A point worth bearing in mind here is that much of Capitalist Realism isn't concerned with markets as such, but with the marketisation of things that aren't markets and can only be treated as markets by systematically deforming them from the inside out. This is a fairly common complaint of people who've worked in the English education system
I think (hope) that I can speak to this.
For those that don’t know, when Labour came to power in 1997, they wanted ramp up spending on education. To do this, they looked around for an intellectual framework that might justify their policies to the public and to the sector itself. The “marketisation” of education under Nu Labour should be understood as the product of a particular strain of politicians and their desires (improving social welfare; keeping power), and a number of theoretical, academic worldviews (namely,
school effectiveness and school improvement). Meat meets machine—like the Bolshevik revolution or the use of the Gaussian copula model to price collateralised debt obligations.
Among other things, politicians understood school effectiveness and school improvement as explanations for how they could use indicators to justify spending increases to the public. If everyone is improving on their performance measures, then—to torture this metaphor some more—the return on investment is good and we are making a profit. The public will love us. We will get re-elected. The theory provides intellectual cover for policy decisions (increasing spending on education) and a framework for evaluating their success.
So the “marketisation” of education turns out to have been carried out for fairly traditionally leftist goals, as well as the generic aim of political survival. But these purposes notwithstanding, to what extent did the reforms really “marketise” education? It all depends on what you mean. Labour expanded education as a proportion of government outlays, which is not normally how one goes about reducing the influence of the state and increasing the influence of markets. What they did was try to some extent to do something that is comparable to what markets do. They tried to make improvements quantifiable. Like a company’s net profit, a school’s league table position or value added score tells us whether they are a winner or a loser, successful or unsuccessful. And so we hope that something like market discipline is introduced into the equation. Of course, the reality is actually pretty fucked up. But education should not be confused with an actual market. The "marketisation of education" is just a metaphor (if a popular one) that describes its reorientation along performance-based lines in order to justify spending increases. It is not literally true. There is no market for education that wasn’t there before New Labour took power. There is no market for education inside the state-dependent school system.