Aims of the Paper

The proliferation of non-state policy actors in public education systems globally has actuated a turn to new governance analysis within education scholarship. In what has been called the ‘governance turn’ (Ball 2009b), education policy theorists have sought to clarify the interface between governance by non-state actors and public systems of policy formation and enactment. Renewed enthusiasm for education reform has in recent decades emanated from private capital, as well as philanthropic organisations, trusts, think tanks, edu-businesses, and other non-governmental organisations. In what has been called a Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg 2012), networks of these actors have rearranged, reshaped, or displaced public bodies in their traditional responsibilities for education governance. Charter schools, school vouchers, corporate vocational institutes (i.e. P-TECH), e-learning networks, privately-financed teacher education networks (i.e. Teach for All), even the standardised testing regimes that are now commonplace, are often denoted as consequences of this governance shift (see for example Au and Ferrare 2015; Fabricant and Fine 2012; Giroux 2011; Ravitch 2013).

Typically excluded from this list is the variety of private sector interventions into curricula that occur via the phenomenon of enterprise education. Known variously as enterprise studies, enterprise learning, or entrepreneurship education, enterprise education has become a staple of public schooling in New Zealand and abroad. Its composite schemes are directed toward skills associated with private enterprise, such as management, finance, and marketing, with an emphasis also on values and attitudes that are favourable to private enterprise. Enterprise education is in some form almost as old as capitalism itself. The phenomenon of corporations managing their own schools dates to at least the late nineteenth century in the United States, for example (Sukarieh and Tannock 2009). Enterprise education did not develop in New Zealand, in any significant sense, until the 1980s and 1990s, with the establishment of groups like the Enterprise New Zealand Trust (ENZ) and the education reforms of the Fourth Labour and National Governments. Enterprise education is defined locally in broad, often ambiguous terms. For example, in the only national review of the strand, the New Zealand Council for Education Research (NZCER) describes it as fostering ‘enterprising attitudes’, to ‘help students, teachers, and people in the community to think and act in enterprising and creative ways.’ (NZCER 2009d). As a consequence of its official abstrusity, an element of confusion persists as to the objectives of enterprise education. A survey of New Zealand school principals conducted in 2001 revealed that it ‘was apparent that schools have no common understanding of what enterprise education consists of or what the term means’ (Renwick et al. 2001, p. 7). Such uncertainty is perhaps perpetuated by an absence of critical discussion of the concept in education scholarship internationally (McLarty et al. 2010).

This article draws on governance theory and methods of social network analysis to posit that enterprise education constitutes a shift in curriculum governance towards a style of network governance. It shows that, in a resemblance to related components of Global Education Reform, enterprise networks incorporate and supplant public actors in their traditional prerogatives for curriculum development and delivery, with critical implications for governance. It begins with a discussion of relevant theoretical frameworks for analysis of new governance modes. This is followed by an historical exposition that seeks to locate enterprise education within the wider history of neoliberal education reform. Finally, enterprise education networks are critically analysed to support two conclusions, that (1) enterprise education should be considered within the inventory of education reforms effected by neoliberal policy flows internationally, and (2) that enterprise education does constitute an emergent type of network governance in the area of curriculum.

Social network analysis, representing a broad family of techniques, has been used by sociologists of education since the 1980s. Deriving initially from sociology (Carolan 2014), in recent years has it been used to analyse the role of private and non-state actors in global education reform (Au and Ferrare 2015). Social network analysis gives primacy to relations and networks of relations between individuals or organisations. Four generally agreed-upon principles characterise the approach (Au and Ferrare 2015; Carolan 2014; Wasserman and Faust 1994):

  1. (1)

    actors and their actions are viewed as interdependent rather than independent.

  2. (2)

    relational ties are perceived as channels for the transfer or ‘flow’ of policies, resources, ideologies and other materials.

  3. (3)

    network models view network structured environments as providing opportunities for constraints on individual action.

  4. (4)

    social, economic and political structures are conceptualised as comprising lasting patterns of relations among actors.

Social network analysis is therefore based on a relational intuition derived from ties connecting social actors (Carolan 2014; Freeman 2004). A distinctive feature of social network analysis is the use of graphic representations, or sociograms, to represent actors and their relations, generated through computational models. Images of networks allow for more detailed understanding of complex network structures, as well a clear mode of communication for these understandings.

This paper uses document analysis and internet searches to construct and analyse basic network sociograms using Gephi software. These sociograms offer a picture of the interface between enterprise education networks and public schooling in New Zealand, while analysis of their properties provides deeper understanding of their functions. Some have criticised social network analysis for producing flat and two-dimensional representations of networks that are inevitably multi-dimensional and characterised by relations of power (Au and Ferrare 2015; Ball 2009c). Social network analysis ‘has inadequately theorized the causal role of ideals, beliefs, and values, and of the actors that strive to realize them’ (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994, p. 1446). While it ‘renders an overarching sketch of an interaction, it will fail to capture detail on incommensurate yet meaningful relationships’ (Howard 2002, p. 550). Networks are, after all, not merely sets of connections between actors and sites; they are also characterised by the qualitative attributes of specific actors, relations, resources, interests, and practices. Networks can be opaque, and the nature of their relations is often concealed unless they are deliberately interrogated and explored. Questions of how, or whether, these qualitative features of networks can be mapped remain open.

Such criticisms threaten a reductive view of social network analysis. Most of its uses are, in fact, descriptive or discursive works that aim to represent a network’s underlying social structure through data reduction techniques, as much as they aim to construct models of structures as a whole (Carolan 2014; Knoke and Yang 2008). Despite this, the use of more qualitative techniques within network analysis is sometimes referred to as ‘network ethnography’ (Au and Ferrare 2015; Ball 2016; Hogan 2016). The specific use of documentary analysis, interviews, internet searches, media sources, observations of policy meetings and attendance at network events has been described as network ethnography within the broader social network analysis paradigm (Ball 2016). The deployment of some or all of these techniques within network analysis has grown in popularity in recent years (see Au and Ferrare 2015; Ball and Junemann 2012; Hogan 2016; Olmedo et al. 2013). Ball and Junemann (2012) describe these techniques as enabling the mapping of both ‘the form and content of policy relations in a particular field’ (Ball and Junemann 2012, p. 13). While network ethnography might represent merely a specific focus within the broader social network analysis paradigm, it is sometimes presented as meeting the shortcomings of social network analysis as a whole. Rather than be considered as ethnography, this paper merely emphasises the qualitative nature of social network analysis, stressing its intention to understand the properties of networks as much as the structures themselves.

The Governance Turn

Education governance has attracted renewed attention from scholarship as the pace and scale of Global Education Reform has increased in recent decades. Deriving initially from political science (Rhodes 1995), governance was popularised conceptually within education research by Roger Dale (1997) to refer to governing activity that is carried out both by government and non-governmental actors (Kooiman 2003; Robertson and Dale 2013). Governance draws attention to the fact that decision-making and control within education systems increasingly extend beyond traditional state actors to non-state, multi-national actors and networks. Dale and Robertson perceive education governance as comprised of combinations of: (i) distinct forms of education activity (funding, provision, ownership, regulation); (ii) particular kinds of entities or agents with different interests (state, for-profit/not-for-profit market, community, individual); and (iii) different platforms or scales of rule (sub-national, national, supranational) (Dale 1997; Robertson 2009; Robertson et al. 2002; Robertson and Dale 2013). Ideological and political contexts run through these categories, alerting education researchers to the operation of ideologies, policies and practices on the understandings and practices of education governance (Balarin 2014; Robertson and Dale 2013). In this sense, education governance is not limited to narrow technicist considerations of who makes decisions and how, but is concerned also with the interests that are served by governance systems and to what effect.

In recent decades, the role of private actors and networks in driving education reform has effected changes to governance within education systems on a global scale. A number of education researchers have observed that the intrusion of actors typically external to education, such as private corporations and philanthropic organisations, has increasingly displaced the role of government and public bodies in their traditional responsibility for education (Au and Ferrare 2015; Ball and Junemann 2012). With the governance turn, education researchers have drawn distinctions analytically between ‘government’ on the one hand and ‘governance’ on the other. According to this framework, control over education is shifted from government to governance by ‘an informal authority of diverse and flexible networks’ of actors (Ball and Junemann 2012, p. 3). The idea of ‘network governance’ has been used at times to refer to this shift away from centralised, public control over education to governance by more diverse networks of actors (Ball 2008, 2009a; Bevir and Rhodes 2003). Governance has therefore become a concept for encapsulating the loss of public control that occurs as corporate-driven education reform proceeds. As corporate-driven education reform proceeds, ‘responsibilities for governing are increasingly shifted from democratically elected state governments towards private bodies that are unelected and unaccountable to the voting public’ (Au and Ferrare 2015, p. 4).

Other researchers have questioned whether new networks have truly replaced older public modes of governance, or whether public and private actors have coalesced to create polycentric amalgamations, through which loci of power and responsibility are decentred, and public and private prerogatives conflated (Bache 2003; Ball 2008; Ball and Junemann 2012; Jessop 1998; Kooiman 2003). Whitty and Wisby (2016) suggest that ‘the “partnering state” can change its partners and reassign contracts as it wishes’ (p. 325), while others have adopted the language of ‘heterarchical governance’ in place of bureaucratic state hierarchies (Ball 2009a), or the ‘market state’ that relinquishes degrees of authority to maximise the freedom of non-state actors within market conditions (Bobbitt 2003). Other prominent theorists have advised that new governance analysis has failed to adequately acknowledge that the state has always depended on external actors in exercising government (Dale 1997). On the whole, these theorists have been reluctant to accept that new forms of governance result in the erosion of public control, tending instead to suggest that responsibility is shared through new modalities of state/non-state power that is reconstituitive of what has traditionally been considered ‘public’. New Zealand experiences with enterprise education offer an opportunity to consider the applicability of these governance frameworks. This article proposes that the reconstitution of public/private governance in the context of prevailing neoliberal ideology, while it problematises strict public-versus-private conceptual binaries, nevertheless poses a challenge to public control over curricula.

Enterprise Education: An Aspect of Neoliberal Curriculum Reform

Actors involved in the development and delivery of enterprise education since its inception in New Zealand have also been involved in the actualisation of broader governance reforms that have enabled and encouraged enterprise education. These include, most significantly, the Chamber of Commerce, the New Zealand Business Roundtable (NZBR), the NZ Employers’ Federation, the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA), and ENZ (renamed as the Young Enterprise Trust in 2009). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the project of neoliberal economic reform in New Zealand was broadened to social policy, effecting dramatic changes to education (Crawshaw 1999; Grant 2003; Janiewski and Morris 2005; Kelsey 1997). The emergence and continuation of enterprise education schemes has occurred within the framework of these changes, of which three aspects in particular have been vital: the adoption of a new national curriculum, a new emphasis on skills and competencies proportionate to knowledge within the curriculum, and the devolution of school governance. These developments materialised largely in consequence of the 1989 Education Amendment Act, the Administering for Excellence report of the Picot Taskforce (1988), the Tomorrow’s Schools (1988) policy package, and the development of a new national Curriculum Framework. Each of these initiatives assisted the more prolific deployment of enterprise education schemes within schools, and received significant support from actors within enterprise education. The Picot Taskforce itself was led by former Chamber of Commerce president Brian Picot. The report of the Taskforce and the Labour Government’s response, Tomorrow’s Schools, both received immediate and influential support from the NZBR (Sexton 1990; Kerr 1992; Openshaw 2011). Both the Chamber of Commerce and the NZBR have historically given vital support to the activities of the ENZ and later YET within schools.

In curriculum development, enterprise actors lobbied for a new curriculum that would emphasise skills and attributes favourable to enterprise. A “Review the Curriculum for Schools” document prepared on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, the New Zealand Employers Federation, the ENZ, and the EMA in 1986 campaigned for the adoption of compulsory ‘economic education’ at Years 9 and 10 (Wellington Chamber of Commerce Annual Report 1986). The NZBR campaigned enthusiastically for enterprise education from the outset. As proclaimed by its Chairman to a conference on the issues (Business Roundtable 1993):

in too many of our schools it is still not ‘politically correct’ to teach school students about the nature of our market economy and the place of business and commerce within it. There is a suspicion that business and the ‘market’ are, at best, necessary evils and aspects of life that must be tolerated until some better system is found. This is thoroughly unhealthy for the education system and for a society which has to make its own way in a highly competitive world.

These efforts are reflected in the inclusion of enterprise within the Vision, Principles and Key Competencies sections of the national Curriculum document adopted in 2007 (Ministry of Education 2007). Submissions to the curriculum consultation process that occurred throughout 2006 indicate the ongoing role of enterprise in the production of enterprise education policies, with the EMA, ENZ, and Business NZ making lengthy submissions emphasising the need for enterprise representation in the new curriculum (see EMA 2006; Business NZ 2006; Enterprise New Zealand Trust 2006). Education for Enterprise (E4E) has since existed as an independent curriculum strand (prior to the addition of E4E as a separate strand in 2007, the Ministry of Education related enterprise education to the ‘Resources and Economic Activities’ strand of the Social Studies curriculum). Under E4E, enterprise networks are given official sanction to provide programmes and resources, including personnel, to schools directly.

Curriculum reform since 1990 has also been characterised by a broader emphasis on skills and competencies in place of specific content knowledge, to which enterprise education has been concomitant. Internationally, industry-led agendas for school curricula frequently have a new emphasis on the kind of person desired by employers; ‘adaptable and flexible’, ‘negotiating and team skills’, ‘personal management and planning’ and the like (Williams 2005). In line with the trend, New Zealand curriculum developments have initiated a transition away from specific disciplinary knowledge to a focus on the development of generic skills, attitudes and dispositions relevant to citizenship, the workplace and employment (Priestley and Sinnema 2014; Young 2008). This has been perceived in critical terms as a ‘hollowing out’ of the curriculum. Elizabeth Rata has asked: ‘Why does our national curriculum not mention content knowledge? Why is it all about skills, competencies, and values? […] our national curriculum is hollowed out of knowledge.’ (Rata 2013). Aside from the explicit inclusion of enterprise principles in the Curriculum document, the prioritisation of broad skills and competencies serves to further validate enterprise education by creating a broader base for its inclusion. As a result, a range of enterprise schemes can be deployed within schools under the aegis of general competencies recognised by the national curriculum.

Countervailing centralised curriculum developments, enterprise education is expedited by the decentralisation of school governance legislated in the 1989 Education Act. School autonomy empowers enterprise education networks to implement schemes through direct relationships with school boards and teaching staff. With the devolution of school governance, the 1990s became a period of unprecedented engagement between independent businesses, enterprise networks, and schools (Beder et al. 2009). During this period ‘corporate involvement with schooling’ grew at ‘an unprecedented and almost unchartable rate’ (Harris 1996, p. 1). The Chamber of Commerce was an ardent supporter of both devolution and school-enterprise links. ENZ established the Young Enterprise Scheme in the late 1980s with support from the Fletcher Challenge Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce, the latter organising direct industry contact with schools through its regional boards (Wellington Chamber of Commerce Annual Report 1990). The Chamber also established an ‘Education Committee’ in the mid-1980s, its ‘major thrust’ to ‘put business people and teachers together’ (Wellington Chamber of Commerce Annual Report 1986). A series of conferences were held in 1993 by the Education-Business Partnership Trust, sponsored by the NZ Employers’ Federation, the Auckland Employers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and individual companies such as BP, Telecom and the National Bank, with the aim of building ‘a climate of mutual trust and respect’ between business and schools, and ‘exposing schools to a business perspective’ (Business-Education Partnership Trust 1993, pp. 5–6). The rapid proliferation of school-industry links by which enterprise education is delivered would have been difficult without school autonomy.

Contemporary Enterprise Education Networks in New Zealand

The case for enterprise education as a site for network governance can be seen through analysis of both the historical context of enterprise education and the present structure of the Young Enterprise Trust (YET), formerly ENZ. This organisation played an active role in the reform processes outlined above and became the most significant network for both the production and delivery of enterprise education from the middle 1980s. By 1993, the Education-Business Partnership Trust—a related organisation—claimed that 8 out of 10 secondary schools nationally were using ENZ services (Education-Business Partnership Trust 1993). This development was facilitated both by inclusion of enterprise in a new national Curriculum defined by an emphasis on skills and competencies and the introduction of school autonomy, creating space for a network of private actors to govern much of the emergent enterprise curriculum. As a networked governance mechanism, it relies on ‘a dense fabric of lasting ties and networks that provide key resources of expertise, reputation and legitimization’ (Grabher 2004, p. 104). Crucial to the concept of network governance, rather than merely network functioning, the actors and networks that have acquired responsibility for governing these curriculum components were instrumental to the process of introducing the reforms necessary for their existence. This foremost includes the YET and its contributors. Enterprise New Zealand formally changed its name to the Young Enterprise Trust (YET) in 2009. Its role and function remain unchanged. In the words of former Chief Executive Donna Dentice, ‘The name change is a natural transition from one that was often confused for a government agency’ (Enterprise Matters, No. 1, 2009). The YET network continues to oversee the vast majority of enterprise education programmes within schools.

The YET network has shifted and changed in its composition since its inception, though it has remained comprised fundamentally of the same actors. Figures 1 and 2 stand as simple graphic representations of the YET network structure in the present (Fig. 2) and at the time of its name change (Fig. 1). It has for the past decade continued to be supported by a network of private actors, including large domestic and multinational corporations, as well as philanthropic organisations, employer associations, with a small number of government agencies. Between 2008 and 2016, a similar number of ties are incident upon the YET (the central ego of both sociograms). All ties are directional arcs representing financial and other support. Philanthropic actors, such as Gallagher Charitable Trust, are also connected to their individual or corporate donors through their own directional arcs. It can be seen that the YET network is composed of many of the actors involved in historic education reform relevant to enterprise education as a network governance space, including Business NZ, the Chamber of Commerce, and the various regional and national bodies of the EMA. The enduring interdependence of public and private actors within the YET also presents challenges for designating the network as either private or public. Private actors dominate the YET numerically. A Supporters’ Council comprised at any time of between forty and sixty organisations advises the central decisions of YET and is comprised overwhelmingly of private actors. The Ministry for Youth Development (MYD) remains a Platinum Sponsor of the organisation (through a funding relationship established in 2014), alongside the Lion Foundation. Specifically, the MYD provides specialised funding for the YET to employ ‘Roaming Teachers’ within schools. Other public bodies provide lower-level support. For example, the Ministry for Pacific Peoples sponsors an individual youth enterprise award. This interface between public and private actors is extended by the YET’s activities within schools, where it establishes relationships with individual teachers and school leaders. The organisation markets actively to schools, offering activities and materials aligned with enterprise and business in the New Zealand Curriculum. The devolution of school governance gives YET a significant advantage in these activities.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Supporters of YET, 2008

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Fig. 2
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Supporters of YET, 2016

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The parameters of a social network analysis approach would suggest that public actors involved in the YET are constrained by goals and activities defined by private enterprise. If we are to accept the contention that the location of an actor within a network will inevitably shape their behaviours, opportunities and outcomes (Carolan 2014), it might be deduced that the relatively minor contribution of public actors within the YET is likely to bring them into alignment with other actors, certainly rather than the converse. Through their relational ties, resources and practices flow between these public and private actors and on to schools. Within YET, public actors are both a numerical minority, while their power is minimised by their role as public actors within networks that exist to promote skills and attitudes associated with private enterprise. The influence of private actors in the policy production process dating to the 1980s has been well-documented, largely due to their significant financial resources. There is little reason to think these actors have less influence in processes of policy implementation. It can be deduced that the bulk of YET activities are carried out by private companies and their charitable trusts, while the influence of public actors is further diminished in an ideological context that privileges entrepreneurial values and private sector economic prerogatives.

As an aside, this ideological component perhaps makes possible the involvement of private actors in the processes of development and review of enterprise education within the national curriculum framework. The entanglement of public and private actors proceeds and is assisted through the Education 4 Enterprise (E4E) strand of the Curriculum. Prior to the adoption of E4E, under the Government’s ‘Bright Future’ policy, the Ministry of Education contracted directly to private networks to facilitate school-industry links, including the Partners NZ Trust, the Canterbury Development Corporation, and Enterprise NZ, which was for several years contracted to deliver the Primary Enterprise and Enterprise Studies Programmes (Renwick et al. 2001). The conflation of public and private prerogatives is pervasive. For example, the only review of E4E nationally was carried out by the New Zealand Council for Economic Research (NZCER) in 2009, though the review was sponsored by the Tindall Foundation, the charitable arm of The Warehouse Group (NZCER 2009a, b, c, d). It is notable that The Warehouse Group operates its own enterprise education programme, “Red Shirts in Schools”, providing NCEA Level 2 credits and retail industry training. Between 2002 and 2012, more than 4000 students have participated in the scheme (O’Callaghan 2012). The NZCER evaluation was targeted towards ‘tracking and supporting developments’ in E4E. (2009d, p. 1). While the ethical integrity of NZCER is not in question, such a convergence of interests at the level of policy evaluation warrants discussion. A multivalent entanglement of public and private actors within enterprise education occurs from the level of policy development, enactment, and review, down to the practical implementation of schemes at the school level.

The specialised and privileged location of private sector and non-state actors within enterprise networks is given further validation by the fact that large corporations run their own enterprise education schemes independently. Australian banks operating in New Zealand are particularly active. ASB, formerly a major sponsor of the YET, ran its SmartStart financial literacy programme in more than 300 New Zealand schools as of 2009 (ASB 2009). ASB also launched the GetWise financial literacy programme in 2009, a series of free and highly interactive classroom workshops for schoolchildren at primary and intermediate (Years 1–8), reaching 55,000 students through 2200 sessions in 2010 (Udanga 2011). BNZ similar programmes within schools. One of its charitable adjuncts, Savy, provides financial literacy training within schools with the assistance of the University of Auckland. In late 2016, Spark NZ (formerly Telecom) piloted a scheme to ‘help young New Zealanders become more attractive to prospective employers as they enter the world of work’. (Spark 2016). No public actors run such schemes independently. Enterprise education therefore represents a body of practices and policies that flow from enterprise itself, to be supported by public actors, with the sanction of official institutions. This observations points again to the relations of power that characterise enterprise networks that, appearing diffuse, remain practically and ideologically dominated by non-state actors.

Enterprise Education and Implications for Curriculum Governance

This article seeks to propose that enterprise education schemes should be considered among changes to education governance that have occurred as a result of the greater involvement of private actors in education systems over the course of at least two decades. Like charter schools, new modes of teacher training, and other reform projects, enterprise education enables public–private networks to take responsibility for core functions of education systems. To facilitate enterprise education schemes within schools, the YET and its individual elements develop and provide entire packages of learning content, as well as assessment and reporting strategies, school-to-work pathways, and private ‘experts’ to facilitate teaching. The YET network, constituted of public, private and civic actors, functions through direct links to schools, under the auspices of a reformed national curriculum. In this sense it can be said that enterprise education constitutes an expression of network governance, through which an important and growing section of curriculum is governed by a network of state and non-state actors. The establishment and rapid expansion of national enterprise education programmes in the 1980s, led by ENZ, did not merely coincide with broader reforms that occurred within the governance of education nationally. Enterprise education actors were involved in the production and enactment of reform policies that enabled them to have greater control over curriculum governance. Sketches of the YET network help us to see that the same actors involved in these historical reforms now constitute a mechanism for networked governance over the development and delivery of a growing curriculum area. Sociograms provide snapshots of the YET’s composition both at the time of its transition from ENZ and in the present day, illustrating the fundamentally non-state nature of the network.

It is true that businesses have long had important points of contact with public schools in New Zealand. This is also true internationally, where it has been well-researched, though it remains an avenue for further research in the New Zealand context. This includes the nature and implications of the contemporary interface, but also historicisation of relationships between business and public education in New Zealand. While the substantive nature of enterprise education networks can be conceived through competing theoretical frameworks, there can be little disagreement that they encroach upon the historically exclusive responsibility for public curriculum control possessed by state actors. If enterprise education networks existed historically, they did not exist to the scale of the YET, nor were their activities given formal recognition in a national curriculum document. The involvement of public actors in the provision of enterprise education also problematises the conceptual binary between public control and private network governance, as posited by governance theorists (Au and Ferrare 2015; Ball and Junemann 2012; Lipman 2011; Rhodes 1995). The entanglement of public and private actors within new networks results in less definitive boundaries between the two. This too has been a feature of neoliberalism internationally. That the former CEO of the YET describes the organisation as ‘often confused for a government agency’ exemplifies this (Enterprise Matters 2009, p. 1). Concurrently, enterprise education networks are assisted by actors that remain (at least nominally) accountable to public interest and input. These include government departments, but also the role of school governance boards in approving enterprise education schemes within their curricula. An emergent expression of network governance can be observed, with enterprise education as both a catalyst and an implication.

Changes to governance occur within determinant ideological and political contexts (Balarin 2014; Robertson and Dale 2013). Among the core features of transnational neoliberal reform since the 1980s has been the encouragement of private sector involvement in public sphere by states and public actors themselves. As stated, policy theorists have questioned whether new modes of network governance do not so much displace the public as much as reconstitute it, conflating the roles of public and private actors and creating decentred, polycentric, or heterarchical models (Bache 2003; Ball 2008; Jessop 1998). Indeed, enterprise education schemes emanate from bodies that are neither ‘public’ nor exclusively ‘non-state’, but rather an amalgamation of actors from within both categories. As the policy goals of these actors converge, their networks are neither public, nor private, but are reconstituted as both. What is more, as Ball (2008) and others have sought to elucidate, the state often retains its traditional responsibility for steering curriculum policy, while remaining dependent on governance networks for its implementation. Consequently, the most serious implication of enterprise education for curriculum governance may be in the deliberate concession of responsibility that occurs on the part of state and public actors within new networks. The presence of shared objectives and cooperative action does not detract from the loss of public control that transpires as private actors are granted responsibility for curriculum matters. Support for this process among policy makers is broadly reflective of neoliberal ideology. While it is eroded by the incursion of non-state agents, public power is also reconstituted and diluted as it becomes enmeshed in polycentric formations.

Enterprise education has further ideological implications for curriculum governance. Presenting a situation in which certain values and attitudes are determined to be important by private enterprise, and are promoted to students within a public curriculum framework, enterprise education has provoked ideological reaction historically. Allan A. Gibb, an early proponent of the phenomenon in the UK, noted that the central curricular objectives of enterprise education ‘do not […] sit easily with those of certain ideological persuasions’, and cautioned that ‘the “goodness” of enterprise therefore needs to be considered carefully in respect of the various stakeholders involved’ (Gibb 1993, p. 26). The inclusion of enterprise studies in the recently-adopted Australian Curriculum invoked consternation. One Australian commentator quips of the new Curriculum’s enterprise strand that ‘most Year 10 students will be ready to become Treasury secretary or Reserve Bank governor’ (Sloan 2013), while others criticise its economic functionalism as deriving from individualist neoliberal conceptions of self-development (Ditchburn 2012; Harris-Hart 2010; Skourdoumbis 2015). Intriguingly, international researchers in fields of sociology and political science have pointed to the dangers inherent in the ‘opinion-forming’ potential of enterprise studies and its effects on public discourse (Beder 2001, 2006; Carey 1995; Fones-Wolf 1994, 2000). However the outcomes of enterprise education are perceived, to suggest that public and private actors have naturally convergent interests is to deny historical antagonisms between the two. In the neoliberal era, the interests of private capital at times come into stark contradiction with those of the public. The reconstitution of the public that occurs within new governance networks should be considered ever more carefully in this respect, as its interests become obscured and conflated with those of forces that, in the final analysis, remain external to it.