Page 28 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

starting quasi-autonomous entities and (internal) reform of public
organisations or institutions.
These various reforms are based on the idea that the provision of
service should be viewed through a model of economic transaction,
meaning that public services should approach their users as clients or
as customers. This posits that the offices and desks of municipalities,
cities, and towns, but also those of hospitals and schools, are opened
for customers. These customers are the beginning and end for organis-
ing the transaction of services, such as social work, medicine, or edu-
cation. Numerous instruments, procedures and principles surface in
this context: forms of outsourcing (contracting out) and contractualism
(encouraging competition for best price and quality); forms of spe-
cialisation and organisation of labour aimed at efficiency and output
(new division of labour); an emphasis on management (envisioning
efficient and effective administration) instead of, or alongside, lead-
ership; replacing bureaucratic organisations (rule-oriented manage-
ment) by forms of output-based management; decentralisation and
deconcentration combined with new forms of output and perfor-
mance accountability; and emphasis on financial incentives (such as
bonuses) to highlight just a few examples (also see Olssen et al., 2004).
Without going into the consequences or into the differences between
countries, we clearly see a policy discourse that problematises educa-
tion in economic terms as an in-efficient, in-effective public service.
This means that the student and their parents come to the foreground
as customers that are offered service. Customer satisfaction and meet-
ing specific needs of the student and parents are here then indications
of quality, and thus also criteria for the efficacy of the service.
The public sector is not only reformed in the name of the customer.
In the same period, we can also hear reforms based on criticisms of
the power of professionals and experts, such as doctors, social work-
ers, welfare workers, and therapists, but also teachers. Already by the
end of the 1960s, the authority of experts was being challenged. The
emphasis, then, was on how professional authority could block or
counter emancipation (see for instance Achterhuis, 1979; Illich, 1970).
At the end of the 20th century, this develops more into an economic

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