Selling world-class education: British private schools, whiteness and the soft-sell technique

ABSTRACT

Education-UK and British private schools more specifically are often framed as a global brand of ‘world-class’ quality. However, the increased competition within the international education market has meant British private schools cannot rest on their laurels but instead must continue to project their ‘world-classness’ in a way that does not diminish their brand image. Drawing on interviews of parents and key gatekeepers, this paper examines how British private schools in Nigeria (BPS-NIG) and British private boarding schools in the UK (BPBS-UK) evoked and projected their supposed world-classness through the strategic use of white symbolism and the expensive admission process. The paper contends that the latter are types of soft-sell marketing techniques utilised by BPS-NIG and BPBS-UK to sell British schools without imperilling their brand image. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the racial implication of framing whiteness and white British specifically as synonymous with high-quality, ‘world-class’ education.

KEYWORDS:

• World-class education
• the soft-sell technique
• British private schools
• Nigerian elite parents
• British whiteness
• white symbolism

Acknowledgements

This paper draws partly from a book chapter published previously by Springer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The international education market is a particular field of education within which private international schools with international affiliations and/or reputations operate. As a global marketplace, the international education market allows the buying and selling of international schools while facilitating the flow of Western ‘knowledge’ from the West to non-Western nation-states at the same time. Integral to its origin and sustainability the international education market has a close relationship to elite international schools within non-Western societies as well as private boarding schools in Western countries such as the UK (Ayling, 2017, pp. 2–3).

2 Global education market and international education market are used interchangeably in this paper.

3 IBC also known as off-campus universities are universities in non-western countries such as United Arab Emirates that are affiliated to, and/or modelled on western-based universities (Shonekan, 2019; Sin, 2013).

4 Whilst the latest PISA report shows a slight improvement from previous years, the UK is still not one of the top ten countries; coming came in 15th place in science, 13th in Reading, and 14th place in Mathematics (Schleicher, 2023). Interestingly, Asia countries such China, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore have consistently ranked as the top five countries in PISA’s ranking.

5 The ‘colonial condition’ is Blacks’ internalisation of Western hegemonic discourses, values and ideologies, whereby Whites and Whiteness is constructed as superior to Blacks and Blackness. Though the colonial condition is a byproduct of colonialism, it is maintained in contemporary times through and by coloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).