Defining neoliberalism in post-neoliberal times?

Education providers' dissatisfaction with market regimes seems as high as its ever been: there is little trust in market capacity to distribute resources and efficiently achieve shared political and social ends. But while providers seem to have become completely disenchanted with 'student choice', government appears to still be entirely reliant on it as orthodoxy and the only market signal they trust. This is an unresolved tension between supporting the freedom of individuals to pursue their best interests and what it means to be convincingly accountable to public finance and national prosperity.

I've been thinking a lot about these tensions and frustrations in the principles of liberal societies recently (for some reason), so it was great to be able to discuss these with Chris Millward and Helen Carasso and colleagues at the Centre for Global Higher Education annual conference last week, and consider how these tensions have precipitated some of the current crises in higher education around equity, affordability, access, and sustainability.

Are there ways of working those these tensions? For those who weren't at the presentation, I wrote up some of these ideas in parallel for Post-16 Educator. Going beyond labels and pejoratives and empathising with how historical agents tried to deal with these tensions in the past is key to appreciating where we might go next in balancing freedoms in the pursuit of national prosperity.

Non-subscribers can now read here: https://post16educator.org.uk/resources/archive/123/PSE-123-Patel.pdf