TRADE unionists in Britain will be no strangers to the ravages of privatisation. Forty years of neoliberalism have seen our public services decimated: deliberately underfunded, fragmented, privatised and asset-stripped. When the profit motive rules, effective provision of universal public services becomes not just secondary, but entirely incompatible with the system.

Meanwhile, rates of profit in privatised services have been kept artificially high by the continued provision of public subsidies that effectively go straight into the pockets of the shareholders. The results of this process can be clearly seen in transport, public utilities, health and education.

Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, the role of local authorities in overseeing education has been progressively stripped out. First, funding and budget decisions were effectively devolved to schools via “Local Management of Schools” and this, combined with per capita funding and a false “parental choice”, set the key foundations for the marketisation of schools. New Labour introduced academies, “specialist” schools and a plethora of other market diversifications. Then, since 2010, Tory-led governments have supercharged these policies, aiming for the full realisation of the project that started in 1988.

The result has been disastrous, with numerous examples of profit-making and skimming off the top of our children’s education, narrowing of the curriculum, centralisation of decision-making within multi-academy trusts and “orphan schools” abandoned because no academy chain wants to take them in. This process has led to a worsening of educators’ terms and conditions and of students’ learning conditions.

What British trades unionists may be less familiar with is the way in which our government uses aid money to promote this same failed model internationally.

The National Education Union, in partnership with Global Justice Now, is releasing a new report today – In Whose Interest? – which explores the growth of the private education sector internationally, and the way in which this trend is being perpetuated by the UK Department for International Development. The findings of this report are quite shocking.

As the report notes, 262 million children and young people worldwide are being denied a basic human right: the right to education. Despite the commitment made in 2015 by the international community through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to deliver this right for all children and young people, millions remain unable to access the “inclusive and equitable quality education and […] lifelong learning opportunities” they were promised.

This is being used as an opportunity by private capital to try to access the estimated $5 trillion potential education market worldwide. One quarter of all secondary school students are now in private education, with the proportion in some areas being as high as 85 per cent. Bridge International Academies – a for-profit chain of schools operating in the global south, and currently educating 500,000 pupils per year – recently declared its intention to grow to 10 million pupils by 2025.

This process is directly and indirectly supported by DfID funding, which is used to leverage international capital and funnel it into private education in the global south, using the spurious argument that there isn’t enough public funding available for education to realise the SDGs. This has a dual impact, promoting an exponential growth in private (often for-profit) education, whilst undermining state education systems and actively discouraging governments from investing in them.

Needless to say, this has the same negative impacts in terms of workers’ pay and conditions and quality of education as the privatisation of education does domestically.

Our response is clear. We must oppose privatisation at home and worldwide, and expose and challenge our government’s hand in it. We need to link our campaigns against academisation and privatisation with the global struggle for high-quality public education, supporting the calls of our sister unions across the globe in demanding that their governments invest in education as a public good, not as a commodity to be bought and sold.

The report, In Whose Interest, will be launched today at a meeting at 2pm in the Mersey Room of the Pullman Hotel in Liverpool, with representatives from the NEU and Global Justice Now alongside Dan Carden MP, shadow secretary of state for international development.

Gawain Little is chair of the National Education Union international committee.