Introduction

Public service education has been hard won but is not yet fully achieved in many countries around the world – and where it is seemingly in place, it is not secure and is being actively privatised. In this book we not only report research about how and why this is happening, but we also specifically focus on the contribution of corporate elites to the ideas, conditions and materiality of the reform of public education. Such corporate elites do not usually have a personal or family stake in schools for the masses, because their purchasing power is greater than those they are acting as benefactors for. Indeed, as Dorling (2014b) reports, ‘in the US, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population now takes 20 per cent of all income before tax. In the UK, that figure stands at around 15 per cent’ (pp 36-8). Such corporate elites are not only very wealthy, but are globally mobile and networked, and can locate across national boundaries in ways that disconnect their lives from the realities of those who support, access and rely on public services.

Elites studies has not been a strong feature of social sciences research (see Savage and Williams, 2008a), but a range of recent texts suggest that there is a serious problem with inequality and the power structures and processes that construct and sustain it (Wilkinson and Picket, 2009; Judt, 2010; Stiglitz, 2013; Dorling 2014a; Jones, 2014). Such concerns are evident within public education, where the causal relationship between poverty and educational underachievement in affluent countries is regarded as an endemic problem located in commodification and trade (Raffo et al, 2010).

Elites studies in educational policy research is also limited. Work has taken place on the economising of education policy (Ball, 2007, 2012a; Burch, 2009; Lundhal, 2011; Norris, 2011), philanthropy (Ball, 2008; Scott, 2009; Saltman, 2010), the networking role of elites (Ball and Junemann, 2012; Gunter, 2012; Spring, 2012; Au and Ferrare, 2015), and the type and impact of elites education (Kynaston, 2014; Kenway and Koh, 2015; van Zanten et al, 2015; Ye and Nylander, 2015). Elites studies is a site where the complexities of what is unfolding is being identified as being in need of a range of in-depth studies (Buckley and Burch, 2011).