This article critically considers the implications of ‘crisis transformationism’ for development education’s radical agenda of cultivating politically engaged, self-reflexive global citizens who have a deep understanding of power and politics and who are firmly committed to working collectively towards fundamental change. Crisis transformationism is a mobilising ideological framework which deploys crisis rhetoric in order to consolidate the corporate takeover of education from a democratically controlled system to one designed and run by private actors in service of the global economy. In this article, we demonstrate how this takeover has accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on the 2022 United Nations’ Transforming Education Summit (TES) as exemplary of a growing trend in global educational governance whereby the values and interests of global corporations – through the ascendancy of Big Tech philanthropic foundations – increasingly shape educational policy and programming. Our primary purpose is to consider the implications of crisis transformationism for the future of development education’s transformative goal of achieving global and ecological justice. Applying critical discourse analytic techniques, we explore the ways in which the discourse of crisis transformationism is being deployed by influential policy actors to legitimise the expansion of the private sector in the delivery of education and to accelerate depoliticised notions of the ‘global’ via a skillification agenda premised on the acquisition of neurologically-inflected social-emotional skills or competencies which seeks to yield a productive (i.e., mentally healthy, resilient and skilled) workforce and a pliable, politically docile citizenry.