Introduction

The following quotation is about an academy sponsor:

This quotation suggests that the especial experiences of an entrepreneur (combined with a sense of private ownership of ‘his’ schools) should be invested in public services education in order to make them successful. It seems that particular types of know-how, knowings and knowledgeabilities is what matters in the re-purposing of schools as effective educational products, where schools are now businesses that retail differentiated merchandise (such as charters, free schools, academies). Educational products are designed, marketed and sold, improved and withdrawn, where all consumers are offered a ‘good school place’ as a means of displaying and securing biopolitical distinctiveness. In reality what is on offer is moderated by market share, and can only be accessed and purchased through having the right type of resources (funds to pay fees, social capital to be accepted). These reforms question what Arendt (1958) identifies as the importance of promising in the public realm, based on active security and enabling stability. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity (EPKP) shows how the state has adopted a form of depoliticisation by contract as a form of risk-management-promising, where the trend is towards proactive private as distinct from public contractualism based on the binary risk of failure–success designed to secure and extend segregation. Underpinned by globally networked corporate ideas regarding education as a site for investment, the identification of success and the eradication of failure has become policy in school reform. Importantly, the pursuit of child and school failure as public policy is integral to this process, where schools and children do and, indeed, have to fail in order for segregation to be effective.