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Neoliberalism has been ‘powerfully framing the economic debate of the past thirty years’ (Raworth, 2017, p.67) - but much else besides. As Stephen Ball, a leading scholar on neoliberalism and education concludes, ‘neoliberalism now configures great swathes of our daily lives and structures our experience of the world – how we understand the way the world works, how we understand ourselves and others, and how we relate to ourselves and others’ (Ball, 2020, p.xv). Not least, neoliberalism has had a profound influence about how we understand the welfare state and public services, such as education, but also how these are organized and practiced.

But like all hegemonic projects, neoliberalism has peaked and is now in decline, having lost credibility and legitimacy; for ‘[neoliberalism’s] promises did not survive the test of the real world… [and] today, they are largely exhausted’ (Beckert, 2020, p322). In its wake it has left a trail of damage having ‘taken us to the brink of ecological, social and financial collapse’ (Raworth, 2017, p.61). Moreover, by its undermining of democracy, solidarity and collaboration, it has left societies weakened, and less capable of responding to the converging existential crises that mankind is confronting, and which have led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to recently move their Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to midnight the clock has been since it was established in 1947.

We find ourselves, therefore, in fateful times, full of Gramsci’s morbid symptoms of a hegemony. But also times when new possibilities are opened up, both because the neoliberal stranglehold (its motto ‘there is no alternative’) is weakening and because of the urgency to rebuild societies that are democratic, just, sustainable and caring. Education and educational institutions have a role to play in this process of exploring and developing alternatives. We need, ironically, to take the advice of one of neoliberalism’s godfathers, Milton Friedman, who wrote, back in the 1960s when social democracy was in the ascendent, that only a crisis ‘produces real change. When that crisis occurs the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, we believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’ (Friedman, 1962/1982, p.ix).

It is this analysis, of the conditions of our times and of our responsibility when faced by these conditions, that provides the context and direction for this ‘class of future possibilities’, the aim being to create what Geoff Mulgan has called a ‘Possibility space’, when referring to the role of social sciences in ‘understanding, mapping and shaping the future’. The focus of the seasonal school will mainly be education on coherence with other with perspectives relating to pedagogy, social work, disabilities studies, sociology, gender studies, political sciences and early childhood education and care. In doing so, the seasonal school aims to engage with major issues such as democracy, the environment, care and gender relations.