“Challenging the global market in education - building international solidarity in post-school education”

London May 9 2009
Monique Fouilhoux, Education International

Trends in global marketisation in higher and vocational education and lifelong learning from the EI perspective. We see the following trends:
-	Hidden privatisation of public education; to introduce forms of privatisation into public education – often paves the way to total privatisation of parts of public education.
-	Casualisation of staff working conditions; staff are required more and more to work on flexible non-tenured contracts. 
-	New forms of funding; Increased pressing for so called “diversified funding sources”, including introducing or raising tuition fees, forcing institutions to look for external private funding, to commercialise research findings, with public funding becoming more performance-based, targeted and allocated through competitive procedures. Examples of this can be found all over the world 
-	Increased focus on accountability, effectiveness and performance; rankings, classifications of HEI, standardised tests for learner performance and similar initiatives are working in this direction.  
-	New governance structures; we see a move towards new governance structures – HEI to be run more like a company with an external board which sometimes do not have any representation of the academic community. This is often done in the name of accountability for public money and effectiveness of education. Institutional leaders are urged to become managers, coalition-builders and entrepreneurs. This also has an impact on staff working conditions and the possibility to bargain collectively. 
-	Increased pressure to turn new research findings into commodities. 
-	Increased importance of intellectual property matters, with a difficult balance to be striked between openness of teaching and research materials and the right for the individual researcher to own her own ideas. 
-	Increased attention given to rankings of higher education institutions, sometimes linking this to funding, often done on the basis of commercial indicators related to higher education.
In the face of these trends EI continues to re-affirms and promotes the importance of:
-	High quality public education
-	Collegial governance and academic freedom
-	The imperative to keep a high and sustainable level of public funding
Among these trends we also see a few matters that can be exploited in an ambiguous way such as mobility of staff, quality assurance and the need to react and interact with the whole society. EI wants to:
-	Promote increased possibilities for staff to be mobile
-	Underline the importance of quality assurance and peer-discussion 
-	Demonstrate that education has always and must always be open to society and function in a dialogue with society. In areas such as mobility, quality assurance, employability, access to education and lifelong learning we must be careful with how we voice our demands and propose policy change in order for the outcome to be in-line with our wishes. 
EI and national unions must however be careful not to be exploited or have our goals misinterpreted and misused by governments, inter-governmental institutions and international institutions. 
Background of international corporate activity, 'entrepreneurial' universities, GATS and bilateral agreements
-	GATS; the Doha round has been taken up again, but with the current economic crisis it is difficult to know exactly where things are heading.  GATS and the negotiations are however spurring the view that education is a tradable service and thus adds to commodification of higher education. Furthermore GATS aims at liberalising trade in education not only between countries but also by encouraging domestic liberalisation in the form of privatization, contracting out of public services, and deregulation. As a method of instruction that is highly linked to the workplace, VET is especially threatened by this development, and thus the whole system for Lifelong learning. 
-	Bilateral trade agreements have similar effects as GATS, but are even more difficult to monitor. Such bilateral agreements sometimes go even further than the general GATS agreements in terms of liberalising trade in education. 
-	OCED activities – AHELO, Tertiary review, Future scenarios. The OECD has undertaken some major studies in order to identify policy trends and future policy needs in the area of higher education. However both the identification of trends and the then proposed policy answers are geared towards reinforcing trends such as methods output-based funding and management of HEIs which are imported from the ethos of  the private sector. The policy proposals from the Tertiary review report and the Future scenarios project aim at such measures that increase marketisation. The Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project is still in its first phase, but the rationale behind is clearly that of performance-based funding, ranking of education systems, efficiency in education outcomes and higher education provision that is  geared mainly to serve the immediate needs of the labour market. 
Financial crisis: the long-term impact of the financial crisis on education is still difficult to predict. Whereas some countries have recognised the importance of investing in education and have increased funding –  e.g. France, though tied to controversial reforms; the UK, which has increased its teaching budget;  the US, which increased research funding; investment in infrastructure in a number of countries -  we can already now see how cuts are being made to public funding of higher education  (e.g. In the UK the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills recently suffered a cut of £400 million in its budget; in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states in particular, funds for higher education institutions are sharply reducing; California has suffered a $1 billion dollar cut in funding to state college systems) . This might further push institutions into the direction of obtaining funds from private sources, which is also a dead end, as many higher education institutions which had private investments, particularly in the US and the UK, all suffered severe financial losses at the very outset of the financial crisis. 
The trade union response at international level: allies and tools 
-	Our focus and policy is to underline the public character of education, to criticise and counter proposals leading to more market practices like rankings, AHELO and GATS
-	On GATS EI has been rather successful. EI has delved deep into the issue and has campaign the inclusion of education in GATS since its inception. In the struggle against the increasing privatisation of education, EI has designed and implemented a political campaign to stop the GATS attack on public education. EI has acted on a multiplicity of levels to this end, and has adopted a strategy that contemplates the multi-scalar nature and scope of the GATS. EI has lobbied at international level within the WTO, it has been present in a number of different fora, explaining the nature and the threats posed by GATS, and it has brought its affiliates together on the issues, organising conferences, producing information for its affiliates, and a toolkit to be used at the national level. For the past ten years, EI has been pushing for an educational response to the increasing internationalisation of higher education as opposed to a market-based approach.
-	The 1997 UNESCO Recommendation on the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel is an example of how an educational response can be provided at the international level. This recommendation guarantees a set of rights and working conditions for higher education staff, and it is an example of educational consensus at the international level. CEART – the Joint ILO/UNESCO Committee of Experts on the Application of the Recommendations concerning Teaching Personnel  - gives EI the opportunity to  produce a report of implementation of the mentioned recommendation every three years. This feeds into an overall CEART report on the application of the recommendation. EI will be producing such a report this year.  What we always observe when drafting such a report, is that, as the years go by, the application of market-based mechanisms of management and governance, and the increasing connections that institutions have with private companies are a threat to the rights of higher education teaching staff as promoted by the recommendation, particularly in terms of academic freedom and collegiality. 
-	Bologna Process; EI has been deeply involved in the Bologna Process since 2005 when we were admitted as consultative members to the so-called Bologna Follow-up Group. The Bologna Process has a different character than most other processes and policy movements in Europe and globally. In the Process the view of the stakeholders - students, staff and institutional leaders - are more listened to than elsewhere. This has resulted in the Process being sometimes rather ambiguous regarding matters such as commodification of education. While often stating that education is a public responsibility, it also more and more tends to promote matters such as diversification of HEI, classifications, diversification of funding sources and overly emphasises matters such as efficiency, employability and output.  The new ministerial Communique adopted in Leuven/Louvain-la-neuve on the 29th of April contains examples these double messages. It is also important to note that the Bologna Process does not aim to harmonise the content of higher education, the methods of delivery or assessment. 
However, as the nature of the Process is such that the stakeholder involvement matters, engaged and focused involvement in the Process at the national level can pay off, resulting in less focus on marketisation trends and more on high quality public education. It is therefore important that unions work together with EI in this effort. 

Unions at the national level - EI view of the strategy set out in the proposed UCU agreements/ EI policy and answers to this
EI finds that the agreement proposed as a result of this conference contains some important elements. It identifies some of the major problem areas, among them the threats posed by the increasing drive to commercialise transnational education, and the difficulties faced by mobile higher education staff. Importantly, it outlines the responsibility of the different national unions to support and assist each other and each other’s members in the work to uphold high academic labour standards. What is missing perhaps from this agreement is a clear reference to GATS and the insistence to introduce rankings of higher education institutions, as well as a reference to the financial crisis, calling for more quality education as pivotal for recovery.
It is important that we, as unions, provide an educational response to the internationalisation of higher education. The OECD/UNESCO guidelines for quality assurance in cross-border education are an example of such a response. EI was extensively involved in the drafting of these guidelines.  Yet we should not wait others to provide us with the opportunity to give such a response. We, as the voice of the academia, need to be at the forefront of the drive for public education of high quality which is sustainably funded and resourced, and in which higher education staff is given full support. 
The task is not an easy one, as we think of the struggle to achieve internationalisation rather than globalisation of higher education, as we seek to foster mobility while trying to counter brain drain, and as we face a financial crisis that has affected the higher education worldwide.
GATS negotiations remain ongoing, and we cannot be placid at such at a time when we are counting on public education to act as the key for recovery. It is important for unions to remain focused in their work and to work intensively with each other and EI on these issues, particularly working in solidarity and cooperation with unions from developing countries where the effects of marketisation of higher education are felt the most, and where capacity to counter this is at its lowest.