Beyond states and markets: Centralised and decentralised networks in education

This work in progress is intended as a contribution to the current politics of education. I attempt to identify strategic points of intervention in the current context that might help to reconsolidate education’s role as a social institution that orchestrates learning and advances social justice. My aim is to move beyond current characterisations of education politics, best seen in debates about markets in education and the Third Way, by disaggregating developments in the organisation of education and interrogating their implications for the politics of education policy and practice. I argue that the critical challenge for education research in advancing this intervention is to generate better understandings of: the relationships between centralised and decentralised networks; their articulations with both state and market forms of coordination and governance; and the infrastructure required to support networks that can anchor and protect educational values and commitments.