Maria Balarin

Since the mid-1990s, Peru has undergone a process of default educational privatization, with the private education market now accounting for more than a quarter of the country's enrolments. Such growth has taken place in the context of highly loose and disorganised regulation, resulting in an extremely heterogeneous private education market, in terms of both supply and results. Since 2011, the Ministry of Education has led at least five attempts at improving the regulation of private education, bringing it closer to state oversight. These attempts have faced staunch resistance from some sectors of the market, showing the problems that a completely ‘free’ market for private education may lead to. In this chapter, we revisit the strategies deployed by both the state and private actors to advance or hinder these reform attempts, and we discuss how contextual factors have influenced them. We base our discussion on investigations we conducted as both researchers and participant-observers of the reform attempts. Our analysis shows the challenges faced by private education regulatory reforms in contexts with weak states and institutions, where largely unregulated social sectors, political instability, and the permeability of the state to private interests pose considerable challenges to the consolidation of reform agendas.

"Limitations and possibilities of justice in education and the implications for sustainable futures" published on 22 Jul 2024 by Bristol University Press.

While education is expected to play a significant role in responding to global social challenges, sustainable development discourses often fail to attend to issues of pedagogy, purpose and process. In this paper, we argue that one way to focus arguments on educational practice is through considerations of the relationship between education as justice and education for justice. We do this through discussing one form of justice in education – epistemic justice – and developing our conceptualisation of an epistemic core. Drawing on Elmore’s instructional core, this includes openness to students’ experiences and the place where they live, rich pedagogies and a broad range of epistemic resources. We argue that this is one way that secondary education’s contribution to sustainable and just futures could be made more concretely possible.

This paper draws on findings from the JustEd study to discuss the shallow pedagogies that have emerged in Peru in the context of learner-centred and outcomes-based reforms that have been poorly implemented in a context with many limitations in terms of policy orientations, resources, and teacher training and support. These pedagogies promote little to no critical thinking, are disconnected from students’ experiences and do not encourage them to problematise reality nor to grasp complexity. Such pedagogies constitute a form of epistemic injustice in that they do not help to develop students’ capacity to participate as equals in the consumption and production of knowledge. Through this, these pedagogies also limit education’s potential contributions to justice, peace and sustainability. Our discussion of shallow pedagogies leads us to articulate some more positive elements of what rich and just pedagogies might entail.

Over the last decades, Peru has experienced an extraordinary rise of low-fee private schools (LFPSs). While global debates on the quality of this modality of schooling have been gaining currency, research on the organizational practices of LFPSs remains comparatively underdeveloped. This paper aims at identifying and describing the managerial, business and organizational practices exhibited by Peruvian LFPSs– and at understanding them in relation to the social norms and institutional arrangements specific to the context in which they operate. The study draws on a combination of archival analysis, interviews with decision-makers, and interviews with school owners and principals. The results of our research show that the specificities of the socioeconomic, cultural and regulative environments in which Peruvian LFPSs operate have led to the consolidation of a particular subsistence model of LFPS where profit-making appears to play a limited role. This model is also characterized by the low formalization of management routines, the impossibility to generate economies of scale, and the reliance on interpersonal trust as a means to reduce risk – in a context of low bureaucratization and limited regulatory oversight. We argue that, in view of the distinctly low achievement levels of Peruvian LFPSs, gaining a fine-grained understanding of their organizational practices (and the incentives they respond to) remains a relevant task, and a necessary step to devise effective policy strategies.

The paper reports on a mixed methods study that sought to analyse determinants of youth labour market and educational disengagement in Peru. It begins by questioning the widespread focus on NEET – youth not in employment, education or training – as a measure of youth vulnerability in countries with extensive informal labour markets where labour precarity can be as problematic as unemployment for young people’s futures. A broader category of ‘urban vulnerable’ youth, including both NEET and precarious workers, is proposed and used as the basis for analysing the factors that influence young people’s trajectories. Key factors and shocks in youth trajectories are identified through qualitative life histories, and are tested using cross-section and panel survey data. Findings from the study have implications for the analysis of youth labour market vulnerability in the Global South, as well as for the policies that seek to address this problem.

ExtractMaría Balarin Aurora Escudero In the past decades, Peru has taken great strides in closing the access gap to education. Coverage is now at about 92. 3 per cent in primary schools and 84. 3 per cent in secondary schools. Until recently, however, the movement towards universal enrolment came without any concomitant increases in public investment for education. At the beginning of the 1990s, after a decade of economic crisis and internal violence, Peru’s educational expenditure was at an all-time low at 162 dollars per student per year. By the end of that decade, investment had risen to just 278 dollars per student per year (Saavedra and Suárez, 2002) . This meant that over a period that lasted approximately three decades, the quality of Peruvian public education was consistently eroded (Arregui, 2000) . Teachers were underpaid and inappropriately trained – today, they are still among the worst paid in Latin...

This Campbell systematic review examines the impact of vocational and business training targeted at women in low- and middle-income countries. The review summarises evidence from thirty-five quantitative studies with an experimental or quasi-experimental design. The review summarises the impact of 30 interventions, containing data from over 80,000 women. The qualitative narrative meta-synthesis includes findings from 50 studies. Included studies are experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations which measured the impact of vocational and business training programmes targeting women 18 years or older, in low- and middle-income countries. The review also includes qualitative and mixed-methods studies that explore barriers to, and facilitators of, vocational and business training effectiveness. Vocational training has small positive effects: employment and formal employment increased by 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively, and income by 6 percent. There is some variability in the findings. Effects are larger in programmes with a gender focus. Effects on earnings, but not employment, are larger in programmes that include life skills training or an internship. Employment effects are larger in Africa and Asia. Effects are stronger six months after the start of the programme than twelve months after the start of the programme. Vocational training programmes were commonly outsourced without establishing adequate quality control procedures or monitoring mechanisms that may undermine effectiveness. Business training combined with cash transfers or life skills training increases the likelihood of self-employment by 73 percent, and sales or profits by 7 percent. Business training with cash transfers did not have different effects from business training without cash transfers. Effects on sales are larger in sub-Saharan Africa (15 percent). This larger effect may be caused by the stronger gender focus of those programmes. The positive effects on sales and profits appear driven by the inclusion of mentoring and technical assistance components that enhance business knowledge and practices. Structural barriers, such as distance and cost of transportation, time constraints for participation, and economic and labour market barriers, limit programme effectiveness. Gender norms such as occupational segregation and the unequal division of domestic and care responsibilities, as well as the cost and availability of childcare facilities also discourage women?s participation in vocational and business training. Plain language summary: Vocational and business training benefit women on the labour market, but the effects of most programmes are small: Vocational training has small positive effects on employment, formal employment, earnings, and income. The review in brief: Vocational training has small positive effects on employment, formal employment, and earnings. Business training combined with other programme components has positive effects on self-employment, and sales or profits. These relatively small effects may be insufficient to justify scaling up vocational or business training programmes. Design variations to increase impact need to be tested. What is this review about?: Women around the world often perform jobs with minimal skill requirements, and encounter few opportunities for learning and advancement. Governments and development agencies try to improve women's skills through vocational and business training programmes. This review summarises evidence on the impacts of such programmes, and on the barriers to and facilitators of vocational and business training effectiveness. What is the aim of this review?: This Campbell systematic review examines the impact of vocational and business training targeted at women in low- and middle-income countries. The review summarises evidence from thirty-five quantitative studies with an experimental or quasi-experimental design. The review summarises the impact of 30 interventions, containing data from over 80,000 women. The qualitative narrative meta-synthesis includes findings from 50 studies. What are the main findings of this review?: What studies are included?: Included studies are experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations which measured the impact of vocational and business training programmes targeting women 18 years or older, in low- and middle-income countries. The review also includes qualitative and mixed-methods studies that explore barriers to, and facilitators of, vocational and business training effectiveness. Vocational training has small positive effects: employment and formal employment increased by 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively, and income by 6 percent. There is some variability in the findings. Effects are larger in programmes with a gender focus. Effects on earnings, but not employment, are larger in programmes that include life skills training or an internship. Employment effects are larger in Africa and Asia. Effects are stronger six months after the start of the programme than twelve months after the start of the programme. Vocational training programmes were commonly outsourced without establishing adequate quality control procedures or monitoring mechanisms that may undermine effectiveness. Business training combined with cash transfers or life skills training increases the likelihood of self-employment by 73 percent, and sales or profits by 7 percent. Business training with cash transfers did not have different effects from business training without cash transfers. Effects on sales are larger in sub-Saharan Africa (15 percent). This larger effect may be caused by the stronger gender focus of those programmes. The positive effects on sales and profits appear driven by the inclusion of mentoring and technical assistance components that enhance business knowledge and practices. Structural barriers, such as distance and cost of transportation, time constraints for participation, and economic and labour market barriers,...

This paper explores the changing governance of education in two distinct contexts: England and Peru. While there are major differences between these two cases, the paper argues that a common agenda can be identified where an increasing degree of organizational hybridity is patent—where the traditionally distinct goals and rationales of public and private sectors are being recombined. Although this agenda has been very differently enacted in the two contexts, it has generated similar outcomes, which include an increasing degree of fragmentation of educational services and a consequent depolitization of education. In this process, education has been transformed from a contested space of knowledge and identity formation to a commodity bought, sold, and administered through the rules of the market and has been recast as a private rather than public good. This, it is argued, is contributing to the emergence of more segregated education systems and to the rise of equally segregated societies.