The Privatisation in Education and Human Rights Consortium (PEHRC)
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For nearly a decade, civil society organisations have sounded the alarm about issues of education quality, labour standards, and respect for the rule of law in schools operated by commercial behemoth Bridge International Academies. In the coming weeks, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, the independent complaints and accountability mechanism for the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), will publish the second of two reports into the IFC’s investment into Bridge, recently investigated following allegations of sexual and physical abuse in its Kenyan schools. The findings contained in this second report will range from issues including teacher labour standards to non-compliance with national regulations. They will likely mirror thefirst, deeply troubling document published in March 2024, which revealed how the IFC failed to prevent irrevocable yet avoidable harm to students, causing “acute and long-term damage to [survivors’] physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development, in addition to economic disadvantage due to lost productivity, disability, and reduced quality of life”. The horrific experiences of children, teachers and their families in these institutions must never be forgotten nor minimised.
Crucially, this experience occurring in institutions supported by public funds from governments and institutions across the world pushes the question of how education is funded back into centre stage.
We live in an epoch of perma-crisis, in which education is egregiously underfunded – according to the most recent estimates, to the tune of US$100 billion. Into this fiscal void, well-funded public relations campaigns spearheaded by business interests appear, making persuasive claims that education privatisation solves problems that the state cannot fix.
The seductive logic behind Bridge International Academies and other commercial school outfits is that they can provide education cheaply at scale while delivering benefits to shareholders. Yet when states, development finance institutions, investors, funders, and intermediaries follow this neoliberal logic and support private education – particularly profit making or commercial education – they end up supporting actors or systems which often exacerbate segregation and discrimination, erode free education, dilute curricula, fail to meet basic, minimum quality standards, and reduce democratic oversight. As the unfolding Bridge scandal shows, this support can also lead to public funds propping up scandalous abuses.
Despite the PR successes of businesses in making the case for their role in education, across the world people overwhelmingly want an education which is public. Public education works, delivering positive, transformative results, even when budgets are limited. More fundamentally, free, quality public education is a human right, and states bear the duty and obligation to provide it.
Reclaiming public education in five steps
Over the last century, the world took unprecedented steps to expand education to more young people. In this critical juncture for humanity, with inequality skyrocketing as inflation soars, environmental decline accelerating, democracy and autocracy in ever greater tension, and the very fabric of many societies wearing thin, public education can help create a well-informed public with the capacity to address these global challenges.
The Privatisation in Education and Human Rights Consortium (PEHRC), an informal network of national, regional and global organisations and individuals, works to challenge the unprecedented expansion of private interests in education from a human rights perspective, while advocating for the right to free, quality public education.
Over the past decade, PEHRC has worked to advance the understanding and implementation of the human right to free, inclusive, quality public education for all, to oppose the privatisation of education, and to hold governments and institutions to account for their obligations to realise the right to education.
The sum of our research, advocacy and success in driving accountability leads us to determine five core steps that should be taken to reclaim public education.
Firstly, and perhaps most simply, we must prioritise the public. All education and political actors must make the provision of quality, public, inclusive, free education for all a priority – in tandem with greater support for the public sector in general. This approach responds to public wishes and meets international human rights obligations.
Meaningful prioritisation must include significant spending commitments. In second place, then, public education needs robust public funding. Clear standards and frameworks guide public education spending, and governments worldwide must achieve the minimum benchmark recommended during the Transforming Education Summit (TES) of allocating 6 per cent of GDP and 20 per cent of public expenditure to education to realise the right to education and teachers’ labour rights and well-being – as well as taking national and global action on tax justice, debt alleviation, and overcoming austerity policies as recommended in the TES Call to Action on Financing.
Thirdly, we must stop funding education privatisation. Public funds should fund public education, and states, development finance institutions, investors, funders, and intermediaries must review their investment portfolios with greater urgency in the wake of the Bridge scandal, to ensure their funding does not support commercial/for-profit education. Where funds are imbricated in Bridge or other commercial entities, investors must divest and take steps to remedy harms committed to students.
In fourth place, where private actors deliver education, they must be effectively regulated by states. This regulation must be robust, in particular to avoid conflicts of interest which often occur due to private actors shaping regulatory processes that govern their activities. States must invest in enforcing laws already in existence and develop new, strong regulation to protect the right to education.
Finally, to counter the ‘business is best’ framing which has dominated political thinking for too long, we need a narrative change.
The privatisation of education is incompatible with equality. We must not accept the vision of education as an individual good within inequitable systems; where those born into greater privilege benefit at the expense of those born into low-income families, and where private education providers reap considerable profits to the detriment of universal, high-quality education for all learners.
At this vital juncture for humanity, we must defend public education. In recognition of this, we have launched a movement to reclaim public education supported so far by nearly 300 organisations and individuals. Transformative public education represents the greatest tool we have to educate our populations, reduce inequality, and build a future in which all members of society are equipped to face the challenges which lie ahead of us.
Education privatisation may work for a small few, but for a future in which the spectres of climate change, conflict, and democratic decline loom large, we need public education to work for all.
Originally Published: 2024-05-28 23:00:00
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