In no other academic discipline do students so regularly, and so widely, express deep dissatisfaction with the content of what they are taught. However, for a range of reasons, reform of the economics curriculum has, thus far, been incredibly slow and modest. In addition, university courses are often unacceptably poor in terms of the quality of teaching and course design yet is nonetheless very expensive. Given the problems just described, the School of Political Economy (SPE) was established in 2019 to simply bypass economic departments, and the university system in general, by offering high-quality tertiary-level courses in economics education at reasonable cost.

SPE's courses are pluralist and interdisciplinary, seeking to create a level playing field for the contest of economic ideas and to more clearly illuminate how economics articulates with other academic disciplines. This approach not only allows students to make more informed choices between schools of thought, but it also enhances their capacity to combine schools of thought in order to produce more intellectually robust analysis and policy recommendations.

SPE is suitable for any student, academic or member of the general public who cannot otherwise access a high-quality introduction to economics. SPE’s role within the New Economics Education Network is synergistic: creating competitive pressure on universities to lift their game, demonstrating to universities the strong demand that exists for a reformed economics curriculum, building the capacity and confidence of university students to push for curricular reform, assisting academics to formulate and teach a reformed curriculum, and informing working economists of what they have missed out on in their previous education and what they should be looking for when employing other economists.