my experiences of working as a contractor for the MoE 25 years ago, and read again some of the books on my bookshelf of noted NZ education pioneers such as Clarence Beeby the evidence of how much has changed becomes clearly evident – but why.

What’s driving this?

Rather than simply dwell on the items in the table in isolation, it’s more important to consider the drivers of these changes, and why we are seeing corporate approaches emerging where others may argue for a relational or professionally oriented approach. I’ve identified a number of things that might be considered drivers (there may be others), including

1. Political pressures

Governments often want to show they are “fixing” education. We’ve seen this over successive government changes here in NZ, leading to frequent changes in policy (“reform cycles”) based on promises that schools will achieve better outcomes for learners. These pressures encourage corporate-style systems that look more streamlined, measurable, and “in control.”

2. Economic pressures

Education is expensive, and budgets are always tight so governments are always  looking for ways to cut costs and evidence they’re getting “value for money”. This pushes the system toward business-like practices such as cost–benefit analysis, contracts, and performance measures.

3. Influence of Global Policy

Countries are always watching what others are doing. Large organisations like the OECD or World Bank promote ideas about how education systems should improve. Often these suggestions result in responses based on competition, target setting, efficiency and strong performance management. These ideas spread internationally, and governments adopt them because they seem “modern,” “evidence-based,” or globally accepted.

4. Accountability narratives

There is growing public expectation that schools should show results, not just here in NZ but globally. How often do we see questions from parents, media, and politicians along the lines of; “How do we know schools are doing a good job?”; “Why aren’t results better?” “Where is the data?” To answer these questions, systems introduce reporting requirements, monitoring, and performance targets.

5. Technological pressures

This is an area that has occupied much of my working career. Not only does technology provide opportunities for new ways of engaging within learning (think digital devices, AI chatbots etc.) but new digital tools also make it easy to collect and track huge amounts of data. Dashboards and metrics become tempting because they offer a simple picture of complex things. As a result, we see decision-making driven by numbers rather than professional judgement Technology doesn’t cause corporatisation, but it makes it much easier for systems to behave like corporations.

If you want some examples of this, think about some of these things happening in NZ:

• Standards-based accountability (e.g., NCEA data as monitoring currency) – for example the New Zealand Initiative’s 2018 report “Score! Transforming NCEA Data” demonstrates how NCEA results function as performance currency, with researchers developing weighted ranking systems to measure relative student performance across standards. Also the Office of the Auditor-General’s 2024 report “Promoting equitable educational outcomes” that highlights the System Monitoring Framework and use of NCEA and PISA results as key performance indicators for tracking educational achievement
• Increasing centralisation of decision-making – for example the recent Ministry of Education restructures proposed creating regional delivery groups and an Education Service Agency, centralising property management and oversight previously held by local school boards
• Corporate-style restructures across the public service, including MoE, TEC, NZQA

Or internationally:

• England’s academisation policies where Multi-Academy Trusts operate as corporate entities constituted as limited companies with charitable status, bringing groups of schools under centralized governance that diminishes local democratic accountability
• US charter school networks – according to a report from the National Alliance for Public Charger schools, for the 2023-2024 school year, charter schools in the US added more than 80,000 new students, making these innovative public schools the only segment of the public school ecosystem experiencing consistent growth, in contrast to district public schools, which have seen a steady decline in enrolment
• Australia’s governance by performance metrics –  an interrogation of 25 years of national and international standardised assessment data highlights how student achievement is treated as a Key Performance Measure providing “evidence of the outcomes of schooling”

Corporatisation – the consequences?

The shift I see happening toward corporatisation, at the exclusion of any professionally-oriented approaches isn’t simply a matter of administrative (or political) preference – it carries profound consequences for the very nature of education itself.

When our public education system adopts corporate values exclusively, we risk fundamentally misunderstanding what schools are for. A corporation exists to maximise efficiency, minimise costs, and deliver measurable outputs to shareholders. But education isn’t producing widgets – it’s nurturing human beings through their most formative years. The metrics that make sense in a quarterly earnings report (i.e. standardisation, scalability, predictable outputs etc.) can actively work against the messy, non-linear, deeply human work of teaching and learning.

We lose something precious when we reduce the teacher-student relationship to a service delivery model, when we frame curriculum as “product,” and when we measure success solely through data points that can be dash-boarded. The intangible but essential elements – the moment a student’s eyes light up with understanding, the patient rebuilding of confidence after failure, the culturally responsive pivot a teacher makes when they truly know their community – these become invisible in corporate frameworks because they resist quantification.

The efficiency-equity paradox

Perhaps nowhere is the tension more acute than in the collision between efficiency and equity. Corporate logic demands standardisation: one curriculum, one assessment system, one set of benchmarks applied uniformly. It’s efficient. It’s scalable. It’s also profoundly inequitable.

Children arrive at school with vastly different starting points, shaped by their whānau circumstances, their cultural contexts, their individual learning profiles, and the resources available in their communities. A truly equitable system requires the flexibility to meet each child where they are – which is inherently inefficient. It requires smaller class sizes for struggling learners (expensive), culturally responsive pedagogies that can’t be scripted (hard to standardise), and long-term investments in relationship-building (poor ROI on quarterly timelines).

The cruel irony is that efficiency measures often download costs onto those least able to bear them. When schools are under-resourced and over-monitored, it’s students from already marginalised communities who suffer most. When experienced teachers leave the profession due to compliance burdens, it’s schools in low-income areas that struggle most to replace them. The drive for system-wide efficiency can deepen the very inequities education is meant to address.

BUT – that doesn’t mean the pursuit of efficiency shouldn’t be a feature of our system. We all run a home budget and in the process make choices about where we’ll allocate the money we earn, who does the chores around the house, what order they are done in etc. It’s the same in a school and in a system – we must ensure what we’re doing is efficient – but making efficiency the primary goal, and embracing corporate structures to achieve that can and will, as cited above, have a negative impact on equity.

A profession under pressure

When education becomes overly corporatised, it fundamentally reshapes the relationship between the state and teachers. Where there was once professional trust, there is now surveillance. Where there was collegial support, there is now performance management. Where teaching was understood as a vocation requiring deep expertise, it increasingly becomes framed as the implementation of centrally determined programmes.

This isn’t just about teacher satisfaction ( though the exodus from the profession should concern us all). It’s about what kind of people we want working with our children, and what kind of work we’re asking them to do. When the role becomes primarily about compliance – ticking boxes, meeting targets, implementing prescribed programs with fidelity – we lose the creative, responsive, intellectually engaged professionals who were drawn to teaching precisely because it required sophisticated judgment and deep care.

The corporatised system assumes teachers need to be managed because they can’t be trusted. This becomes self-fulfilling. We end up removing professional autonomy, and creating conditions where only the compliant or the desperate stay. The passionate, critically thinking educators who should be leading our schools increasingly find the conditions intolerable.

Imagining different paths forward

The crucial question isn’t whether education systems need to improve – of course they do, and always need to be. Children are experiencing learning challenges, opportunity gaps persist, and we face unprecedented challenges preparing young people for a rapidly changing world. The question is: what kind of improvement?

This morning I had the privilege of participating in the 24Hours for Change in Education marathon in which there were presentations from three NZ schools sharing their stories of how they are working to address change and achieve improvement for their learners. It was truly inspirational hearing what they shared. Many of the things the educators and students shared in this session reinforced for me the wisdom that comes from practice, highlighting important things we need to consider for our education’s future such as the need for…

Learning networks over audit systems: Rather than compliance-driven monitoring, imagine regional hubs where teachers regularly collaborate, share practice, and refine their craft together. Where experienced practitioners mentor newer teachers not through evaluation but through genuine partnership. Where schools learn from and with each other rather than competing for rankings.

Inquiry-driven development over reform cycles: Instead of top-down initiatives that change with each political cycle, what if improvement emerged from sustained inquiry? Teachers researching questions from their own practice, supported by university partners and curriculum specialists. Changes that are tested, refined, and scaled gradually based on evidence from classrooms rather than imported wholesale from consultants’ reports.

Community partnership over stakeholder management: Real improvement requires authentic relationships with families and whānau – not as customers to be satisfied or stakeholders to be managed, but as genuine partners in children’s learning. This means decision-making processes that are slow enough to build understanding, flexible enough to respond to local contexts, and humble enough to recognize that communities possess knowledge that professionals need.

Professional accountability over metric surveillance: What if accountability flowed through relationships – principals supporting teachers, advisors coaching principals, regional networks fostering improvement – rather than through dashboards and KPIs? This doesn’t mean lowering standards; it means understanding that real accountability in a professional context means taking responsibility for continuous learning and growth, supported by colleagues rather than monitored by managers.

Long-term stewardship over strategic performance: Education is inherently a long-term endeavour. The child entering school today won’t complete their education for over a decade. The impact of good teaching often isn’t visible for years. What if policy reflected this reality? What if we valued institutional memory, rewarded deep expertise developed over careers, and protected the system from constant disruption?

Finding Balance Without False Binaries

In a recent blog post I highlighted how a narrow, technocratic notion of science has been used to justify sweeping changes to reading instruction. A school principal responded to me arguing that (quote) “ It is not about balance…it’s about deliberately teaching ‘how’ to decode and encode so that children can then make meaning”. From her response I am guessing she was arguing in favour of the explicit teaching approach because of the impact it is having on students in her school that have previously not be experiencing success in reading. I fully support that and would argue that there is, indeed, a place for explicit teaching in our repertoire of pedagogical approaches.

My argument is that it’s all about balance – and all that this pricnipal’s response highlights is the harm that occurs when we lose that balance and need to address where we’ve failed – but not at the expense of everything else.  

None of this means rejecting all accountability, ignoring costs, or abandoning data. It means asking harder questions about what we’re actually trying to achieve. Numbers matter – but which numbers, and to what ends? Efficiency matters – but efficient at what, exactly? Standards matter – but standardisation may be their enemy.

The task before us isn’t to choose between corporate and professional models, or between efficiency and quality. It’s to build systems that understand what education actually is: a profound, patient, deeply relational investment in human potential. That requires resources, certainly. But it also requires wisdom about what can’t be captured in metrics, humility about the limits of central control, and trust in the professionals we ask to do this essential work.

Our young people deserve educational systems designed around their flourishing, not around managerial convenience. They deserve to be known by their teachers, not just tracked by data systems. They deserve communities of educators who have the time, autonomy, and support to respond to them as whole human beings with infinite possibility.

That’s not inefficient. That’s the point.