This paper applies ideas that emanate from the Global North, concerning neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality, to the case of marketisation in South Africa. It also attends to the limits of Northern ideas that are both intellectual undertakings and policy manifestations. In the first part of the paper, we identify how rationales for school choice, many of which have been introduced in countries like England, the USA, and Australia, have also been introduced in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite the introduction of markets to address apartheid era racial segregation, we suggest that in South Africa marketisation operates as part of racial neoliberalism. In the second part of the paper we explore in more detail how neoliberal governmentality operates in relation to education policy more generally, and specifically in South Africa.

At least prior to the global financial crisis in 2008, policy circulations were the primary representations of neoliberalism based on five values:‘the individual; freedom of choice; market security; laissez faire, and minimal government’(Larner, 2000, p. 7). These values pose a challenge to the Keynesian welfare state by combining institutional economics, which includes public choice theory, and managerialism, and the ascendance of privatisation and deregulation. Free trade and market competition are deemed to be the appropriate organising principles of a global economy and policy enactments within and between nation states (Harvey, 2005; Saul, 2005). This assumes the key actors are politicians and bureaucrats, developing and implementing a coherent programme of policies as a response to problems of global capitalism (Larner, 2000). There are aspects of converging neoliberal education policy, particularly education markets and school choice in KÁ12 schooling that appear to be taken up in similar ways in various parts of the world (Forsey, Davies, & Walford, 2008). Neoliberalism has become the dominant characterisation and form of education, in which international, intergovernmental and non-government organisations are important policy players. One consequence is that ‘[p] olicy circulation and comparison across national boundaries occur on a regular basis’(Rizvi & Lingard, 2009, p. 22).