Partnerships between schools and third parties in curricular delivery and their implications for the quality and equity of outsourced education Seminar

Event details

This talk discusses the delivery of TESOL curricula in Hong Kong state schools in collaboration with third parties such as education businesses, and the impact of the practice on the quality and equity of outsourced education. It draws in part on findings from two government-funded projects that investigated the enactment of public-private partnerships in four polities (Hong Kong, Japan, Greece and Australia), involving policymaker interviews, document analysis, case studies and surveys. In Hong Kong where school-based management gives schools autonomy in fiscal and curricular management, the outsourced programmes’ quality varies as its monitoring is left to the discretion of the schools or service providers. While the extra funds allocated for outsourcing increased marginal students’ access to learning English, an indispensable capital for social mobility, the arrangements were not necessarily conducive to their active engagement or increased learning outcomes. The findings suggest that the designers and managers of education reforms mind the evolutionary nature of policy processes to raise their effectiveness.