New Public Management and Education

Public administration has always been under constant review. Such reviews were mostly parochial, incremental, initiated or driven by low-key staff and often ended as fads. From the end of the 1970s to the 1990s, however, governments around the world were engaged in widespread and sustained reforms of their public administration. These reforms were born out of economic recession, but also had political and social drivers. They were initiated by the political apex and fuelled by New Right ideology. Collectively, these reforms came to be termed New Public Management (NPM). NPM is characterised by marketisation, privatisation, managerialism, performance measurement and accountability. This employment of corporate attitudes in public administration is grounded on certain theories, mainly public choice, transaction cost analysis and principal-agent theory. As with every other sector, the education service was also reformed. In this field the major signs of NPM are the local management of schools on managerialist principles and the heightened influence of stakeholders in the daily life of the school, while the collegiality of academia is diminished. At the higher education level, institutions are tending towards full-fledged corporate organisations delivering enterprise education. This article discusses NPM in detail, tracing its origins, considering the theories and examining its principal characteristics, and then takes a critical look at its implications for education.