Abstract

The intention of the project, Public Private Partnerships and the Educational Outcomes for the poor (P3EOP), is to identify how the poor experience schooling in the public, private and partnership sectors. The term ‘private’ sector covers all non-state actors with corporate entities, NGOs and faith based organisations all falling into this category. These different players are likely to have distinct approaches to education provision emerging from their own historical evolution as well as economic motivation. The project uses an augmented school-in-community framework where the interpretation of educational policy by providers and the actions and struggles between teachers, parents and pupils provide the social context of education provision. The methodological approach taken in this project is that educational choices and conflicts constitute the reality of education. Schooling that is provided by public, private and partnerships schools in the school responds to demand directives from the parents/ pupils/community and is generated by the agendas and understandings the providers (teachers/heads/education officials). The project follows a Hirschman-type (exit, voice and loyalty) analysis to examine how demand and supply aspects of provision are affected by the ability of parents, pupils and providers to use and respond to voice and exit respectively, in the absence and presence of loyalty. This emphasis on the qualitative and the experiential provides us internal constructions of exit and voice in the community that is faced by different school types and can be linked to the demand and supply factors operate in the educational sector. On the Demand Side it is the impact of parents and pupils using the mechanisms of voice and exit that influence all types of schools. On the Supply Side the objectives of the providers in the educational sector affect the outcomes of educational provision as do the shifting enrolments between types of schools on account of changing price and non-price changes within the school. By using school type and parental choices the project hopes to understand better the political and economic outcomes of an increasing number and growing diversity of educational providers within poor communities.