Teach for America, which began in 1989 as a market response to teacher shortages and underachievement in disadvantaged communities, brought high-achieving graduates into schools serving the poorest students (OECD, 2023). This inspired Teach First in the UK, which began in 2002. Teach for All was founded in 2007 and led to the establishment of Teach First Denmark and Teach for Sweden in 2013. Together, these programmes illustrate the rising influence and activity of international philanthropic networks in non-democratic education governance in Europe (Viseu, 2022). They assume the character and leadership of highly successful individuals allow them to help disadvantaged students overcome the social, cultural, and economic barriers that lead to educational underachievement (Thomas et al., 2021). 

For Wacquant (2010, 2012), the neoliberal reform of public services on the basis that mobilizing market competition will promote human flourishing has never been realized as an economic project. He suggests, instead, that this is a structurally coherent project, where the state is neither rolled back nor dismantled but reconfigured to impose the market on its citizens. The state achieves this by taking a hyper-individualist stance that emphasizes personal responsibility over social obligations. This stance underpins discourses of meritocracy, where hard work is assumed to bring just reward, and this, in turn, aligns closely with the American dream that all can achieve a better life through their own efforts and initiative. 

The neoliberal technologies of marketisation, increased performativity (Ball, 2017), and the new science of learning (Hordern & Brooks, 2023) have transformed the teacher education landscape in Denmark, England and Sweden, albeit in different ways. These reforms have resulted in the narrowing of teacher education programmes (Larsen et al., 2023) and exacerbated a tension that exists across the formal education sector between promoting individual excellence and education for all. lndeed, in all three countries the gap between the highest and lowest educational achievers, which Teach for All is expected to narrow, has either remained the same (in England; Farquharson et al., 2024) or widened (in Denmark and Sweden; Kjeldsen et al., 2024) over the past 20 years.

Rizvi characterizes the Teach for America agenda as ‘ridding school districts of veteran teachers, privatizing public schools, and forcing a data-driven culture upon low-income communities that face serious and often unique challenges’ (2021: xvi). Referring to Teach for All, he adds, ‘little is known, however, as to how these ideas travel and are translated through local cultural, political, and educational traditions’ (ibid: xvii). Whilst others (Brewer et al., 2020; Thomas et al., 2021) have begun this task mostly in policy terms, our symposium explores how the common rationale of Teach for All is recontextualized in three countries chosen for their contrasting education cultures, histories, and embrace of neoliberal approaches to education reform, Denmark, England and Sweden. We do this by examining programme documentation and the views of the teachers involved. The study reflects how neoliberal technologies and hyper-individualism permeate teacher education in the three countries studied, providing both agency, risks, and hope to their education systems.