Methodology and methods

Research design

This project is a multiple-methods case study, which consists of three strands:documentary, survey and interview. Each strand has a distinctive sample. The documentary strand explored attitudes towards privatisation by examining a small number of key policies and texts from ten CARICOM countries: Antigua and Barbuda; Barbados; Belize; Grenada; Guyana; Jamaica; St. Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; and Trinidad and Tobago. This strand happened concurrently with the survey strand. Here, three participant groups were invited to share their understanding of the extent and impact of privatisation in their experience through an online questionnaire. These three groups were teachers, school leaders (principals), and parents, all in the publiceducation system. The phases upon which we focused in this strand comprised early childhood, primary and secondary. All ten nations mentioned above were invited to participate; responses were received from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados, and Saint Lucia. The third strand comprised interviews, and took place following the questionnaire. Here, we interviewed seven people from five countries. The participant groups were a) Regional Body representative, b) teacher, c) school leader, d) teacher union representative. All data were analysed concurrently.

Recruitment

In accordance with regional requirements, we asked permission of each national government to undertake empirical research there. This authorisation did not arrive from Antigua and Barbuda; St.. Kitts and Nevis; St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In those countries, the documentary strand alone took place. Where authorisation was granted, a list of public schools and their principals was obtained from the minister, or from a public database. For the questionnaire, a sample was created through targeting a number of these principals from each of that nation’s districts (unless advised by the Ministry, as in Guyana, to avoid certain districts owing to lack of internet there). The existence of a functional email address was therefore a key selection criterion.

The overall number approached was determined by the overall desired number of 385 returns, shared between the ten countries in a proportion determined by population density. The school leaders were emailed with a request to participate and to forward the invitation to their teachers and those parents for whom email addresses were held. This approach produced fewer responses than anticipated, particularly amongst teachers. Reminders were sent once. Those willing to be interviewed after the survey could supply their contact details; in the event, two interviews were secured in this way. The other interviewees were selected purposively; we made contact with key people at a range of teaching unions, as well as with a regional body, and interviewed those agreeing. We made unsuccessful attempts to recruit interview participants from the following groups: early-childhood teacher and leader; primary-school teacher and leader; education support worker; government minister; lobby-group representative; Organisation of East Caribbean States/ World Bank/ Inter-American Development Bank and Caribbean Development Bank representatives. We can only speculate that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on our ability to recruit to this project. Teachers, school leaders and state officials have been primarily concerned with maintaining an educational service through intermittent periods of home learning (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2021).

Documentary analysis

We were particularly interested in the ‘official’ view of privatisation sanctioned by respective Caribbean states, and so we started by opening each government’s website and following links to documents. In this way, we located ministers’ speeches and strategy documents. These latter proved so relevant that we subsequently searched for them directly. The documents were analysed by one member of the research team, for consistency, through an approach that drew on critical discourse analysis (Mullet, 2018). Specifically, the unit of analysis was the sentence, and relevant extracts were interrogated for how they reveal, reproduce and disrupt discourses of privatisation through the lexis (including collocations and any jargon) and semantic intent, as well as through significant omissions or silences.

Questionnaire

Three versions of a questionnaire were created, drawing upon Winchip et al.’s (2019) features of privatisation. The number of items featured in

each questionnaire depended on the number of which someone in that group might reasonably be expected to have knowledge or experience. Therefore, 26 of the 27 items were included in the questionnaire for principals, whereas teachers and parents were asked about 16 and 7 items, respectively (see Appendix One for a full list and participant breakdown). The samples were as follows: School leaders (n = 21; males = 8; females = 13), countries represented: Jamaica (2); Trinidad and Tobago (5); Guyana (3); Barbados (8); Saint Lucia (3). Teachers (n = 11; males = 1; females = 10), countries represented: Trinidad and Tobago (6); Saint Lucia (1); Barbados (4). Parents (n = 64; males = 18; females = 46), countries represented: Trinidad and Tobago (4); Barbados (60). The relatively low number of participants means that the present analysis should be seen as exploratory and heuristic, indicating new avenues for future research. We had anticipated that emailing 80 school leaders might produce up to 250 responses, once the initial email had been cascaded to parents and teachers. In the event, we emailed 135 school leaders, but this still produced only 96 full, analysable answers (we removed the incomplete data of a further 293 respondents—this implies that the survey burden was experienced as high, particularly during a pandemic). The questionnaire produced mostly Likert-scale, ordinal data; we therefore analysed this using mode rather than mean averages.

Interviews

We conducted semi-structured interviews with a secondary-school leader and teacher from Barbados; Teacher Union representatives from Barbados, Belize, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, and a representative from a Regional Body. Interviews took place via Zoom and lasted around 45 minutes to one hour each. Our interview schedule covered the required points, such as which features of privatisation are evident, their impact and who the key actors are. However, we also took advantage of the semi-structured format to follow up emerging lines of enquiry. Data were transcribed using Microsoft 365 software, and tidied/verified manually afterwards. The interview data were analysed thematically, using a hybrid inductive/deductive approach. In other words, we were sensitised from our prior research to common themes, and so identified them here too. However, we were also able to respond more inductively to sub-themes that we detected for the first time in our data, including those arising from several participants’ inability or unwillingness to relate their experiences to privatisation.

Ethical implications and research integrity

The project was scrutinised and authorised separately by the Universities of Manchester and of the West Indies. A key ethical feature is that whilst we will use a pseudonym for all participants, we cannot guarantee that a determined reader will not be able to deduce the identity of representatives of teacher unions and the regional body, owing to their size and reputations. Our consent forms were framed accordingly, and participants recruited on that basis.