Permanent Transition
A Reckoning in International Education
By Alexander Gardner-McTaggart
There are moments in academic life when you encounter a paper that confirms, with both clarity and courage, what you have long observed, written, and lived. Precarious Privilege by Jeanne Rey, Matthieu Bolay and Yonatan N. Gez is one such paper. It does more than explore the lives of international schoolteachers: it exposes the system that structures them, in all its dazzling allure and brittle precarity.
I was always fascinated by the workings of international schools - I worked in one for nearly six years with my family in tow. I experienced some of the best elements of schooling, but also some of the entirely avoidable and very worst. Accordingly, in my time, I have been their greatest fan, but also their most critical of friends. In 2018 I completed my doctoral thesis, a couple of years after this picture was taken with my kids on dress up day in an international school. In my research, I introduced the notion of permanent transition as perhaps the most defining feature of international school leadership. These are schools characterised not by stability or institutional coherence, but by a culture of constant change, turnover, and superficial consistency maintained through glossy branding. Directors and teachers alike live and lead within what I described as an atmosphere of “endemic change,” where the symbolic capital of ‘internationality’ masks a fragile operational core.
Rey, Bolay and Gez confirm this… and take it further. Their study, based on rich ethnographic data from multiple continents, offers an unflinching view into the personal and structural vulnerabilities that underpin international schooling. Their focus on the adventurer teacher - young, Anglo-Saxon, debt-laden, and drawn by the mirage of freedom and lifestyle - reveals the architecture of a system that thrives on mobility while delivering instability.
These teachers, as the authors show, often enter the sector burdened with student debt and limited domestic career prospects. The international school becomes a kind of escape, or a chance to chase a vision of the “good life” through travel, tax-free salaries, and professional reinvention. But this dream, the article argues convincingly, can be somewhat of a neoliberal trap. Behind the curated Instagram feeds and sun-drenched campuses lies a sector of insecure contracts, strategic silence around debt, and a churn of personnel that undermines any real institutional memory or professional growth.
I explored many of these material drivers in my PhD, particularly the twin allure of higher salary and lower behavioural management burdens. These remain key pull factors for international schoolteachers. But Rey and colleagues’ intervention goes deeper by framing these incentives within a critical political economy of globalised education: where education becomes a service industry, and the teacher a mobile labour unit in a precarious global supply chain.
What this paper achieves is, in short, an honest reckoning with the international school sector. It cuts through the mythology of cosmopolitanism and travel and foregrounds the neoliberal logic that drives recruitment, contracts, and mobility. It tells us what those inside the system have long whispered: that international schools, for all their progressive rhetoric, often operate on a structurally exploitative foundation.
And yet, as someone who has lived, taught, and led in this world, I also recognise the tension. These schools do offer moments of excellence, innovation, and joy. But as I wrote in my thesis, these bright spots occur in spite of (not because of), the broader system. The glossy brochure promises global citizenship, but often delivers financial fragility, pedagogic incoherence, and moral ambiguity. In leadership, the scene is characterised by ‘permanent transition’, and as any leadership scholar will tell you, the leadership approach for instability is ‘command and control’: transaction.
The authors’ call for a more grounded and critical engagement with the realities of international schooling is one I fully endorse. It is time the sector confronted the difficult questions: How sustainable is a system that depends on debt-laden, mobile teachers with no long-term stake in their institutions? What kind of leadership is possible when every actor is, structurally, in transition? And what ethical responsibilities do these schools carry, not only to their students, but to the teachers who sustain them?
This paper is not just an academic contribution: it is a mirror held up to a sector long intoxicated by its own reflection. And in that mirror, we see both the privileges and the precarity of a globalised teaching class, caught between aspiration and exploitation.
For those of us who have walked these corridors and sat in these leadership chairs, it confirms what we already knew but were rarely permitted to say: that the international school is as much a product of financialised globalisation as it is of educational idealism. And that its future, if it is to be ethical and sustainable, must be built on more than lifestyle promises and aesthetic cosmopolitanism.
The other side of this coin is that the international schools sector is likely to attract a certain type of teacher - its a risky business, which invites a certain amount of disruption and change. Perhaps these teachers see the international sector as their spirit home, as has been argued by Poole and Bunnell. Whatever the case, international schools should be built on care, coherence, and a long-overdue commitment to the people who make international education possible: the teachers.
Read here:
Rey, J., Bolay, M., & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 361–373. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1732193
Gardner-McTaggart, A. (2018) The International Baccalaureate and globalisation: implications for educational leadership. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/53671/