Public Education as Trade: A Brief Historical Survey on the Export Education in New Zealand and the Introduction of an International Student Programme in a State Secondary School

Abstract

Export education – the selling of educational services to international students – has become a lucrative industry in New Zealand. While New Zealand has long been involved in transnational education, introducing a profit-generating model was more recent. This historical study will include a single case study of a school that became a ‘late adopter’ of export education in 1998 and address some of the broader historical developments of this industry in New Zealand, including the disruption caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020. Export education in New Zealand state schools reveals the ideological tensions in a system built on egalitarian aims that later adopted liberal capitalist values. Post-primary education provides an interesting context as the expansion of compulsory and free secondary schooling was an emblem of New Zealand’s supposed egalitarianism. Export education was part of a shifting education picture under the Tomorrow Schools, which has implications for the present day including widened disparities between publicly funded schools. The market-based education reforms of the late 1980s set the conditions for the export education industry to be established and to thrive. The promotion of education as an export faced criticism over what was seen as the privatisation of public goods and that international fees would be used to shore up inadequate government funding for public schools. As more schools became involved and successful in export education, the focus shifted from barring the industry to regulating it. Based on participant interviews and documentary research, the findings suggest that export education provided some cultural and financial incentives for state secondary schools that were most noticeable at the individual school level. The presence of this industry within the state system supported an education system of individual actors – schools of varying means and quality – rather than a collective of state institutions with equitable resourcing