Redesigning collective educational capacity: From integrated public systems to capacity building enterprises

This paper examines teachers' work based upon a dichotomy between centralised publicly funded and administered education systems and more diversified and marketised education providers. It considers the way recent government reform agenda have redesigned education and training, creating a new educational landscape and new contexts for educational work. These changes in provision represent a re-ordering and re-organisation of collective educational capacity. Both centralised bureaucratic education systems and more marketised enterprise-based providers aim ‘educate the people’ but they operate in somewhat different ways and with somewhat different consequences. The paper uses the experience of teachers and managers in the marketised providers to demonstrate changes in pedagogical practices and innovations, and to begin to assess the costs and benefits of the two ways of orchestrating collective educational capacity.