Education Policy, Practice and the Professional 9781350004962, 9781350004955, 9781350004993, 9781350004986

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Education Policy, Practice and the Professional

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Education Policy Research, edited by Helen Gunter, David Hall and Colin Mills Education Policy Unravelled, Gillian Forrester and Dean Garratt The Study of Education: An Introduction, Jane Bates and Sue Lewis

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Education Policy, Practice and the Professional Second Edition

Jane Bates, Sue Lewis and Andy Pickard

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First edition published in Great Britain 2011 Second edition published in 2019 Copyright © Jane Bates, Sue Lewis and Andy Pickard, 2019 Jane Bates, Sue Lewis and Andy Pickard have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design by Dani Leigh Cover images by Freepik and istock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0496-2        PB: 978-1-3500-0495-5     ePDF: 978-1-3500-0498-6     eBook: 978-1-3500-0497-9 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For all those students who followed Education Studies programmes at Manchester Metropolitan University from 1998 to 2017 and who were very much part of our academic and pedagogical journey.

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Contents

List of illustrations  viii Preface  ix List of abbreviations  xi

Part I  Historical perspectives 1 Educational policymaking and social change  3 2 Policy, politics and ideology, 1945–97  23

Part II  Contemporary perspectives 3 Policy in practice  45 4 Globalization and education  67 5 Education for social justice  83 6 The school system  97 7

The curriculum  115

8 Caring for and educating young children  129 9 Teachers’ professionalism, practice and policy  143 Bibliography  161 Index  177

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Illustrations

Figures 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3

Timeline: British Prime Ministers 1945–70  24 Timeline: British Prime Ministers 1970–97  24 The rational model of policymaking  47 From issue to implementation  47 Influential stakeholders in the policymaking process  50

Tables 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 6.1 7.1

Education policy under the Conservatives 1979–97  35 Political and educational ideologies  52 Continuity and change  62 The Coalition and the Conservative’s main policies  63 Theoretical perspectives on education and globalization  69 Diversity in the school system  110 Revisions to the National Curriculum from Baker to Balls 1988–2010  117

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Preface The publication of the second edition of Education Policy, Practice and the Professional has provided the opportunity to both update the text with policy developments since 2010, but also to do some rewriting and restructuring of the original book. Our intended readership remains undergraduate students following Education Studies programmes. However, we have been heartened by the number of colleagues working in teacher training who reported that they found the first edition a useful means of providing their students with a broader context for their work as teachers. We have retained the two-part structure to the book with part one being concerned with historical perspectives and part two contemporary policies. As before, the history begins with the nineteenth century but now includes most of the twentieth century also. It is unusual for books with essentially a contemporary focus to include an extended historical narrative, but we believe history can make a major contribution to understanding and analysing today’s policies. The book shows how earlier policymakers wrestled some of the issues facing those of today. We show also the extent to which current policies are influenced by the past. Sometimes this past is as policymakers imagine it to have been rather than as it was. A disciplined historical narrative can act as a corrective to history as it is imagined to have been. Most of all though history shows how policy can only be understood by reference to a wider social context, something we encourage readers to consider in the contentious idea of ‘lessons’ from history. The history chapters should also encourage the reader to think about how they are reading the book. We do not include history as ‘background’ but as a means of thinking of policymaking as a process. That process involves a complex mixing of ideas, experience, agencies, power and relationships. It is policy as process that we encourage our readers to understand as well as the content offered on schools, the curriculum and teachers. In terms of content, the book is deliberately far from comprehensive: specific areas such as special educational needs, early years and higher education are relatively neglected. Nevertheless, as an exposition of how policy gets made, students working on those areas can still profit from reading the book. This is why, although Part II of the new edition has been extensively rewritten and restructured, it begins as before with the book’s pivotal chapter on contemporary policymaking. It is pivotal because it offers an overview of how educational policy is made, which subsequent chapters enlarge by reference to specific policies. The pivotal chapter is followed by an entirely new chapter on globalization and a reworked social justice chapter. They are placed here because so many contemporary policies are driven by the idea that education is the means of achieving both a more prosperous and a more just society. Sadly, as we argue, these two policy drivers can work against each other. These chapters are followed by chapters focused on three fundamental areas of policy: the policies which account for our current school system; those which have created our school curriculum; and then, because education is more than schools, those policies which are concerned with child care more

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generally. Throughout the book we are concerned with relationship between policy, its practical impact and the effect on teachers. The final chapter offers an overview of where teachers stand now in the light of educational policies and the effect that seemingly endless policy initiatives have had on their professional identity. There is a convention that books on policy include a last chapter on education in the future. We have not followed that convention. We have spent some time looking at the past; we have spent far more time with educational policy as it is being shaped today; but we have left the future for the future. Inevitably though the book does have implications for that future. The central preoccupations of policymakers with education and the economy, with issues of equality and social justice and with educational efficiency and teacher accountability, have been around for a very long time and are unlikely to disappear any day soon. However, there is also a recognition that some of more crude mechanisms for delivering on these preoccupations, such as an excessive use of examinations, have a stultifying effect on educational possibilities. Likewise, with agencies through which policy is made and delivered: these too will continue to look something like they do today but will also be subject to modification. The growth of academies, which has been the agency innovation of recent years, has entered a more critical phase with serious questions being asked about their finances and achievements. There is the possibility that local authorities, largely excluded from a policymaking role in recent years, may see some renewal. Underpinning all of this, as we argue in our last chapter, is a concern with the relationship between schools and their local communities. Good schools know that the way that they are regarded, the esteem in which they are held, is central to educational success. Deriving policy from such knowledge though is challenging and still eludes policymakers today, although the growing numbers of university students studying education will provide an informed cadre to help in future debate. In all other respects, our intentions in publishing the first edition remain true for this second edition. The book still seeks to of an account of some of the most important policies affecting education today and to do so in a way which enables students to analyse policymaking. A key motif of the book remains the idea of a policy cycle – economic and social crises result in a change in education policy. Initially, the new policies impact positively on teacher professionalism; later however, perceived policy failure has an adverse effect on teachers’ reputations. We hope that, overall, the book will provide students with an accessible account of where we came from, where we are and where we might be going. We hope you enjoy ‘the journey’.

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Abbreviations A8 ARWU AST BTEC CPD CTC CVA DCSF DES DfE DfEE DfES DoE EBacc ECM EFA EMA EP ERA EU FBV FE FSM GATS GTC HE HMI IMF ITE LA LEA LMS MDGs OECD Ofsted

Attainment 8 Academic Rankings of World Universities Advanced Skills Teacher Business and Technology Education Council Continual Professional Development City Technology College Contextual Value Added Department for Children Schools and Families Department for Education and Science Department for Education Department for Education and Employment Department for Education and Science Department of Education English Baccalaureate Every Child Matters Education for All Education Maintenance Allowance Expected Progress Education Reform Act European Union Fundamental British Values Further Education Free school meals General Agreement on Trade in Services General Teaching Council Higher Education Her Majesty’s Inspectorate International Monetary Fund Initial Teacher Education Local Authority Local Education Authority Local Management of Schools Millennium Development Goals Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Office for Standards in Education

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Abbreviations

OTTP P8 PISA PTA QTLS QTS SATs TDA THE-QS TiSA TIMMS TTA UNESCO UTC VA2 WTO

Overseas Trained Teachers Programme Progress 8 Programme for International Student Assessment Parent Teachers Association Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills Qualified Teacher Status Statutory Assessment Tests Teacher Development Agency Times Higher Education – QS World Rankings Trade in Services Agreement Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study Teacher Training Agency United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation University Technical College Value Added 2 World Trade Organization

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Part I Historical perspectives

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1 Educational policymaking and social change Introduction Educational policy does not happen in a vacuum but links intimately to economic, social and political events. This chapter will show how the social history of the previous two centuries shaped educational policies of the time and affected the emerging teaching profession. The focus is on the creation of our modern school system beginning with the nineteenth-century elementary schooling because that was the central preoccupation of the policymakers of the time. For much of that century formal education for most children was an intermittent affair and largely over by the age of twelve years old at the very latest. Schools were ‘elementary’ rather ‘primary’ because secondary education was restricted to a very small minority of children. The second half of the chapter examines the extending of secondary education to all children in the context of war and political change. We begin with an account of two nineteenth-century working-class movements. They are intended to serve as two snapshots showing how social experience and beliefs are connected to educational policy.

Chartism British society experienced possibly the most rapid economic and social change in its history between 1790 and 1830. It became neither fully urbanized nor fully industrialized (that happened in the second half of the century), but pre-industrial work patterns and their associated cultural formations were broken up as the presence of factories grew. The heart of the earlier economy lay with the artisan trades. These were groups of men and women possessing particular skills and their own tools who retained considerable control over when and where they worked and when they relaxed and played. Population growth and economic difficulties made it impossible for many of these skilled trades people and the artisan trades societies into which they were organized to retain their old authority and independence.

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The experience of rapid social change led to demands for political change which was deepseated enough to begin to redefine the relationship between the English state and its people. At the time, the state was profoundly undemocratic as we would understand democracy today. Few men and no women were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. Day-to-day government still remained to a remarkable extent (to our eyes) in the hands of the monarch and his or her advisers in the Privy Council. The House of Lords remained hugely powerful and the major way in which ‘citizens’ sought to influence politics was by petitioning parliament and/or taking their protests on to the streets. By the 1790s, such traditional political practices were being augmented by new politics. The American War of Independence and the French Revolution combined with home-grown radicalism to let a different kind of democratic genie out of the bottle. For radicals, democracy was the entitlement of shared humanity rather than vested in property ownership and they promoted this idea through a myriad of pamphlets, radical newspapers and speeches to sometimes vast popular gatherings. Harried and repressed by an aristocratic state which could not countenance such a fundamental redefinition of democracy, it was nevertheless an idea which refused to die. In 1837 these radical ideas crystallized around the ‘Charter’. Chartism was a diverse and diffuse movement with each locality having its own distinctive characteristics. However, the central features of Chartism included a working-class national leadership, a mass national participation, an extensive means of promoting its ideas through radical newspapers and local and national meetings, and above all, a national political agenda in the six points of the Charter including universal male suffrage. The response of the state was entirely predictable. Troops were used to suppress Chartist demonstrations and ringleaders were imprisoned, transported or occasionally hung. By 1840 it was becoming clear to some Chartist leaders that the government was unlikely to concede directly to their demands and some began to advocate what has been termed ‘knowledge Chartism’, that is, the building of Chartist schools and other means of spreading radical ideas to ensure that the new ideas around democracy took root for future generations. Why is radicalism generally, and Chartism in particular, so central to our understanding educational policymaking in the period? The answer lies in the role education plays in society and politics. Just as individuals sometimes see education as a way of progressing their well-being, modern governments invest in education in order to achieve progress as they see it for a society as a whole. This was not a point of view to which British governments subscribed to before the 1830s, but the Chartists did. They built on working-class traditions of self-education to redefine the role of education broadly to help bring about the transformation of the relationship between the state and its citizens into a democratic form. The presence of self-generated working-class forms of education is now well documented by historians (see Harrison 1961, Laqueur 1976, Johnson 1979) and means that it becomes problematic to see state educational policy as simple altruism. State interest in elementary schooling in the 1830s and 1840s was a policy of replacing emergent popular educational institutions with those policymakers found more congenial. As we shall see this is not an unfamiliar story in the history of educational policymaking.

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The Dock Strike of 1889 The ‘defeat’ of Chartism as a mass movement was followed by a decade of relative social quiescence variously described as the age of consensus, the high Victorian years, or the age of equipoise. There were still moments of local working-class protest, some of it highly organized, and the upper and middle classes continued to be exercised by the pernicious effects, as they saw it, of poverty, but there was no mass challenge to the legitimacy of the aristocratic state. By the 1860s, agitation for an extension of male suffrage reappeared and there was a limited extension of the franchise in 1867 although the right to vote was still tied to property. By the 1870s, women too were beginning to agitate for political rights, but it was the onset of a major economic depression which renewed radicalism. Of course, the world of the 1880s was very different from that of the 1830s. In place of largely rural population with scattered towns and occasional large cities, England was now thoroughly urbanized. Eighty per cent of the population was now ubiquitously categorized as ‘working class’ and they, together with a vast army of lower middle-class clerks serving the rapidly expanding commercial enterprises, dominated the late Victorian cities. There was also a renewed popular appetite for discussion of all kinds of ideas, scientific, religious and philosophical, as well as political. Socialist societies in a number of forms appeared to question the current social, economic and political arrangements of contemporary society. The renewal of radical ideas and economic depression came together quite startlingly in 1889 in the Great Dock Strike. The strike was the single most important event in labour history in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the time, London was the greatest port in the world with ships from all over the world loading and unloading goods to meet the insatiable needs of British industrial, commercial and imperial power. All of this activity was serviced by an army of casual workers who would be employed on a daily or even hourly basis as was required and then laid off as the docks became idle. By 1889, some of these men, aided and abetted by representatives from skilled unions, had organized themselves into the Dockers’ Union. In June they struck, demanding an increase in wages of sixpence (2 1/2p) per hour – the Dockers’ ‘silver orb’. The strike was long and bitter and after six weeks it looked as if the men might be forced back to work. Their cause was rescued by sympathetic unions in Australia who sent £30,000 in gold for the Union coffers. It was enough: the dock owners capitulated to Union demands. The strike was very important industrially and culturally. The alliance of skilled and unskilled workers was achieved in the face of the huge fissure between those whose skills could promise regular employment and the casual poor whose lives were ones of continual struggle and uncertainty. Such union alliances were not always easy to sustain but the strike remained an important symbol of what could be achieved by the emerging Labour Movement. It was no less important culturally in that the good conduct of the strikers as they marched through the west end of London impressed many middle-class observers. The relationship between all of this and educational policymaking remains to be explored but in very general terms, an educational system created around the belief that its users came from dissolute and possibly revolutionary homes would no longer serve as policymakers contemplated the arrival of the twentieth century. A mature working class

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busy creating trades unions and independent political agencies required different kinds of educational policies.

Policy dawn: Elementary education and teacher professionalism This chapter has argued thus far that educational policies cannot be understood if divorced from their historical context and the most important political contextual feature of the nineteenth century was the emergence of the working class. This is not to say that education was not profoundly influenced by other factors. The churches and their denominational rivalries were clearly central to the building and maintenance of the schools and the shaping of the curriculum. The responses of the children who attended elementary schools and the parents who sent them there helped to determine the quality of education. Educational policy, however, has a narrower focus. It is produced by politicians, administrators and those who seek to influence them with the purpose of shaping future society. It is therefore about what ends matter most at the time and the means deemed best suited to achieve these ends. This section therefore examines the motivations of those most active in mid-nineteenth-century policymaking and the policy outcomes of their endeavours. Educational policymaking really began in 1839. Prior to that, the state restricted its activities to episodic efforts to support the work of the religious societies who were building schools for working-class children. By 1839, this support took the form of an annual parliamentary grant by which time also it was becoming clear that an administrative system was required to oversee this expenditure. Modern cabinet government whereby the prime minister chairs meetings of the great ministers of state, had yet to emerge. Instead, executive government remained in the hands of the Privy Council who constitutionally had the job of advising the monarch in the running of the nation’s affairs. Education required running and so the Committee of the Privy Council on Education was set up to do the job. The first secretary to the new Committee was James Kay-Shuttleworth. His first task was to appoint two men to the new post of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Their role was to inspect schools in receipt of government grants and then to present their findings in an annual report to the Education Committee. The number of HMIs increased steadily through the 1840s, and while continuing to insist on their quasi-independent status, they became a major means by which government influenced educational practice for the next 150 years. By 1840 therefore, educational policymaking had delivered two essential principles which were to stand the test of time: the state had a role in funding educational provision and a duty to ensure that this money was well spent. Both of these principles have been a source of policy conflict ever since. The first raises the issue of to what extent and to whom should the money go. The second leads to the question of what counts as good spending. Having established an administrative system and means of policing standards, KayShuttleworth turned his attention to the problem of teacher supply. Policy at the time was

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promoted through the annual minutes of the Education Committee. The minutes for 1846 were the most ambitious of the decade and quite possibly the most ambitious, far-reaching piece of policymaking in the history of English education. They guaranteed funds being available to school managers to build and to equip schools, to supply those schools with professionally trained and relatively well-paid teachers and to augment school income with regular funding from the state. In return, the school managers would have to agree to their schools being inspected by HMI with satisfactory outcomes. Thus, school managers from 1846 could apply for a grant to help them build a school. They could then apply for book grants, blackboard grants and slate grants to equip their new building. From 1853, after a protracted parliamentary debate on how many days a child could be expected to attend school, attendance grants could also be claimed. The 1846 minutes also enabled schools to appoint a pupil teacher, a young person of thirteen or so years of age, who would work in the school learning to be a teacher. The pupil teacher would receive a very modest salary (up to £10 per year) and the school would receive a pupil teacher grant. The really talented or well-placed future teachers could apply for a ‘Queen’s scholarship’ to attend one of the newly opened teacher training colleges from which they would obtain, if successful, a teachers certificate. These certificated teachers would be entitled to augment their salaries with additional government payments in line with the value of their certificates. These remarkable 1846 minutes dominated the administration of education for the next twenty-five years. The state had not yet created a state-run educational system – the Protestant and increasingly the Roman Catholic churches remained the most important builders of schools, and the two or three pence per week charged to parents helped to fund their children’s education. Nevertheless, the state had established a formidable policy presence in elementary education. Not the least effect of the minutes was to give birth to a professional teaching force and what is exciting about the 1840s is to witness the emergence of a shared consciousness among some teachers. This took two forms:  the creation of an educational press and the formation of teacher associations (Tropp 1957). One of the hallmarks of a profession is the belief that the practices engaged in by an individual and the values which underpin them, are a shared currency among all those practising that particular trade. This involves creating formal agencies to promote systematic conversation aimed at professional enhancement. Teachers as early as the 1830s had begun to form local associations but these were often under the supervision of the local clergy. A decade later these local associations were beginning to come together into national bodies and to assert their professional autonomy. Thus, the General Associated Body of Church Schoolmasters in England and Wales was formed, complete with what Tropp (1957) calls a ‘militant wing’ who wanted to exclude the clergy from membership. Some of the clergy who ran most elementary schools, were deeply unhappy at such shows of independence from those they regarded as their employees and social inferiors. John T.  Smith (2009), in his study of teacher clerical relationships in the nineteenth century, sees such clerical unhappiness with teachers, as endemic to the relationship between the two professions and of such intensity that it approaches a class conflict in proportions.

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Educational policy and teacher professionalism in the mid-nineteenth century The 1840s, therefore, marked the beginning of educational policymaking and one consequence of this was the beginning, too, of teachers as professionals. Undoubtedly, the scale of educational business was miniscule in comparison with today’s policy juggernauts. Nevertheless, some of the preoccupations of policymakers then are still the preoccupations of today. Specifically, the need to juggle the two balls of sufficient funding for education to deliver the social ambitions held for it, while maintaining prudent public expenditure. By the 1850s, there were those who felt that the juggler had dropped the second of these balls. It was time to retrench. The fear of a Chartist revolution receded in the 1850s and with it, one of the reasons for the state investing so heavily in education. We can see this in two contrasting views both set out in 1854: for Kay-Shuttleworth (now retired from the Education Office) the defeat of Chartism had given rise to a new menace, ‘Socialism’, as evidenced in trade unionism in Lancashire. He urged that rather being content to trample Socialism into the mud of our streets, under the hoofs of our dragoons, or to bury it in the ruin of its barricades under cannonades of grapeshot . . . every master must look well to the sewerage of his factory village; he must improve his cottages, make his schools models of order and intelligence, diligently work his benefit societies, savings banks, and annuity clubs, provide for the education of the young men and women in evening schools, and give constant, earnest, and practical proofs of the presiding influence of his sympathy and intelligence. (Educational Expositor, 1 February 1854)

If Kay-Shuttleworth still saw schools as a counter revolutionary weapon, one of his inspectors was much more optimistic about the effects schools were already having on working-class behaviour. Thus, according to John Norris, HMI for Staffordshire, while miners in his Staffordshire district might still be mired in ‘vice’, among mill operatives and farm labourers there was a growing ‘thoughtful and almost reflective cast of countenance’ with ‘improved dwellings and neatly kept gardens’ evidence of ‘sobriety and thrift’ (Norris 1854). Norris was typical of an emergent discourse in the 1850s whereby the working class were recalibrated into subcategories of deserving and undeserving and rough and respectable. This shift had implications for policy in that it raised new questions about educational policy purpose and provision. More immediately there was a concern with the cost of education which by the late 1850s was running at £6 million a year. Moreover, it was not as if the educational policymaking of the 1840s had delivered unalloyed success. Government aid to voluntary educational effort had not created a universal educational system whereby every child in the country was guaranteed a school place. In the words of James Fraser, a man of notable influence among policymakers and a future Bishop of Manchester, there were areas ‘utterly destitute’ where schools had never been built by voluntary effort and consequently ‘lengthening the gloom and dreariness of the surrounding waste’ (Newcastle Report 1861: 55). Not just an expensive system then but also a failing one too in the

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eyes of some. These then were the questions which exercised the thinking of policymakers by the late 1850s: 1 2 3 4

What was a reasonable level of state financial support for education? Should educational provision continue to be essentially a matter of voluntary initiative? Would a system of local taxation provide more secure funding for education? Should parents be compelled to send their children to school?

In an attempt to arrive at some answers to these dilemmas, the government decided to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate elementary education. Commissions were already an established instrument available to politicians by the mid-nineteenth century although this was their first application to elementary education. Their format too was well established. Commissioners would be appointed from among those worthies with some knowledge of the subject to be investigated, chaired by a well-connected figure who might command some support across factional politics. Assistant commissioners would act as field investigators and expert witnesses would be invited to share their expertise with the commissioners. This was broadly to be the formula for next 150 years for a series of commissions which have investigated a range of educational topics and influenced to a greater or lesser extent educational policy. The 1858 Commission was chaired by the Duke of Newcastle, hence the Newcastle Commission, and reported in 1861. The establishment of the Commission in 1858 reveals the extent to which the theory of Royal Commissions  – the dispassionate and objective weighing up evidence to reach unimpeachable recommendations –was at odds with the actual practice of commissions. The selection of commissioners by those responsible for policy was determined in part by the need to reduce educational costs (see, for example, Lingen to Granville 14 February 1858, Granville Papers PRO 30/29 Box 24 part 2). In the event the Commission’s report advocated two policy initiatives in an attempt to reconcile a simplified system of adequate funding for schools with a guarantee of quality of provision. Schools would henceforth be funded out of local taxation in the form of rates charged on property and administered by ‘County Boards’. This would compel local landowners who, in the view of the Commissioners, had been neglectful of their responsibilities, to contribute to school provision. Secondly, this rate aid would be distributed on the basis of the results of each individual child in their ability to read, write and do arithmetic. Prize schemes, whereby children were rewarded with modest prizes for good attendance, were a familiar part of the 1850s educational landscape. However, the Commissioners discovered that a scheme in the Diocese of Bath and Wells awarded the prizes not to the children but to their teachers. For the first time but certainly not the last in the history of education, a local practice was extrapolated into a national policy. At the time of the Newcastle Commission, Robert Lowe was Vice President of the Education Department and thereby the politician in charge of education. He had no interest in rate-aided education but seized on the Commission’s idea of examinations to measure performance with alacrity. In 1861, a New Code was published, which abolished the 1846 grants system to be replaced by single payments to schools based on children’s performance in what came to be called the Three Rs (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic). From the age of three children would be examined in ‘standards’ and would earn their school 2/2d for each pass in each of the three subjects. The examinations were

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to be conducted annually by HMI and henceforth, it seems, the maximum educational value of a child was set at 6/6d. The response to the New Code could have been predicted. There was almost universal outrage. The clergy resented the exclusion of religion from the subjects to be tested. School managers suspected that the proposals were a thinly disguised attack on the levels of school funding. Teachers saw the policy has a threat to their livelihoods and an undermining of the advances they had made in professional status since 1846. Even HMI were alarmed by the prospect of their new inquisitorial role. Lowe described his own Educational Office as being in revolt from ‘the teaboy to Matthew Arnold’ (the Chief Inspector). Poor Henry Bellairs, the HMI for the Bristol area, complained bitterly that the ruction in his area had been such as to bring on his gout (see Pickard 1982: 269). The policymaking procedure whereby government publishes a green paper to gauge opinion had not yet been established, but the events of 1861–1862 have that feel to them. The hostility to the New Code was such that the government was forced into concessions: attendance grants would be maintained; there would be continued financial support for teacher training; and children would not be tested before the age of five. However, the government stood by the main provision of the Code. In 1862, the now Revised Code declared that henceforth, school income and therefore teacher pay would be partly determined by the children’s examination performance. ‘Payments by results’ had arrived. In the years following the Code, teacher salaries fell and with it recruitment to the profession. The number of educational journals declined although teachers continued to meet in their various societies partly to agitate for the ending of what they saw as the pernicious effects of the 1862 Code. Historians have tended to see the negative impact of the Code on teachers as an unfortunate by product of cost cutting/value for money preoccupations of the policymakers. We would argue that managing teachers, ensuring that they were teaching appropriate content in appropriate ways, was central to policymaking at the time. Moreover, the suspicion of teachers in the quasi private world of their classroom, however well trained, has been an enduring theme of policy ever since.

Educational policy and teacher professionalism in the late nineteenth century The Revised Code may have successfully reined in educational expenditure and teacher professional independence. However, it did little to address the central weaknesses of the mid-Victorian elementary school system:  the inability of a voluntary system to ensure that schools were built where they were most needed or to guarantee that children actually went to school. Policymakers for the next thirty years after 1862 were preoccupied with trying to resolve these issues. In the 1860s, a number of unsuccessful attempts were made to introduce rate-aided education as advocated by the Newcastle Commission, but it was not until the election of a Liberal Government in 1868 that such a policy became a realistic proposition. In 1870, William Forster, the Vice President of the Education Committee, introduced a parliamentary bill whereby local Boards of Education were to be established wherever there was an insufficiency of effective school provision. These boards

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would be empowered to levy rates to build, equip and run schools financed by local taxation. They were also empowered to pass local by-laws to compel parents to send their children to school. The passage of Forster’s bill was delayed by disputes about the nature of religious teaching which would take place in the new Board schools: should denominational religion be permitted, or should the schools be ‘unsectarian’? Eventually, a compromise whereby religious teaching was permitted provided it was without ‘catechism or religious formularies distinctive of any particular denomination’, enabled Forster’s bill to become law. From 1870, therefore, the ambitions of the educational policymakers of the 1840s to create a national elementary school system at last began to be realized. Forster, with great political skill, had assuaged the concerns of the denominational interests of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in particular by guaranteeing the continued existence of the voluntary schools. At the same time, the new Board schools would ensure that there was sufficiency of school places. Reality turned out a little differently of course as is often the case with policy. Board schools were sometimes built in order to challenge the monopoly of church schools while in other areas ratepayers could be slow to saddle themselves with additional taxation. Also, the ‘voluntary’ schools felt acutely disadvantaged by the superior resources of the Board schools and their power to compel attendance. The latter concern was partly remedied by the Sandon Act of 1876, which empowered the denominational schools to compel children to attend schools, followed eventually by a parliamentary act in 1890 setting a national school-leaving age at thirteen. Schooling could not simultaneously be compulsory and paid for, so in 1891 elementary education also became free. The introduction of compulsory education perhaps conceals a more complex process by which educational policy gets made and, in some ways unmade as it is happening. Even after 1891, it remained permissible for factory and mill owners to employ twelve- and thirteen-year olds provided they spent half their day in school. The ‘half-time system’, as it was called, remained part of the experience of large numbers of young people growing up in the north of England well into the 1920s. Economic need, which as we shall see, commanded a growing presence in educational discourse, could cut both ways. In general terms, business might agree that educational investment helped to foster skills which industry required but in practice, it was difficult to set aside the nimble fingers and cheap wages of children. Parents too, frequently tried to evade their responsibility to send their children to school. Attendance Officers, or ‘Board men’ in popular parlance, and the prosecutions they instituted were widely resented by parents. Compulsion and the use of corporal punishment were the persistent focus of working-class antagonism to formal education. The history of the introduction of compulsory education is a chastening reminder that all educational policy has unforeseen consequences.

The making of educational governance As we have seen, the emerging policy themes and outcomes of the nineteenth century included: a growing state presence in educational provision at the level of elementary schools; the provision of machinery both permanent (a government minister, a Whitehall department, inspectors) and periodic (Royal Commissions) to ensure that the state investment in education was effective; an

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educational narrative in which assumptions about the working class featured prominently but also began to include the idea that national economic prosperity depended on effective educational provision; a professional body of teachers which was the object of suspicion among some policymakers. These emerging themes were to become an enduring legacy bequeathed to subsequent generations of educational policymakers as later chapters will show. One last nineteenthcentury creation needs to be examined in order to understand policymaking today – the machinery connecting central government to local schools. In order to be effective, policymakers require the means of putting policy decisions into practice. They are also likely to be more effective – to ensure their policies have greater ‘stickability’ – if their policy machine provided for two-way communication. This way they will know how their policies are being implemented and received. We have already seen how the first educational policy machinery, consisting of an education department in Whitehall overseen by the Committee of the Privy Council and aided and abetted by a team of inspectors, was set up in the 1840s. From the 1870s, School Boards began to provide local educational machinery, but they were only set up where there was believed to be a need for Board schools and the political will to address this need. In truth, at the beginning of our period educational administration from the view point of those in government was something of a hotchpotch. In 1888, Parliament passed the Local Government Act, which created sixty-two county councils and a large number of county boroughs where the population was in excess of fifty thousand. This meant that for the first time there was a standardized national system of local government. These new county councils quickly began to acquire new powers, including the power to improve technical education in their areas by making grants to secondary schools and to provide scholarships in technical subjects. As we shall see, these were the precursors to more far-reaching innovations in the years to come. In 1899, central government machinery was reformed with the creation of a Board of Education to subsume the powers previously residing with the Education Department, the Science and Art Department and the Charity Commission. In keeping with the emergence of cabinet government, the Board was to be headed by the Minister of Education. The minds of policymakers in the 1890s were exercised by two major concerns: how to respond to the evident appetite for education above and beyond that provided by the elementary schools; and how to address the growing disparity in funding between the rate-financed Board schools and their voluntary counterparts dependent on Whitehall grants and funding by the churches. In March 1902, Arthur Balfour, shortly to become prime minister, introduced a bill into the House of Commons to replace over 2000 School Boards with 318 local educational authorities. In the future these would also be responsible for secondary and technical education in their areas as well as elementary schools, including those hitherto under the control of the voluntary bodies. In return for providing the buildings, voluntary managers would continue to appoint teachers but running costs would be met from the rates. The bill provoked a political storm concerning the rights of non-Anglican and non-Roman Catholic children. Nevertheless, in December the bill became law. With the passing of the Act the country had an administrative system which was to endure for most of the twentieth century. The new local educational authorities could provide the means by which policy could be translated into practice reasonably effectively. As ever though,

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the creation of policy machinery was caught up in with notions among policymakers about how society was and how it might be. Secondary education became increasingly central to this debate.

Secondary education for all? As has been argued, the first generation of Victorian policymakers were largely preoccupied with the provision of elementary education. For them, a working-class child’s education would be completed by the age of ten, eleven or twelve. By and large, secondary education was a matter for parents via the great public schools while those of more modest means sent their children to many hundreds of private ‘academies’ which sprang up in the period. The exception was the eight hundred or so endowed grammar schools. These had been founded by land or money bequeathed by earlier generations for the education of ‘poor scholars’ who were largely boys. As charities, these schools came under the auspices of the Charity Commission. In 1865, the Taunton Commission investigated endowed schools and suggested that they could become the basis of a ‘national’ system of secondary education. However, such a system would be premised on different schools for different social classes with a minimal working-class presence in the top echelon of schools. The Endowed Schools Act which followed marginally increased the number of scholarships available to send children to these schools. That apart, policymakers largely ignored secondary education before the 1880s. Of course, to argue that government policymakers were not overly concerned with secondary education before 1890 is not to say that secondary education was not happening. At a local level, there was growing provision of secondary education for working-class children, albeit a small minority. A number of school boards in the large cities took advantage of the relaxation of the Revised Code to establish higher elementary schools. In 1889, the Technical Instruction Act enabled the Science and Art Department to promote science teaching in such schools by providing some funding. It seems that by the 1890s, the growing awareness of Britain’s industrial decline relative to Germany and the United States, the technological nature of what has been termed the ‘second industrial revolution’, and the hugely increasing demand for clerical and retail workers, created an appetite for education beyond the Three Rs. As has already been argued, policy cannot be understood without some insight into the mental maps – the ways of understanding – of those driving policy. This is more complicated to achieve in 1900 than it had been in 1850 when policymakers, policy implementers and policy influencers often shared the same almost familial world of university college, Whitehall office, London salon and country estate. By 1900, in contrast, political parties had emerged as something more than essentially different factions of the same landed and industrial elite. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives were seeking in different ways to validate their claims to represent an urbanized population. The Labour Party with its claim to be the authentic voice of the working class, was not created until 1906 but its nascent forms were established in the 1890s. Trades Unions were established among some groups of workers and they were counterbalanced by employer organizations. The School Boards and the new county councils were developing cadres of informed educational opinion while elementary school teachers had successfully organized their first national union. Nor had

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the traditional providers of the nation’s schools disappeared: the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Nonconformists (the latter largely in opposition to the first two) retained a formidable, possibly premier, presence in educational politics. Policymakers at the turn of the century were surrounded by a veritable cacophony of voices telling them where to direct policy. Nevertheless, within the ‘din’ it is possible to detect some core beliefs about secondary education. The nineteenth-century secondary system such as it was, was emphatically a stratified system. There were schools for the upper classes, schools for the middle classes and a very few schools for a tiny number of very able working-class children. The concept of social mobility – that individuals could move out of the occupation and/or social class into which they were born, and education was the means of so doing – was not widely subscribed to by policymakers or anybody else very much. By and large you did what your parents had done except where industrial change intervened. By the 1880s such change was intervening, and it is possible to see the impact on the thinking behind policy decisions.

William Rogers – a policy making case study What then was the purpose of secondary education if not to foster social mobility and how was what we would see as the manifest inequalities of the stratified system understood? William Rogers provides one answer. He was a London clergyman who had been founding schools in London since the 1840s. Increasingly, his schools offered an extended curriculum and scholarships – all the characteristics in short of schools which were neither educationally unambitious nor like conventional secondary schools. As such he was open to criticisms from both sides: for some his schools excluded working-class children, while for others they were excessively ambitious. In a school prize day speech, he responded by arguing that while he accepted that his schools might be aimed at those travelling so to speak in the second-class carriages of a train as opposed to first or third class, their destination was the same – ‘good citizenship’. (Address by Rogers, 26 December 1874. City Press newspaper cuttings held by the Bishopsgate Institute). As for the charge of over educating children, late in life Rogers considered what was educationally appropriate for a child who was now staying at school until thirteen: You may keep it still at the Three Rs and the effect will be that it will become dulled and wearied. Or you may open to its enquiring intellect the first gates of higher knowledge, and by varied and deeper instruction afford it certainly less present monotony and perhaps some future happiness. Is there a doubt which is the better course? And I commend this view to many worthy people who talk very thoughtlessly about the over education of the poor. (Hadden 1888: 202)

Rogers was undoubtedly an educational policymaker, albeit at a local level in that he had ideas about where society should be going and was practically adept at putting those ideas into effect. He was also not without influence in Whitehall and parliament. The notion of good citizenship he and others subscribed to was sufficiently porous and friable to allow educational ambition and notions of individual social mobility to seed themselves. Moreover, his robust defence of education beyond the Three Rs, demonstrated an understanding of the realities of classroom life which eluded many

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others. His views on ‘middle class’ education, citizenship, the acceptance if not outright promotion of social mobility, and the ways in which these slid into a distinctive secondary curriculum, provide one door into the mindset of some policymakers of the time. What had undoubtedly happened in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and for which Rogers was a spokesperson, was a welling up from outside central government of a demand for an expanded education for more children. For how many, in what form and to what ends was what policymakers were wrestling with. The terms of their debates about secondary education were complicated. Some expressed attitudes which seemed to belong firmly in the past while others were struggling to give voice to ideas which would become part of a twentieth-century narrative about education. This can be seen in the correspondence of Frederick Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and as such the recipient of the concerns of his church members and an assiduous communicator with a largely sympathetic Tory government. He was, in short, at the heart of the turn of the century policy nexus. In a typical piece of correspondence, a Mr Vaughan Davies wrote to Temple disparaging the work to extend elementary education as threatening the supply of manual labour and recruitment to the Royal Navy. He was convinced that secondary education for the working class was above their ‘position’. Temple’s reply was significant: I did not say that the Education now given to children of the Industrial Classes was beyond their position but beyond their capacities. (Temple Papers Vol. 22, Letter dated 26 January 1899)

The letter and even more Temple’s correction reveal some of the terms of the secondary education debate: 1 2 3

There were still those who were fearful about over educating large numbers of working-class children Secondary education was widely assumed to be predominantly a matter for boys The notion, expressed by Temple, that ‘capacity’ or intelligence set the ceiling on educational opportunities

The 1902 Education Act None of these attitudes disappeared entirely in the coming century. Fears about education certainly surfaced whenever the possibility of expanding university education was raised, although social class became an implicit rather than explicit feature of the discourse. Girls were going to have to wait a long time to obtain equal educational opportunities with boys. It was Temple’s articulation of ‘capacity’ however, which would be the dominant feature of secondary education in the twentieth century. It was assumed that by and large, all children up to the age of eleven would benefit from a broadly shared curriculum and while ‘intelligence’ might determine their successful acquisition of knowledge, it should not produce stratified schools. Secondary education for reasons to do with ‘capacity’ was conceptualized differently as inevitably a selective process. Selection was reinforced by ensuring that the secondary curriculum reflected the elite traditions of the public school rather than the innovative kind of knowledge espoused by some of the higher

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elementary schools of the late nineteenth century. This can be seen clearly in the way in which the Regulations for Secondary Education were drawn up by Robert Morant, Secretary to the Board of Education, in 1904. These were not anti-science but they were anti-vocational education of the kind offered by some of the school boards prior to 1902 and school builders like Rogers. By in effect defining a core secondary curriculum as English, languages to include Latin, and maths and science, they ensured that children’s ability or ‘capacity’ would be measured in terms of a traditional subject-based curriculum. This was to have a profound effect on future educational policymaking and generations of children’s experience of secondary schooling. Secondary educational opportunity did expand over the next few years. Five hundred grantaided schools in 1904 had grown to a thousand by 1914. The numbers of children attending these schools trebled from 64000 to 188000. Even technical education managed to retain a foothold in the continued provision of some higher elementary schools, albeit of uncertain status. In 1907, the government expanded the number of scholarships such that by 1914, 25 per cent of children were not paying fees for their secondary education. Of course, by the same token, 75 per cent were feepayers, meaning that the main beneficiary of the expansion of secondary provision was the middle class. In 1917 the examination system was reformed. Subjects were grouped in three areas: English, languages and maths and science and access to grammar school was on the basis of five passes to include one from each curriculum area. In spite of this, secondary education remained a minority experience. Only 5 per cent of children at the time attended secondary schools. For most elementary education was what they got until they left school at fourteen or earlier.

Secondary education for all: The impact of war and the Labour Movement We have argued that the educational policymakers before 1914 were indifferent to the possibility of universal secondary education which in any case, they defined in a narrow way. Those who thought differently lacked the political power to influence policy. This was to change in the second quarter of the twentieth century under the twin impact of war and the influence of the Labour Movement. Prior to outbreak of war in 1914, attitudes to social policymaking were shifting. The long period of Conservative power was broken in the general election of 1906 when the Liberal Party was elected with an 84-seat majority in the House of Commons. Additionally, for the first time, Parliament now included 53 Labour members of whom 29 were sponsored by the newly formed Labour Representation Committee. The new Liberal Government was not exactly in the business of social transformation, but it displayed a greater appetite for state intervention to address poverty than its predecessors. What then was the impact of war on this political mindset and the policies it generated? The loss of life in the First World War was immense: 745,000 young British men were killed, 9 per cent of all those under forty-five, and over 1.2 million wounded. The effects of death and pain on such a scale are impossible to measure but Marwick argues that society in the twenties and thirties ‘exhibited all the signs of having suffered a deep mental wound’ (1970: 63). In comparison with the Second

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World War, civilian casualties at around 1,500 from aircraft and warship raids were modest, but in all other respects there were daily reminders that war was now ‘total’: shortage of foodstuffs, rising taxation and from 1916, the conscription of husbands, sons and brothers. All of this fed an appetite for social change. A Ministry of Reconstruction was set up in 1917, many reports were written on aspects of social and economic life and ‘a land fit for heroes’ became the slogan under which the wartime coalition government fought the 1918 election campaign. It is perhaps remarkable, therefore, how little post-war society actually changed. The Civil Service increased in size and the upper grades were open to women for the first time, always providing they did not marry. New Ministries for Health, Transport (shorn of its powers to nationalize the railways), Labour and Pensions survived into the 1920s, but many of the wartime agencies were simply dismantled. While total war might produce an appetite for social change, it seems that the meal itself was modest. The same modesty pertained to education policy. The war clearly had a detrimental effect on formal education. Demand for child labour was such that over 600,000 children were allowed at the age of twelve to work for up to thirty-three hours per week in factories while attending school for the remainder of their time. A ‘land fit for heroes’ also embraced the heroes’ children. In 1917, H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, drew up an educational bill to put before parliament. For Fisher the bill was linked to the war in two ways: it was important that education provided for the physical well-being of children and youth and secondly educational provision should acknowledge the shared citizenry so tragically evidenced in the mud of Flanders. He criticized the 1902 Education Act for failing to provide a national system of secondary school, but his social and educational attitudes were those of his predecessors. While recognizing that ‘industrial workers’ were demanding a secondary education, he tried to define and categorize this demand: They [industrial workers] do not want education only in order that they become better technical workmen and earn higher wages. They do not want it in order that they may rise out if their own class, always a vulgar ambition, they want it because they know that in the treasures of the mind they can find an aid to good citizenship, a source of pure enjoyment and a refuge from the necessary hardships of a life spent in the midst of clanging machinery in our hideous cities of toil. (Maclure 1973: 74)

Small wonder the 1918 Act was such a mouse. The Board of Education was empowered to compel local authorities to offer a ‘comprehensive’ system of education, by which was meant provision from nursery through to an adequate number of senior or central school places. There was some talk of raising the school-leaving age to fifteen but in the end, it was kept at fourteen. The half-time system which allowed children younger than fourteen to be employed was abolished, although this was slow to be implemented. By and large though after 1918 all children attended elementary, higher elementary or secondary schools until they were fourteen. The rest of the Act fell victim to post-war public expenditure retrenchment  – ‘the Geddes axe’. Nursery provision was abandoned, teacher salaries cut and there was talk, never enacted, of beginning formal schooling at the age of six. Not for the first time and certainly not the last, educational policy fell foul of treasury requirements. Politics was changing though. Savage and Miles (1994: 80) argue that the Labour

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Party, which began as a defensive movement to help protect trade unions before the war, had evolved by 1920 into a party representing large sections of urban Britain. During the next twenty years it increasingly favoured state intervention into social policy, gradually abandoning earlier alternative strategies to achieve socialism. As we have seen, the concept of secondary education for all did not really exist at the beginning of the century. Even those in the emerging Labour Movement thought more in terms of expanded provision to meet the needs of talented working-class children. Towards the end of the war this began to change as it occurred to some on the left that if untalented middle- and upper-class children could obtain secondary education as of right, the same could not be denied to working-class children. In 1918, the Labour Party advocated a system of education ‘which shall get rid of all class distinctions and privileges and bring to every boy and girl all the training, physical, mental and moral, literary, technical and artistic of which he is capable’ (cited in Branson 1975: 122). In 1922, the Labour intellectual, R. H. Tawney, published ‘Secondary Education for All’ in which he attacked the organization of secondary education along class lines. For Tawney, the so called ‘educational ladder’ supposedly affording bright working-class children social mobility did no such thing. Instead it was a greasy pole. What was needed was free secondary education for all, initially to the age of 15 and thereafter to 16.

The Hadow Committee In 1924, the first Labour government was elected with a commitment to prioritizing secondary education. The government lasted less than a year, but it left two legacies. Firstly, free secondary places were expanded so that by 1931, nearly half of secondary children were paying no fees at all. Secondly it appointed the Hadow Committee to advise on the form of secondary education. The Committee reported in 1926 and introduced new language into educational policymaking. It advocated a two-stage model of education: all children would attend primary school until the age of eleven or twelve when they would all transfer to secondary school. Secondary schools would be of two kinds: the existing grammar schools would be retained for the academically able; and new schools, called modern schools, would be built with much the same curriculum but with a practical bias. The school-leaving age was to be raised to fifteen by 1932. The Committee also went beyond a focus on systems to address the curriculum enthusing about modern foreign languages, outlining a desirable science course, and roundly condemning much current maths pedagogy. The Committee’s recommendations were not implemented. The Tory government of the time was preoccupied with economic and industrial policy given the General Strike of that year and an attempt to raise the school-leaving age to fifteen in 1930 was thrown out by the House of Lords. Branson (1975: 127) attributes this in part to the conviction among the middle class that secondary education was a luxury which they should not be funding except for their own children. There were still voices in the Conservative party who doubted the value of education at all for many children. The Hadow Committee did not share this view, but they did believe in different intelligences requiring different schools. This was a belief which would harden over the next twenty years and shape the eventual form of universal secondary education.

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The Spens Committee Policy makers had one more go at secondary education for all in the interwar years. In 1938 a consultative committee was set up by the Board under the chairmanship of Will Spens, a university academic, to report on secondary education. The Spens Committee placed their emphasis on technical education, arguing that its relatively low status was attributable to the grammar schools’ attachment to a traditional curriculum. However, instead of critically engaging with this curriculum, the Committee proposed establishing technical schools orientated towards commerce and industry. The same 11-plus test set for admission to grammar schools could be used to select children for technical high schools. The children with aptitude for neither academic nor technical education would attend modern schools. The Committee emphatically albeit reluctantly, rejected ‘multilateral’ schools. This was a policy beginning to be favoured by some in the Labour Movement to build secondary schools which would house all children under one roof and thereby avoid the risks of sheep and goats types of division.

The Second World War The outbreak of war in 1939 reconfigured politics, policymaking and policy outcomes, but not immediately. Marwick (1970:  263–65) provides an inventory of the disruption and destruction caused by the war:  the considerable population migration as people sought to escape from the bombing; two out of every five households affected by bomb damage; the eventual stationing of one and half million foreign troops on British soil; the destruction of one-fifth of British schools and the evacuation of whole populations of children to the countryside. Perhaps more telling, he suggests, than these physical and psychological costs, was the ideological shift in beliefs about state power from which politically the main beneficiary of the war was the Labour Party with what Marwick describes as a double dividend (1970: 290). Churchill’s coalition government included Labour ministers but at the same time the Party and the Trade Unions maintained platforms from which to criticize government policy. One such example was the call by the Trade Union Council in 1940 for a complete overhaul of social services. The government responded in May 1941 by announcing that Arthur Greenwood, the Minister for Reconstruction, would carry out a comprehensive review of social service provision. The survey, Marwick argues, became the Beveridge Report and eventually the blueprint for the Welfare State as constructed after 1945 The Beveridge Report was published in December 1942. It was largely concerned with three areas: social insurance for periods of unemployment, arguing that this should not be time limited; the provision of old age pensions; and a system of National Assistance for those who fell through the insurance net. However, it was the language and ambition of the report which transcended technicalities and caught the political and popular imagination. While Beveridge suggested he was largely concerned with ‘Want’; successful reconstruction could only happen, he argued, if the other great needs were addressed: ill health, inadequate education, bad housing and unemployment. In order to address these needs his report proposed a national health service, family allowances, an

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improved educational system, the avoidance of mass unemployment through government economic intervention, and a national housing and town planning programme (Marwick 1970: 309).

The 1944 Education Act As early as 1941, the Board of Education had published a ‘green book’ setting out the intention to implement secondary education for all. This was followed in 1943 by a White Paper ‘Educational Reconstruction’. The paper is an interesting example of the entwining of policy, politics and social ideology in a wartime context. The least contentious aspect of the paper is the embrace of the Hadow principle that education should be organized in three stages, primary, secondary and further. This had become the received wisdom and war meant that those previously opposed to the expansion of secondary education, notably employers’ organizations, were now supportive. Secondly, the White Paper was eager to defend diversity of provision. This was a defence of the continuation of church schools (the churches remained a formidable influence on policy), and a rejection of multilateral schools as espoused by some within the Labour Movement. Finally, the Paper set out its egalitarian principles; within the diversity of provision there was to be parity of esteem and resource provision of different schools. Post 1945, the contradictions between these principles became more evident. Diverse schools, serving different populations, attracted different regard in the minds of policymakers and policy implementers, including teachers and parents. In terms of William Rogers’s earlier metaphor, the children still tended to arrive at a railway terminus in accordance with the school they had travelled in. In 1943, this lay in the future. The Education Act was passed in 1944. All local authorities were now required to organize educational provision in accordance with the three stages model. Secondary education was to be organized in a way which met the needs of different ages, abilities and aptitudes. In other words, multilateral schools were rejected in favour of a tripartite system of grammar, technical and modern schools. The school-leaving age was to be raised to fifteen (enacted in 1947) with a view to eventually raising it to sixteen. Adequate specialist provision was to be made for children with special educational needs, free milk and medical inspections were to be provided. Two parts of the Act were never enacted: the provision of nursery education (again!) and compulsory part-time education in county colleges for young people to the age of eighteen. The position of church schools was modified to enable them to choose between ‘aided’ or ‘controlled’ status which traded different levels of financial support in return for different levels of local authority control. Denominational teaching could continue, and all schools were now required to begin their day with an act of worship. Apart from the need to be formally registered, public schools were left untouched by the Act. Germany surrendered to the allied forces on 7 May 1945, although the war with Japan continued. Churchill offered Clem Atlee, leader of the Labour Party, the choice of continuing with the coalition government or an election. Atlee chose the latter. Both parties promised reconstruction and the full implementation of the Butler Act in their manifestos. The Conservative campaign, however, was, according to Addison (1994: 263) a negative one, trying to scare the electorate away from voting Labour. They failed: Labour won a landslide victory with 393 seats to the Conservative’s 213. The new Prime Minister, Atlee, true to his Party’s election promise, implemented the 1944 Act in

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spite of the criticisms of some on the left of the tripartite secondary education system. The postwar baby boomers were to be the first generation to enjoy or suffer universal secondary education provision.

Summary This chapter then has delivered what history is meant to deliver in that: 1

There is a clear narrative about the creation of educational policy machinery, some of which still functions today. 2 We have shown how social change shapes the thinking of policymakers and influences policy. 3 We have noted how persistent concerns with educational quality and costs can be. 4 We have described how teachers’ professional identity and educational policies are entwined with one another. 5 And we have shown how assumptions about children and social class have influenced school provision in the United Kingdom and England especially. The next chapter will see how understanding the history of the more recent past contributes to understanding contemporary policies.

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2 Policy, politics and ideology, 1945–97 Introduction The first chapter examined the ways in which educational policymaking was intimately linked to some of the deeper changes at work in society. Class, gender and the experience of total war did not determine the precise shape of educational policy, but they did frame policymakers’ thinking as well as creating a need for an expanded educational provision. This second historical chapter focuses more closely on the relationship between political beliefs and values and policy outcomes. Three broad policies areas are examined: 1 2 3

The introduction of secondary education for all, initially by providing two types of schools and then comprehensive education. A shift in pedagogical practice towards a more ‘progressive’ approach. The increased intervention of central government into the curriculum and other aspects of school practices.

The policy history is then used to inform an understanding of policymaking in terms of the context, consensus and conflict between policymakers, and the role of ideology.

The party political context Government in the interwar years had been dominated by the Conservative Party, governing either independently or in coalition. The general election of July 1945 changed this. The Labour Party won in places which had never returned a Labour member before. The crowds may have turned out to cheer Winston Churchill as the victorious wartime leader, but they voted Labour. The next fifty years were to be dominated by these two parties, as the timeline in Figures 2.1 and 2.2 shows:

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Figure 2.1  Timeline: British Prime Ministers 1945–70

Figure 2.2  Timeline: British Prime Ministers 1970–97

Building a secondary school system Post-war educational policy cannot be understood outside of the general social and economic policies of the Labour government. In order to meet the expectations created during the war, the incoming government set out to slay Beveridge’s five ‘Giant Evils’ – squalor, ignorance, want,

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Policy, Politics and Ideology, 1945–97

idleness and disease – by modernizing industry, guaranteeing support to the unemployed and sick, rebuilding the nation’s housing stock, creating a national health service and, of course, building a new school system. In the first eighteen months of its existence the government took into public ownership the Bank of England, Cable and Wireless, civil aviation, coal and electricity and road and rail transport. This was over one fifth of the economy and constituted ‘a massive transformation unique in British history’ (Morgan 1992). In 1946 it passed the National Insurance Act by which the unemployed were guaranteed a minimum income of 26 shillings a week (£1.30 when the average wage was £2). Unlike the pre-war ‘dole’, it was not subject to the hated means testing. Similarly, with respect to housing, over 200,000 houses were built to replace those destroyed or rendered uninhabitable through bombing. This commitment to house building was to remain a hallmark of governments, irrespective of party, until the end of the 1960s. On the other hand, the creation of a national health service proved one of the more controversial post-war measures. Most doctors were bitterly opposed and there remained a deep attachment to the notion of local hospitals under local control. Nevertheless, in 1948 Aneurin Bevan, the fiery Health Minister, secured the National Health Act. He had to concede the continuation of doctors’ right to practise privately but henceforth, income was no longer the most significant factor in obtaining good medical care. The National Health Service became the centrepiece of the new Welfare State, commanding huge public support and popularity. So as far as education was concerned, the main task of the 1945 Labour government was to recruit a new teaching force, not least from among the service men and women being demobbed, and to rebuild the school infrastructure in accordance with the terms of the 1944 Act. The Act was ambivalent about the institutional form the new system should take, declaring that local education authorities should educate children ‘in accordance with their abilities’. However, in December 1945, the newly created Ministry for Education published a circular and accompanying booklet ‘The Nation’s Schools’ telling LEAs to plan for three types of schools: grammar schools for academically gifted children; technical schools for the technically minded; and secondary modern schools for the rest. Although the booklet was withdrawn under pressure from Labour Party members, Ministry officials continued to promote the tripartite model. Unsurprisingly this is what the LEAs set about creating. Or rather they did not: most planned instead for a bipartite system of grammar and modern schools. Technical schools were simply too expensive except for a handful of cities where a large population, coupled often to a long tradition of technical education, made technical schools a viable proposition. Also, as Jones (2003) has argued, technical education never enjoyed the status afforded to grammar schools. As a consequence less than 4 per cent of children were educated in technical schools. This then was the post-war Labour government’s major educational creation: a bipartite system of schools in which children were divided at the age of eleven by means of an examination (the 11-plus) into the ‘academic’ and the non-academic to attend either a grammar school or a secondary modern. The 11-plus supposedly measured intelligence quotient (IQ) and although the form it took over the years changed somewhat, at its heart remained exercises in verbal and mathematical reasoning, coupled to some general knowledge. And of course, it became a rite of passage

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for ten- and eleven-year-olds, their teachers and their parents: passing or failing the watershed of the 11-plus could shape lives. From the beginning the policy of different schools for different children had its critics who grew in influence over the years. Three groups, in particular, began to reshape the debate about secondary education and influence the thinking of policymakers. There were those in the Labour Movement itself who had never accepted what they saw as a Conservative tripartite model. Academics, especially in the growing discipline of sociology, began to question some of the assumptions on which the system rested and its efficacy. Then there were the teachers who had responsibility for putting the 1944 Act into effect and experienced on a daily basis its shortcomings. Together they constituted a powerful body of opinion which began to shift policy in a new direction.

Teachers While politicians envisioned policy and LEAs gave it bricks and mortar substance, it was the teaching profession who had to realize the hopes of 1944 in their schools and classrooms. It was primary teachers who had the job of preparing children for the 11-plus, who consoled those who failed, especially if failure was unexpected, and who dealt with sometimes resentful parents. Grammar school teachers had to ensure that ‘academic’ children remained academic and moved smoothly forward to further examination success. Their secondary modern colleagues had the rather different task of ensuring that children who had been labelled as ‘failures’ could still find routes through education which were meaningful and contributed to the children’s development into adults. This was far from easy given that those who failed the 11-plus understandably, Jones (2003) argues, developed an indifference and sometimes a hostility to education. For many teachers the neat, almost surgical categorization of children, was at odds with their daily classroom experiences. Ability, capability and attainment are complex concepts. The development of real live children ebbs as well as flows, rarely moving on an ever upward trajectory. They were related too in complex ways to the contexts of school, family and neighbourhood. Putting the 1944 system into effect is a classic example of what Ozga (2000: 18) calls operating on the ‘terrain of culture, identity formation and communication’. As such, policy is a matter of contestation and a process in which the actions and understandings of subjects play a significant part. For the most part the contestation of policy happened at the level of school and classroom but there were agencies which gave voice to the opinions of at least some teachers. The National Association of Labour Teachers was an example of one such agency and they were long-time critics of the tripartite system. As early as 1938, they had published a pamphlet ‘Social Justice in Education’ in which they attacked the Spens Report for recommending that children be taught in three different types of school. In 1946, they urged the Labour government to adhere to Labour Party policy in favour of comprehensive schools. They were also instrumental in getting the Nation’s Schools booklet withdrawn even if they failed to change official minds. Those teachers who were critical of the tripartite system had allies among their co-professionals working in the local educational authorities. The London County Council

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in particular, experimented with comprehensive schools from 1946 and the development plan for the Authority’s schools in 1947 envisaged a comprehensive system. In 1948 their booklet ‘The Comprehensive School’ argued in favour of common entry at thirteen and in 1954 the Authority opened Kidbrooke School, the first purpose built comprehensive educating two thousand girls.

The Labour Movement From the beginning of the ambition to provide secondary education for all, there were those on the political left who had argued for common entry ‘multilateral’ schools. Thus in 1938, the Trades Union Council passed a resolution in favour of multilateral schools, against the tripartite recommendations of the Spens Report. In 1942, the Labour Party annual conference declared its support for multilateral schools and party members exerted pressure on Butler, the Minister for Education, to adopt a unified secondary school system. However, once elected the Labour government took a more pragmatic line that the form that the new system should take was the responsibility of local authorities. There were also those in the Labour Party, notably Ellen Wilkinson the first post-war Minister for Education, who believed that secondary modern schools might renew the distinctive working-class secondary education which had begun to develop in the late nineteenth century (see McCulloch 1998). It was a political line that was to come under increasing pressure once the Labour Party lost power in 1951. In 1956 Anthony Crosland published the influential essay The Future of Socialism as an attempt to ‘modernize’ socialist thinking for the second half of the twentieth century. The older generation of wartime leaders, many of whom had been born in the nineteenth century, were beginning to leave the stage. People were becoming more prosperous, although concerns about Britain’s economic and political standing in the world continued to exercise political minds. Crosland was far from being on the political left, downplaying for example the role of government in the economy. In writing the essay, he was trying to ease his party away from seeing nationalization as the route to social justice towards increasing working-class capacities though educational reform (Jones 2003: 50–1). In some ways this was a precursor to ideas of New Labour. Unlike Blair though his criticisms of grammar schools were trenchant. For Crosland, they were skewed towards the middle class and unfair to working-class children, who were disadvantaged by crowded homes and inadequate resources. The 11-plus was an arbitrary examination and secondary modern schools often offered poor educational provision. A particularly telling section of The Future of Socialism is Crosland’s discussion of leadership in a modern democracy. In his view, leaders should offer good judgement in their service to the public, they should be technically informed and efficient, and above all, they should be democratic. It followed that grammar schools as cultural ghettoes, offering a narrow academic education, could not possibly provide the leadership required. Nothing speaks more clearly of the ways in which educational policy intersects with wider social thinking and concerns for the future than Crosland’s publication.

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Academic influences As we suggested in the introduction, policy review is a fundamental aspect of policymaking. Sometimes this is instituted by government usually in the form of an official inquiry. More often it arises from outside of government among those concerned at the impact of policy. Academics are often employed to conduct research in order to provide evidence on which to base any change in policy. Ozga (2000) has suggested this was particularly true of the post-war period until the 1970s when they played an important role in evaluating the working of the various arms of the welfare state. This was especially the case in education where educational sociologists pointed to the failure of the tripartite system to deliver equality of opportunity. Floud, Halsey and Martin’s (1956) Social Class and Educational Opportunity was a notable piece of research. In a detailed statistical analysis of two contrasting areas (Middlesborough and South West Hertfordshire), they showed how working-class children were far less likely to be admitted to grammar schools. The difference was attributable to material deprivation, family size and the ethos of schools not ability as measured by IQ testing. The sociologists were not alone in questioning the working of the 1944 Education Act. Some economists too began to argue that a tripartite school system, especially one that neglected technical education, was incapable of contributing to economic growth as required by modern industry and commerce. In 1962, John Vaisey published Britain in the Sixties: Education for Tomorrow in which he argued that education was the best investment ‘statesmen’ could make but that comprehensive schools were better at producing the skills required by a modern economy.

Reorganizing secondary education: The comprehensive schools policy Secondary education for all children is an important example of the complexity of educational policymaking. By the late 1930s the desirability of universal secondary education was widely accepted but it took a world war to translate political desirability into political necessity. The form taken by the new secondary system reflected deeply held assumptions about children and their capabilities and developmental needs. These assumptions stretched back to the previous century when policymakers constructed typologies of children which could then be matched to different educational institutions. Twentieth-century science with the creation of IQ testing may have added a sheen to Victorian thinking but the outcome of different schools for ‘different’ children remained the same. The story of secondary provision, therefore, illustrates the extent to which educational policy is always a compromise between history, present events and hopes for the future: a matter of something new and something borrowed. Something blue too perhaps given that some historians see the Butler Act as a Conservative measure (see Addison 1994). Their arguments draw attention to the failure to address the issue of public schools, the continued role of the churches, but above all the embracing of the ‘different minds’ thesis.

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In 1964 the Labour Party returned to power after thirteen years in opposition. It was committed to replacing the bipartite system with comprehensive schools which would take all children at the age of eleven. However, rather than legislating for this, the Labour government opted for a gradual approach in the belief that local educational authorities would be largely supportive of the new policy. Behind this ‘softly, softly’ approach lay the continued regard of some Labour politicians for grammar schools. Closing secondary modern schools might seem desirable, closing grammar schools much less so. Hugh Gaitskell who had led the Labour Party until his premature death in 1963, tried to side step the issue by declaring that the party’s policy was to turn all schools into grammar schools (Letter to the Times, July 1958, cited in Chitty 2008: 19). Such sophistry and attempts at eating the policy cake and keeping it too, rested on the belief that grammar schools were ‘good schools’ and as such, the benchmark for secondary provision. It was a belief that was to influence the debate about grammar school education right down to the present day. Despite the regard for grammar schools among some party members, the 1964 Labour government pressed ahead with its comprehensive schools policy. In 1965 it published Circular 10/65, which requested rather than required local authorities to submit plans to transform their secondary schools into comprehensives. There was some outright resistance but most eventually fell into line, if only for pragmatic reasons to do with securing governmental funding. Even so, in 1970 the Labour government was preparing to impose comprehensive schools when it lost power. The new Conservative government, with Margaret Thatcher as Secretary of State for Education, continued the progress towards a fully comprehensive system, albeit at a more leisurely pace. When the Labour Party returned to power in 1974 they once again tried to secure a national comprehensive schools system. However, a number of successful legal challenges by local authorities in defence of their grammar schools, notably by Tameside in Greater Manchester, seems to have convinced successive Labour education secretaries that discretion was the better part of policy valour. Thus, the comprehensive policy concluded at the end of the 1970s with the 90 per cent of children being taught in comprehensive schools but with 165 grammar schools still in existence. In most cases these coexisted with comprehensive schools but a handful of local authorities retained a fully selective system. In terms of policy, ‘bring back grammar schools’ can still make some Tory hearts beat faster: in 2016, the new Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, pledged to facilitate founding new grammar schools. From the 1980s though the more immediate issue was how to create a more diverse system of secondary schools without necessitating 11-plus type selection.

Primary schools and ‘progressive’ education The creation of a universal, selective system of secondary education and its eventual replacement with comprehensive schools was largely the work of political policy makers. As we have seen, they were influenced by academics and teachers and no doubt constituents made their views known to their members of parliament, but the policies themselves was a top down process. Ultimately, it was the job of governments to determine educational systems while teachers operationalized them and parents fulfilled their responsibilities by sending their children to school. What follows is another

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kind of policy narrative whereby policy becomes much more a matter of responding to changes happening on the ground in the schools themselves. Schools, especially primary schools, changed quite dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘Victorian’ classroom layout of two by two rows of desks facing the teacher gave way to grouped tables. Children now faced one another and in some classrooms the teacher’s desk disappeared altogether. Classrooms became richer environments with extensive displays of children’s work and curriculum corners in which children could work independently. There was rather less single subject work and rather more ‘topics’ or projects in which different subjects were integrated. Secondary classrooms remained rather more familiar in appearance but here too it was a time of curriculum experimentation. The Nuffield Foundation in particular, supported a range of innovative projects, especially in science and mathematics but in other subjects too. LEAs began to create teachers centres in the 1960s where teachers could meet to explore curriculum innovation. The government-sponsored Schools Council Project, was yet another source of curriculum and pedagogical innovation (see Lowe 2007: 48). What these various agencies had in common was a belief that an active, hands-on approach to teaching resulted in more learning than student passivity. These developments were not the consequence of policy initiatives. Rather they arose from the work of university education departments and colleges of education, set up in 1963, where academics sought to establish the intellectual validity of the study of education. In order to achieve this, the disciplines of sociology, philosophy and psychology were deployed to enable teachers to understand how children learned, what they should learn and how social context impacted on schools. At the same time, study of the history of education carried the message that educational change was inherent to any educational system. These educational disciplines then, together with subject knowledge, constituted part of the professional knowledge of a generation of teachers and local authority advisers. They now possessed a new vocabulary of child centeredness, of experiential learning, of behaviour management and of cross curricularity which was alien to political policymakers and many parents. Of course, the new language coexisted with the traditional vocabulary of order and discipline and in the vast majority of schools it was still the teachers who decided what was taught and when. Indeed, the tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ways of understanding education were a challenge for both teachers and policymakers for years to come. The term ‘progressive education’ had been applied in the late nineteenth century to a body of educational thought which took a very different stance on childhood and education from mainstream beliefs and practices. Jones (2003: 54) defines the term as seeing children as unique individuals, learning as the product of active relations between individuals and their environment and the outcome of collaboration between teachers and their students. In the 1960s progressive education became associated with those teachers whose thinking and practices began with children rather than what had to be taught. It became especially popular with right wing politicians and media who used it as a term of abuse. As late as 2013, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education in the Coalition government, was still attributing children’s assumed lack of achievement to the ‘progressive betrayal’ (Speech to the Social Market Foundation, 5 February 2013). Initially, however, the changes in primary schools received official policy blessing in the form the 1967 report ‘Children and Their Primary Schools’, commonly referred to as the Plowden Report after its chairwoman Lady Bridget Plowden. Somewhat ironically given its subsequent reputation,

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the report had been commissioned in 1963 by the Conservative government. It is important not just for its content: it was the last report to be submitted by the Central Advisory Body for Education, a somewhat autonomous body with the task of scrutinizing education policy and practice. The Plowden Report was nothing if not thorough. Its recommendations included enhancing relations between schools and parents, the abolition of corporal punishment in primary schools, greater availability of nursery education, the introduction of the term ‘slow learner’ as a substitute for ‘subnormal’, reduced class sizes and, especially popular with teachers, additional resources for schools in deprived areas (to be called Education Priority Areas), including additions to teacher pay. It was the Report’s all-pervasive enthusiasm for the theories of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget which was to bring a lasting coupling between Plowden and progressive education. Piaget had argued that children learned in stages and that early learning in particular, required the opportunity for children to engage practically with materials. These ideas and those of others had been developed in British context most notably by the child psychologist Susan Isaacs, and it was this practical, play-based, experiential pedagogy which was endorsed by Plowden. By the late 1960s, a reaction had set in against the pace and direction of educational change. This reaction crystallized around the publication of the Black Papers (a play on governmental white papers) in which between 1969 and 1977, an eclectic group of academics and writers and most famously, Rhodes Boyson, a head teacher and Conservative politician, expressed their disapproval of much of a decade of educational policymaking. While not altogether opposed to comprehensive schools, they certainly favoured selection. Child-centred, progressive methods were an anathema, leading to a neglect of subjects which should be at the heart of education. As for the expansion of higher education, late 1960s student unrest was taken as evidence that more meant worse. Such views commanded a hearing in the media, especially in the Daily Mail, which created a new folk devil – the ‘trendy teacher’– irrevocably wedded to progressive pedagogies which destroyed her or his pupils’ life chances. For a time, the political response to these educational conflicts was muted. Politicians were preoccupied in the late 1960s and early 1970s with other national issues. In comparison with later decades, the British economy was rather successful in the 1950s and 1960s, but growth rates did not match those of other advanced economies. This was attributed in part to what was believed to be poor industrial relations between employers and employees. Attempts to reform industrial relations by both Labour and Conservative governments were not especially successful and culminated in the miners’ strike of 1973–4. Couple this to a quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 as a consequence of an Arab-Israeli war and it is not difficult to understand why governments were relatively educationally inattentive. This began to change in October 1974 when the newly appointed Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, made a speech which melded together some fairly disparate ideas into an apparently coherent whole. He accused teachers, especially those working in poorer areas, of lowering standards and giving rise to growing illiteracy. Some schools, he argued, were now ‘dominated by gangs operating extortion rackets against small children’. Educational decline had spread to the universities which had lowered entry standards in order to accommodate pupils from comprehensive schools. This he connected to the behaviour of ‘the bully boys of the left’ – a reference to the recent wave of university student protests. Ultimately, such disorder was, according

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to Joseph, evidence of the decline in self-discipline brought on by a lack of parental responsibility and children being born to ‘unsuitable mothers’ (Times Educational Supplement 25 October 1974). The whiff of eugenics in the speech probably put paid to Keith Joseph’s political ambitions to lead the Conservative Party but it did signal that education was about to become politically central once again. Joseph was not alone in his concern with illiteracy. In 1972 Margaret Thatcher, as Secretary of State for Education, had appointed a committee under the chairmanship of the historian Alan Bullock to investigate the teaching of English. Bullock presented his report, A Language for Life, in 1975 to a Labour government. The report argued that language development was the responsibility of all teachers not just those in the English departments. It also argued for much greater emphasis on spoken language. The Bullock Report was influential in the teaching of English for the next decade, but it is significant too in understanding policymaking procedures. The Committee was made of academics, local education authority professionals and some practising head teachers. In subsequent years, the role of the practitioners in making policy recommendations to government would increase at the expense of academics and LEA personnel. Bullock assumed also that new educational initiatives required resourcing. Teachers needed in service training and English advisers needed to be appointed to local authorities. Again, in future years the belief that new policies would call forth new resources became more problematic. The inquiry into English teaching was matched by a similar examination of the teaching of mathematics, initiated in 1978 under a Labour government and reporting to a Conservative administration in 1982. The Cockcroft report, the Teaching of Mathematics, was as impressive as its English counterpart and focussed even more strongly on classroom practice. For Cockroft, mathematics was there to be enjoyed and understood, rejecting the idea that the subject could be reduced to a narrow range of arithmetical and computation skills. It too called for more in-service provision for teachers in post, arguing wholly logically that mathematics could only be improved if the practice of those currently teaching was made better. Neither of these two reports could be said to be advocating educational ‘progressiveness’, but they shared a belief that successful learning and teaching necessitated engaging with children’s experiences. They also believed that educational progress was achieved through giving a steer via reports such as their own, to well-trained, adequately resourced teachers. Around them though the policy world was changing. The Cockcroft Committee was set up in the midst of the ‘Great Debate on Education’, initiated by Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1976. Callaghan was a shrewd politician who knew that the Conservative Party’s critique of education, aided and abetted by some in the press, was gaining ground with the electorate. Callaghan took the opportunity of a speech at Ruskin College (October 1976) to set out his own educational ideas and to provide an overview of what he considered to be the educational challenges facing the nation. While being careful to praise teachers and to dissociate what he had to say from the Black Papers, nevertheless he catalogued what he thought needed addressing: to raise levels of educational achievements; to recognize that parents were concerned about ‘informal’ teaching methods; to acknowledge industry’s belief that young people were not well prepared for the world of work; and to consider at least the need for a ‘basic curriculum’. Possibly the most telling moment in the speech was when Callaghan addressed the purposes of education:

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The goals of education are clear enough. They are to equip children to the best of their ability for a lively constructive place in society, and also to fit them to do a job of work. Not one or the other but both. (Available at www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/speeches1976Ruskin.html accessed 9 June 2018)

He went on to suggest that perhaps that employment had been neglected in recent years in favour of the more personal development of children. Callaghan’s speech has been widely regarded as a pivotal moment in both shaping the educational policy agenda in the following decades and in unsettling the traditional means by which policy was made. The sentiments in the speech were banal enough. Concerns with children’s levels of achievement and what counted as achievement had been endemic to education since the 1850s. It is entirely probable that some parents found the innovations in primary teaching somewhat bewildering, albeit that these concerns were amplified by some newspapers. Connecting education to the economy had been part of educational rhetoric since 1870, and industrialists’ complaints about educational outcomes were historically familiar. In other respects, though Callaghan’s speech remains highly significant. The mere fact that a prime minister had chosen to make education the focus for a major statement was unusual: to do so in such levels of detail including pedagogy was unknown. The notion of a ‘basic curriculum’ hinted at an intervention into what was taught in schools which was last seen at the beginning of the twentieth century. Callaghan’s motivation in all of this is a matter of speculation. The fact that Shirley Williams, his Secretary of State for Education, was dispatched to lead the ‘Great Debate on Education’ in schools and universities up and down the country for the next two years, could be interpreted as a wish to kick education into the policy long grass. Alternatively, it may well have represented a commitment on Callaghan’s part to democratic discussion of educational policy. It is certainly the case that HMI were busy working on what was beginning to be called a National Curriculum when his government fell in 1979. Nevertheless, as Lowe (2007) has argued, the policy tide was running strongly in the direction of much greater government intervention into educational practice. Jones (2003: 94) has expressed the point especially eloquently: [1976 signalled] a sharp and lasting change in governments’ understanding of education’s priorities and procedures. In this sense post-war reform died from the top; there was still life after 1976 in the various branches and limbs of the system, but it was slowly through the 1980s extinguished as a new educational order created by law making rather than decentralised initiatives emerged.

Nationalizing education: conservative educational policies 1979–1997 Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in May 1979 was decisive. She won nearly 44 per cent of the vote and had a majority of forty-three seats. The victory ushered in a long period of Conservative power and Thatcher herself was not just the first woman prime minister, but also the first politician to be identified with a distinctive political ideology – ‘Thatcherism’. Conservative policies

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emphasized ‘the use of markets and free enterprise to produce and distribute, with a minimum of regulation, the goods and services wanted by consumers (Tomlinson 2005: 31) Education, like other state services was, therefore, viewed as a commodity and pupils and parents acted as consumers in the ‘education market’. Tomlinson argues that the consequence of such a policy direction was the loss of the once democratically controlled education system, and its replacement by one that was centrally controlled and funded (2005: 31). The extent to which the pre-1979 educational system was democratically controlled is debateable. Johnson (1989) has described it as a ‘local system’ into which central government intervened when it deemed it necessary. Indeed, Johnson argues that the absence of democracy partly explains the popular indifference to the new right’s takeover of education. It was certainly the case that the Conservative policy envisaged the curtailment of local authority powers. The abolition of the Inner London Education Authority in 1990 became something of a symbol for both the right and left of politics. A matter then possibly of policy pluralism giving way to policy monopolism, although the Conservatives would argue that they were replacing an ineffective local authority agency with a much more proactive role for parents. Education did not play a major role in the 1979 election, but the Conservatives committed themselves to raising educational standards by introducing tests in reading, writing and arithmetic. They also promised a ‘parents charter’ which was part of a package of measures to diversify secondary provision. The Conservatives ambition therefore was to change the whole educational system based on a view of the existing education system that characterized it as having low standards, incompetent teachers, poor pupil behaviour and being cocooned by the welfare state. The Conservatives ambitious reform agenda was to be achieved through a long-term strategy that included the use of parental choice, government control over the curriculum and assessment, removing or reducing the powers of LEAs, teachers and their trainers, increasing accountability and encouraging selection under the auspices of diversity (see Tomlinson 2005). As can be seen from the Table 2.1, progress post-1979 was slow, but the pace picked up following Mrs Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987.

The National Educational Reform Act 1988 This Act was undoubtedly the most important piece of educational legislation since 1944. For the first time, schools were required to teach a curriculum of ten subjects, plus religious studies, set out as prescribed programmes of study. Children were no longer categorized as infant, junior and secondary but now fell into four key stages. At the completion of each stage, children were to be assessed by examination, the results of which would be published on a school by school basis. The resulting school ‘league tables’ would, it was believed, enable parents to make informed choices about where to send their children and pressure poor-performing schools to improve. Also, HMI would in future make their school inspection reports public, adding to the stock of public knowledge about the quality of the education provided for children in the nation’s schools.

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Table 2.1  Education policy under the Conservatives 1979–97 Issue

Conservative policy

Selection

Education Act 1979 • Halted the comprehensive school programme • LEAs could retain grammar schools and selection

Private schools and parental preference

Education Act 1980 – strategies to ration educational opportunities • Protection and promotion of private education • LEAs to assist pupils to go to private schools on a means tested basis • Parental preference for schools • School-governing bodies established with parental representation • Discretionary but not compulsory education for under five-year-olds • Abolition of free school milk

Special education

The Education Act (Special Education) 1981 • Introduced the concept of special educational needs and inclusion

School governance

• Governing bodies became the major agency running schools with increasing parental influence

Centralization

• Control of education became more centralized • Government took over functions normally carried out by LEAs and teachers

Removal of teacher autonomy

• Government took control of teacher, their training and salaries • Prescribed teacher training courses introduced • 1980 – introduced a core curriculum

Vocational education • The New Training Initiative 1981 • Creation of City Technology Colleges Wide-ranging reform

The Education Reform Act (ERA) 1988 • National Curriculum • National Tests at 7, 11 and 14 • Local Management of School budgets (LMS) • Parental  choice • Opting out – grant-maintained schools • Ofsted – a new inspection regime

Further and higher education

• New funding mechanisms • Polytechnics become universities • Expansion of HE but more control

More wide-ranging reforms

Education Act 1993 • Increase in number of grant-maintained schools (GMs) • Funding agency for schools established • Code of Practice for SEN • PRUs established • Clarification of procedures for failing schools

Teacher training

Education Act 1994 • Teacher Training Agency (TTA) established and school-based training

14–19

• Plethora of youth training schemes, TVEI programmes in schools • Dearing Report 1996 called for national qualification framework

Tomlinson 2005

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As was to be anticipated, the 1988 Act provoked something of a storm among teachers and other educational professionals. It enshrined much of ‘new right’ educational thinking of the previous twenty years, thinking which had been fiercely contested by its opponents. It was premised on the belief that the curriculum, including that of primary schools, must be subject based; that educational achievements could be readily measured; and that schools could be judged as successful or not on the basis of such measurements. Lowe speaks for many when he describes the Act as ‘draconian’ and argues that ‘never again would the profession [teachers] be able to dictate what went on in schools’ (2007: 97). Much of the remaining years of Conservative rule to 1997 were spent in implementing, defending and shoring up the 1988 Act. Focal points of possible opposition were targeted and their powers to take policy in a different direction suitably circumscribed. Thus, the powers of local education authorities were further eroded with the introduction of the local management of schools, empowering schools to manage their own budgets. This had the desirable attribute in the eyes of Conservative politicians of opening education to the possibility of making profits. In 1992 teacher training students were required to demonstrate that they had met over six hundred ‘standards’ and university education departments were heavily policed by Ofsted to ensure that the new generation of teachers did so. School-governing bodies were required to include representatives from local businesses and performance-related pay was introduced, first for head teachers and then for classroom practitioners. It was equally important to government that its own agencies for policy implementation were committed to making the Reform Act work. To this end the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority was created to replace existing agencies and to ensure greater control by the DES. In 1994, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate were reorganized into the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and Chris Woodhead, a critic of all things ‘progressive’, was appointed as chief HMI. All of this points to the ways in which policymaking cannot be understood by reference to legislation alone. Major acts like 1988 have to become embedded in the practices and the culture of teachers and their co-professionals as Ozga (2000) has argued. This may involve some concessions by the policymaker. For example, the Act resulted in huge amounts of paperwork for teachers and considerable stress. In response, the Dearing Report in 1994 slimmed down the National Curriculum and reduced the key stage tests. Essentially though, the system inherited by the incoming Labour government in 1997 was the product of the Education Reform Act. From the age of five all children in state schools followed a national curriculum in which mathematics, English and science enjoyed special status as ‘core’ subjects. The importance of teaching as instruction had been reasserted against its supposed marginalization by ‘child centredness’. Education could now be packaged in terms of learning outcomes, providing a currency by which schools and teachers could be held to account. Schools as workplaces had been transformed by the need to ensure that the new demands were skilfully managed. For now, secondary education remained predominantly ‘comprehensive’ but the Conservative government had founded nine City Technical Colleges  – specialist schools independent of local authorities. They were to prove important indicators of future policy. The fundamental legacy of Conservative rule, of greater significance than policy detail, was the transformation of the policymaking process itself: the partnership of government, local authorities and educational professionals lay shattered.

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The extent to which a new policy engine consisting of government and private enterprises, influenced by a number of ‘think tanks’ was the driver of policies in the twenty-first century, is the subject of the following chapters examining contemporary educational policies.

What does history tell us about educational policymaking? The first lesson to be learned from this review of educational policy in the second half of the previous century is that policy making processes are not fixed and immutable.

The 1944 Education Act was primarily the work of government, parliament, civil servants and the local education authorities, albeit that their creation rested on half a century of pressure for better educational provision. The introduction of comprehensive schools was similarly a political process with a capital P, although one which was heavily influenced by academics and teachers. In contrast, ‘progressive education’ was hardly a policy in the first instance but a shift in the practices of some schools in which teachers, academics and local authority personnel were the key movers. It became a matter of policy only when initially endorsed through an inquiry and then the object of suspicion for politicians. The popular press and politicians’ links with non-governmental agencies began to squeeze out the previous influence of teachers and local authorities. Universities too, Ozga (2000) has argued, became less concerned with systems evaluation as they had been in the 1950s. Instead, university academics began to focus on providing politicians with practices which were employable in schools. Thus, educational policymaking by 1997 was very different from what it had been in 1945. The second lesson from history is that policy making is always intimately connected to the immediate context of events.

The 1944 Education Act can only be understood by reference to the Second World War. The widespread questioning of educational goals and practices in the 1970s is attributable in part to a dysfunctional economy produced by a failing educational system some argued. Perkin (1990) took this argument still further. Economic failure in the 1970s, he argues, splintered middle-class professionals into ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors. While the economy and wealth had been growing, taxation had not seemed onerous. As company and individual incomes declined in the 1970s, taxation became a ‘burden’ and public-sector professionals like teachers, were seen simply as a cost. Policy, it seems, can be a matter of contingency. Context then clearly matters. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that whatever the context, policymakers still have choices. The extent to which those choices are widely seen as legitimate or deeply contested will be highly important in understanding educational policymaking. The third lesson from history then is that policy making cannot be understood without understanding political consensus and conflict.

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In an argument first set by Paul Addison (1975) and taken up by others (see Kavanagh 1989, Kavanagh D and Morris P 1994), the period between 1945 and 1979 was characterized by consensus extending to both major political parties, the civil service and members of professional groups. This consensus, the argument runs, was broken by the election of a Conservative government with a very different world view from its predecessors. The post-war consensus seems to have had five key elements: 1

That the goal of politics was to ensure that the family thrived by providing protection against life’s ups and downs, including ill health and unemployment. This positive view of welfare committed policymakers to ensuring public services were well resourced and staffed by trained professionals. 2 Raising the standard of living was a legitimate and laudable political ambition and could be achieved by state intervention into industry whenever appropriate. 3 The means by which these policy goals were to be realized was socially democratic by which parliament was the legitimate agent of change. Revolution was not the ‘British’ way. 4 Affluence for all was the ultimate goal of politics and best achieved by a ‘mixed economy’ of private and state enterprise. 5 In terms of foreign policy, the disaster of Suez in 1956 whereby Britain had failed to prevent the Egyptians nationalizing the Suez Canal, meant that Britain’s days as a great imperial power were over. In future, British influence could only be maintained by recasting the Empire as the Commonwealth and ensuring a close relationship with the United States. (Policymakers were more ambivalent about embracing Europe which never commanded the same level of consensus.) With the exception of foreign policy, this consensus around political ends and means was the mindset which politicians and other policymakers brought to educational policymaking. The notion of a post-war consensus has not gone unchallenged. For Pimlott (1989) it was a myth, born out of historians’ reaction to the undoubted combative political style of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in the 1980s. For Jones and Kandiah (1996) consensus underestimates the socialist commitment of the post-war Labour Party and the distinctive social policies of Conservative governments, rooted in a rejection of the state as an agency for egalitarianism. Kerr (2001) goes further to argue that consensus more accurately characterized the 1990s when much of the Thatcherite transformation of public policy, especially in education, was accepted by her political opponents. Other historians (CCCS 1981, Jones 2003) have avoided the problematic term consensus in favour of the notion of ‘settlements’. Thus, Jones writes of a post-war settlement which implies acceptance of the Atlee government policies was altogether more contingent and strategic than consensus would suggest. It points to a more temporary, more brittle agreement around some policies such as the tripartite school system while reserving the right to search for an alternative. That said, the 1970s did give rise to an increasingly forceful critique of both the policy means and ends of post-war governments, especially Labour governments. This chapter has already examined the alternative policy ideas articulated by the political right, but the critique was no less voluble by the left as well. A number of ethnographic studies of life in school, notably Paul Willis Learning to

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Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977), showed how school was irrelevant at best and oppressive at worst for many children. The thirty-year preoccupation of policymakers with issues of access to secondary education for all children had neglected the deeper issues of how schools functioned in society. The Contemporary Cultural Studies Centre at Birmingham University (1981), for example, argued that the failure of social democratic policymakers since 1944 to address key issues such as the nature of knowledge and the role of education in social reproduction, exposed education to political attack in the 1970s. For them the ‘old repertoire’ of Labour Party policy was largely exhausted. Quite what could be offered educationally in its place was more difficult to articulate. What then does this debate about political conflict and consensus, surrounded as it is by all kinds of caveats, tell us about educational policymaking. Are there any lessons to be learned from this particular historical moment? First, there is a need to ask serious questions about the extent and level of agreement surrounding policy innovation. In 1945 there was no serious opposition to the idea that expanding secondary education would make a major contribution to the national well-being. For most politicians and their civil servants, there was little doubt that a tripartite system was an entirely appropriate way to cater for different children but was not necessarily accepted by others at a different level in the educational system. Secondly, consensus is never for ever. Seemingly robust assumptions about the appropriateness of a political course will contain the seeds of their own destruction when they appear to be failing. Thus, the assumption that the state was a benign institution working for the common good, was tellingly challenged by the American president Ronald Reagan declaring that ‘government is not the solution to our problems, it is the problem’ (available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws?pid+43130 accessed 9 June 2018). In other words, for Reagan as for many others on the political right, government supressed the kinds of freedoms and spirit of enterprise which could transform education along with much else. Of course, faced with this onslaught, positive views of the state’s role in education did not simply disappear. It did however, become far more difficult for policymakers to build policies in which the state was the central director. Such views no longer commanded consensual support, for the time being at least. The fourth lesson from history is that ideology is key to understanding educational policy.

The discussion of conflict and consensus has drawn attention to the role of ideas in educational policymaking. For some, and Ronald Reagan is a good example of this, the market was more than just a device to fund and organize education: it was an all-embracing benign agency, a ‘hidden hand’, which ensured personal freedom and responsibility. For their opponents, the democratic state had been hard won through the sacrifices of men and women over generations and through its representative powers had the legitimate authority to check the excessive privileges of power and to redistribute wealth in favour of the poor and marginalized. Such ways of seeing are more than ideas: they are systematic world views, connected to collective experiences and with the power to move their holders to action. They are in short ideologies. Ideology however, remains a hugely complex concept. Eagleton (1991) in his comprehensive epistemological history, examines the many ways in which ideology has been understood: from referring to a very wide set of ideas to something narrow and quite specific; from

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something enlightening to something which can conceal reality; from something is desirable and inspiring and drives action to something which inhibits; from something to be lauded to a term of abuse. In his conclusion, Eagleton summarizes some of the major characteristics of ideology which can be paraphrased as follows: 1 2

Ideology has a breadth of meanings both broad and narrow. It can represent the interests of dominant social groups but equally can be present in oppositional groups. 3 Ideology can have elements of both truth and falsehood. 4 It is an important organizing force which actively constitutes human subjects, equipping them with values and beliefs relevant to their experience. 5 However, ideology is more than a subjective, personal process: it can reside in institutions. 6 Ideology is a matter of discourses, involving both ‘utterance and the ‘material conditions of possibility’. In other words, it is more than talk: it has to be actionable. If these points are related to the policies described in this chapter, we can see how an understanding of ideology deepens our understanding of policymaking. Thus, ‘affluence’ as both a political goal and a reference point in the dominant ideologies of the post-war period, had a very broad set of meanings. The faith in grammar schools as a way of securing affluence was a much more specific ideological belief which actually narrowed over time. Equally it could be argued that the grammar school was an important element in the ideologies of dominant social groups. A belief in comprehensive schools, on the other hand, emanated initially from oppositional groups before being taken up more widely. It was manifestly true that primary schools were becoming more ‘child-centred’ in the 1970s. It was false that this led to the abandonment of English and mathematics as dominant subjects. It is clear that the conviction that children fell into three types of mind was both a matter of ideology but also part of the ‘personhood’ of those subscribing to the view. As McCulloch (1998) has shown, it was a belief that drew upon the classical education of its advocates. Also, as we have seen, it was a belief which took up residence in the corridors of power to become transcendent of particular individuals and shaped policy for years. Finally, we can see how such a belief needed a material instrument to be enacted. The 11-plus was that instrument and possibly, today’s selective education ideologues struggle because they have yet to find a convincing alternative ‘material possibility’ to the 11-plus. It is clear then education policy cannot be understood without reference to the ideological worlds they inhabit. In the words of Ozga (2000: 114): ‘we are also required, I believe, to explore the effects of prevailing ideologies on educational policy.’

Summary This chapter has sought to deploy an historical analysis to deepen an understanding of policymaking. It has offered a narrative of how some of the principal features of our modern education

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system came to be. It has shown how the policies which created those features were contested, especially following the political changes of the 1980s. Throughout the process of creating our modern education system policymaking has been vitally shaped by events, by the nature and extent of agreement among policymakers, and the ideologies they hold. Above all, the chapter serves as a platform to understand the contemporary world of policymaking which follows in the remaining chapters.

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Part II Contemporary perspectives

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3 Policy in practice Introduction While we are anxious to see a general system of education adopted we have no doubt of the impropriety of yielding such an important duty as the education of our children to any government. (Lovett 1840 cited in Alexander 2014: 351)

There has always been a reluctance by the state to get involved in the education of its children which it appears is once again emerging in contemporary policymaking. The period from 1870 to the 1990s saw the state taking responsibility for and playing a major role in providing solutions to social problems through public services like education. However, as Stephen Ball (2013) points out, A liberal reluctance on the part of the state is now once again very evident in a number of respects. Both the New Labour (1997–2010) and Coalition Governments have worked to unpick the idea of direct responsibility for the delivery of educational services. The current system of education in England is beginning to resemble some aspects of the pre-1870 system of education. The distribution of responsibility for the solution of social problems is changing and now philanthropy and business are essential parts of the delivery and policy processes of education.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s a ‘revolutionary change’ swept through the English education system. The growth of, and confidence in public services, like education, was coming to an end, heralding in a period of ‘retrenchment and redefinition’ (Bondi 1991: 126). Such changes were occurring in education systems throughout the world, particularly countries like the United States where, as in England, falling birth rates, declining public confidence in education due to concerns over standards and progressive teaching methods and economic recession had brought the relationship between education and the economy into question and raised the potential for restraints on public spending in that area. The result was a ‘ “neo-liberal” revolt against existing public services . . . seeking to restructure them around a market model in which “consumers” chose which service to use just like when buying commercial products’ (Hirsch 2002: 4). According to Levin (1998), educational reform became an ‘epidemic’ of global proportions which Hall and Gunter (2015) suggests was driven in part by a raft of powerful non-educational agencies such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

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Ball (2008: 25) suggests that the result was a ‘global convergence of reform strategies’ that resulted in a ‘one size fits all model of transformation and modernisation’. This led to the emergence of three policy technologies – the market, managerialism and performativity that have become increasingly important globally as part of this dominant education reform package (Ball 2003).

The contemporary policymaking process Education policy refers to the raft of laws and initiatives that determine the shape and functioning of educational systems at both a national and a local level. Trowler defines an educational policy as follows: ‘A specification of principles and actions related to educational issues, which are followed, or which should be followed, and which are designed to bring about desired goals’ (2003:  95). According to Baldock et al. (2009: 5), a policy is therefore ‘an attempt to think coherently about objectives and the means to achieve them . . . [and is something] . . . that will occur at every organizational level’. A policy can, therefore, provide a statement of: 1 2 3

The intent to make something happen. The actions to be taken. The organizational or administrational practice to be put in place. (2009: 2)

From the government’s perspective, policymaking is simply considered to be: the process by which governments translate their political vision into programmes and actions to deliver ‘outcomes’ – desired changes in the real world. (Modernizing Government White Paper 1999)

Rational policymaking In academic writing about education policy and policy formulation a ‘normative’ approach to policy analysis is often adopted. Coles (2006: 2) refers to this as the ‘established ways of thinking about policy’ where policy is simply a course of action that results from government problem solving of issues facing society. Thus, it is widely believed that policymaking is carried out in a ‘rational fashion’ and that there is a simple, linear development from the identification of an issue or problem to the implementation of policies or practices that are designed to ameliorate it (Sutton 1999; Trowler 2003). In the rational model, policymaking occurs in a series of steps that include the following: 1 2 3 4 5

Recognizing the issue and defining its nature. Identifying alternative solutions and ways of dealing with the issue. Weighing up the alternatives and selecting the ‘best way’ forward. Implementing the policy. Evaluating the impact of the policy once it has been put into practice. (Sutton 1999: 9; Trowler 2003: 35). See Figure 3.1.

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Identify Issue

Identify Possible Solutions

Choose Best Solution

Implement Policy

Evaluate Policy in Practice

Figure 3.1  The rational model of policymaking

Issue

Policy Solution

Green Paper

Consultation

White Paper

Bill or Act

Implementation

Figure 3.2  From issue to implementation

Policymaking is, however, often a messy process, and this rational ideal is often far from the reality. For example, there is often a gap between the planned outcomes of a policy and what is actually achieved. Policymaking can sometimes be simply ‘incremental’, that is, small changes are made to existing policies. Often too, as Trowler suggests, policymakers just ‘muddle through’ responding to situations as they arise. As a result, policymaking can sometimes appear uncoordinated and even contradictory (2003: 35). In order to introduce a new policy (see Figure 3.2), the government must first produce a Green Paper outlining its intentions, which is sent out for consultation to relevant stakeholders (individuals, groups or organizations that have an interest in or will be affected by the policy) such as local authorities and schools. Following consultation and amendment, the Green Paper becomes a White Paper. Some policies do not need to pass through parliament to be implemented; others, however, have to be considered by parliament in the form of a bill, where

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the policy undergoes further scrutiny, debate and amendment. If the proposals are accepted by both Houses of Parliament, then, with the granting of Royal Assent, it becomes law, an Act of Parliament. Once the policy becomes entrenched in law, guidelines are sent out to local authorities, schools and other agencies that fall within its remit, which detail how the new legislation is to be implemented and how current structures and practices will be affected (see Baldock et al. 2009: 68–71).

Policy implementation According to Le Métais (1997), ‘education is a long-term project’ and any educational system is ‘at any given point in time, a combination of the past, the present and the future’ (1997: 4). With education, however, it is impossible to start afresh with a new structure, old structures and ways of working persist, and therefore new policy directions and initiatives have to bear cognisance of such factors in order to be successful. Once implemented policies are, therefore, considered to have a ‘career’, in which they are changed and adapted as they pass through the various stages of implementation at regional (local authorities) and local levels (head teachers and classroom teachers). This is because at each stage the policy is received by various stakeholders and actors, who each bring their own values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours into the equation. Sometimes, particularly when policies are ‘imposed from above’, they can be met with considerable resistance, be ignored or subverted. More often, however, in order to make things happen, policies are simply adapted to suit local preferences and needs (Trowler 2003). As Ball comments, ‘policies shift and change their meanings . . . [and] are represented differently by different actors and interests’ (1994c: 16–17 cited in Trowler 2003: 131). The people who actually implement the policy are, therefore, ‘crucial actors whose actions determine the success or failure of policy initiatives’ (Juma and Clarke 1985 cited in Sutton 1999:  22). Schools and teachers, therefore, are ‘not mere cogs in an automatic transfer of policymaking to outcomes in practice’ (Sutton 1999: 22) and as a result, the outcomes of policies are rarely the same in different contexts. The impacts of policies are, therefore, not always those intended by the policymaker. In order for policies to be successfully implemented, the people who actually implement then have to have a significant ownership of how the policy is developed and put into place.

Influences on policymakers Social and economic imperatives, such as child poverty, high levels of youth unemployment and economic crises often provide the drivers for new educational reforms. Increasingly, in the context of globalization and national comparisons of educational performance, governments are also keenly aware of what is happening in other countries and are influenced by the kinds of approaches that are being taken by other national governments. More importantly, however, all policy initiatives are to some extent inevitably determined or delimited by financial considerations and constraints.

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The actual measures taken by governments – the policies and initiatives they implement – are also influenced and shaped by the views of the stakeholders, particularly those who are powerful and influential; by ideological imperatives; by contemporary social constructs and discourses relating to the policy area and by the findings of academic research.

International influences and comparisons Competitive international league tables that rank individual countries with respect to their standard of education, such as PISA or TIMMS, are often, the stimulus for politicians to initiate or justify educational reform. Similarly, for political purposes, politicians will often use the fact that a particular policy initiative has been successfully implemented in one country, that ranks higher than theirs in the league tables, as a rationale for change in their own – assuming that the policy will simply transfer from one country’s context to another (see Bates and Lewis 2009). the workings of the global economy and the increasing interconnectedness of societies pose common problems for educational systems around the world . . . there are common problems  – and what would appear to be increasingly similar education agendas . . . (Arnove 2007: 1)

As a result, many policy initiatives are simply copies, adaptations or reworkings of policies or initiatives that have been developed in other countries, a process that is termed policy borrowing or policy transfer. Many of New Labour’s childcare policies were borrowed from America and there was a distinctive ‘American Way’ which influenced, for example, Every Child Matters (No Child Left Behind) and Sure Start (Head Start). The Conservative Coalition looked more towards Europe and, for example, with its Free School policy borrowed from the Swedish model of Free Schooling. Policy borrowing however, is not always a one-way process, and many initiatives developed by the UK government influence or are copied or borrowed by other national governments (see Furlong 2002). In addition, initiatives arising from intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, UNESCO and the OECD have an increasing influence on national policymaking. For example, Education for All (EFA) an international initiative that was first launched in 1990 by UNESCO together with a broad coalition of national governments, the World Bank Group, UNICEF, UNDP and UNFPA committed to achieving quality basic education for all children, young people and adults has influenced the expansion of early years education in the UK.

Influential stakeholders Policymaking is not a static process but is often the result of a dynamic interplay between the politics and personalities of those involved in the process (see Figure 3.3.). Thus ‘policy making often is considered a privilege and is jealously guarded by those in authority’ (Kumar and Sunderi 2000: 1). According to Neal and McLaughlin (2009), policymaking involves a range of different actors, stakeholders and interest groups who function as a kind of ‘policy community’ in influencing or attempting to influence the direction that policymaking takes. A ‘policy community’ can, therefore, include government ministers, members of relevant government departments, government

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The Policos

Select Commiees

Civil Servants Influenal Academics and Research

Pressure Groups & Think Tanks

Internaonal Influences

Professional Organizaons

Praconers

Policy Making

Stakeholders

Figure 3.3  Influential stakeholders in the policymaking process

advisors, members of external pressure or interest groups or other organizations and individuals who might be affected by the policy. When considering the influences on the Conservative government’s policymaking from 1979–97, Callaghan (2006) identified three key influential groups which he termed as follows: 1

The Politicos: Individuals holding political office, for example, the Prime Minister, Secretary of State, Ministers. 2 The Regulars:  Professionals who work in the policy field, including ministry officials, members of ‘quangos’ (quasi autonomous non-governmental or governmental organizations) for example, the National College for Teaching and Leadership and representatives of government agencies for example, Ofsted. 3 The Irregulars: Members of ‘pressure groups’ (e.g. the Campaign for State Education), ‘think tanks’ (e.g. the Fabian Society – Labour and the Policy Exchange – Conservative) and government advisers. It would be sensible to assume that because teachers are the people who most often have to implement education policy, literally at the ‘chalkface’, they would be closely involved in the policymaking process. Too often however, this is not the case and the teacher’s ‘voice’ is often absent from policy deliberations. As Butter’s highlights, policymaking is often a ‘top-down process’ with policies being imposed on teachers from above, a process that she suggests ‘encourages fear and submission rather than trust and collaboration’ (n.d.: 1). Referring to the Conservative government’s approach to consulting stakeholders, Bolton suggests,

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There is no crime in listening to your political friends. But a wise government listens more widely than that, and especially to those with no political axe to grind. It is not auspicious that the formal channels of advice about education to the Government appear to be either muzzled (e.g. HMI), or packed with people likely to say whatever the Government wants to hear (i.e. the NCC and SEAC). (1993: 15 cited in Gipps 1993: 11)

Ball (1994) argues, therefore, that what is actually more important than how a policy is formulated is who is invested with the power to decide what the problem is, how it is framed and how it will be fixed. While educational research may identify areas of concern, it is policymakers who bring about changes in practice. Indeed, while schools and teachers may be viewed as the agents of such changes in practice within the system it is questionable whether they actually wield any real power. Education policymaking is, in reality a highly political process which is more about bringing economic success to the country and facilitating favourable international comparisons.

Select Committees Since 1979, parliamentary analysis and reports on the functioning of government departments and their policies have been the responsibility of the government’s cross party Select Committees. The Education Committee and related bodies such as Ofsted deal with issues relating to schools, while the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee deals with issues relating to higher and further education. While, the formal role of the Select Committees is narrow, as McFall (2009) points out, in practice they have a wider remit and often embark on wide-ranging inquiries into specific issues in which they can call on the expertise and advice of relevant stakeholders and academics. This, McFall suggests, gives them ‘considerable power to set the agenda for public policy’: The power of a Select Committee lies not in an ability to make direct changes to laws, but in the capacity to get to the heart of important issues, to hold the government to account, and to speak with a credible, coherent and non-partisan voice. Ultimately, in order to influence policy, a Select Committee must command the respect of Parliament and the public. (McFall 2009)

Examples of inquiries initiated by the current Education Committee include investigations into: transforming children and young people’s mental health, the integrity of public exams, value for money in higher education and apprenticeships and skills training.

Ideological perspectives From an educational perspective, an ideology can be defined as ‘any package of educational ideas held by a group of people about formal arrangements for education’ (Matheson 2008: 21). Thus:  ‘An ideology is a framework of values, ideas and beliefs about the way society is and should be organized and about how resources should be allocated to achieve what is desired. This framework acts as a guide and justification for behaviour’ (Trowler 2003:  103, adapted from Hartley 1983: 26–7). Ideologies work at different levels within an education system, from informing education acts at a national level to influencing classroom practices at a local level

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Table 3.1  Political and educational ideologies Political ideology Neo-liberalism

Neoconservatism

Social democracy

• Belief in the free market • Limited government intervention • Individualism • Freedom of choice

• Belief in traditions and customs • Strong state providing direction • Central control • Disciplined society

• Belief in state intervention • State activities complemented by private and charitable activities • Pluralistic decision making • Regulation to overcome social disadvantage

In education • Marketization – competition between schools • Diversity of schooling • Parental choice

• Compulsory attendance • Focus on the link between • Centralized curriculum education and national performance • Traditional subjects • Promotion of social justice • Focus on school • State intervention to mitigate discipline against the effects of disadvantage

Educational ideology Traditionalism

Progressivism

Enterprise

Social reconstruction

• Disciplinary and subject knowledge • Traditions and heritage • Elitism • Teacher-centred learning

• Disciplinary and subject knowledge not important • Freedom of choice • Student-centred learning • Mass access to higher education

• Students viewed as future workers • Emphasis on usefulness of the curriculum • Emphasis on the use of new technologies and approaches • Concentration on core skills

• Education viewed as a force for social change • Radical approach to enterprise • Experiential learning • Focus on subjects • Students become autonomous learners facilitated by teachers

Links with a neoconservative ideology

Links with a social democratic ideology

Links with a neoliberal ideology

Links with radical left-wing academics – is not evident in government policymaking

Adapted from Trowler 2003: 104–18

(2003: 103). There are several competing ideologies evident within contemporary British policymaking, some are more general, political ideologies, while others are more specifically educational (see Table 3.1). According to Trowler, ‘ideology does place limits on thinking. It defines what the important questions are, where the priorities lie, how issues should be viewed, and indicates the sorts of actions that can and should be taken’ (2003:  171). As Trowler indicates, thinking about education is always inherently ideologically laden. However, the link between ideology and education

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policy is not always straightforward, with governments often adopting contradictory ideological stances, or as we shall see, in the case of New Labour, trying to move beyond traditional ideological boundaries.

Texts and discourses Stephen Ball (1994) offers a definition that conceptualizes policy as both text and discourse. With reference to literary theory, Ball (1994: 16) conceives policies as: ‘representations which are encoded in complex ways (via struggles, compromises, authoritative public interpretations and reinterpretations) and decoded in complex ways (via actors, interpretations and meanings in relation to their history, experiences, skills, resources and context)’. Policies can therefore be viewed as a textual representation of interventions into practice – they articulate the policy aims and values, what needs to be done and by whom and the intended outcomes – thus creating the conditions for action and solutions to problems that are solved within a context. But policies are not created in a vacuum, in practice they are influenced by other policies that are in place and like any text, they are open to different interpretations – thus their meanings are constantly contested and changed. Ball (1994: 21) also suggests that a policy is not only a text but also a mechanism by which power is exercised through the ‘production of truth and knowledge, as discourses.’ Expanding on this, Trowler (2003: 133) explains, Policy-makers, then, can and do constrain the way we think about education in general and specific education policies, through the language in which they frame policies. The use of discursive repertoires drawn from business, marketing and finance is one of the ways by which this is accomplished. Franchising, credit accumulation, delivery of learning outcomes, the possession of skills and competences, skills audit and the rest can become part of everyday discourse and begin to structure the way people think about education. Perhaps most importantly, they work to exclude other possible ways of conceptualizing the nature of education.

Sutton describes a discourse as ‘a configuration of ideas which provide the threads from which ideologies are woven’ (2003: 6) which can relate either, to particular ways of thinking about an issue, for example, a scientific discourse or, to the kind of language that is employed in the policymaking process. Often, therefore, this results in ‘labelling’ being used to highlight how certain groups of individuals are viewed within the policy context. For example, labelling certain groups of boys as ‘failing boys’ within a policy context, provides justification for the actions and initiatives that are to be put in place to ameliorate the situation and to prevent them from failing in the future. Discourses within policies are also often used to legitimize particular ways of viewing situations and thus, as a result, ‘become part of the everyday discourse . . . [often excluding] other possible ways of conceptualizing the nature of education’. (Trowler 2003: 132). For example, Trowler highlights the fact that within the policy agenda for Higher Education the discourse: Frames the higher education system as a market catering to students as customers, situates knowledge as a commodity to be acquired and accumulated like any other and positions learning as involving the serial acquisition of learning outcomes, all available on the open market. (2003: 132)

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This discourse, Trowler suggests, has clearly been adopted in higher education in some of the everyday discourses that affect the way lecturers and students view education and also in practices, such as ‘credit accumulation’ and ‘skills audits’ (2003: 132). Adoption of the dominant discourse, however, is not inevitable, for although some individuals are ‘captured’ by it, Trowler suggests there are always others who will act in ways that subvert the message.

An economistic discourse The economic crisis in the 1970s brought the Education system under ever growing scrutiny. One influential journal of the time, the Critical Quarterly, produced a series of ‘Black Papers’ (in contrast to government White Papers) that focused on developments in education and, in particular on what its authors viewed as the failures of comprehensive education and the excesses of progressive educational methods. According to Ball (2006), the Black Papers established a ‘discourse of derision’ in which education was considered to be in crisis and, as a consequence, schools and teachers were held partly responsible for the nation’s economic decline. In particular, there was a view that comprehensive schooling, progressive methods, poor teaching and subversive, leftwing teachers were contributing to a decline in educational standards, standards of discipline and behaviour in schools and consequently to an increase in social disorder. This ‘discourse of derision’ was ‘legitimized’ by James Callaghan’s Ruskin speech in 1976 which initiated the ‘Great Debate’ on Education. Since then, this ‘economistic’ discourse has come to dominate education policymaking (Tett 2008). Education is increasingly being couched in economic terms, particularly with respect to its contribution to the nation’s global competitiveness. Tett, however, highlights the fact that this ‘transformation of social problems into economic problems is achieved through the emphasis on individual responsibilities’ (2008: 1). Individuals as a consequence have to take the blame for any failures. The key ‘social actors’ in education policy, the schools, children, parents and teachers are, therefore, all individually held responsible for the nation’s economic prosperity and failure is ‘blamed’ on their attributes. Thus, we have the ‘badly managed school’, the ‘ineffective teacher’, the ‘pupil lacking in motivation or ability’ and the ‘bad parent’ who, according to Coles, does ‘not take their responsibilities seriously enough’ (2006: 20). According to Porter (2009: 292): ‘The use of highly selective globalisation theory and informational capitalism enabled the Government to re-imagine education and so change its ecology. The aim and the effect were to alter the process of teaching and learning, the nature of institutions, the role of teachers and the place of education in society.’

Schools and teachers: Derision and redemption Prior to the 1970s, schools and teachers were generally held in high regard within society. However, from the 1970s, and certainly until the 1990s, schools and teachers were portrayed in an increasingly negative way (Hansen 2009). As Rea and Weiner point out, ‘to suggest that the poor performance of a minority of the teaching force is a main cause [of Britain’s economic

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decline] is clearly untenable, but this is one perspective that is currently receiving wide support’ (1997: 5). Contemporary educational policy discourse, therefore, has continued to adopt a ‘shame and blame’ discourse (1997: 4), its ‘derision’ of failing schools and teachers has led to an increasing number of schools being ‘named and shamed’ for failing to meet the government’s targets and opened up the potential for individual teachers to be demonized in a similar fashion in the future. In 1999, for example Chris Woodhead, the then Chief Inspector of Schools released the infamous 15,000 statistic, suggesting that there were literally thousands of incompetent teachers within our schools. However, interpreting statistics can be problematic, as an Ofsted inspector pointed out at the time: ‘I write the reports he's reading’, said one. ‘He can say that n% of lessons are judged to be less than satisfactory. That does not entitle him to say that n% of teachers are incompetent. That's a very different thing. A competent teacher can have an unsatisfactory lesson. Plus it is subjective, this data we provide is impressionistic. And it shouldn't be used for the drawing of these bogus, politically acceptable tabloid slogans’. (The Guardian 1999)

The government has attempted to ameliorate this situation through the application of various policy initiatives which provide schools with the mechanism for the ‘redemption’ of such failings and the opportunity for ‘salvation’. A new discourse of ‘redemption and salvation’ has, therefore, emerged: Competence, achievement, deliverance and salvation are promised to present-day teachers who are ‘named and blamed’ for the failings of decades of inadequate education recipes and policies . . . [and] because of the mass of new legislation and statutory duties, all of which require surveillance and inspection . . . it has become overwhelmingly compelling for teachers to be ‘born again’. (Rea and Weiner 1997: 5)

The media image of teachers and the teaching profession has, however, improved over recent years. According to Hansen, research has shown that since the 1990s, although there have been a number of individual high-profile media cases of ‘bad teachers’ (mainly relating to sex offences), teachers were ‘increasingly being portrayed in a way which implied respectability and esteem which afforded recognition to their claims and which recognised their plight and (sometimes) beleaguered situation as a genuine problem requiring political action’ (2009: 345).

Parents as partners or consumers Prior to the 1989 Children’s Act, parents were assumed to have certain ‘rights’ with respect to their children. The Children’s Act, however, replaced those rights with the notion of ‘responsibility’. Under the Act, parents had to ensure that their children were ‘safe, healthy, educated and cared for’ (Yeo and Lovell 2002: 104). However, in line with the then Conservative government’s particular ideological perspective, support for traditional family values was also set against a minimal role for the state (Murphy et al. 2009). Alongside parental responsibility, the Conservative government’s

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market ideology also introduced the notion of ‘parents as consumers’. Parental choice over their children’s schooling was seen as a mechanism for driving up standards in schools and promoting excellence. However, as Ball and Vincent (2005) highlight, parental choice is complex – a mixture of emotional and practical concerns. Although the state has generally been loath to become involved in family affairs, from the late 1960s parental involvement with the state, through involvement in their children’s schooling, became a central tenet of educational policy. Parents were expected to become actively involved in preparing their children for school and facilitating their children’s educational success. The Plowden Report (1967) highlighted the impacts of socio-economic factors on educational success and thus ‘created a deficit model of parenting’ arguing for ‘the greater involvement of parents in schools in order to ‘compensate for “society” ’ (Muschamp et al. 2007: 3 plus references). While this deficit model of parenting has persisted, it is gradually being replaced by the notion of ‘a good enough parent’ who produces ‘good enough children’, a notion that acknowledges the realities of family life and the various pressures and demands that contemporary society places on parents. Better or ‘authoritative’ parents are viewed to be those who have high-level expectations of their children and who exercise supervision and discipline while remaining sensitive and supportive of their children’s needs (Gutman et al. 2009). As a market ideology has entered education and care, parental choice has become paramount to the success of the system. Parents under New Labour were promoted as ‘partners’ with the state in providing for the care and education of their children, rather than simple consumers of its products. As such, ‘a notion of a home-school alliance that promotes the wider interests of children and the community’ has arisen (Wolfendale and Topping 1995: 2, cited in Muschamp et al. 2007: 3). New Labour, therefore, in line with other Westernized governments, took on a greater role for the state in ensuring that families undertake ‘proper childrearing’ and that their children were well prepared for school and for their future role within society. They did so because they believed that governments have ‘a legitimate and active role to play in assisting rational parentcitizens to do the best they can by their children’ (Nichols et al. 2009: 65). This approach, typically, was characterized by intervention and regulation, particularly when parents are viewed as problematic.

Research evidence Under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government there was, according to Gipps, a ‘hostile policy climate for research in general and education in particular’ (1993:  3). There was a general move away from discussions with stakeholders and the use of research evidence to inform policymaking to a situation in which ‘principles and gut reaction’ characterized an ‘impoverished policy process’ guided by ‘think tanks’ and favoured advisors (1993: 8). In addition, research evidence, even internationally renowned research, was in the main ignored. There was according to Whitty (2006a: 161) a perception, fuelled by the media, that educational research was generally:

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1 2 3 4 5 6

Lacking in rigour Incoherent, inaccessible and poorly disseminated Ideologically biased Lacking in relevance to schools Lacking the involvement of teachers Not cost-effective

As a consequence, one of the persistent issues for researchers has been that such views, however unfounded, have been difficult to dispel. When New Labour came to power, it claimed to put an end to the kind of ideologically driven policymaking that had been a characteristic of the previous government pledging, in their 1999 White Paper ‘Modernising Government’, to use research evidence in the policymaking process. Over the following decade there was, therefore, an increasing emphasis on evidence-based policymaking, coupled with a mantra of ‘what matters is what works’. According to Ozga (2004), because New Labour’s policymaking was no longer bound by ideological constraints, policymakers had to rely on the ‘best’ research evidence in order to identify ‘what works’ in a particular context. Research evidence also had to support the improvements that are needed in the performance of the educational system, in the face of international comparisons and competition within a global economic market. New Labour’ s evidence-based policymaking approach brought with it more resources for research and also led to the establishment of a number of research programmes and centres, for example the Centre for the Economics of Education and the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. In addition, there was also long-term reviews of educational research, such as those carried out by the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI). The way that research evidence is used in policymaking is, however, complex and Nutley et  al. (2004) identify a number of ways in which research findings can be used: 1

The Political Model:  Research is used to defend a political position. For example, the use of research evidence to support a proposal to reduce class size in New Labour’s 1997 Manifesto. 2 The Engineering Model: Favoured by New Labour, in which research evidence provides the hard data on which decisions can be made, in some cases irrespective of the quality of that research. For example, New Labour’s use of evidence from the Specialist Schools Trust to support the case for specialist schools in its 2001 White Paper: Schools Achieving Success. 3 The Enlightenment Model:  Research findings do not directly inform policy, but the concepts and perspectives they provide pervade the policymakers thinking. For example, research on formative assessment and assessment for learning informed New Labour thinking in this regard which in turn is represented in aspects of the Secondary National Strategy. 4 The Interactive Model:  Research findings are only one part of the evidence on which the policy is based; the views of a wide range of stakeholders are also sought. For example, the

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development of New Labour’s Sure Start Local Programmes. (Nutley et  al. 2004:  30 after Weiss 1979. See also Whitty 2006a: 165–70) Research evidence is often used by governments of all persuasions in a very selectively way and despite often made claims to evidence-based policymaking, such evidence is often ignored research altogether. As Lawton suggests, ‘Research evidence as well as the views of educational theorists have too often been ignored in favour of the quick-fix bright ideas of spin doctors and advisers at No 10’ (2005: 142 cited in Whitty 2006a: 168).

Policy technologies Policy technologies involve the calculated deployment of forms of organisation and procedures, and disciplines or bodies of knowledge, to organise human forces and capabilities into functioning systems. (Ball 2017: 50)

Since the Conservative Government’s Education Reform Act of 1988, both Conservative and New Labour governments have used a number of interlocking policy ‘technologies’ which together form a policy framework with respect to schools which is designed to bring about desired improvements in the system (Simkins 2000). A  belief in the power of the ‘market’ to improve public services like education was one of the policy technologies that became enshrined in public policy reform. As West and Pennell (2002) highlight, so-called ‘market reforms’ included the promotion of parental choice, encouraging competition between schools, introducing new types of schools and devolving budgets and the power to innovate schools. Since the late 1990s, therefore, both New Labour and Coalition/Conservative governments have employed three main policy technologies in their reform packages: 1

Marketization ●● ●● ●●

2

Managerialism ●● ●●

3

Parental Choice Diversity of Schools League Tables and Competition

School autonomy School based management

Performativity ●●

Standards, targets and performance related pay. (See Ozga 2009 and Ball 2006; Ball 1999 in Trowler 2003: 37; Chitty 2009: 73)

Ball (2003) suggests that when these three technologies are employed together they create the preconditions for various forms of ‘privatisation’ and ‘commodification’ of the core public services like education.

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Policymaking in action Closing the attainment gap – the Pupil Premium The policy problem schools are failing because they cannot meet the complex needs of today’s students. Teachers cannot teach hungry children or cope with young people who are too distraught to learn. Anyone working in an inner-city school, in a marginal rural area, or even on the fringes of suburbia will tell you how impossible her job has become. The cumulative effects of poverty have created social environments that challenge educators, community leaders, and practitioners of health, mental health, and social services to invent new kinds of institutional responses. (Dryfoos 1994: xvii)

Socio-economic inequality in educational outcomes is a problem that has challenged our education system for many years. For far too many children, the circumstance of their birth is still a greater determinant of the quality of the education they receive, their academic success and their future life chances than their inherent ability (Gibb 2016). For such children social mobility is a not a reality. Using the rather crude measure of the uptake of free school meals (FSM) as an indication of low socio-economic status and child poverty it has been shown, that across all educational measures, children who are eligible for FSM perform less well than their wealthier counterparts. In 2015, 57.1 per cent of all pupils in state-funded schools achieved 5 A* to C grades at GCSE, including English and mathematics, but only 33.1 per cent of pupils entitled to FSM achieved the same standard (Gibb 2016). Similar statistics can be seen across all age groups and all measures of progress, indicating a strong correlation between low socio-economic status and poor educational attainment. However, it is too simple to suggest such a deterministic relationship because, in reality, the interactions between education, material deprivation, social class and family characteristics are extremely complex (Cassen and Kingdon 2007; Duckworth 2008; Raffo et al. 2010). Poor educational attainment has both financial and social costs for individuals. An analysis carried out by the Department of Education suggests that pupils who achieve 5 or more GCSE at grades A* to C (including English and Maths) as their highest qualification are likely to earn £100,000 more over a lifetime than those who do not receive that level of qualification. It also means that such disadvantaged young people often fail to reach their full potential in society and through their lack of social mobility continue to be under-represented in the professions and public services (Gibb 2016).

The policy solution Under New Labour there were a raft of targeted initiatives aimed at reducing this attainment gap for children from poorer backgrounds. These included Excellence in Cities, the City Challenges, Schools in Challenging Circumstances, the Extra Mile initiative, the Narrowing the Gap programme, Every Child a Reader, Every Child a Writer, and Every Child Counts together with a range of other area-based grants (Lupton and Thomson 2015a). New Labour also targeted more

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general funding towards disadvantaged areas in its academies and Building Schools for the Future programme. Its Every Child Matters and Sure Start programmes were also aimed at achieving better outcomes for all children. However, as Lupton and Thomson (2015a: 6) point out, ‘some progress had begun to be made under Labour, but gaps remained very wide. While there was emerging evidence that targeted support to individuals could be beneficial, there were also those who argued that much wider systemic changes would be needed to make a serious impact on the problem’. In 2011, the then coalition government made reducing the socio-economic attainment gap one of its major education policy priorities with the introduction of the pupil premium. This policy targeted extra funding to schools in the form of a premium that followed individual students based on their entitlement to FSM or who had been ‘looked after’ for more than six months. The funding was intended to be used specifically to close the attainment gap for pupils who were eligible for FSM and their peers who were not (Higgins et al. 2013). However, according to Lupton and Thomson (2015a: 10), ‘it has also been an isolated policy – a rare example of investment in the life chances of disadvantaged children among a broader range of policies which have reduced family incomes and depleted services’. According to Abbott et al. (2015), individual schools with a high number of children eligible for FSM can receive a considerable amount of additional funding and there is some evidence that schools have, therefore, often actively encouraged parents to register for FSM. The pupil premium funding was not ring-fenced to certain activities and schools had considerable freedom in deciding how the monies were spent providing there was evidence that their use was closing the attainment gap. The government also initiated research into ‘what works’ and established the Education Endowment Foundation to disseminate knowledge of successful interventions so that schools could select initiatives best suited to their own context. Schools were also held accountable through the school inspection system that included a new framework that considered how well schools provided for different groups including those eligible for FSM. Schools were also required to publish information on the pupil premium and its use on their websites (Lupton and Thomson 2015a).

The policy in practice Research by Carpenter et  al. (2013) found that most schools preferred to use educational need rather than economic need in terms of FSM entitlement as the criterion for the allocation of the additional support to pupils via the pupil premium. Carpenter et. al’s. research also highlighted that the majority of schools were using the money from the pupil premium to support all disadvantaged pupils – with different kinds of support being put in place for different age groups. The money from the pupil premium has been used by schools to fund a wide variety of initiatives (Carpenter et al. 2013; Abbott et al. 2015; Lupton and Thomson 2015a) which include the following: 1 2

Funding additional staff including teachers, teaching assistants and learning mentors Staff training and development

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3 4 5 6 7 8

Providing one-to-one and small group tuition Reducing class sizes Booster classes Support for numeracy, reading, language and communication skills Additional after-school, weekend and holiday sessions Educational visits

Policy impacts Chowdry et  al. (2010) suggests that the pupil premium could potentially serve to narrow the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children in a number of ways. First, attainment could improve as a direct result of the school having more resources for their pupils’ education. Secondly, the extra funding could result in schools becoming more competitive and attracting more socially advantaged pupils. Theoretically such peer group changes could indirectly have a positive influence on disadvantaged pupils’ attainment. Thirdly, the financial incentive of the pupil premium could lead to the establishment of more specialist schools that could indirectly benefit disadvantaged children. According to Lupton and Thomson (2015a) there is some evidence that the pupil premium has had a positive effect in terms of school funding for some disadvantaged schools – although for some the funding has actually been reduced. Because it is a relatively new initiative there is little evidence to determine whether it has had any noticeable impact on pupil attainment (Lupton and Thomson 2015a; Abbott et al. 2015). Lupton and Thomson point out that the Coalition government’s approach is one that relies heavily on an academic-focused school system to rescue low income students and provide them with access to improved life chances, rather than one which invests in the foundations of secure childhoods, putting students in a better position to learn and to make choices. It shifts responsibility, in some respects, from the wider welfare state to schools. (2015a: 13)

Given the fact that the pupil premium is an education policy that sits in isolation from other social policies Lupton and Thomson (2015a: 17) ask the important question ‘can [the pupil premium] be expected to have any meaningful impact as part of a suite of education and social policies likely to work in the opposite direction?’

Education policy – continuity, change and contradictions What is most striking about the neo-liberal project in education under Conservatives, then New labour, then the Coalition rule from the 1980s to the present in England is the extent to which it points to a new kind of policymaking. This involves a process of ratcheting by increments and by experiment makes more things thinkable, possible and do-able. (Bailey and Ball 2016: 26)

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Since the late 1980s the pace of educational reform has been phenomenal, with each successive government adding its own philosophical perspectives to the neo-liberal project started by Margaret Thatcher. With each government there has been some continuity with the past, some change and often a degree of contradiction in their policy programme.

New Labour When New Labour came into power it was trying to shed its ‘militant, cloth’ cap image. According to Tomlinson (2005), Labour showed a mixture of despair and admiration for Tory policies and either took them over, reworked them or actually extended them (see also Hill 1999). Uncharacteristically, it set out to capture the middle ground of politics, focussing on raising standards in partnership with teachers, parents and local government and promoting choice and the market while also, contradictorily, being aware of inequalities. Examining New Labour’s policy initiatives in its first term of office, Leathwood and Hayton (2002: 139) suggest that rather than offering something radically different there was actually a great deal of continuity between New Labour’s policies and those of the previous Conservative government (see Table 3.2). Like the Conservative government before it, New Labour’s programme of marketization reforms were designed to facilitate the breakdown of the public-sector monopoly over schools.

Table 3.2  Continuity and change Continuity with the Conservatives

New directions

• Marketization – competition between schools • Parental  choice • The National Curriculum and a focus on the basics • Accountability • Focus on standards – testing and assessment • Naming, shaming and closing • Focus on the use of information technology

• Higher levels of spending on education • More emphasis on inclusion and social justice • Greater emphasis on partnership and collaboration • Greater emphasis on early years and care • Reduced class sizes • Expansion of further & higher education • Privatization • Use of paraprofessionals in the class room

Leathwood, C., and Hayton, A. 2002: 138–53

Coalition and Conservative policies The Coalition’s term of government between 2010 and 2015 was remarkable for the scale and pace of its reform in education: the transformation of the school system, the extensive reform of curriculum and assessment at all levels, and the overhaul of teacher training. This was an exceptional period of policy and one characterized largely by conflict with ‘the educational establishment’ – namely, teacher unions and education academics. (Lupton and Thompson 2015a: 4)

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After thirteen years of New Labour government, the general election on 6 May 2010 eventually resulted in the formation of a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. With respect to education, one of the first things that the new Secretary of State, Michael Gove did was to rename the Department of Children Schools and Families  – the Department for Education. This was part of a shift away from the policies of New Labour – a shift, according to Stewart and Obolenskaya (2015) from ‘wellbeing’ to achievement (see Table 3.3), which also included abolishing Labour’s flagship policies like Every Child Matters and Building Schools for the Future and reducing support for Sure Start. Two dominant but contradictory ideologies were central to the Coalition governments policies that show both continuity with New Labour policies but also change. The Coalition continued with the neoliberal project of marketisation and privatisation of education was ratcheted begun by New Table 3.3  The Coalition and the Conservative’s main policies Area of reform

Policies

School system

• Expansion of the Academies programme with oversight of Academies by Regional Commissioners • Diversification of schools – introduction of Free Schools, University Technical Colleges and Studio Schools • New national formula for school funding from 2018–19 • Wider school performance measures including Progress 8 and Attainment 8 • New Ofsted inspection framework (2017) but tougher regime • Reduced role for Local Authorities

Teaching profession

• Reform of initial teacher training (ITT) – more school led and smaller overall role for universities. • Academies and Free schools enabled to employ unqualified teachers • Greater role for schools in teacher professional development. • Reform of teachers’ pay and conditions including performance pay and freedom for heads to vary pay and conditions locally

Educational inequality

• Introduction of ‘Pupil Premium’ • Ofsted to inspect on free school meal attainment gap and this to be included in performance tables • Education Endowment Foundation set up to identify and disseminate ‘what works’

Curriculum

• Major reform of the curriculum at primary and secondary level: more traditional and more demanding content. • Major reform of assessment to make it ‘more challenging’

Higher Education

• Reduced public spending on HE • Higher tuition fees for students • Withdrawal of public funding for taught postgraduate programmes • Accelerated degrees (in consultation)

Adapted from Lupton and Thomson 2015b: 12

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Labour – breaking the state monopoly on schooling, diversifying the school system and opening up schools to new providers, providing schools with greater autonomy and parents greater choice (Lupton and Thompson 2015b; Bailey and Ball 2016). However, Coalition policy has also diverged from that of New Labour with its changes to the curriculum and assessment being characterised by neo-conservativism (Bailey and Ball 2015) with an emphasis on traditional pedagogy, a prescriptive and traditional curriculum and rigorous assessment. But as Lupton and Thompson (2015b: 49) point out there are: ‘Apparent contradictions within the policy programme . . . a more rigorous national curriculum, but an aim to grant all schools independence from it; higher qualifications for teachers but more freedom for schools to hire unqualified teachers; greater localisation and school autonomy, but an increasing number of powers for the Secretary of State’.

Summary Education policymaking in the UK has become increasingly politicized, particularly over the past thirty years. The Conservative government from 1979–97, the New Labour government of 1997– 2010 and the Conservative Coalition and Conservative governments from 2010 to the present have introduced, what can almost be described as, an ‘epidemic’ of reforms. Modern policy is often viewed as a rational process, through which political solutions to contemporary issues are met which is influenced by a range of stakeholders, research evidence, international comparisons, ideological perspectives and contemporary discourses. However, policymaking is seldom a rational process and the impacts of policies often vary considerably from what was originally envisaged. Conservative policymaking was predicated on a neo-liberal/conservative ideology. Such an ideology promoted a ‘market economy’ in education with a focus on standards driven by parental choice and centralized government control over the curriculum, coupled with a regime of assessment and testing together with the rigorous inspection of schools and teachers. New Labour’s approach followed a more centrist policy agenda that it promoted as being ‘beyond ideological’ boundaries, relying more heavily on research evidence than its predecessor. However, in reality, New Labour policies were often merely extensions of the previous Conservative government’s marketization and competition agenda with a greater emphasis, however, on social inclusion, partnerships, the early years and privatization. With the arrival of the Conservative Coalition government there were rumblings of concern, with Gillard (2010: 144) commenting, ‘If Gove gets his way – and there is every indication that he will – will a recognisable state system of education exist five years from now?’ The scale of the changes brought about by the Coalition government and its Conservative replacement ‘eclipses anything Labour enacted in the thirteen years previously’ (Lupton and Thompson 2015b:  9). Cameron’s governments introduced an element of neoconservatism into education policy. Ball (2017: 4) suggests that while the Conservatives continued to position education as central to economic competitiveness it was also about social discipline and nation building – reinventing the past and bringing back the values of a good education. A project Theresa May intends to continue (2017).

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In conclusion, as Exley and Ball (2014) suggest the neo-liberal project in education carried out by successive governments since the 1980s is ‘changing what it means to be educated, and what it means to teach and learn’. They also go on to suggest’ that ‘the current changes taking place in the English Education system represent a reversion, a reinvention of a pre-1870 patchwork of provision and providers, faith and philanthropic in particular, funded and monitored by a reluctant state (2014: 29).

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4 Globalization and education Introduction Some associate the idea of globalization with progress, prosperity and peace; while for others, it conjures up a sense of deprivation, disaster and doom. In a normative sense globalization has been variously regarded as a major source of new opportunities and optimism in the world, but also a source of dangerous levels of instability and inequality, both within and across nations. (Rizvi 2017: 2)

Globalization is a complex and multifaceted concept which Stromquist and Monkman suggest encapsulates: ‘the strong and perhaps irreversible changes in the economy, labour force, technologies, communication, cultural patterns and political alliances that it is shaping in every nation’ (2014: 1). Globalization can also refer to the efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and other international organizations to create a global free market for goods and services like education. According to Rizvi, ‘while globalization has become something of a buzzword, it is an idea that is also hotly debated. Little consensus exists with respect to its definitions and its implications for policy’ (2017: 2). Majhanovich (2015) suggests that globalization has had a profound influence on education systems worldwide and that the neo-liberal version of globalization promoted by international organizations (in the form of marketization, competition and the commodification of services) has come to dominate both global and national educational policy agendas. According to Burbules and Torres (2000:  15), this ‘privileges, if not directly imposes, particular policies for evaluation, financing, assessment, standards, teacher training, curriculum, instruction and testing’. Thus, as Morris (2016: 1) highlights, Over the last 30 years educational policymaking within nation states has, increasingly been framed with reference, not to a nation’s domestic setting, but rather to what has been variously described as a ‘global policyscape’ (Carney, 2012) or a ‘global imaginary’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010), in which nations seek to borrow the features of ‘world class educational systems’. That approach is acutely evident within educational policymaking in England, far more than in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

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The impact of globalization on education Themes, discourses and theoretical perspectives perhaps the use of the term ‘globalization’ in educational discourses has itself become ‘globalized’. (Rizvi 2017: 2)

Globalization, according to Priestley (2002:  121–2), has ‘been accompanied by a seemingly endless process of change within education’. It has become an apparently worldwide phenomenon that has resulted in a number of identifiable common themes or discourses that have shaped national educational systems. Priestley (2008: 2) and Spring (2014: 3) suggest that these discourses include: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

An economistic model of education – notions of a ‘knowledge economy’, lifelong learning and human capital. Neo-liberal reforms of educational services – the development of quasi-markets in educational provision. Homogenization of educational provision – the adoption of similar policies with respect to curricula, schools and pedagogy. The influence of international organizations and their global policy initiatives such as Education for All (EFA) on national policy. Expanding access to education (including girls’ education). Global educational agendas, for example, human rights, environmentalism. An education industry – multinational companies marketing educational products. Global networks that facilitate the flow of ideas and practices. The growth of English as a global language and as a language of instruction.

However, as Priestley (2008:  3) also suggests, while globalization has brought a high degree of convergence in terms of policy and practice in educational systems worldwide, there also exists a considerable amount of diversity between systems as ‘local traditions and influences merge with global trends through a process of ‘glocalization’. Because globalization is open to a number of different interpretations a range of theoretical perspectives have also been suggested that seek to conceptualize the process of globalization and its effect on education systems. Such perspectives, according to Shields (2013), all acknowledge the fact that overtime globalizing forces have caused education systems worldwide to become more and more similar, however, they all differ in their explanation of why and how this globalizing effect has occurred. As Spring points out, these theoretical perspectives provide us with ‘different lenses for examining global education discourses’ (2014:  27). Three theoretical perspectives are pertinent to our discussion of the impact of globalization on education, namely, Neo-liberalism, World Culture Theory and World Systems Analysis (see Table 4.1 for more details).

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Table 4.1  Theoretical perspectives on education and globalization Theoretical perspective

Main features

Neo-liberalism Globalization as competition

• Globalization usurps the role of the nation state and supports the decentralization of the provision of services like education • Free markets and competition result in greater efficiency, innovation and economic growth • Globalization creates a ‘flat world’ – more equitable, fair and meritocratic • Education is key to economic growth • The knowledge economy and lifelong learning are central tenets • As countries compete they adopt best practice models from around the world in services like education and, as a result, education systems become more efficient and accountable but also more similar • Global organizations encourage competition, for example, PISA

World culture theory Globalization as Culture

• Globalization contributes to cultural integration – hybridization, this leads to a uniform global education culture resulting in similar goals, practices and organizations worldwide • By integrating different cultural aspects everybody gains – an integrated culture is a ‘better culture’ • By adopting a western model of mass education national systems become more similar • Global organizations contribute to integration

World system analysis and postcolonial theory Globalization as Conflict

• Globalization contributes to westernization, the undervaluing of non-western cultures and contributes to increased inequality. • Competition is never fair since there are previous power relationships and it tends to benefit the most powerful. • Rich nations impose educational practices and ideas on other nations • The universalization of schooling is caused by the spread of western values against other forms of education. • Global organizations support educational policies that benefit richer nations

Adapted from Spring 2014: 7. See also Shields 2013

Neo-liberalism Neo-liberalists suggest that competition, market forces, privatization and new forms of governance are the how and why of globalization. According to Rizvi (2017: 1): ‘The neoliberal imaginary of globalization has re-cast the purposes and governance of education, viewing it in human capital terms while supporting individual self-interests in an increasingly competitive society’. From a neo-liberal perspective, therefore, education is viewed in purely instrumental terms, its purpose to meet the requirements of the global economy. This is a viewpoint that is supported by the majority of international organizations like the World Bank and national governments and, as a consequence, there has been a growing trend towards convergence in educational policy terms through similar approaches to policy reform (Ball 2008; Rizvi 2017). Notions of a knowledge economy and of lifelong learning are also central tenets of this perspective, enabling individuals to garner the requisite knowledge and skills to flourish in a global workspace.

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World Culture Theory World Culture Theory, on the other hand, assumes that nation states are not shaped by economic conditions or power struggles but are ‘culturally constructed or “imagined” ’ (Anderson-Levitt 2003: 6). From this perspective, national education systems become more similar over time because governments adopt what is viewed as ‘the modern way to run schooling’ (2003: 7). The globalizing force for change is therefore cultural imitation brought about by competitive pressures for national education systems to improve. Spring (2014: 10) suggests that such imitation has resulted in the adoption of a westernized model of mass education with similar school structures and curricula, educational credentials being required for employment and educational research that highlights and points to the best practice to be adopted.

World Systems Analysis and postcolonial theories From a World Systems Analysis and postcolonial theorists’ perspective however, globalization is imagined as ‘conflict’ or ‘anti-domination’ – an attempt to impose a western hegemonic viewpoint – an economic and political agenda that benefits the richer nations at the expense of the poor (Spring 2014). Such theorists suggest that: ‘ideas and policies from the global flow are imposed on nations by the economic power of multinational corporations and institutions like the World Bank’ (2014: 10). They also envisage the world as being divided into three economic nation groups. The first group consists of the rich nations of the world – the United States, Japan and the European Union. The second group consists of nations such as Russia, China, India and Brazil – the so-called BRIC nations with rapidly growing economies, while the third group consists of the poorer nations. Thus, through unequal power relations richer nations are able to impose westernized view of education and educational values on poorer nations and this view of education is further legitimized by international organizations and multinational corporations. For postcolonial theorists, globalization has facilitated a new form of empire, one in which the old elites can once again impose their western views about education on their old colonies.

International organizations and global policymaking According to Moutsios (2009: 467), ‘The globalization of economy is accompanied by the globalization of policy making’. The traditional view of educational policy making is that it is the undertaking of national governments. However, Verger et al. (2012: 15, citing Yeates 2001: 637) suggests that national policymaking is increasingly the result of a ‘combination of political forces, social structures, cultural traditions, and economic processes entangled in a matrix of intersecting multilevel, multi-scalar (local, national, regional, and global) sites and spaces’. Consistent with the theoretical perspectives we have just discussed, international governmental organizations (IGOs) with an educational remit acting within that global space, such as the World Bank, the OECD and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have increasingly played a role in education policy formation.

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Verger et al. (2012: 15, with reference to Barnett et al. 2004) highlight the ways in which such IGOs exercise their power and influence over national policymaking: 1 Standardization  – defining and promoting the adhesion to a set of policy principles and standards that frame policy reform, for example, ranking nations according to their level of performance in international evaluations such as PISA and putting pressure on governments to introduce certain education reforms based on this performance. 2 Dissemination – articulating new norms, principles and beliefs by, for example, spreading what they consider ‘good’ or ‘best’ practices’ in education. 3 Imposition – compelling some countries to take on particular education policies, for example, the conditionality to credit of the World Bank, the IMF and other aid agencies to borrower countries. 4 Harmonization – getting countries to mutually agree on the implementation of common policies in a certain policy area, for example, the configuration of the European Space for Higher Education. 5 Creating interdependence – when countries agree to achieve common objectives to tackle problems that require international cooperation, for example, ‘education for all’. Some international organizations, for example the World Bank, therefore have the ability not only to establish education agendas and to define national education reform priorities but also to impose certain policies through funding mechanisms and through conditionality related to the aid and loans they provide. In addition, other IGOs like the WTO have ‘the capacity to transform the legal framework of member countries and, by doing so, alter the rules of the game through which policies are being formulated’ (Verger et al. 2012: 4).

The World Bank The World Bank is a unique global partnership consisting of 189-member countries that work together to reduce poverty and build shared prosperity in developing countries (World Bank 2018). Since 1962, when the World Bank approved its first loan for educational purposes, the organization has increasingly become involved in education and is now the largest provider of loans for educational purposes. Between 2000 to 2017, the World Bank invested more than $45 billion in education. Since the 1990s, the World Bank has promoted a neo-liberal reform agenda of decentralization, marketization, accountability and privatization. As a consequence, the Bank is now a central actor in shaping the global education policy agenda (Fontdevila and Verger 2015) and as Ball highlights: ‘The World Bank lies at the center of the major changes in global education of our time. . . . It has served as a major purveyor of western ideas about how education and the economy are or should be connected’ (2017: 38 citing Jones 1992: xiv). The World Bank has established a new Education Strategy for 2020, which sets out its agenda for achieving Learning for All in the developing world. The World Bank has already played a central role in helping nations achieve EFA and the education Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by enabling millions of children to attend school. However, in terms of development it is what people learn from preschool to entering the labour market that is important, hence the focus on

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learning rather than schooling in the strategy. The objectives of Learning for All promote nationwide reforms of education systems and the building of a global knowledge base (World Bank 2018).

The OECD, PISA and international assessment Since its inception in 1961, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has had an underlying commitment to a global free market economy. While its primary concern is economic development, education has become an increasingly important part of its mandate, because education is viewed as a driving force for economic development and national competitiveness. Alongside other international organizations, it has therefore, actively pursued it neo-liberalist commitment and has become a significant part of the globalization process and, for education, a part of the process of policy convergence (Grek 2009: 2). However, as Grek points out, unlike the WTO and the World Bank, the OECD does not have the financial and legal levers to promote its policy agenda (2009). Instead, the OECD has been able to wield influence in the ‘global policy space’ through its programme of international assessment PISA and its annual reports – Education at a Glance, the International Adult Literacy Survey and the World Education Indicators produced in collaboration with UNESCO and the World Bank (2009). As Morris highlights, The process of testing, and constructing league tables of winners and losers, fits easily with what Hall and O’Shea (2013) refer to as ‘common sense neo-liberalism’: a process that is normalized by the dominance in popular culture (especially television) of entertainment that involves competitions designed to select winners and losers in everything from baking to singing. (2016: 8)

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been conducted every three years since 2000. PISA aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of fifteen-year-olds in compulsory education. Originally students were assessed in science, mathematics and reading, but more recently financial literacy has been added to the mix. In 2015, over half a million students from seventy-two countries and economies took part in the internationally agreed two-hour test (OECD 2018). From the data garnered from the tests the OECD produces tables of results that rank participating nations with respect to their scores. The OECD also provides analyses of the data and based on that analysis provides policy advice to nations. Thus, Sjøberg (2015: 114) maintains that ‘The political, economic and indeed normative use of PISA by the OECD is also very clear. The OECD makes regular economic reports to many countries, with advice on future policy.’ PISA is also expanding its remit and developing new areas of assessment which include ‘PISA for schools’ (providing individualized analyses for schools) and a version of PISA that is more relevant to developing countries – ‘PISA for Development’. For national governments, PISA is a high-stakes test with governments being either blamed for poor performance or lauded for success dependent upon the results (Sjøberg 2015). As Morris points out: ‘Performance in these tests – along with the consequent onset of PISA “envy” in lowperforming nations and, presumably, PISA “ecstasy” in high-performing ones  – has emerged as a powerful source of governance that now serves to define the necessity for educational reform, the means to achieve it, and its ends’ (2016:  2). PISA can therefore, sometimes have a

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profound influence on education policy. PISA results are often selectively used or abused for political purposes to justify and give some legitimacy to educational reform (Sjøberg 2015: 125). In Germany, for example, ‘PISA shock’ due to poor performance in the initial rounds of PISA in 2003 led to a complete overhaul of the education system. Morris however, points out that while PISA results might be the stimulus for reform: ‘ the reforms introduced [in Germany] were longstanding and did not address the structural problems identified as the sources of the low performance in the tests’ (2016: 6). The PISA tests have proved useful in a number of ways. They have brought education to the forefront of public attention with, albeit sometimes, lurid headlines proclaiming national failure or success in the tests. They have also been useful in highlighting weaknesses within education systems and for providing governments with evidence to legitimize their reforms. In addition, PISA has built up a huge and valuable data source for future research (Morris 2016; Sjøberg 2015). Morris (2016) however, also highlights a number of well-documented concerns with the PISA tests. First, the tests are carried out on very varied student populations who come from very varied national contexts. Secondly, the tests assume that all student groups are equally motivated to take the test and thirdly, the conclusions drawn about education systems are extrapolated from a very small sample of questionnaires. In May 2014, in a letter to Dr Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, academics from around the world (including Stephen J. Ball and Nel Noddings) expressed their concerns about the impact of PISA tests. In their letter, published in the Guardian newspaper in May 2014, they suggest the following: 1

PISA has contributed to an escalation in such testing and a dramatically increased reliance on quantitative measures. 2 In education policy, PISA, with its three-year assessment cycle, has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings. 3 By emphasizing a narrow range of measurable aspects of education, PISA takes attention away from the less measurable or immeasurable educational objectives like physical, moral, civic and artistic development, thereby narrowing our view of what education is and ought to be about. As an organization of economic development, OECD is naturally biased in favour of the 4 economic role of public [state] schools. But preparing young men and women for gainful employment is not the only, and not even the main goal of public education, which has to prepare students for participation in democratic self-government, moral action and a life of personal development, growth and well-being. 5 Unlike the United Nations (UN) organizations such as UNESCO or UNICEF that have clear and legitimate mandates to improve education and the lives of children around the world, OECD has no such mandate. Nor are there, at present, mechanisms of effective democratic participation in its education decision-making process. 6 To carry out PISA and a host of follow-up services, the OECD has embraced ‘public-private partnerships’ and entered into alliances with multinational for-profit companies, which stand to gain financially from any deficits – real or perceived – unearthed by PISA.

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7 Finally, and most importantly:  the new PISA regime, with its continuous cycle of global testing, harms our children and impoverishes our classrooms, as it inevitably involves more and longer batteries of multiple-choice testing, more scripted ‘vendor’-made lessons, and less autonomy for teachers. In this way PISA has further increased the already high stress level in schools, which endangers the well-being of students and teachers. (Guardian 6 May 2014 available at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/ oecd-pisa-tests-damaging-education-academics) The authors of the letter also recommended a number of remedial actions that they felt would be of benefit, including finding an alternative to league tables, including a wider range of stakeholders in the drawing up of the tests, going beyond a simple economistic view of education, publishing the cost of administering the tests in individual nations and being more open to scrutiny and external monitoring (Guardian 2014). The authors went on to conclude, We assume that OECD’s PISA experts are motivated by a sincere desire to improve education. But we fail to understand how your organization has become the global arbiter of the means and ends of education around the world. OECD’s narrow focus on standardized testing risks turning learning into drudgery and killing the joy of learning. As PISA has led many governments into an international competition for higher test scores, OECD has assumed the power to shape education policy around the world, with no debate about the necessity or limitations of OECD’s goals. We are deeply concerned that measuring a great diversity of educational traditions and cultures using a single, narrow, biased yardstick could, in the end, do irreparable harm to our schools and our students. (Guardian 2014)

Whatever one feels about PISA, international rankings and the OECD’s policy advice for participating nations, as Sjøberg suggests, ‘International comparisons in education are important; they can open up new perspectives, and they can provide inspirations and ideas for educators, researchers and policymakers’ (2015: 125). However, as Sjøberg also points out such international comparisons have ‘a kind of Janus face; they can be understood and used in two opposite ways . . . as a source of inspiration. . . . . [or as] a pressure to oblige and fit to allegedly universal and common standards set from the authority of external specialists’ (2015: 125).

The World Trade Organization and GATS Established in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international agency consisting of 162-member countries. The purpose of the WTO is to promote international commerce, to provide a forum to reduce barriers to trade and to administer the rules governing trade between nations. Its international treaty – the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was designed to extend multilateral free trade to services such as healthcare and education. Through GATS, the WTO is able to modify a range of in-country ‘regulatory barriers’ to cross-border trade in services education including ownership, taxation, licensing or quality assurance rules (Verger et al. 2012). Thus, by defining education as a service in this way, the WTO is trying to establish a global free market in education.

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Examining the politics of rescaling and the emergence of the WTO as a global actor . . . enables us to see how education systems are both offered as a new service to trade in the global economy and pressured into responding to the logic of free trade globally . . . the WTO becomes a site where powerful countries are able to dominate and shape the rules of the game, and in a global economy some countries increasingly view opening their education systems to the global marketplace as a means of attracting foreign investment. (Robertson et al. 2002: 495)

Zapp, however suggests that: ‘WTO/GATS might be another example of (controversial) regulation in education. Although [the] actual effects on national education systems remain still limited, [the] implications are thought to be far-reaching’ (2017: 2). Currently, the latest round of negotiations relating to the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) which includes education have stalled, but the European Union stance on this (of which the UK is still a member) is that state-funded education be excluded from the treaty. As Robertson points out: ‘If it were possible to quantify the value of education as an industry, it is estimated to be huge’ (2006: 4). Global expenditure on education, both public and private is in the region of 4–5 trillion dollars (OECD 2018). The education marketplace consists of services such as technology, books and publishing, testing, the provision of schools and higher education (OECD 2018). According to Moutsios (2009: 473), GATS defines four modes by which the trade in such services can take place: 1

Cross-border supplies, for example, distance and e-learning, trade in materials, for example, teaching aids and examination materials. 2 Consumption abroad, for example, study abroad. 3 Commercial presence, for example, establishing an annexe of an institution in another country and private training companies. The presence of natural persons, for example, teachers and researchers working abroad. 4 While WTO member nations have been tentative in making commitments to be part of GATS, many engage in polices that favour the access of the private sector to public education and which would easily facilitate the adoption of the GATS (Robertson 2006). Many, however, are also critical of education being included in GATS, suggesting that education is a public good that should not be open to commodification and privatization in this way. Others point out that the form of trade in education proposed by GATS could infringe an individual’s human rights, particularly individuals from the marginalized or poorer sectors of society (indigenous peoples, and females) by either denying them access to an education or the kind of education they desire (Robertson 2006). As Robertson concludes, While some observers have asked ‘what is all the fuss is about?’ with regard to applying GATS mechanisms to education – given that education has been globalizing as an industry without GATS, it can be argued that the creation of a set of global rules that both creates and regulates a global education market and industry represents a very significant transformation in the role and function of education. . . . In sum, it could be concluded that the GATS as it stands is a high price to pay to regulate the global education industry. (2006: 14)

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Globalization and higher education – the quest for the ‘World Class University’ Since the mid-twentieth century there has been a rapid rise in the number of students progressing into higher education. In the UK in the 1920s, 9,200 were awarded first degrees; by 1950 that number had risen to 17,300 students, and by 2011 the number had risen to 331,000 students (Bolton 2012: 3). This is a picture that has been mirrored globally – enrolments in higher education were approximately 65 million in 1990 but by 2009 that number had nearly tripled, to approximately 170 million students. Four countries – China, India, United States and Russia have a combined share of 45 per cent of that total. Over the past twenty years on average the number of students enrolled in higher education has increased by 5 per cent per annum, however, the world’s 18–22 age population has only risen by 1 per cent per annum, implying a significant rise in the rate of enrolment in higher education (British Council 2012). This increase in enrolment in higher education has partly been due to an increase in jobs requiring more technical skills and knowledge and partly due to the increase in the number of children worldwide having access to both primary and secondary education. However, some suggest that the main reason for the rise has been the impact of globalization and the spread of neo-liberal cultural values that emphasize knowledge and lifelong learning. For some, the expansion of higher education has led to a changing purpose for universities. Universities are no longer ‘ivory towers’, institutions established solely for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, isolated from social and economic concerns. Instead, massification has brought about their demise, reconceptualizing them as the producers of commodified knowledge and the drivers of economic growth – mere slaves to a ‘knowledge economy’. Concerns about the expansion of higher education are, however, not new. They were first raised in the UK in the 1997 Dearing Report which highlighted the escalating costs of such expansion – a concern that remains today in the ongoing debates about the funding of universities and the rising level of student fees. Universities have a special role to play in the global knowledge economy. They are both the producers of specialist human capital – providing graduates with the skills that are vital for employability and also the creators of knowledge – in the form of research that can be used to the benefit of the economy. However, higher education is also in itself an important part of the global economy, with increasing demand for its goods and services (Zajda 2005). Revenue from trade in such services runs to the billions of dollars a year (Kubler and Lennon 2008). Hazelkorn highlights the ‘the multiplier effect’ of investment in education, which for the UK results in £1.35 million pounds of income being generated by universities for every £1 million pounds of investment (2013: 11 citing Kelley et al. 2009 and Varghese 2010: 11). Most of the income generated by universities is from international student mobility coupled with the offshore delivery of university programmes, either in the form of a physical campus overseas, some form of joint delivery of programmes or by distance learning. According to Kubler and Lennon, ‘Undoubtedly, the combination of an expanding sector, high levels of (unmet) demand and greater flexibility in delivery has underpinned the international market for higher education services. At the same time widespread stagnation and decline in public funding for higher education is forcing institutions to diversify their income streams and engage more readily in revenue generating international activities’ (2008:  2). While higher

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education has been part of a natural process of globalization for some time, due to the resultant growth in trade in higher educational goods and services there has also been pressure for nations to be part of the GATS trade agreements. However, as Altbach (2004a: 6) points out, being part of GATS potentially strikes at the heart of academic autonomy, institutional decision making, and national higher education policy. . . . For countries such as the United States and the larger European countries with strong and mature higher education systems, the chances of being greatly affected by foreign providers is slim. However, for countries with high unmet demand for access, smaller academic systems, and universities at the periphery of the world knowledge network, GATS could result in considerable external impact.

For a number of years, higher education has also been the subject of cross- national comparisons due to the appearance of university league tables in 2003. The first index to appear, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), was published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003. This was quickly followed by the publication of the Times Higher Education QS Top University Ranking (THE-QS) in 2004. According to Hazelkorn: ‘the arrival of rankings has been a game-changer for higher education and research, intensifying cross-national comparisons . . . [attracting] the attention of policymakers and the academy, challenging perceived wisdom about the status and reputation, as well as quality and performance, of higher education institutions’ (2013: 8). Initially the rankings focused on whole institutions, but gradually they have broadened their remit to include, for example, individual disciplines and different types of institution (2013). The THE-QS uses thirteen performance indicators to rank universities according to their core mission in terms of teaching (the learning environment), research (volume, income, reputation and influence), knowledge transfer (income from industry) and international outlook (available at https:// www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings accessed 26 February 2018). The ARWU on the other hand, uses six objective indicators which include: the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and the per capita performance of a university (available at http://www.shanghairanking.com/ accessed 26 February 2018). The lack of uniformity in the performance indicators on which the rankings are based used has led to confusion and also to some institutions falsely claiming ‘world class’ status (Birnbaum 2007: 7). Both league tables, however, are dominated by universities from the United States – Harvard and Stanford; while English universities such as Oxford and Cambridge are also prominent. This is not surprising, since these are the most prestigious and wealthy universities in the world (David 2016). As Hazelkorn suggests: ‘many of the indicators used by rankings simply reveal the growing wealth gap between well-endowed selective universities and public, mass recruiting HEIs without having anything noteworthy to say about teaching quality or the quality of the student experience’ (2013: 19). University rankings have, therefore, come in for some severe criticism and have been boycotted by some higher education institutions. Shields (2013: 110–11) highlights some of the concerns that

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have been raised about the university ranking process suggesting that they ‘lend a false sense of objectivity’ to comparisons between very diverse institutions, and in fact simply favour wellfunded institutions in wealthy countries. Despite the concerns, increasing attention is being paid to such rankings, and as David suggests, ‘Results are interpreted to justify increased de-regulation, privatization and escalation in “user” fees. It is claimed that results show such neo-liberal reforms [are needed]’ (2016: 186). As Hazelkorn points out, Their legacy is evident in the way rankings have become an implicit – and often explicit – reference point for policymaking and higher education decision-making and have reinforced an evaluative state’s over-reliance on quantitative indicators to measure quality. They are embedded in popular discourse and have informed the behaviour – positively and perversely – of many stakeholders, within and outside the academy. But, rankings have also produced their antithesis in the form of alternative rankings; importantly, they have sparked an important, world-wide conversation about the role, value and contribution of higher education. (2013: 9)

In addition, Hazelkorn (2013:  21) suggests that the rankings have increasingly become ‘central to national and institutional reputation and status in the global marketplace’. Such universities are promoted as being central to success in the global economy, with their attributes having a ‘norming’ effect on higher education Every university now strives to be a ‘world class’ university. Altbach (2004b) suggests that the criteria for university ‘world class’ status should actually include:  excellence in research, academic freedom, an intellectually stimulating environment, internal self-governance by academics over key aspects of academic life and adequate facilities and funding. However, Altbach also suggests that although: ‘Everyone wants a world-class university. No country feels it can do without one. The problem is that no one knows what a world-class university is, and no one has figured out how to get one. Everyone, however, refers to the concept’ (2004b: 5).

Policy borrowing I’d like to talk about a belief that surfaces with increasing regularity in the educational policy discourse of Britain and indeed many other countries. It is the belief that we will solve the nation’s educational problems not by investigating their distinctive pathology and revealing their cultural, historical and political determinants, thus arriving at explanations and solutions that have a chance of being valid, honest and appropriate, but by copying or adapting the policies of those countries whose students outperform our own on a few narrow and contested measures of educational achievement. In this process of policy grafting or transplant it appears not to matter whether the countries in question are comparable to our own or utterly unlike it, or whether they are passable democracies in which educational debate is encouraged, or autocratic regimes where debate and dissent are suppressed. (Alexander 2012b: 1)

Policymakers have long looked to other nations for inspiration when reforming their education system. Simply picking an education policy from one successful country and transplanting it into

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your own education system can provide a political quick fix for an existing problem or a justification for reform. Phillips and Ochs define such ‘policy borrowing’ as ‘the conscious adoption in one context of policy observed in another’ (2004: 774). However, a number of other terms have been applied to the process including policy diffusion, policy transfer, policy travelling and policy learning (Verger et  al. 2012)  which suggest a degree of complexity. Winstanley suggests, ‘It is also worth remembering however that policy borrowing exists at a range of different levels, from quite specific small-scale borrowing (such as intra-institutional or inter-institutional) to local and regional levels. Similarly, the expression can also describe the adaptation of ideas and methods into education policies from other fields, such as business’ (2012: 523). ‘Policy borrowing’ according to Morris has a long tradition which has recently ‘been reinvigorated and redefined by the impact of globalization and technology’ (2012: 91). Global league tables together with the policy advice provided by international organizations such as the OECD and multinational corporations like Mckinsey (see the Mckinsey Report 2010)  have made it easy for policymakers to identify best practice in high-performing, ‘world class’ education systems, which can then be borrowed and adopted. Winstanley (2012: 517) highlights Ball’s suggestion that policy borrowing has become an essential part of contemporary policymaking – a feature of a new ‘global policy paradigm’ (Ball 1999: 199 in Garratt and Forrester 2012: 154). Such contemporary policy borrowing has typically been a voluntary exercise, undertaken by richer nations in a quest to achieve a world-class education system. However, the introduction of PISA for Development suggests that poorer nations could be coerced into policy borrowing as part of reforms suggested by powerful IGOs in return for financial loans. One of the models which conceptualizes the process of educational policy borrowing is that proposed by Phillips and Ochs (2004: 9). In this model, the process of policy borrowing is viewed as taking place in four stages: 1

Cross-national attraction – identifying the initial impulse or attraction to investigate the educational practice and policy in another country. 2 Decision making – determining the feasibility of ‘borrowing’ practice or policy from another country to implement at home. 3 Implementation  – providing support for or overcoming resistance to the policy’s implementation. Internalization/indigenization – evaluating how well the ‘borrowed policy’ has impacted on 4 the existing system and how well such policies or practices have been synthesized into the system. While policy borrowing may initially provide an easy solution to an issue facing a nation’s education system, whether a policy is successfully internalized or indigenized is dependent on a number of factors. As Phillips points out, ‘education reforms move from country to country like a travelling circus, with successful acts copied and less popular performers shunned. But context is allimportant in deciding whether a reform will truly be successful in education’s Big Top’ (available at https://cerp.aqa. org.uk/ perspectives/perils-policy-borrowing accessed 26 February 2018).

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Finland as a source of inspiration The focus on Finland as a source of inspiration for educational policy reform is a case in point. The early success of Finland in the PISA tests was met with ‘PISA Surprise’ and led to Finland becoming a hotspot for ‘educational tourism’ and a focus for policy borrowers keen to emulate Finland’s success. Sahlberg suggests that Finnish success was in part due to what they had learnt from observing other nations, particularly America. Such ‘policy learning’ helped to structure the Finnish school system, the curriculum and assessment. Secondly, Sahlberg suggests that success was also partly due to its adoption of consensus-based policymaking. Education policymakers in Finland, therefore have to consider the views of all stakeholders involved including school leaders, teachers and educational researchers. This has, he suggests, resulted in very little change in the principles of Finnish education since the 1970s. Finally, Sahlberg points to the fact that success is mainly due to the fact that the Finnish authorities have defied international convention by not embracing competition, student testing and school ranking as the path to improvement, but have focused on providing equitable funding of schools throughout the country, giving particular attention to pupils with special needs, providing local autonomy and developing a committed, professional and highly qualified teaching force (Sahlberg 2012, available at https://pasisahlberg.com/ finlands-educational-success-is-no-miracle/ accessed 26 February 2018). As Phillips points out, ‘In this case, as in so many others, what creates success has to do with a complex set of inter-related contextual factors and cannot simply be “borrowed” from elsewhere’ (available at https://cerp.aqa. org.uk/ perspectives/perils-policy-borrowing accessed 26 February 2018).

Policy borrowing in England England has a long history of policy borrowing. For example, in 1870, in the dawning of education policymaking, discussions and debates about the formation of a national education system and universal primary education were informed by policy initiatives in Germany (Winstanley 2012). In fact, Germany’s position, as a major economic competitor, has often resulted in it being the inspiration for or influence on policy reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of the major reports that influenced educational reform – such as the Robbins Report (1963), the Plowden Report (1967) and the Warnock Report (1978) – were informed by visits by various committee members to a wide range of international education systems ranging from the United States and Canada to Sweden and Denmark (Winstanley 2012). Later, in the decade from 1985–95, policy borrowing started to become a major part of educational policy making and comparative data was used to add legitimacy to educational reforms (2012). Policy borrowing was also a major part of the educational reforms of the New Labour government. Many of New Labour’s reforms were influenced by programmes in the United States – the American way. Thus, reforms such as Every Child Matters and Sure Start were influenced by the American No Child Left Behind and Head Start programmes respectively. According to Morris, the arrival of PISA led to policy borrowing being focused on ‘comparisons to “world class systems/ schools” . . . . [and] an increasing reliance on league tables of educational performance of pupils across nations’ (2012: 91). Thus, under New Labour we see the outcome of

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this in the introduction of interactive whole class teaching based on teaching methods in Taiwan (Morris 2012). Why Taiwan? Morris suggests that, The essential binary logic underlying the proposals seemed to argue that in comparison to England, Taiwan is a very successful rapidly growing economy; Taiwan is at the top of the league tables for pupil achievement and its pupils perform at a higher level; the relative success of the Taiwanese economy is significantly affected by the quality/level of education provided; therefore, if England adopted some of the educational practices used in Taiwan it would improve both the quality of its education and the state of its economy. (2012: 5)

The Coalition government’s sweeping reforms introduced in 2010 were detailed in their White Paper: The Importance of Teaching. The reforms drew heavily on comparative data and the evidence of high-performing systems provided by the PISA league tables (Morris 2012; Winstanley 2012). As the government highlighted in its introduction to the White Paper, what really matters is how we’re doing compared with our international competitors. That is what will define our economic growth and our country’s future. The truth is, at the moment we are standing still while others race past. In the most recent OECD PISA survey in 2006 we fell from 4th in the world in the 2000 survey to 14th in science, 7th to 17th in literacy, and 8th to 24th in mathematics. The only way we can catch up, and have the world-class schools our children deserve, is by learning the lessons of other countries’ success. (Department for Education 2010a: 3)

The government borrowed from, what Winstanley terms, a ‘plethora of foreign initiatives . . . . [which] Include[d]‌Singaporean approaches to teaching mathematics and English, Japanese in-school continuous professional development, and the relatively large class sizes as found in South Korean primary schools’ (2012: 517). According to Morris, the government identified three key lessons from such comparisons which they addressed in the White Paper: the need to reform teachers, to give schools autonomy and to help children from poor families. Most notable of the reforms was the introduction of ‘Free Schools’ which drew inspiration from the Swedish model of Free Schools and which we discuss in Chapter 6. Education policymaking in England has, it seems, been a bricolage of policy initiatives, picked and mixed from high-performing nations around the globe. It seems pertinent, therefore, to end this discussion with Michael Sadler’s oft-quoted warning about the perils policy borrowing issued in the early 1900s: We cannot wander at pleasure among the educational systems of the world, like a child strolling through a garden, and pick off a flower from one bush and some leaves from another, and then expect that if we stick what we have gathered into the soil at home, we shall have a living plant’. (Cited in Winstanley 2012: 521)

Summary Globalization is a term that describes how the world is becoming more interconnected and interdependent through the use of new technologies; through trade in goods and services; through the

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movement of people and through cultural exchange. Globalization has had a profound influence on education systems worldwide. While theorists may differ on how and why globalization has brought about change, they are all agreed on the outcome – a convergence in education policymaking worldwide. The fact that national policymakers use similar policy solutions in educational reforms is due to a number of factors. First, the increasingly dominant role being played by powerful intergovernmental organizations, like the World Bank, the WTO and the OECD in global education policymaking and in setting educational agendas such as EFA, has helped to establish and entrench a neo-liberal worldview that has permeated education systems. This has led to the promotion of policies that favour marketization and competition, new forms of management and performativity, privatization and the commodification of education. Secondly, national policymakers have increasing turned to comparative data and to education world rankings like PISA when formulating policies. In a race to the top, to be World Class, national policymakers therefore look to high-performing education systems like Finland, Singapore and for policy inspiration. However, Stephen Ball points out, national policy making is inevitably a process of bricolage, a matter of borrowing and copying bits of pieces of ideas from elsewhere, drawing on and amending locally tried-and-tested approaches, cannibalizing theories, research trends and fashions, responding to media ‘panics’ and not infrequently, a flailing around for anything at all that looks as though it might work. (2017: 36)

In the following chapters we will explore how those nuances of blending the global with the local play out in national policymaking in England.

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5 Education for social justice Introduction Can discussions on justice inform more democratic approaches to . . . education? (Delgado et al. 2017: np)

For decades, politicians have been emphasizing the role of education in helping to create a fairer and more equal society (see Smith 2012), for example, does education bring about change in society or do educational institutions merely reflect the status quo in the macro society? The answer is possibly somewhere between the two. However, politicians have disagreed as to how the school system should be organized in order to bring about such changes. Such approaches have been summarized by Smith (2012) as pertaining to merit, that is, getting what you deserve, or equality, based on a principle of equal treatment, or equity, where there is an attempt to influence outcome by treating people differently, according to their need. Traditional Labour policy would have favoured the latter, justifying increased central government control of the education system in order to try to overcome the disadvantages experienced by many children at the start of the schooling process. New Labour’s ‘Third Way’, however, strengthened state control through such policies as Every Child Matters (2003) but, significantly, introduced an expectation for sharing responsibility for key social policy areas with individuals and community. New Labour, for example, welcomed private investment in state institutions. The Coalition government, however, favoured a return to an emphasis on individual responsibility, together with the community, in the form of David Cameron’s vision of ‘The Big Society’. Whichever theoretical perspective is in vogue, the fact remains that inequality is still very much in evidence in modern society and a lack of fairness is experienced by many children and young people. We start this chapter by revisiting current theories of social justice and their relationship to education policies and practices, focusing on three of the most useful discourses.

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Theories of social justice Social justice as redistribution Redistribution can be understood as an attempt to provide students with a more equal experience of education by reallocating service provision according to pupils’ needs. The Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was an example of providing less well-off pupils with a financial incentive that would enable them to remain in school and, according to Ball (2013), did result in an increase in staying on rates for pupils post-16. Expanding participation in Higher Education (HE) was a key policy focus for New Labour. While participation increased across the population, middle-class students still far outnumbered those with a working-class background, who, in turn, were over-represented in newer universities (Ball 2013). New Labour also introduced extra funding for schools that were perceived to be failing, in terms of performance output. Despite New Labour’s efforts with respect to redistribution, in 2012 Michael Gove was able to assert that, in the UK, parental background remained the key factor in educational progress, and moreover, this was in comparison to most other developed nations. (Gove 2012 in Ball 2013). The continued importance of social capital in determining children’s life chances makes it useful here to revisit the concept of social capital as explained by Putnam (1993) incorporated into the Commission for Social Justice Report in 1994. Social capital consists of the institutions and relationships of a thriving civil society – from networks of neighbourhoods to extended families, community groups to religious organizations, local businesses to local public services, youth clubs to parent – teacher associations, playgroups to police on the beat. Where you live, who else lives there and how they live their lives – cooperatively or selfishly, responsibly or destructively – can be as important as personal resources in determining life chances (CSJ 1994: 308–9 in Gewirtz 1998: 473). Putnam (1993) goes on to deconstruct aspects of social capital into three subcategories: 1 2 3

Bonding – applying to strong ties among a family or ethnic group. Bridging – applying to cross-cutting ties, for example, business or friendship groups. Linking – applying to connections among those with different status and power.

One confusing aspect of redistribution relates to the establishing of many different types of schools, a policy begun under New Labour and continued by the Coalition government. While this may appear to allow a more varied approach to educational provision, enabling parents and communities to respond to local needs, it can operate in a completely different way, allowing market forces to dictate the allocation of resources. In this model, schools are free to ‘purchase’ goods and services from providers, while simultaneously attracting more and perceptively ‘better’ students, which, in turn, impacts on their funding. In reality, a market forces ideology has been the dominant approach since the 1980s, regardless of which government has been in power in the UK. Theoretically, parents are free to choose those schools they perceive to be successful, notably, in terms of their assessment results and the often quoted ‘standards’ that they uphold. Therefore, those schools in more challenging catchment areas have inevitably had

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to juggle with more limited resources, requiring great dedication on the part of teachers. Some have chosen the strategy of opting out to become academies or ‘free’ schools simply in order to avoid closure. Another interesting development relating to equality through redistribution is the phenomenon within teacher education. Teach First, as it is known in the UK, rests on the notion that educational inequality can be reduced significantly by placing top graduates from elite universities into marginalized schools, without any professional preparation. (Vellanki et  al. 2014 in Delgado et  al. 2017). There are a number of assumptions underlying this approach, one being that those who perform best in academic assessments will inevitably become the best teachers. Secondly, there is the belief that this happens through some sort of magical process, rendering any theory of education itself irrelevant. Ironically, this redistributive strategy is lodged firmly within a capitalist framework of corporate education. (Ross et al. 2017). Of course, the mere presence of such young teachers cannot change the social and cultural context of a school, nor the economic conditions into which the students will emerge. Moreover, the curriculum has become increasingly limited and moved away from encouraging a more critical stance on economic and class issues to a more traditionalist content, advocated by Gove and his successors. North (2006) offers the following observation on how the dynamic of redistribution plays out in education, suggesting that it reveals that a unique focus on the distribution of social goods, such as housing and healthcare in society at large and school funding, high-quality teachers, and multiple curricular and extracurricular options in educational institutions, can hinder efforts to address cultural imperialism issues in schooling. More specifically, educational redistributive arguments do not necessarily address how dominant values and beliefs normalize and thus privilege middle-class, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, English fluent, male students in most U.S. schools. (2006: 511)

North also points to Fraser’s argument that we should synergize ‘a politics of recognition with a politics of redistribution; that is, a politics that pays attention to how “economic disadvantage impedes participation in the making of culture, in public spheres and in everyday life” and how “[c]‌ultural norms that are unfairly biased against some are institutionalized in the state and the economy” ’ (Fraser 1997: 15 cited in North 2006: 508). An understanding of how these two aspects work together to keep people disenfranchised would enable more effective action.

Social justice as recognition In contrast to the reassertion of economic redistribution as being key to establishing equality, some researchers have prioritized a more sociological and cultural perspective. This focuses on what Fraser (2003) calls a process of experiencing injustice and demands further scrutiny of structural and cultural practices, not just economic. Recognition should be given to individuals and communities of individuals in terms of their identity being worthy of equal respect. Economic justice theories in isolation may reinforce injustice by assuming that more dominant groups represent ‘the norm’ to which other groups must be subordinate. In educational institutions, this has led to a greater understanding of how individuals and groups have become marginalized and have a less

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positive experience within the system. Gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation are some of the most obvious examples but there are many others. Social justice in this sense requires not the melting away of difference but the promotion of respect for differences that is removed from any form of oppression (Young 1990: 47). Gewirtz (1998:  475) describes a politics based on recognition as an ‘ethics of otherness’. It can be seen as a feminist response to the ‘ethical paradox of post modernity’ (Bauman 1992 in Gewirtz 1998: 475) and helps us make sense of the modern dilemma of how ‘to balance two apparently oppositional moral obligations  – difference and solidarity to construct a politics which works with and through difference’ (Hall 1988 in Gewirtz 1998: 474). It demands a transformation of patterns in society, so that we rethink notions of esteem and the culturally defined assigning of status. Those who are powerless in the modern world both lack recognition (Young 1990) and are denied the opportunity to seek out routes through which to achieve recognition. They are subjected to cultural imperialism manifested as othering, stereotyping and, ironically, invisibility. Social justice as recognition encompasses such aspects as cultural justice, cultural autonomy, recognition and respect, which cannot be viewed simply as goods to be distributed (Fraser 2003). Yet what do these terms actually mean in different contexts? Gewirtz (1998: 471) calls this dimension relational justice, ‘that is, the nature and ordering of social relations, how people treat each other both in a macro level and at a micro interpersonal level’. It is, therefore, a holistic approach to justice and social relations. ‘There is no contradiction between inner universalism and the external reformist actions of a world citizen’ Ikeda (2001: 178) as the individual’s inner beliefs are mirrored in their behaviour in society. Of course, recognition itself, is not an uncontested term. Fraser (2003) has put forward a critique of recognition theory (Gewirtz 1998: 480) as not all differences can be celebrated to an equal degree; some expressions of difference are oppressive to others, while Young (1990) proposes that different forms of misrecognition and injustice require different responses and remedies. Moreover, in a post-modern world, people may have multiple and shifting identities, whether individually or as groups. Ultimately, we all want to be recognized as human beings, capable of fulfilling our potential and deserving of respect and dignity, with the freedom to define ourselves whether as individuals or groups.

Social justice as democracy The final theoretical perspective on social justice in education is centred on a belief that democratic practices are essential for social justice to become a reality (Delgado et al. 2017). The political in this sense furnishes the stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition are played out (Fraser 2003). It tells us not only who can make claims for redistribution and recognition, but also how such claims are to be mooted and adjudicated, who is included and who is excluded? Fraser goes on to refer to the concept of equal participation and includes a number of criteria such as standard forms of legal equality. This could be interpreted as people having equal rights under the law or having access to a free voting process to elect a government. People will also be involved in the major structures of society and, therefore, they must be materially independent in order to be free to use their ‘voice’ (Fraser 2003).

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An example of non-participation in education could be seen in the ways in which schools interact with parents. Some parents may never be able to attend standard meetings due to childcare issues or work demands, such as shift work and, therefore, may be marginalized. The assumption is often that they are not interested in their children’s education. Ball (2015) suggests that increased complexity in the form of the types of schools now in existence, will result in an inability for some parents and pupils to navigate the school system itself. Inevitably, this will lead to further exclusion from democratic power and continue the trend towards selection by schools based on ‘an economy of student worth’ (Ball 2015: 16). Others may suffer misrecognition and judgment in relation to such perceived value, which can be far more complex than the redistribution of material wealth. For example, middle-class black parents’ voices can still go unheard in the wider context of exclusionary social forces such as selective schools (Stanton Salazar 1997 in Smyth 2010). In schools and universities, students can voice their opinions through channels such as student unions, or councils and take action to exert influence over practices that affect their experience. Similarly, teacher unions have traditionally been able to influence policy both nationally and locally. However, it is unclear, currently, how much power students and teachers actually possess. According to Ball (2015), both New Labour and Coalition governments have sought to redirect responsibility for education provision and policy away from the unions and local authorities. Indeed, democratic processes may be viewed by some, (Brown 2014) as elaborate exercises in masking the truth that global markets are really in control of major government policy decisions, which, in turn, affect the microcosm of the school/university. Students need to be encouraged to explore the role of education in relation to those increasing numbers of people who are outside all systems, asylum-seekers, refugees, migrant workers and so on. Can they aspire to aspects of social justice while being denied any form of democratic participation? Are these cases where identity politics and economic redistribution both fall short?

Case studies Gypsies, Roma and travellers What constitutes a group? According to Young (1990: 44), a social group is defined by a sense of identity. Being ‘black’ covers a range of shades of skin colour but includes ‘identification with a certain social status, the common history that social status produces and self-identification that defines the group as a group’. Studies such as that by Myers and Bhopal (2009) provide insights into issues of recognition for the complex social group that make up the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities, present in the UK since the sixteenth century. Across the British Isles there are different ethnic origins for GRT groups leading to a distinct and hierarchical society. Significantly, all share a belief in nomadism and a common experience is the fear and antagonism they provoke in the majority society. The discrimination they face internationally has been described as ‘distinct and distinguishable’ from that facing other immigrant groups. (2009: 420). Racist representations of GRT people remain consistent over centuries as is the figure of the ‘exaggerated stranger’, the ‘perpetual outsider’ (Myers 2008, 2015). This contradicts the perception of GRT communities

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having a sense of strong community which, in itself, has become a figment of a mythical nostalgic past envied by the settled majority. As societies across the world have come to be organized around the needs of settled populations, those clinging to their nomadic traditions have posed complex challenges to inflexible systems into which they do not fit easily. Thus, they have faced barriers when trying to access services, to have their rights acknowledged and to be treated with dignity and respect. There have been many accounts of the ongoing problems experienced by GRT children in relation to education systems. These problems include underachievement, poor attendance and high exclusion rates. Many parents feel that their children receive a differentiated and lesser quality education service than the majority ‘settled’ community and that the curriculum delivered is not culturally appropriate (Myers and Bhopal 2009: 418). Barriers include aspects such as school trips and sex education. ‘Bullying and racism have been identified as a consistent cause for families not to send their children to school’ (Liegeois 1998; Reiss 1975 in Myers and Bhopal 2009: 419). This is one example of a group suffering from ongoing lack of recognition and the resulting poor access to social justice in terms of education, health services, welfare and the criminal justice system. Gypsy young people have been known to ‘pass’, that is, disguise their true identity in order to survive in the school system. (Wilding 2008: 3). Where schools have been successful in creating trusting relationships, there are accounts of children describing ‘how safety and understanding of belonging shaped their engagement with the education process’ (Myers and Bhopal 2009: 418) and helped to counter fears of racism and bullying. Despite this, GRT people remain some of the most excluded and misunderstood in modern society, a phenomenon exacerbated by the apparent acceptability of racism directed towards them. Sir Trevor Phillips (Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in UK from 2007), famously described attitudes to GRT communities as ‘the last respectable form of racism’ (Foster and Norton 2012: 87).

Young carers ‘There has been a great deal of attention paid to young carers in recent research on social policy and service provision’ (O’Dell et al. 2010: 643). Almost three million children in the UK live in households with a family member who has chronic illness or disability (Butler and Astbury 2005). The 2001 census recorded 175,000 young carers in the UK (see Becker 2004). This is a group of children and young people who have remained largely invisible and unrecognized (Warren 2007), sometimes hidden from agencies such as education and social services through fear that the family will be separated. Recently, there has been growing awareness of their existence and complex lives. Young carers here are defined as ‘the main unpaid provider of care to a relative’ (Moore 2005: 51); they may indeed be the sole carer in a family with other siblings and where there is only one parent. Issues for the care recipient can include physical disability but increasingly, they may have mental health problems or be alcohol or drug dependent (Warren 2007). While it is acknowledged that many children help with household chores, young carers are involved in ‘exaggerated levels or types of caring’ (Warren 2007: 136) such as intimate personal care, coping with suicide prevention and may also have to manage the family budget and younger siblings. In fact, some children may

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perform caring duties from the age of three. The number of hours spent caring, up to twenty-six per week, also distinguishes young carers from other children. Young carers come from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, therefore cannot be characterized as a member of one of the social groups more frequently thought of as disadvantaged, (although, there are usually more girls than boys). However, by virtue of their family situation, they are more likely to face economic hardship as they grow up. This is often accompanied by exhaustion, anxiety, depression and physical strain. Their situation has been exacerbated by recent policy to move to a model of care in the community, often without the necessary input of finance to support those who take on that responsibility, and thereby saving government billions (Aldridge and Becker 1993; Warren 2007). The barriers preventing access to support have been described as ‘disabling’ (Aldridge and Becker 1993 in Moore 2005) a concept reflected in the ‘disablist’ culture of schools, often supported by teachers. As Moore explains, young carers’ access to education has been limited as a result of contemporary social services and social welfare policy organization and practice.

Impact on education According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 28, every young person under the age of eighteen has the right to a quality education, and there is evidence to suggest that far fewer young carers stay on at school compared to the general population (Moore 2005). Although not all young carers miss out on education in obvious ways such as not attending or being late (Warren 2007), many suffer from bullying, an irrelevant curriculum, which never reflects their experience, and sometimes, unsympathetic or unaware professionals. As a result, they sometimes lack a sense of belonging to the school community, which results in an unwillingness to participate (Moore 2005: 54). They, and their families, are often seen as different from the majority, lacking the time to socialize and create friendship networks. Such factors affect their chances of staying on into further and higher education, which will impact on their qualifications and future earning power. The key message according to researchers, is the lack of recognition that this group of young people exists, the lack of inclusive policies and, again, inflexible systems. The barriers to their achieving their true potential are ‘systemic, cultural and practical’ (Moore 2005: 54) and are created by ‘the decisions of policymakers and the wider community’ and need to be addressed by professionals across the range of services. An additional perspective is provided by O’Dell et al. (2010: 643), who point to the tendency to construct young carers’ identities from the perspective of the ‘normal’ child’s experience and to see their parents as ‘non-normative and deficient’. The usual assumption of developmental psychology is that of an ordered sequence of development from childhood to adulthood. Children are viewed as in a state of becoming and positioned as vulnerable and unable to negotiate the world of adults. O’Dell’s research examined different constructions of childhood, particularly in relation to social diversity. The survey permitted respondents to self-define as a young carer or to describe their activities rather than be known for a specific role by which they are labelled. As such, the children do not have an identity imposed upon them by the majority population. Interestingly, caring was not perceived to be a real part of the children’s lives but an obstacle in the way of achieving the ‘reality’

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of being a teenager, a view that reflects the dominant view of caring in Western, individualized cultures. O’Dell et al. (2010: 653) suggest that there are varying constructions of childhood that may coexist in society (2010: 653). Furthermore, theorists and practitioners could acknowledge the diversity of children’s lives which impact upon them to produce different kinds of children with different kinds of skills, rather than holding up one version against which all who are different, fail. Interestingly, some respondents revealed that they were aware that they alone could take action to effect success in terms of education, therefore, taking responsibility for their current and future lives and refusing to accept the label of powerless victim. There are remarkable similarities between the issues relating to these two groups of often ignored or hidden members of society. Both GRT and young carers can be subjected to stereotyped representations of their lives, constructed as ‘the other’ by dominant groups. Both may feel alienated from educational structures which appear inflexible in their systems and both are perceived as living outside the norms of mainstream society, as being of lesser value. Neither group may have access to democratic participatory bodies. The state may also engage in micro redistribution of resources, resulting in more marginal social groups competing for small-scale projects and ultimately, emphasizing difference:  a divide and rule approach. Young’s theory (1990) which conceptualizes injustice based on the five faces of oppression is helpful here. She sees oppression as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence and suggests that focussing on relational justice can make us think about what treating each other with respect and acknowledging their dignity actually means (in Gewirtz 1998: 472). We need to recognize the difference but also see the similarity in people’s experiences across class, race and gender. Fraser (1994) in Gewirtz (2006) refers to ‘mainstream multiculturalism’ which calls for a revaluation of unjustly devalued group identities while leaving those identities and differentiations intact. An alternative more radical strategy would be a transformational approach, which involves totally deconstructing existing group identities and challenging the underlying structures. Thus, we may move towards a more fluid and shifting scenario, accommodating a post-modernist notion of multiple identities.

Policy focus Education’s second value – as a driver of real social justice. The very best means of helping all realise their potential – of making opportunity more equal – is guaranteeing the best possible education for as many as possible. (Michael Gove 2009: 3)

In reviewing recent policy initiatives, Ball (2013) asserts that New Labour’s education policy was often attached closely to other goals, particularly economic. While New Labour had looked to raise standards in ‘failing’ schools in particular, this was under the umbrella of the broader strategy of tackling social exclusion. In some ways, the Coalition government highlighted inequality more overtly in terms of rhetoric, as in Gove’s 2009 speech, although this did not necessarily translate into practice. In October 2010, all previous equality legislation was drawn together under one act, the Equality Act, replacing the Race Relations Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Disability

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Discrimination Act and in 2012, the Coalition government issued non-statutory guidance to schools. However, Ball (2013) notes that the emphasis had undergone a subtle shift away from issues of race and, instead, focused on areas such as homophobic bullying and transgender issues. The Coalition chose to focus on social disadvantage and maintained a belief that education can interrupt patterns of inequality. They also saw civic responsibility as a means of reminding young people of their duty to opt in to the Big Society. The Liberal Democrats did manage to rescue their policy of a Pupil Premium, providing extra money to schools with higher numbers of poorer children, although Ball points out that the funding came from cuts elsewhere (Ball 2013). The Educational Maintenance Allowance had led to some increase in post-16 staying on rates but was reduced and replaced by the Coalition. Of course, the dramatic increase in fees in Higher Education had a negative effect on the numbers of young people applying to university, particularly those from working-class backgrounds. Moreover, certain groups such as BME graduates continued to face higher unemployment. In 2011, the OECD declared that social and economic inequalities were growing (Ball 2013: 182). In truth, policy has continued to reproduce inequality.

Policy in action The Prevent Strategy Amidst the confusion of policy strategies, many initiatives have tended to follow periods of social unrest or challenge, such as 9/11 or 7/7. Some of these initiatives became law, one of the most notable of recent years being The Prevent Strategy. This was launched by New Labour in 2007 and part of the strategy was directed specifically at schools and other educational organizations. The Coalition government went on to highlight the role of schools and universities in particular in terms of identifying young people who might be in danger of radicalization. In reality, they called on educators to take steps to counter the influence of radical Islamic groups and to prevent young people from following an alternative world view. This move away from previous policies supporting multiculturalism, parodied by David Cameron, marked the beginning of a renewed interest in the concept of Britishness that brought with it a return to a distrust of difference, and its connotations of an absence of unity, (Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2017). In contrast, the same researchers point out that there had been no call to teach about Irish Nationalists during the 1970s and 1980s in the same way, even though bomb threats were an accepted fact of life for those of us working in schools in London and other major UK cities. Recent terrorist threats related to extremist Islam have provoked more of a panic among politicians of all parties. Responses have included: materials distributed to schools for use in citizenship classes, mentoring to ‘de-programme’ vulnerable students and extra surveillance cameras in Asian communities. Understandably, these have had the opposite effect, in that they have possibly led to the alienation of some Muslim young people. The Prevent Strategy became enshrined in law as part of the Counter Terrorism and Security Act of 2015, which placed a statutory duty for its implementation on educational institutions. Alongside this, the Department for Education introduced a new concept into the revised Teacher Education Standards (2012), which included Fundamental British Values as an addition to the ‘spiritual, social

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and cultural’ section. Initially, teachers were simply asked not to undermine Fundamental British Values (FBV) and these were articulated as follows: 1 Democracy 2 The rule of law 3 Individual liberty 4 Mutual respect 5 Tolerance of those with different faiths or beliefs. It is unclear how these particular principles have come to be regarded as particularly British as most democratic countries would own similar statements as part of their constitution. It is equally unclear quite how trainees and teachers were to exert influence over their students in such matters as political and religious beliefs without resorting to indoctrination. To clarify this, the government went so far as to issue guidance to schools in 2014 in order to help them with the promotion of British values. This is in line with a long tradition of expecting schools to deal with any current moral panic. ‘Poverty, disadvantage, underachievement, unemployment, sexism, racism, homophobia and much more, can all be overcome if only schools would get it right – or so the message goes’ (Tomlinson 2015: 10). Ball (2015: 31) echoes this criticism by observing that it has become ‘a political blood sport’ to blame teachers for the ills of society in order to deflect attention from the failure of policy. According to Elton-Chalcraft et al. (2017), teachers are now being held accountable for failing to prevent the radicalization of students. Furthermore, Ofsted will inspect how school leaders are actively promoting, or teaching, British values. It is difficult to understand how students/trainees can collect evidence for their files relating to such a notion and, moreover, there is an underlying assumption that there is a homogenous attitude towards ‘Britishness’ among trainees. Elton-Chalcraft et al. (2017: 32) also suggests that trainees must appear to adopt an explicitly ‘assimilationist and prescriptive’ interpretation of Britishness or be compromised professionally. This, in turn, is leading to a narrow, uncritical conception of Britishness which trainees may lack the experience or sophistication to challenge. As a result, there is a danger of such a policy ‘demonising all Muslims’ and indicates a failure on the part of government to understand the growth of Islam except in relation to terrorism (Tomlinson 2015: 12). This whole area touches on the theme of national and teacher identity which is explored by a number of current researchers who put forward a range of ideas for future developments in schools and teacher education, a review of which will form the focus of the final section of this chapter. Young’s (1990) framework of a set of questions for educationalists remains helpful for policy analysis: how, and to what extent and why do educational policies support, interrupt or subvert: 1

Exploitative relationships such as capitalist, patriarchal, racist, heterosexist, disablist and so on, within and beyond educational institutions? 2 Processes of marginalization and inclusion within and beyond the education system? 3 The promotion of relationships based on recognition, respect, care and mutuality or produce powerlessness (for both educational workers and students)? 4 Practices of cultural imperialism and which cultural differences should be affirmed, which should be universalized, and which rejected? 5 Violent practices within and beyond the education system?

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Teaching for social justice Since the 1980s and the introduction of market reforms to education and other public services, inequality has remained a key factor in British society. Connell (2013: 1) argues that marketization is often presented as a ‘development agenda, a strategy for growth and prosperity’ an increase in flexibility that allows for individuals to achieve. Ironically, the effect is, usually, a move towards a more unequal society by creating labour market insecurity. Education, itself, has become a commodity, a privilege which needs to be ‘rationed’ (Gillborn and Youdell 2000). In such a system Connell (2013) maintains, there have to be ‘losers’ and the fear of being categorized as such, puts pressure on those who can afford it to pay to be ‘winners.’ League tables provide an obvious example of the public celebration of winners and the humiliation of losers in terms of schools and local authorities, and PISA now extends such competition to whole countries. We have returned to a culture of ‘blame the victim’ where the answer can never be the fault of the market itself but rather that the individual did not work hard/try enough and schools’ failure must be the fault of poor teaching or, indeed, teaching the ‘wrong’ things. In response to the gloomy and negative scenario we are faced with, where we are in danger of returning to an education system that resembles that of pre-1870 Britain, (Ball 2015) a number of researchers, (Connell 2013; Ball 2015; Smyth 2010) are beginning to suggest a revolution, an alternative future for teachers and educators, encouraging schools to reinvent themselves around issues of social justice. They call upon teachers to go back to relying on their own understanding of how some children experience the education system in order to build up local expertise and develop a relevant curriculum. This may involve building ‘alternative spaces where critique is possible’ (Connell 2013: 284). In attempting to deconstruct what constitutes a socially just school, Smyth’s research (2010) highlights several key areas for stakeholders to consider: First, to consciously articulate the concern for social justice and secondly, to continually refocus around learning. Thirdly, schools should pursue a culture of innovation and fourthly, enact democratic forms of practice. For teachers, such behaviours translated into encouraging pupils to feel positive about themselves, to develop resilience and to enable them to experience success. Teachers also developed a curriculum that was accessible, inclusive and participatory. The whole was set in a general environment of emotional stability, demonstrating empathy for the students’ circumstances and acknowledging where poverty was an issue. One of the most interesting aspects of the study was the realization that teachers often draw on their own social capital in order to enable pupils to be trained in how to participate in multiple worlds, as in Putnam’s concept of bonding and bridging. Smyth (2010) suggests that where schools exist in disadvantaged areas, teachers rely on their own high levels of social capital to offer extra emotional support and guidance in order to help counter the neo-liberal context in which the institution is operating. Smyth quotes Ayers to sum up: ‘Teaching for social justice is teaching that arouses students, engages them in a quest to identify obstacles to their full humanity, to their freedom, and then to drive to move against those obstacles’ (Ayers 1998: xvii in Smyth 2010). Such teaching calls for teachers to rediscover their own teaching identities, and move away from being simply ‘unthinking operatives’ (White 2013, in Ball 2015: 34) towards a new form of what Ball

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describes as ‘democratic professionalism’ (38). However, if schools are to develop ways of working with students that are ‘respectful, affirmative and identity-building’ (Smyth and Wrigley 2013 in Ball 2015: 29), then teachers need to develop better knowledge of their pupils and a pedagogy of belonging, which is still quite rare, according to Edgeworth and Santoro (2015). This approach is based on teachers’ willingness and ability to critique and challenge normative constructions of identity. Usually, important boundaries are based on what are accepted forms of knowledge and power relations. As Edgeworth and Santoro (2015) point out, teaching can be exclusionary and, as a result, minority ethnic students, for example, can enter a state of ‘unbelonging’ which relates to the concepts of social justice discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In earlier research (2006 and 2009), Santoro had argued that student teachers commonly fail to perceive they, too, have an ethnicity, and classify students as ‘us’ and ‘them’ even when pupils try hard to minimize their own external signs of difference. How people ‘perform’ their identity involves a complex matrix of factors (Santoro 2009: 1). For example, student teachers can be observed placing children in uncritical groupings, based, sometimes, on the advice of their own mentors. This can lead to simplistic interpretations of behaviour and stereotyped responses. If teachers are to challenge inequality and promote a sense of belonging within a school culture, they must first come to a better understanding of themselves. However, encouraging trainee teachers to confront their own issues in order to enhance their critical thinking is not always easy or comfortable. People can become defensive of the privileges they enjoy in their positions of power within a dominant group and retreat into justifications of their attitudes and beliefs (Santoro 2009). To help prepare students for this kind of work, Santoro calls for truly reflective practices to be taught in teacher education courses in order to understand how teaching identities are enacted through classroom practice. However, Santoro concludes by asking whether such explorations of self are too time-consuming for current models of teacher training. Yet, in the current climate where educators are asked to deal with such subjects as the Prevent agenda, it would certainly be advisable for educators to explore concepts of identity and values in principle before attempting to promote a set of national values (Elton-Chalcraft 2017). In contrast, some young people are already dealing with fluid and changing notions of self. ‘Some young Muslims are accommodating to the country they were born and educated, and hopefully will work in, while embracing an Islamic identity’ (Tomlinson 2015: 12). For a further exploration of how young Muslims develop a critical stance in relation to both the host society and traditional ethnic practices see the work of Ryan 2014. It seems to be the case that many young people with complex backgrounds and heritage are negotiating their way through the challenges of existing in different, sometimes transnational, communities, characteristic of a global society. Reynolds has investigated the ways that second and third generation young people of Caribbean descent ‘bridge’ into cross-ethnic networks to develop alternative models of ethnic identity (2006:  1087). Goodyer and Okitikpi (2007:  83) have focused on a growing group of young people, those of mixed parentage, to discuss how these children perceive themselves in a ‘socially constructed binary world where one must be categorized as either black or white’. Weller’s study in 2010 implies ‘it is important to regard identities as layered and subjective and to explore underlying intricacies and multiplicities’ (2010: 882). Peer group

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formation is an important form of learning and school policies can enable or impede the development of children’s social capital.

Summary We are living in a world where sixty-five million children are on the move – running from poverty and conflict and looking for a better life (Breugel.org. 2016). Yet, in the face of such humanitarian crises intolerance is extremely pervasive and growing in intensity and seriousness. . . . Abuse of migrants and refugees has intensified and there is little support for the idea of ‘migrant rights’ (Crush 2001:  103). Such attitudes can be exploited and exaggerated by politicians and others to encourage people to make unusual decisions, as demonstrated by recent events in a number of countries. While acknowledging that education, alone, cannot rid the world of inequality, most educators would agree that it has a part to play in directing the hearts and minds of young people. It is in this context that Ball (2015: 25) puts forward the argument that we need to go back to a different kind of basics and to ask key questions once more. What is the purpose of education? What does it mean to be ‘educated? Who decides the answers to such questions? If the UK can come bottom in the league table of child well-being (UNICEF 2007), should we not be as concerned with this kind of international comparison as we are with PISA? Ball’s recommendation is for a new connection between education and democracy, where schools draw upon ‘narratives of human possibility’ (2015:  26). That would inevitably include finding new ways of valuing diversity and ‘building aspirational and reflective identities within a pedagogic community’ (2015:  29). Themes in this chapter indicate that there is exciting work to be continued with regard to both students’ and teachers’ understanding of their identities and the ways in which schools are important sites for young people’s social capital formation (Weller 2010). This, in turn, can help to confirm an important sense of belonging based on positive human relationships between teachers and learners.

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6 The school system Introduction As education became established as a human right and nations became more actively involved in educational provision, the growth of state-funded, mass education systems eventually resulted in an increasing institutionalization of learning. Schools and education systems are now a ubiquitous feature in all developed countries. As Ballantine and Spade point out, ‘Schools provide the framework for meeting certain goals of society and preparing young people for future statuses and roles’ (2008: 69). As a consequence, schools all over the world tend to share a common structure and organization, although their general ethos and character can differ widely. Thus, we will all be familiar with schools being organized on a local basis with direction from central government and led by a head teacher, with children, in uniform, organized into classes and taught by teachers who are specialists in particular subjects and with a school day organized into teaching periods defined by the ringing of a bell. Societal views about what constitutes a ‘good, quality education’ tend to reside in this common concept of the school, coloured to some degree by a sort of collective memory of halcyon schooldays of the past. Eisner (2002), in the United States, terms this the ‘yellow school bus model’ of education: Most parents and even many teachers have a yellow school – bus image when it comes to conceiving what teaching, learning and schooling should look like. The yellow school – bus is a metaphor for the model of education that they encountered and that, all too often, they wish to replicate in the 21st century. Our schools as they are now designed often tacitly encourage the re-creation of such a model. (Eisner 2002: 583)

The resulting collective image of what a typical school should be like is appealing to both policymakers and parents alike and thus, according to Davies, our current schools tend to owe ‘more to the past than to the future’ (2005: 101). This love affair with the traditional is clearly highlighted in the directions that policymakers have taken in trying to resolve the perceived failures of modern education systems particularly the failure to meet the needs and aspirations of all pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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The solution as Eisner (2002) highlights, however, has not been to change the system or conceptualize schools in a different way but to simply reinforce those traditional values  – closing ‘failing’ schools, replacing weak leaders with the ‘inspirational’, enforcing discipline and uniforms and instigating relentless regimes of performance management (consisting of testing, inspection, league tables and ultimately competitive market forces) in order to raise standards. Alternative models to the traditional school are rarely considered, perhaps because the traditional school system represents one of the most cost-effective way of educating on mass and ensuring that the right for all children to attend a school near to their home and to receive an education does not remain a mere aspiration. In England, deciding what kind of schools we need and how they can deliver the kind of quality educational experience that will meet the needs and aspirations, not only of the individual pupils and their parents, but also society in general has proved a challenging problem. It is a question that over 140 years of state intervention in the education system has so far, some would consider, failed to resolve with any degree of satisfaction. In this chapter, we are going to explore how the school system has developed in England under both the New Labour and Coalition/Conservative governments from the late 1990s to the present and the policy rationale for those changes. What it is important for you to reflect on as we do so is how little the actual concept of ‘the school’ has changed.

The contemporary context During the late 1980s and early 1990s a ‘revolutionary change’ swept through the English education system. As we have seen, the growth of, and confidence in, public services, like education, was coming to an end, heralding in a period of ‘retrenchment and redefinition’ of such services (Bondi 1991: 126). Radical reforms and changes were also occurring in education systems throughout the world, and the solutions to the perceived problems with education system were all characterized by the use of the three policy technologies we mentioned in Chapter 3 – the market, managerialism and performativity. As Ball (2008: 25) suggests, what emerged during this period was a kind of ‘generic, global policy ensemble’ which together was part of a ‘global convergence of reform strategies’ that resulted in a ‘one size fits all model of transformation and modernization’.

Marketization Since 1979, successive governments in the UK, both Conservative and Labour, have introduced a ‘market-orientated’ philosophy into the education system. As West and Pennell (2002) highlight, so-called market reforms included the promotion of parental choice, encouraging competition between schools, introducing new types of schools and devolving budgets and the power to innovate to schools. In the market sense, schools act as the providers of educational services which are consumed by the customers – the parents and their children and schools, therefore, have to compete with one another to secure the funding that will enable them to survive. It is suggested

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that such competitive market forces will make schools more customer-orientated and will force schools to innovate in order to raise the standard and quality of their provision or else fail. The market, however, is not a true market, but rather a quasi-market, because schools do not make a profit or grow to meet demands and parents do not pay for the services that they receive (West and Pennell 2002).

Choice Parental choice is a cornerstone of the market ideology. As Goldring and Phillips point out, ‘one of the most important ways in which parents are involved in their children’s education is through choosing the school they attend’ (2008: 209). Strategies designed to promote parental choice and to provide the necessary diversity in the school system to enable choice to be exercised, have now been at the heart of contemporary policymaking in England for over two decades and have often been presented as some sort of ‘panacea’ to social and educational problems (Coldron 2007; BenPorath 2009). To some extent parents in England always had a degree of choice about where to educate their children, being able to choose between fee paying private schooling, different types of state schools or schooling their children at home. However, the ability to educate children outside the state sector has generally been restricted to those families who had both the desire and also sufficient wealth or academic resources to do so. Within the state sector, prior to the 1980s, Local Education Authorities (LEAs) allocated children to a neighbourhood school within designated catchment areas. Parents, therefore, with children attending such schools could exercise little choice over their children’s education except on faith-based grounds. Generally, if parents wanted to avoid a particular school they had to move into another catchment area – something that again required resources and a certain degree of familial mobility. The introduction of the ‘quasi-market’ into education in the late 1980s, allowing parents to exercise a preference for the school they wished their children to attend regardless of its location, brought about significant ‘changes in the way families regarded and used educational services’ (Hirsch 2002: 5). Consequently, as a report for the OECD suggests, ‘the basic model of a school within the district of residence and close to the family home, sometimes with an elite private system co-existing alongside has been modified’ (2006: 57).

Policy goals Although the notion of parental choice has been inherent in educational policymaking for some time, its inclusion has always aroused controversy. Choice, according to Coldron (2007: 2) is often legitimized by suggesting that parents desire more choice or that choice is in the best interests of both parents and their children. The advocates of parental choice also highlight the fact that such initiatives can result in the achievement of a number of important policy goals that include a more personalized education with parents able to choose schools that reflect their own aspirations and their children’s needs; raised standards due to competition between schools for pupils, particularly

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when funding is linked to pupil numbers and the reduction of inequality in the system because choice is open to all parents to exercise (see Coldron 2007; Ball 2009; Hirsch 2002). Critics of school choice policies on the other hand suggest that implicit in choice is the notion that some children will have a better educational experience than others. Not everyone is able to exercise choice or to realize their choice of the ‘best school’. Ultimately, because the ‘best’ schools are generally oversubscribed and are not able to expand to meet demand, there will always be ‘winners and losers’ (Hirsch 2002: 7). In addition, the critics also point out that the notion of a market is inappropriate in an educational context, tending to disadvantage families from lower socio-economic groups and undermine the cohesion of the national system (OECD/CERI 2006: 58).

Parents as choosers The exercise of parental choice is a complex process that is affected by a number of factors that include not only parental values and aspirations for their children but also considerations of resources (Moser 2006: 1). There is strong evidence, therefore, of a link between social class and school choice. As Moser (2006:  2) highlights, ‘While market discourses suggest that the mechanism of parental choice is a force for equality because it offers choice for all, the reality is that school choice is dependent upon the amount and type of resources parents have at their disposal . . . [which] include economic and cultural capital.’ The most ‘active choosers’ therefore, tend to be middle-class, well-educated parents who have the resources and also confidence to secure a place at the school of their choice (Edwards 2002). Such parents, according to Goldring and Phillips (2008) have an advantage over those from poorer backgrounds because they have the ability to ‘decode’ information about schools and their resources provide them with fewer market constraints and greater choice, not only between the fee paying and state sector but also within the state sector because they can afford to travel greater distances to schools or to relocate to within the catchment areas of better schools. Parents from lower socioeconomic groups are generally disadvantaged in the exercise of school choice and in gaining access to the best schools, because such parents lack the information and resource to employ a successful choice strategy (Moser 2006: 2). It is obvious that parents will want their children to attend a school which will provide them with the best education and opportunities possible. It is not surprising therefore, that many parents exercise choice in order to avoid an unsatisfactory neighbourhood school (Edwards 2002). Parents choosing alternative schooling are often seeking to avoid schools with poor reputations, where the discipline is perceived to be lax, there is a perceived bullying culture and the school occupies a low position in the league tables. In contrast, the ‘best’ schools are often viewed as those with high academic standards with pupils that come from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds (see Coldron 2007). According to Goldring and Phillips (2008: 13), parental choice is based on a number of factors and the priority placed upon them. For example, some parents may place a greater importance on academic success and the school’s catchment area while others may consider their child’s

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happiness and safety more important. Other factors that can impinge on parental choice include religious ethos, convenience, facilities, reputation, size, values and safety (Goldring and Phillips 2008: 213–14; see also Hirsch 2002). Parents also tend to use information gained from interpersonal networks, that is, the personal recommendations of neighbours, friends and family to inform their choice, rather than that gained from more formal networks (league tables, Ofsted reports, open days, PTA meetings, web sites, school prospectus, newspaper articles etc). Research evidence has shown that these more formal networks are not widely exploited by parents – except by the more ‘active choosers’, with parents relying more on the local reputation of a school (Goldring and Phillips 2008).

Promoting choice The OECD (2006) identified five main policy initiatives that governments could use to promote parental choice which include the following: 1 2 3 4 5

Toleration of privately funded schooling. More liberal admissions policies. Competitive admissions policies. Policies facilitating school diversity and therefore, choice. The provision of more information for parents on which choice can be based, for example, school league tables, Ofsted reports and so on.

The Conservative government toyed with or implemented a combination of these initiatives in their marketization strategy (see Trowler 2003: 39; Hirsch 2002: 9). These initiatives included: the Assisted Places Scheme, the abolition of strict catchment areas and ‘money following pupils’ thus rewarding successful schools. In addition, schools were opened up to parents –they were no longer barred at the school gate. As a result, parents were given greater access to pupil records and information about the school, more places on governing bodies and also were allowed to vote for their school to opt out of local education authority control. Under New Labour there was a renewed commitment to policies that promoted parental choice and diversity. Although one of the first things that the government did when it came into power was to abolish the Assisted Places Scheme, the general policy direction was similar to that of the Conservatives, with moves both to increase choice and parental voice and engagement in schools and also to regulate it (Ball 2008: 129). These policy initiatives were coupled with others that aimed to promote a greater diversity of schools and to personalize education, tailoring it to suit individual pupils needs. The Coalition governments’ reforms also had an emphasis on parental choice and diversity however, as Lupton and Thompson point out: ‘the scale of these changes eclipses anything Labour enacted in the thirteen years previously’ (2015: 49). In Educational Excellence Everywhere (2016), the Conservative government reiterated this commitment parental choice with further diversification of provision and competition between schools:

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When every school is an academy, groups of schools will span geographic boundaries. . . . This provides real accountability, competitive pressure and choice  – improving performance, enabling innovation and scaling success. (DfE 2016: 16)

The proposals also included mechanisms to facilitate parental choice such as publishing improved and more accessible school performance data to inform school choice and making it easier for parents to navigate and understand the school system via a new Parental Portal.

League tables As part of the reforms that introduced parental choice, in the 1980s, schools were required to make examination results available to parents. However, it was not until the 1990s, that the results were published in the press in the form of ‘performance league tables’ to enable parents to directly compare the ‘performance’ of individual schools in order to inform choice. According to West and Pennell (2000; see also Leckie and Goldstein 2009), the publication of league table was justified in the name of ‘choice’ and ‘accountability and, as such, served several purposes: 1 To provide parents with sufficient information on which to base their choice of school. 2 To incentivize schools to improve in order to be competitive and attract more pupils. 3 To holds schools publicly accountable for their results and therefore, for the quality of provision. 4 To inform Ofsted inspections, self-evaluation and management processes. 5 To target poor performing schools for special attention or even closure. Initially focused on secondary school performance, they used measures such as the percentage of students gaining A–C grades at GCSE and later measures for A levels and Key stage 2 and 3 to rank the performance of schools. When it became evident that such measures favoured schools with more middle-class intakes then ‘value added’ and later ‘contextual value added’ (CVA) were introduced to account for pupils’ prior achievements and for individual school effects such as the number of pupils taking free schools meals. In 2011, the Conservative government scrapped CVA because they felt that it was difficult for the public to understand and that it also entrenched low education aspirations in disadvantaged pupil groups (DfE 2010; Leakey and Goldstein 2016). Two new measures replaced CVA: Value-added (VA2) – a measure based on pupils’ predicted GCSE scores from their Key stage 2 scores and Expected Progress (EP). The latter became the governments headline measure requiring all secondary schools to have at least 40 per cent of students achieve 5 GCSEs including English and Maths (although this measure also took into account good progress from very poor initial levels of attainment). Any ‘under-performing’ schools were liable for direct intervention. In 2016, the Conservative government implemented a new school accountability system, scrapping VA2 and EP and introducing a new headline measure, ‘Progress 8’ (P8). P8 is a new measure of GCSE attainment, while a second measure Attainment 8 (A8) is a pupil’s total point score measured across GCSE English and maths and six further approved subjects. A schools’ P8 score is an average of the difference between its pupils’ A8 scores and the national

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average A8 scores of pupils with the same prior attainment – thus there is no need to adjust for pupil socio-economic or demographic characteristics. The use of such league tables has always been contested and, as Leckie and Goldstein (2016) suggest, the new progress measures and school league tables should be interpreted with more caution than they were in the past. They also caution against their use to hold schools accountable and to rule that a school is underperforming if it fails to meet the standard measure. With respect to parents and choice, there is evidence to suggest that less than half of parents, mainly better educated parents, find league tables useful when choosing a school. Parents either ignore the tables or find them difficult to understand and decode (West and Pennell 2000). There is also evidence that schools are choosing pupils rather than parents choosing schools. With respect to schools and accountability, league tables have proved useful as the basis for Ofsted inspections and provided a rationale for placing schools in special measures. It is evident that the competitive nature of ‘league tables’ has incentivized schools to improve. However, such improvement has often been achieved through rather dubious methods such as: ‘creamskimming’ – selection for academic ability, complicated admissions procedures including pupil tests and parent interviews, setting, increased number of exclusions, the coaching of borderline C–D pupils, teaching to the test, either privileging academic teaching or discouraging pupils from taking difficult subjects like science. While league tables have their critics (and in-deed in some parts of the UK they have either never been used or are no longer published) it appears that in England they are here to stay.

The outcomes of choice As Ball highlights the outcomes of initiatives to promote parental choice, under both the Conservatives and New Labour, have been ‘confusing and contradictory’ in fact, as he points out: ‘In a system where many schools now control their own admissions procedures, where there are various if marginal forms of selection and where many “good schools” have the effect of driving up house prices in their locality, choice making and getting your choice of school are different’ (2008: 132). Evidence from research into the effects of school choice in England has also proved contradictory. On the one hand there is some evidence to suggest that choice mechanisms that promote inter-school competition and innovation do raise pupil attainment (see Gibbons et  al. 2008) while there is also evidence to demonstrate that such competition also increases inequality and segregation because more affluent, middle-class parents are generally more able to exploit such mechanisms (see Ball 2008).

Choice and fair admissions? With some state schools hugely oversubscribed, with affluent parents buying houses in the catchment areas of good schools, with schools using tests and interviews to discriminate between applicants, with local authorities resorting to covert surveillance techniques in order to check parent’s claims of residency in a catchment area and with thousands of children denied a place at

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the school of their choice because of the limits on the number of places available in each school – how can the system facilitate parental choice and also provide a fair and equitable admissions process? When schools are oversubscribed they obviously need to select between the pupils that apply. The very notion of selection can often raise controversy and debate, particularly where selection by ability is concerned (see section on Grammar schools). In a study of school selection procedures under the New Labour Government’s Code of Practice on Fair Admissions, West et al. (2007: 12) identified a number of criteria that were being used in the admissions to oversubscribed schools that included: Sibling(s) at the school, distance from home to school or travel difficulties, living in the catchment area, medical or social needs, statement of special educational needs, from a feeder school and religion. Obviously, the application of such criteria raises the issue of whether the way in which the criteria are applied is ‘fair’ and also to what extent a parent’s wishes about how their child is educated should be taken into consideration/take precedence in the allocation of school places. As Coldron (2007) highlights, is there actually sufficient diversity within the system to satisfy all parental preferences, and where it does exist do parents perceive or know that they have a choice or that it is available?

Diversity If all schools were the same there would be no need for parents to choose between schools, so it is obvious that for choice mechanisms to operate and be effective in achieving the policy goals there must be diversity in provision within the state sector. As we have discussed before, choice and diversified provision, whether between state and independent schools or between different types of state schools, has always been a feature of the education system in England. Because of the ‘homogenising pressures on state-maintained schools’ the only ‘radically different’ types of schooling and the only ‘real diversity’ of provision are to be found within the independent and home schooling sectors (Coldron 2007: 5). However, as Coldron points out, only a small percentage of children (8%) are educated outside the state system and so the challenge for governments has been how to introduce diversity to facilitate choice while still maintaining the quality of provision and equitable access. Coldron (2007: 5) highlights several mechanisms that can be used to increase the diversity of provision within the state sector. Under the Conservatives in the 1980s these measures, included first, increasing the structural diversity of the provision by increasing the number of different types of school, the number of providers and the way the schools were governed thus providing the basis for the ‘quasi market’ in schools (see Table 6.1). New Labour, like its Conservative predecessor, sought to enhance the diversity of provision. Although, once in government, while they quickly abolished the grant-maintained schools introduced by the previous government, they also controversially failed to abolish the remaining selective grammar schools, suggesting they should remain if parents so wished. In addition, New Labour were condemning of the vast majority of state comprehensive schools and, according to

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Chitty (2009: 86), were determined to ‘re-energize comprehensive education’ and provide a greater diversity of state schools, each having an individual identity and mission. New Labour, therefore, set out to ‘modernise’ the system to the dismay of many of its supporters who felt that the changes it proposed would result in the death of the comprehensive ideal. In 1998, they published the Excellence in Schools White Paper which initiated their reforms with the formation of a new framework of Community, Foundation and Voluntary-Aided Schools. Greater diversity was also encouraged through an extension of the previous Conservative government’s Specialist Schools programme coupled with a permitted growth in the number of faith-based schools. Later, privatization initiatives added to this diversification programme with the introduction of Academies and later Trust Schools (a state-funded foundation school supported by a charitable trust made up of the school and partners). According to Wood et al. (2007), ‘While there have been phases of different “types” of schools from the 1980s onwards, the archetypal model is that of the “independent school”, where autonomy outside of local authorities is a key strategy, and controlled by private interests from faith, business, and philanthropy.’ This diversification of schools heralded in what Blair referred to as the ‘post-comprehensive era’, although the system still retained the ‘comprehensive principle of equality of opportunity’ (Glatter citing Blair 2004:  4). However, as Chitty (2008:  31) points out, the fact that some schools have ‘the freedom to choose the pupils most likely to succeed while other have to pick up the pieces and educate the rest’ has meant that diversification has resulted in a hierarchical rather than a pluralistic form of diversity (Glatter 2004). As Melissa Benn commented, ‘Slowly I perceived what diversity and choice really mean – a clear hierarchy of local schools. At the top private schools, then the grammars and some of the faith-based comprehensives . . . then the various kinds of comprehensives that are inevitably affected by the area in which they find themselves’ (2006: 10).

Diversification – the Academy Programme Possibly the most significant and most controversial policy (Ball 2009) to emerge as part of New Labour’s diversification agenda was the Academies Programme, launched in 2000 by David Blunkett in the Learning and Skills Act. The programme, the brain child of Andrew Adonis, had its origins in the Charter Schools in the United States and in the earlier Conservative government’s City Technology Colleges (CTC) initiative  – the latter being a sort of ‘half-way house’ between state and independent provision (Gillard 2008: 11). The introduction of Academies was seen as a ‘radical approach’ to breaking a cycle of underperformance and low expectations in failing inner city schools (Chitty 2008: 26). According to Ball, In many respects the [academies] programme stands as a condensate of New Labour education policies, an experiment in and symbol of education policy beyond the welfare state and an example and indicator of more general shifts taking place in governance and regulatory structures . . . Innovation, inclusion and regeneration are tied together in the academies rhetoric and, to some extent, at least, are realised in practice, and are intended to address local social problems and inequalities and histories of ‘underachievement’. (Ball 2008: 184)

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Academies were initially introduced to replace failing schools in urban areas and to provide greater diversity of provision and improved educational opportunities. There was an initial target of two hundred Academies to be built by 2010. The schools were to be a partnership between the government and private businesses, with sponsors initially having to invest £2  million pounds. As publicly funded independent schools, academies and their sponsors were given considerable freedom to shape their own destiny – having a unique legal status, choosing their own head teacher and most of the governors, developing their own curriculum and being able to set aside national agreements relating to the pay and conditions of the teachers and other staff that they employ, although still subject to Ofsted inspections. Academies, however, are not a ‘uniform body’ and there is a great deal of variation among them. As Wilby points out, ‘There is no educational proposition behind them, no philosophy of how or what children should learn, no model of what a school should be like. The point of Academies is political not educational’ (2009: 3, cited in Curtis 2009: 114). Although academies are often well received by parents and consequently oversubscribed, there was initially an active and well-organized resistance to their development in the form of the AntiAcademies Alliance. Academies have also come in for considerable criticism from academics and educational professionals. The first sponsors were bankers, entrepreneurs, business corporations and faith groups and it was felt that they demonstrated notions of: ‘ “corporate responsibility” and the caring face of capitalism and of “self-made men” [sic] who want to “give something back”. These hero entrepreneurs embody some of the values of New Labour: the possibility of meritocracy, of achieving individual success from modest beginnings and wealth creation from innovation and knowledge’ (Ball 2010: 103). However, there was also considerable controversy and concern over the suitability of some sponsors, particularly a small number of what Gillard refers to as ‘pretty crackpot extremists’ (2008: 22) to run schools. Concerns were also raised over the powerful influence that sponsors could exert over schooling in England (see Chitty 2009: 80), particularly the increasing influence of churches and other faith groups in the running of academies. Notable among these concerns have been those about Peter Vardy (the millionaire car dealer) and his Emmanuel Schools Foundation Academies teaching of creationism and its stance on gay teachers. As Titcombe highlighted, Much bizarre and educationally doubtful experimentation is taking place based on the whims and prejudices of sponsors, ranging from the evangelical presentation of religious mythology as historical truth and the discrediting of science, to a belief in the need to rigorously train all pupils in the in the practices and ethics of free market capitalism so as to properly prepare them for employment. One academy is installing a ‘call centre’ so that ‘pupils aspirations can be raised’ by training for this kind of work . . . [and] Manchester Airport, one such prospective sponsor, has overtly stated that the principle purpose of its academy will be to provide employees for the airport. (2008: 56)

Since its inception, under Labour, the academies programme had undergone a number of changes as a consequence of lack of sponsors, rising costs and opposition. These changes, according to Ball (2009: 100), were not part of a planned reform but the result of ‘muddling though and trial and error’, resulting as Beckett points out, in a situation in which ‘the original academies model is sinking under its own weight and being quietly replaced with something very different’ (2008: 8).

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Despite the changes to the programme there was still considerable concern towards the end of the New Labour government about the academies programme and ‘their lack of accountability to the communities they serve, the dubious nature of some of their sponsors (although universities and independent schools can now be sponsors and the financial stake hold is not as high), their high rates of pupil exclusion and their patchy performance’ (Gillard 2010: 142). It came as some surprise, therefore, that the Coalition government decided to continue to facilitate the development of schools as academies, although with the proviso of a more inclusive admissions policies and more openness regarding exam results and performance data. In 2010, the Coalition government introduced the Academies Act which enabled all maintained schools to convert to academy status, however, there was no longer any need for these so-called ‘convertor’ schools to have a sponsor. These schools were also given other freedoms, such as the ability to set teachers’ pay and conditions and dispensation from following the national curriculum. The policy was also no longer targeted at specific schools – all schools were encouraged to become academies. This proved popular with schools – there were 203 academies in England in 2010, by June 2015 there were 4676 academies (over half of secondary schools). For schools that were deemed to be failing there was forced academization. In the 2016 White Paper, the then Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan proposed that all schools would be or would be in the process of becoming an academy by 2022. However, Justine Greening who took over as Secretary of State in 2016 quickly announced a ‘U-turn’ on this policy with Greening (2016) stating, ‘Our ambition remains that all schools should benefit from the freedom and autonomy that academy status brings. Our focus, however, is on building capacity in the system and encouraging schools to convert voluntarily.’ According to Gunter and McGuinty (2014: 4), From 2010 there has been a shift from a ‘something must be done about inner-city schools’ towards a ‘something must be done about all schools’ where it is claimed that those who are doing well within LAs can do even better outside. So, schools that are officially failing remain prime candidates for academy status, but the approach has increasingly been more about creating the conditions in which academy status is an obvious move for the successful school.

The academy programme in its various iterations has been a controversial policy. Its supporters suggest that academies can make a real difference to pupils’ educational outcomes. Its critics, however suggest that ‘they are just a way of privatising the state education system by stealth’ (Machin and Vernoit 2010: 19).

Free Schools In addition to inviting all schools to apply to become Academies, the Coalition government introduced other types of schools as part of the academies programme. One of these was the concept of a ‘Free School’, a ‘pet project’ of the then Secretary of State – Michael Gove (Gillard 2010). Such schools could, be set up by a wide range of providers, including charities, universities, businesses, educational groups, teachers and groups of parents, in response to parental demand, to improve choice and drive

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up standards for all young people, regardless of their background. Free Schools will provide an inclusive education to young people of all abilities, from all backgrounds, and will be clearly accountable for the outcomes they deliver. (DfE 2010b)

Like Academies, Free School were not under Local Authority control and, therefore, had autonomy over staff pay and conditions, budgets, the curriculum, term times and school days. Free Schools are an example of policy borrowing, being based on a Swedish model of schooling which has, however, proved controversial in the UK. Exley and Ball (2010: 8) suggest the establishment of free schools has been based on a ‘highly selective reading of outcomes and claims about the model “improving standards faster” ’. Exley and Ball also highlight the fact that there is evidence to suggest that the development of Free Schools in Sweden has been accompanied by some slipping of standards and an increase in social segregation. The first free schools opened in England in September 2011 and their numbers have gradually increased from 24 in 2011 to 425 by 2016. In addition, government figures (ref) suggest that more than 200 free schools have been approved and are expected to open in the future. In 2017, over 74,000 pupils were being educated in free schools, far fewer than the government’s original targets. Research by Green et al. (2016: 1–2) suggests that the ‘social composition of free schools’ pupils is turning out to be a bit special in certain ways’ partly due to the fact that free schools are being established in disadvantaged areas and are more prevalent in neighbourhoods with high proportions of non-white children. Although there is some evidence of social and academic selection, they still have a higher proportion of non-white pupils. Similarly, in free faith schools there is a higher percentage of non-Christian children than in other schools. The academies programme has been characterized by rapid change which according to Gunter et  al. (2015:  3) has ‘brought about wholesale changes to the organization of state education in England’. However, they suggest that despite claims by politicians there is no real evidence to suggest that academy schools do provide pupils with a better education than schools that have remained under local authority control. There have also been concerns that while the freedom from local authority control ‘has brought opportunities innovation, leadership and higher attainment. . . . [It] has raised the potential for abuses and lapses in standards’ (Gunter et al. 2015). There are therefore several areas of concern regarding the academies programme including their academic standards and performance compared to other types of schools; conflicts of interest in sponsored academies; their ability to provide sufficient places to meet local and the possible lack of autonomy in schools that are part of academy chains (see Gunter et al. 2015: 5; and https://www.parliament. uk/business/publications/research/key-issues-parliament-2015/education/academies-and-freeschools/ (archived).

Grammar schools Grammar schools are a remnant of the old tripartite system of education and are able to select pupils on the basis of their ability, often by exam at age of eleven. In 1997, reforms by New Labour prohibited state schools from selecting pupils on the basis of academic ability, however, grammar schools that existed prior to that date were allowed to continue to select on ability; creating new grammar schools, was, however, not permitted. The merits of selection by ability has been highly

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contested for a long time, with those in favour pointing to the role of selective grammar schools in social mobility in the 1950s and 1960s, while opponents point to the lasting effects on pupils who failed the eleven plus exam and were effectively left behind. The debate was reopened in 2015 when the Conservative government brought in legislation that allowed grammar schools to expand onto a new site providing an existing school is being changed (Long et al. 2017). When Theresa May took over as prime minister in 2016 her desire was to transform Britain into ‘the world’s great meritocracy by reintroducing grammar schools and selective education in order to enhance social mobility and parental choice: We are going to build a country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. A  fundamental part of that is having schools that give every child the best start in life, regardless of their background. For too long we have tolerated a system that contains an arbitrary rule preventing selective schools from being established – sacrificing children’s potential because of dogma and ideology. The truth is that we already have selection in our school system – and its selection by house price, selection by wealth. That is simply unfair. (Theresa May 2016)

The reinvention of a past policy like this can be viewed as ‘the romanticization of past (precomprehensive) ideals, and market reforms . . . and a rhetoric of equality’ (Ball 2017: 114). Despite its appeal to the past, the policy proved controversial even within the conservative party. Although a consultation document Schools that work for everyone and the policy appearing as a manifesto pledge in the 2017 election, the loss of a Conservative majority in that election led to the policy being dropped.

Diversity in the school system The marketization of education in England since the 1980s by governments of all persuasions led to a huge diversification of provision. The original, state-controlled and funded tripartite system has been replaced by a complex and, sometimes confusing, mix of school types funded by the state but with varying degrees of autonomy from it (see Table 6.1).

Privatization and the business takeover of schools The privatization of state education, of which Academies are just one manifestation, first emerged in the 1980s under the Conservative in the guise of CTCs and ‘assisted places’. It is, according to Ball, a process of ‘destatisation’ in which the ‘tasks and services previously undertaken by the state are now being done by various “others” in various kinds of relationships among themselves and to the state and to the remaining more traditional organizations of the public sector’ (2009: 101). As a ‘policy device’ it is not an end itself, but has become under New Labour, has become a force for the ‘modernisation’ and ‘transformation’ of education. Gillard (2007 citing Wintour 2005) suggests that New Labour’s overall aim was that ‘the state should no longer be primarily a

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Table 6.1  Diversity in the school system Type of school

Features

Community schools

Community schools – controlled by the local council – must follow the national curriculum and national teacher pay and conditions.

Foundation, trust and Have more autonomy than community schools, for example, to set their voluntary-aided/controlled own admissions policies schools City technology colleges

Independent schools in urban areas, funded by the state that are free to go to – companies can also contribute. Focus is on teaching science and technology.

Academies

Academies are publicly funded, independent schools that have more freedom and control over curriculum design, school hours and term dates and staff pay and conditions. They are run by an Academy Trust • Sponsored academies – usually underperforming schools that are taken over by a sponsor, for example, a university, FE college, education charity or a business • Convertor academies – usually high performing schools that opt out of Local Authority control to gain independence and autonomy

Free schools

Free schools are state-funded, all ability, independent schools. They are run on a not-for-profit basis and can be set up by groups like: • Charities, universities, independent schools, community and faith groups, teachers, parents and businesses

University technical colleges

Sponsored by universities and business these schools specialize in subjects like engineering and construction and also business skills. The curriculum is designed by the university and employers, who also provide work experience for students.

Studio schools

Small schools (usually with around 300 pupils) teaching mainstream qualifications through project-based and real-world learning.

Grammar schools

Run by the council, a foundation body or a trust – they select all or most of their pupils based on academic ability often by exam

Faith schools

Faith schools follow the national curriculum, but they can choose what they teach in religious studies. Often have their own admissions and staffing policies. Faith academies don’t have to teach the national curriculum.

State boarding schools

Provide free education but charge fees for boarding. are academies, some are free schools, and some are run by local councils. Admission is based on need.

Special schools

For pupils with special educational needs, often specializing in a particular area of need.

Independent/private schools

Charge fees to attend and can make a profit. They are lightly regulated by government and inspected

Based on information at https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/overview (accessed 18 January 2018)

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direct provider of services, but instead become a regulator and commissioner of services purchased from public, private and voluntary sectors’. The Coalition and Conservative governments similarly embraced privatization as a means of delivering public services. According to Rikowski (2003), privatization, or what he considers a more general ‘business takeover of schools’ is part of a larger phenomenon occurring at both a national and international levels which involves businesses and corporations seeking to make a profit out of state enterprises. Ball and Youdell have identified two types of privatization – the first, endogenous privatization is concerned with making schools more ‘business like’ and includes the development of ‘quasimarkets’, managerialism, performativity and accountability. The second, exogenous privatization is concerned with businesses being allowed to participate in the running of public services for a profit or being used to design, deliver and manage aspects of public education. Examples of exogenous privatization in education include the following (see Rikowski 2003; Ball 2007; Ball and Youdell 2008): 1 Private sponsorship of and involvement in state schools  – for example, the Academies Programme and Trust Schools. 2 Outsourcing – contracting out of services like cleaning and catering to private companies. 3 Private Finance Initiatives – the private financing of capital programmes and services, for example, New Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF). 4 Public Private Partnerships, for example, the involvement of Teach First in initial teacher education. 5 The retailing of ‘policy solutions’ and ‘school improvement’ packages to schools. 6 Educational consultancy. 7 Policy entrepreneurship  – selling educational policy overseas (particularly in developing countries) for profit, for example, Ofsted to China. According to Youdell, privatization is now entrenched in the education system and for many the rhetoric of the market ‘makes good sense’ however, as she also points out: ‘These approaches make education a “commodity” owned by and benefitting the individual rather than the public good that benefits the society as a whole. This conceptual shift changes fundamentally what it means for a society to educate its citizens’ (2008: 17).

Managerialism Autonomous schools According to Beckmann and Cooper as part of the process of marketization there has also been an ‘expansion of the new managerialism’ in schools which has resulted in ‘new forms of organization and control’ (2004:  2). Managerialism involves the use of private sector techniques in the public sector and has resulted in schools having to behave more like businesses, in charge of managing their own budgets, resources and staffing. Adopting a more business-like approach is considered one means of making schools more efficient while at the same time raising standards.

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One consequence of managerialism has been a greater emphasis on the economic functions of education rather than its broader social functions (Beckmann and Cooper 2004). Since 1979, successive governments have introduced reforms that sought both to increase the power of central government over the education system while simultaneously reducing the role of Local Authorities (LAs) and increasing the autonomy and independence of individual schools. In 1988, the Conservative’s Education Reform Act introduced Local Management of Schools (LMS) – taking powers away from LAs and devolving the responsibility for school budgets, buildings, management and staffing to schools, the amount of autonomy varying with the type of school. With this devolution of power came a greater role for School Governing Bodies in the management and running of schools particularly with respect to the appointment of staff. It was felt that such autonomy would promote more efficient decision making and resource use (Allen 2010). Making schools more autonomous was also a key feature of New Labour’s modernization reforms. In 1997, their Excellence in Schools initiative promoted both school diversity and autonomy as a key means of driving up standards. In their 2001 White Paper Schools Achieving Success they suggested that, ‘Ours is a vision of a school system which values opportunity for all and embraces diversity and autonomy as the means to achieve it. Autonomy so that well led schools take full responsibility for their mission’ (Department for Education and Skills (2001: 6). Similarly, the Coalition/Conservative governments have promoted school autonomy. In 2010, as part of their White Paper The Importance of Teaching they introduced the concept of the ‘self-improving school-led system’ in which schools are autonomous entities accountable for their own improvement. The Coalition’s White Paper also envisaged LAs playing a critical new role – as strengthened ‘champions of choice’ (DfE 2010b: 65). Support for individual schools would be also provided by Teaching Schools, Academy sponsors and National and Local Leaders of Education would take a systemic lead in school-to-school support. There are obvious tensions in this approach, with on the one hand developing a system free from LA control and on the other expecting them to champion such reforms. While LAs no longer have responsibility for the management and financing of schools, school-based management is not a ‘silver bullet that will deliver the expectations of school reform’ and until recently there has been little evidence that it has had any significant impact on educational outcomes (Caldwell 2007: 22 and 8).

Leadership One of the most significant changes to have occurred as a consequence of embracing a market approach in education is in the way schools are managed and in particular, how the role of the head teacher has changed. The traditional view of the head teacher, before the Conservative reforms of the late 1970s, is characterized by Gewirtz and Ball (2000: 254) through a discourse of bureau professionalism and welfarism. As such, traditional leadership is characterized by a public service ethos and as rationale, rule bound and hierarchical with decisions based on a commitment to professional standards and values. It is also characterized by a commitment to equal opportunities, collegiality, child centeredness and supportive relationships with teachers free to exercise their professional judgements (Gewirtz and Ball 2000: 255–6). As Gewirtz and

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Ball highlight, with the Conservative’s reforms came a need for a new kind of head teacher or leader, and there was, as a result, a ‘concomitant exodus of pre-reform head teachers via early retirements of various kinds’. With marketization, school autonomy and a more business-like approach to the running of schools came the need for a new kind of head teacher and manager whose role was to facilitate the transformation and modernization of the system. This new form of leadership is characterized by a discourse of what Gewirtz and Ball (2000: 256) term the new managerialism. Such leadership is characterized by a customer-orientated ethos, with a focus on efficiency and cost effectiveness with an emphasis on instrumentalism. Such leadership is more authoritarian and competitive than the old bureau professionalism. However, as Precey (2008: 237) suggests, for such leadership to be successful it needs to be more transformational than managerial – promoting vision, shared goals and a productive culture with a commitment to community. This new form of leadership required the ‘construction of new identities’ for head teachers a process that was facilitated in 2000 with the establishment of the National College for Teaching and Leadership. Since then the college has been influential in the development of school leaders and now all school heads have to be holders of National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH). In response to the constantly changing landscape of schooling new models and forms of leadership are emerging. Recently, what Gronn (2008) describes as ‘the new kid on the block’ – the notion of Distributed Leadership has gained favour. In this form of leadership, responsibility for aspects of leadership is shared among individuals within a school. In addition, the notion of schools as autonomous individual entities is also changing with the development of a whole range of partnerships, federations and networks of schools (as described below). New models of schooling include co-leadership of schools, collaborations (soft federations) across several schools, school partnerships, federations of schools and schools sharing facilities. As a result, new styles of leadership, management and governance will inevitably emerge to accommodate these new ways of working. As Ball (2017: 56) suggests, ‘The manager or leader is the cultural hero of the new public services paradigm’.

Summary Since the late 1970s, a series of radical reforms, under both Conservative and New Labour regimes, have sought to both modernize and transform the school system in England. As in other countries, a series of reform technologies have been used in the process, including competition, school diversity, parental choice, new forms of leadership and governance, privatization and entrepreneurship, league tables and performativity. These changes according to Ball, have served to make ‘education like a commodity rather than a public good’ (2008: 42–3). Gunter and McGuinty (2014: 1) suggest, that the traditional ‘provision of educational services as local schools inter-connected within a system governed through individual school governing bodies, area based local authorities (LAs) and elected councils, and a national UK government department and Parliament has been variously challenged, reformed and is in the process of being dismantled’. However, they also suggest

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that ‘the shift from a predominantly public “system” to private “provision” is not yet settled or complete’ (Gunter and McGuinty 2014: 2). However, while systems and practices have been changed, have they really done anything to significantly alter the experience of schooling. As we highlighted at the start of this chapter, our vision of what constitutes quality in education still resigns in the traditional model of the school. Thus, despite the reforms, the new buildings and the emergence of a new age of business and philanthropy it could be argued that schools have changed very little indeed. As Davies highlights, We can see school uniforms today that would not have been out of place in 1950; plans for new schools are still dominated by rectangular classrooms of 50sqm built to contain classes of 30 children, which are segregated by age. Children still move on mass at regular intervals defined by a bell and disgorge into a maze of corridors; they are frequently segregated by something called ‘ability’ although the concept was denounced many years ago . . . and we still largely define success as the consequence of sitting at a small table and writing furiously for two or three hours. (2005: 102)

As Eisner suggests, by clinging on to the traditional model of schooling, what reforms often fail to address is the vision of education that serves as the ideal for both the practice of schooling and its outcomes. We are not clear about what we are after . . . [and what] . . . we want to achieve? What are our aims? What is important? What kind of educational culture do we want our children to experience? In short, what kinds of schools do we need? (2002: 577)

So, despite all the changes and reforms over the past forty years, will any government be brave enough to implement a truly new vision for education with new ways of educating children facilitated by new technologies?

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7 The curriculum Introduction – where we came from In order to understand curriculum policy, it is first necessary to understand what is meant by the curriculum. Bartlett and Burton discuss how difficult it is to actually define the term curriculum and refer to Hayes’ definition ‘the sum total of what pupils need to learn’ (Hayes 2006: 57, in Bartlett and Burton 2007: 75). However, Kelly argues that the curriculum is a more complex concept than this suggests. It does not just relate to the content or syllabus for any educational programme. It is also of major importance to any educational system, suggesting that ‘if you get the curriculum wrong, not only do academic standards fall but behaviour and attitudes deteriorate too’ (Kelly 2009: 217). Moreover, the curriculum has a powerful legal basis; changing it is a difficult process and takes a long time. However, it is also important to remember that the curriculum is not set in stone; it is a selection, a choice that someone has made. In short, it is a social construction. Kelly goes on to define the curriculum as ‘the totality of the experiences the pupil has as a result of the provision made’ by any educational institution (2009: 9) and subdivides the whole curriculum into three areas: 1 The planned curriculum which is delivered but which is not necessarily the same as that which is received by pupils and students. 2 The formal taught sessions and the informal clubs and extracurricular activities offered by teachers. 3 The hidden curriculum which relates back to the socializing functions of schools. Such a broad way of understanding the curriculum means that policies involving curriculum design have wide implications and as such, are likely to be intensely contested. Thus, for Connell (1998: 84), ‘the curriculum is the battleground where theories and politics of knowledge meet classroom practice in complex and turbulent ways’. This chapter shows some of that turbulence.

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The National Curriculum The Educational Reform Act of 1988 introduced a National Curriculum and was the first time since 1904 that a government had sought to determine what was taught in schools. The curriculum that was selected was set out as a hierarchy of subjects with prescribed time allocations for their delivery. English, maths and science were deemed to be the core of knowledge, which the Tory government believed should be placed at the heart of children’s learning in the state school system. As a consequence, nearly half of the week was devoted to these subjects. The core subjects were followed closely by the foundation subjects: history and geography as separate subjects once more (despite teachers’ attempts to integrate humanities); the arts in terms of music and art; technology; physical education and, in secondary schools, pupils would also have to choose a modern foreign language. Information Technology was added in 1992. The whole curriculum was made up of the above, along with religious education and sex education, and the later additions of cross-curricular themes and dimensions. These subjects, together with the informal curriculum of extra clubs, trips and events the school might offer outside formal lesson times, constituted what policymakers at the end of the twentieth century deemed appropriate knowledge for children in the coming century. The stated purpose of the National Curriculum was to provide a broad and balanced education for all pupils as an entitlement and to promote all aspects of children’s development while preparing them for the demands of living and working in a modern Britain. Despite this all-encompassing statement, with which few teachers could argue, it was the emphasis on linguistic and mathematical cognitive ability that many educationalists felt was a return to an almost Victorian view of the way knowledge is constructed and should be imparted. The tone of the documents justifying its introduction was overtly: ‘instrumental, vocational and commercial . . . . the imagery . . . is that of the marketplace, of commerce and industry. It is a factory farming view of schooling’ (Kelly 2009: 257). Moreover, as Chitty argues, ‘the national curriculum quickly became a national syllabus’ (2008: 347). As we can see, the original National Curriculum has undergone numerous revisions in an attempt to make the legally prescribed subject requirements actually deliverable (see Table  7.1). This was one result of the original being over prescriptive and because governments’ failure in the consultation process to take teachers’ and professionals’ views into account.

National Curriculum design and the significance of assessment Since 1988 and the passing of the Education Reform Act (ERA), the curriculum in UK schools has been dominated by subject knowledge which is assessed through a complex system of testing, the approach very much relating to education as a product. However, beginning with the knowledge deemed to be desirable for pupil to acquire, itself a political decision, is not the only place to start when designing a whole programme of study.

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Table 7.1  Revisions to the National Curriculum from Baker to Balls 1988–2010 Year

Secretary of State

Government

Key changes

Why?

1988 1995

Kenneth Baker John Patten

• Conservative

• National Curriculum introduced • Reduction in the amount of prescribed content • The restriction of Key stage testing to the core subjects • Replacement of a 10-level assessment scale for each subject with 8-level descriptors

Response to teachers’ complaints that the National Curriculum and its testing arrangements were too unwieldy and the proposed teacher boycotts of the Key stage tests

1996 1997

Gillian Shepherd • Conservative David Blunkett • Labour

• Addition of two parallel support projects to improve the teaching of literacy and numeracy in primary schools • Support programmes become the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies • Later expanded to the secondary phase

Response to concerns about the poor level of pupil performance in Key stage tests

1999

David Blunkett

• Labour

• Substantial revision and further reduction in the amount of prescribed content • An overt statement of aims and purposes

Response to requests from teachers for a fuller explanation of what the National Curriculum stood for

2000 2002 2008

David Blunkett Estelle Morris Ed Balls

• Labour • Labour • Labour

• Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage introduced • Guidance for younger children introduced (Birth to Three Matters) • Both replaced by the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)

Response to changing government policy with respect to Early Years Education

2008

Ed Balls

• Labour

• Review of secondary curriculum To give teachers more • Further reduction in prescribed time and space to support content personalized learning • Greater emphasis on pupils’ understanding of the concepts, ideas and processes of subjects, on cross-curricular themes and on pupils’ development of life skills

2008

Ed Balls

• Labour

• Review of Primary Education led by Sir Jim Rose • Tasked to reduce prescription and address the development of pupils’ life skills

Children’s Plan demanded a ‘root and branch’ review of Primary Education following concerns from teachers

Based on information at www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/pdfs/2009-CSFC-national-curriculum.pdf

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In 1988, the government chose a National Curriculum which was, and has continued to be, content and assessment-driven which then translate into curriculum objectives and targets. Clearly, assessment in some form is necessary for a variety of reasons. Educators need to be able to judge whether or not their students are making progress and whether their teaching methods are appropriate and effective. Most educational assessment is based on professional judgement and is, therefore, difficult to reduce to a kind of formulaic measurement. Yet, it is precisely this form of assessment that has come to dominate the British educational system since 1988 in the form of Standardised Assessment Tasks (SATs which quickly became Standard Attainment Tests) a strategy borrowed from the United States. Kelly suggests that such standardized forms of assessment have served the purpose of exerting and maintaining even greater control over teachers and their practice with their mechanistic or ‘technicist’ methodology (2009: 143). As we have already stated, one of the main reasons why educational professionals carry out assessment is to make ongoing decisions about the success or otherwise of their teaching methods. As such, assessment is a key part of the curriculum planning process at whatever level. Such assessment can be informal or formative or it can generate a more formal piece of evidence at a particular point in time, known as summative assessment; examinations or tests, for example. A further purpose of assessment is that it allows the teacher to diagnose what problems a student may be experiencing and to remedy this situation by adapting their practice, possibly on an individual basis. Finally, assessment generates data that can be communicated to interested parties, parents, governors and government bodies and therefore provides some evidence relating to how an individual/class/school/local authority or even the country as a whole is doing in certain aspects. To a certain degree, upper secondary education has always been organized around the demands of the public examination boards responsible for 16+ and 18+ qualifications but following the introduction of the National Curriculum, such controls were extended to primary schools as well. Other casualties of ERA included the mode three programmes that teachers were able to develop in order to meet the needs of their particular pupils. These allowed teachers to devise the content and evaluate coursework through continuous assessment but in the climate of distrust of professionals’ judgement that followed 1988, such courses disappeared along with subjects such as Expressive Arts and Integrated Humanities. The result has been an age of assessment-driven curricular development where data generated by constant centralized testing has become the ‘currency’ of the education markets (Broadfoot 2007: 73). Furthermore, ‘the language of standards and targets, performance indicators and strategies, evaluations and transparency is as pervasive as it is familiar’ (2007:  64). Assessment has, therefore, come to be used not as a means of monitoring pupils’ progress but as a mechanism for monitoring the quality of teachers and the education they are providing. As a result, examination data, published in the press, can have the effect of judging and punishing certain schools without any real discussion about the social and economic context in which a school might be operating. What we have been living with for the past thirty years has been a system where ‘at all levels, the testing and inspection procedures control and determine the curriculum’ (Kelly 2009:  150). It is certainly the case that following 1988, assessment was reduced to a simplistic, if frequent, form of testing which arose from the assumption that some forms of assessment can be neutral, and objective and that the publication of league tables would provide some kind of incentive

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to schools: ‘to drive up standards’ (Broadfoot 2007: 65). This, of course, relates to the point that education represents a large investment and successive governments have become increasingly concerned with proving to the public that this is a worthwhile investment. For critics like Broadfoot, such a simplistic concept of educational measurement is a myth and what is more, inhibits educational development. She also points out that there is an inherent incompatibility between the obsession with standards and the reliance on traditional forms of testing and the pursuit of a knowledge economy which supports competitiveness in the global economy of the twenty-first century (2007: 49). Assessment now provides a system of social organization as educational achievement often governs individual opportunity and competition has become increasingly important, you have to be the best, not just reach a standard. This is not to say that assessment policies have not been modified since 1988. In 2004, the Curriculum Council for Wales agreed to discontinue SATs and in England from 2005, Key stage 1 tests were modified to strengthen the role of teacher assessment. In 2008, the Key stage 3 tests were abandoned altogether. From 2016, the national tests were narrowed to focus on reading, grammar and mathematics with other areas being assessed by teachers. It may be that SATs will be abolished altogether from 2023, although this act of policy liberalization is somewhat offset by the proposal to introduce times table testing for nine-year-olds and ‘baseline’ testing for reception classes (testing of four-year-olds against age-related developmental norms). Such modifications are a manifestation of educationalists’ concerns that the National Curriculum and its testing regime were particularly inappropriate, especially for younger children. This concern led to two primary reviews in the dying days of the Labour government which together are important illustrations of how contemporary policymaking meets the challenges coming from policy critics.

The Coalition government and curriculum reform In 1988, the notion of a national curriculum as being an expression of the idea that all children were entitled to study the same body of knowledge was at least as important as testing their acquired knowledge. Over the years, though, the former ambition became relatively neglected. Thus, Lawton (2008) described the National Curriculum twenty years after its introduction, as being in a complete mess with the idea of entitlement having disappeared leaving only a ‘testing regime’ and league tables in England (Wales and Scotland had already abandoned them). Michael Gove, as the new Secretary for State for Education in 2010, was determined to return to ‘the neglected path’, from which previous governments had strayed. For Gove it meant revisiting what was ‘essential knowledge in the “basics” ’ (Alexander 2014: 356). Existing planned reforms to curriculum content came to a full stop: both primary reviews, for example, and further changes to the 14–19 provision in terms of vocational qualifications. In their place, Michael Gove set out his own reform proposals in the White Paper, The Importance of Teaching (DfE 2010a).

The White Paper and policymaking processes The curriculum changes introduced by the Coalition government are a telling illustration of how contemporary educational policy is made in that having set out initial ideas in the conventional

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form of a White Paper, the detail is then left to those deemed to have educational expertize. When the expert recommendations conflict with the educational ideas and presumptions of the politicians then it is the recommendations which tend to fall by the wayside. Thus, Brundrett (2015: 50) argues that the initial changes set out in the White Paper were dramatic: ‘covering matters ranging from teaching and leadership, through behaviour, curriculum, assessment and qualifications, a new schools system, accountability, school improvement, and school funding’. Overall, the government aimed to review the National Curriculum (again) in order to make it more ‘world-class’; to prescribe the content for each subject at each stage, while simultaneously, reducing prescription for teaching methods. Testing at Key stage 2 was also under review. English, maths and science were to remain as the core curriculum with more detailed focus on the essential knowledge deemed to lie at the heart of each of these subject at all key stages. Other subjects were to be reviewed in the second phase. Brundrett (2015) observed that it seemed that knowledge was to take precedence over skills which, in some ways, reflected earlier educational principles. Initially, a panel of education experts oversaw developments and published a set of key principles that would inform the shape of the new curriculum. These principles included freedom, responsibilities and fairness. Alarmingly, several panel members, notably Professors Mary James and Andrew Pollard, resigned from the panel in October 2011, and the version of the curriculum that the government eventually published bore little resemblance to the recommendations made by the panel earlier that year. Some of the more imaginative proposals, such as splitting Key stage 2, were not mentioned at all, schools were not given greater control over content and there was an absence of any reference to values and principles (Brundrett 2015). Those with curriculum expertize responded by trying to assert their voice. Such was the alarm among senior academics that they wrote an open letter to Michael Gove, published in the Independent in March 2013, in which they criticized the content of the proposed curriculum, which consisted of ‘endless lists of spellings, facts and rules and warned that this would not develop children’s ability to think, problem solve and would inhibit creativity and critical understanding’ (Independent 2013, cited in Brundrett 2015: 53). Gove’s response was to dismiss the professionals’ views as ‘bad’ and irrelevant, and instead, hasten plans to remove higher education institutions from their role in teacher education, in order to minimize the influence of academics on the curriculum of the future.

Coalition curriculum reforms The Coalition government’s curriculum reforms came in a burst of activity in a three-year period. Gove initially focused reforms on secondary education with its rather confusing range of alternative qualifications now available to schools and colleges. Many of these were to be replaced in a move to return to the notion of a core of subjects, which would be incorporated into an English Baccalaureate, with all its effects on subject hierarchy. Next, Gove turned his attention to the actual content of the subjects, themselves. This was in order to make the examination system appear more rigorous by insisting that subject knowledge become more ‘difficult’, and to ensure that schools taught ‘what matters’. Apple described ‘what matters’ as ‘official knowledge’ (Ball 2015:19) but, of course, one central question at the core of all education systems remains, who decides what

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matters? These detailed changes to particular parts of the educational curriculum were accompanied by a new National Curriculum rolled out from September 2014.

The 14–19 Curriculum One of the first key actions from the Coalition government was to commission a complete review of 14–19 education by Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College, London. The result was the publication of the Wolf Report; Review of Vocational Education, (DfE 2011). Wolf made twenty-seven recommendations, the majority of which had been implemented by February 2015, when the government published its Final Progress Report. An important change was to reduce the number of post-16 vocational qualifications which had been increasing dramatically under the previous New Labour government and resulting in a highly complex system of pathways that was often difficult to fathom. Alongside this simplification, was the requirement for a set of principles to guide study programmes for young people on vocational routes, post-16, to ensure that the skills gained would lead to jobs or further learning. Wolf claimed that many of the existing courses were of no value at all to employers (TUC 2011). Ball (2015) indicates that this has led to a number of Btec diplomas being disqualified. This, in itself, helped to fulfil one of Gove’s key objectives which was to remove what he called ‘non-subjects’. A renewed focus on English and maths was emphasized to enable students to continue on to Higher Education if they changed pathways, and this was to replace New Labour’s ‘core studies’ in its return to more traditional subject divisions. However, critics point out that Wolf ignored the motivational effect that some of the diplomas had had on more disaffected young people (TUC 2011) and it is doubtful whether those students who had failed to achieve an A* to C in English and maths after several attempts to resit, would be interested in repeating those exams ad infinitum in order to achieve the magic grade boundaries. Similarly, reducing the amount of time for 14+ students to spend on vocational subjects to 20 per cent of the timetable, might not achieve the desired effect of encouraging the majority of young people to remain in a more traditional system post-16. Interestingly, Young (2014) pointed out that there might no longer be the staff available to teach English and maths at the required level, which was a flaw in Wolf ’s proposals. Wolf (2011) also recommended a shift away from accrediting a large number of individual subject qualifications towards a focus on the awarding organizations, themselves, and removed the requirement that all 14–19 qualifications had to fit within the Qualifications Credit Framework. A  further controversial set of proposals related to teachers and lecturers as Wolf (2011) called for wider recognition of the Further Education (FE) teaching qualification, QTLS, which would enable FE staff to teach in schools. Moreover, other professionals without teaching qualifications at all, were to be allowed to have input into the curriculum, in order to ensure ‘best teaching’. Additionally, FE colleges would be able to enrol pre-16 students but would have to provide the necessary KS4 programmes. There is an assumption here that we could trace back to the 1970s that teachers, themselves, are not ‘professionals’ in their understanding of the world of industry, which is, to politicians, the ‘real world’ that matters. With regard to apprenticeships, Wolf (2011) recommended that internships should be made longer and of higher quality and that employers should be paid for taking on trainees, with

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particular emphasis on encouraging small and medium-sized companies to play their part in training. Perhaps more controversial was the proposal that employers generally should be involved with a rigorous evaluation and assessment process for apprenticeships. There would still be a long tradition to overcome among employers of smaller companies in particular, who have often felt unable to afford the cost of their young employees taking time out to attend continuing academic education. This would remain problematic with regard to funding arrangements. Finally, Wolf ’s emphasis on the centrality of a traditional core of academic study for all appeared in some ways to challenge the existing Coalition policy which proposed a return to a previous phenomenon, the division of pathways at 14+. Central to this reinvention of a technical and vocational route (Ball 2015) were the University Technical Colleges. However, their introduction has been very troubled, and their future remains uncertain. High level technical education remains an obvious policy goal but stubbornly difficult to progress. On the one hand, the health of the economy is self-evidently dependent on technological advancement and there are many young people for whom a technical education is appealing; on the other hand, technical education has suffered persistently from esteem and resourcing issues. Ultimately, it may come down to a broad collective failure of policymakers at all levels to recognize that the kind of good ‘doing’ required by effective technical education, is as intellectually rigorous as a traditional academic education. Such deep-seated philosophical considerations are unfortunately not conducive to swift policymaking.

The English Baccalaureate The Coalition government introduced the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) in 2011, the purpose being to encourage a focus on more traditional subjects and to provide a new school performance measure. It involved pupils taking GCSE qualifications in a group of core subjects: English, maths, sciences, history or geography and a foreign language. Percentages of pupils gaining A* to C grades in these subjects were to be highlighted in school Performance Tables something that ultimately affects the curriculum choices available to pupils in different schools (Parameshwaran and Thomson 2015). A further result of this policy, has been the apparent drop in interest in more creative areas of the curriculum. Drama has seen a fall in numbers and there is evidence that Design Technology (not including computer science) has disappeared from a worrying number of schools. There is also a likelihood of schools in more prosperous areas being further advantaged by their concentration on traditional academic subjects, in that, students that may prefer a vocational route, are more likely to be located in economically poorer areas. In a University of Warwick Commission report on the Future of Cultural Value, researchers expressed concern that ‘policy makers are obsessed with a siloed subject-based curriculum and early specialization . . . that ignores and obscures discussion. . . . We need creative scientists as much as we need artists who understand the property of materials and the affordances of new technology’ (Neelands et al. 2015: 45). The report’s recommendations include a new focus for Ofsted on the creative strengths of schools and an additional pupil premium for Arts and Culture, to match that offered for sport. The researchers also state that universities could contribute by placing greater emphasis on arts qualifications for entry purposes instead of advising students that arts subjects are more likely to weaken their application.

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These arguments are set against the economic backdrop of the importance of arts and culture to the UK economy, valued at £76.9 billion in 2013 (Neelands et al. 2015: 19).

GCSE reforms The Coalition government completed their reforms to the 14–19 curriculum by introducing changes to GCSE examinations, themselves. Michael Gove had initially put forward a proposal to get rid of these long-standing exams completely, replacing them with the English Baccalaureate but this proved to be too unpopular. As a compromise, the government planned to make the existing examinations more difficult, in order to demonstrate that they were the government of ‘high standards’. New more rigorous exams in English language, English literature and maths were to be implemented from 2015. A year later, other subjects came on stream, with more difficult subject content. There was anxiety that some subjects, which were to be introduced later, would suffer from poor take-up as schools chose to emphasize those which were already in place (Parameshwaran and Thomson 2015). This would encourage a more traditional subject offering still further. Through Ofqual, (Office for Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) modular assessment was replaced by assessment at the end of the course, with examinations taking precedence over coursework. The results were to be set out differently, with a new grading scale from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest) gradually being introduced from 2017. Such changes are expected to favour higher-ability pupils and will inevitably and intentionally, remove teachers from the position of grading their own students’ work. As mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as totally objective assessment as systems will always be subject to gender and cultural bias, examiner fatigue and so on. Moreover, course work had helped to reduce the pressure on students who found examinations too stressful and raise pupils’ confidence and grades. It is also true that there is a limit to the kind of information examinations can test, the emphasis being on facts and memory, rather than longer discursive writing.

The National Curriculum 2014 In the dying days of the previous Labour government, two reviews of Primary Education took place presenting what could be viewed as the most comprehensive review of primary education since the 1967 Plowden Report. The ‘official’ Rose Review led by Sir Jim Rose and the ‘unofficial’ independent Cambridge Primary Review led by Professor Robin Alexander. The Rose Review was greeted with disappointment for its failure to introduce radical change and its overall conservative approach: ‘It was strait-jacketed by a government-inspired brief to which it adhered tenaciously; and it contained no direct or indirect challenge to, or questioning of, any current or past government policies’ (Richards 2009: 299). The Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander 2009), however, was generally welcomed by professionals. However, both reviews were not well received by the then Labour government, sensitive to the implied criticisms of over a decade of policy initiatives. The Coalition government also chose to reject the recommendations of the two reviews and instead decided to rely on its own review of the National Curriculum. Robin Alexander noted sardonically

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that Michael Gove was inevitably going to reject any suggestions from those he branded as ‘Marxists hell bent on destroying our schools’ (2016: 14). In 2013, the new curriculum was announced with Gove proudly claiming to have ‘laid out the knowledge that every child is entitled to expect they be taught’. (Gove 2013). The basic structure overall, was traditional with the real difference residing in the detailed time frames and prescription of pedagogy. Twelve subjects were listed with English, maths, science, computing and physical education being a statutory requirement in all four Key stages. Geography, history, music, art and design, and design and technology were mandatory in the first key stages. Modern and Foreign languages were to be taught in Key stages 2 and 3 and citizenship in Key stages 3 and 4.  Time allocations to the various subjects were also in line with those set out in the original National Curriculum. English and mathematics retained their status as ‘basic’ subjects on which success in other subjects depended. Science was regarded perhaps as less significant than previously having lost some time allocation to the ‘applied sciences’ of design and technology and computing. History too, was seen as important and the content reasserted a traditional linear narrative for Key stage 2 children from the ‘stone age’ through Roman Britain to the Vikings and Anglo Saxons, augmented by some work on Greek, Roman and other civilizations. In year six, the children could study topics including the ‘changing power of monarchs’. The chronology continued through Key stage 3 from the Norman Conquest to the present day. Again, this could be augmented by the study of at least one other ‘significant society’ and a local historical study. Overall, though, the approach to history was strictly chronological and smacked rather of ‘Our Island’s Story’, a history book much used in schools and hugely popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Altogether, the document included 89 pages of guidance on English, (with detailed lists of spelling and grammar rules), 52 pages for maths and 44 pages for science with just 35 pages for the remaining nine subjects, in a very generalized form (Alexander 2016). The notion of the National Curriculum offering a ‘broad and balanced’ education remains problematic.

The knowledge debate How then to understand current curriculum policymaking? To address that question, we have to understand how the knowledge to be offered to children was understood by policymakers. Equally, perhaps, it is also necessary to understand what curriculum possibilities were misunderstood or ignored by policymakers. This takes us into a debate about knowledge which is implicit to any curriculum policy. At the core of many of the changes introduced by the Coalition, was the notion that the education system in the UK had moved too far away from a focus on content in favour of skills, the process of learning and student experience. As we have seen, this was partly to do with policymakers’ concerns that Britain had slipped down in international comparison tables, leading to a renewed concern about ‘standards’ and acquiring the knowledge necessary for a modern economy. Equally though, the 2014 National Curriculum drew upon another curriculum tradition by asserting the importance of knowledge as ‘cultural heritage’ as we have seen with reference to the history curriculum. In similar fashion, the English curriculum, for example, was insistent on

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children leaving school with a knowledge of Shakespeare as an essential part of a national shared heritage. Only two aims for the 2014 National Curriculum were set out, the first being that The national curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement. (DfE 2015: 6)

Significantly, the reference to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ was first expressed by the Victorian poet and school inspector Matthew Arnold and reflected his concerns at the overly economistic school curriculum of his day. The same tension exists today between the extent to which what is taught in schools is a matter of skills and knowledge required for a successful economy; and/or school knowledge should be concerned primarily with a body of knowledge produced over generations of human thought. There is no doubt that Conservative educational policymakers were powerfully drawn to the idea that curriculum as knowledge had been neglected in recent years. They were influenced by the work of E. D. Hirsch, an American academic, who argued in favour of ‘cultural literacy’ (see The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them 1996). This meant ensuring that all children were familiar with those events and works which were necessary in order to understand the society in which they lived. Hirsch’s work has influenced curriculum design in several American states and it is not difficult to see how his thinking connects to wider issues about immigration and nurturing ‘American values’ or British ones come to that. The enthusiasm for this way of thinking among some policymakers is captured by Nick Gibb who read Hirsch’s book on a holiday in the United States: ‘I began reading it on the beach and could not put it down. Back in my hotel room, I emailed Hirsch to explain my enthusiasm for his ideas’ (cited in Simmons and Porter 2015). It is rare for policymakers to make such a fulsome acknowledgement of the ideas which help shape policy but for Gibb, Hirsch captured much of what he thought was wrong with curriculum policy in recent years. In 2010, he was appointed Schools Minister, an office he also held for a while in the post-2015 Cameron government. As is sometimes the case in educational policymaking, there is a sense in all of this that what goes around, comes around. In some ways, Hirsch’s views return us to the 1960s and 1970s when what was an appropriate curriculum was hotly contested between conservative academics who emphasized ‘cultural’ knowledge, liberal educational philosophers who saw subjects more as ‘forms of knowledge’ or ways of knowing, and neo-Marxists who interpreted the traditional curriculum as a mechanism to categorize children into their places in the class structure. Indeed, some of the academic warriors of the curriculum struggle fifty years earlier returned to the fray in the arguments surrounding the new National Curriculum. Thus, Michael Apple, in Ball (2013) points to the differences in power and cultural dominance that determine conflicting views of what constitutes the kind of ‘official knowledge’ as set out in the 2014 National Curriculum. The notion that ‘knowledge’ is a universal good, transcendent of its class and cultural location, is for many intellectually unfeasible. On the other hand, other veterans were willing to concede something to Michael Gove and current policymakers. Thus, the sociologist Michael Young, whose book Knowledge and Control (1971) had influenced a generation of teacher training students, suggested that Gove could be given

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credit for opening up a key debate once more, by challenging: ‘two lynch pins of political thought about education, that “knowledge is right wing and exclusive and learning is progressive and left wing” ’ (Young 2014: 3). He also put forward the argument relating to curriculum content, suggesting that there is such a thing as ‘powerful knowledge’, to which every child has a right (2014: 1). Like Michael Gove and Hirsch, therefore, Young sees a social justice dimension to a subject-led curriculum. He reserved most of his criticism for the way in which a criterion-referenced assessment system is out of control. Teachers, he suggested, were losing sight of what children were actually learning in their anxiety to keep children engaged. He also questioned aspects of differentiation, whereby some children are not thought to be capable of being taught ‘powerful knowledge’. New Labour’s policy had been to create new subjects and qualifications for young people who might be deemed to be less ‘academic’. For Young, every child is entitled to the ‘powerful knowledge’ at the core of every subject, derived from university subject disciplines and that it should be central to the school curriculum. Other researchers point to a lack of empirical evidence to support Young’s ideas stating that it is very difficult to link university concepts directly to the school curriculum (Wyse et al. 2016: 2) and that this becomes even more complex when dealing with the early years curriculum. Brundrett (2015) offers a different kind of critique of the National Curriculum rooted in the policymaking process itself. For him, the weaknesses of the curriculum derive from inadequate consultation with teachers and others in the education system, and the dismissal of the expert panel’s review and the subsequent derision of their views and those of other academic voices. As a consequence, for Brundrett the primary part of the National Curriculum is a return to the nineteenth-century curriculum of prescribed facts and a narrowing of learning possibilities. He cites Alexander who summed up the National Curriculum in his acerbic comment that the outcome was neither national nor a curriculum, ‘simply a list of subjects’ . . . a testimony to ministerial arrogance and poverty of vision but also a resistance to evidence’ (Alexander 2016: 12). There is little doubt that Alexander reflects a widely held view among other educational academics but as we have argued in other chapters, policymaking has to be understood in terms of its effectiveness as well as its creation. Despite the flaws evident at its birth, to what extent and in what ways has a maturing National Curriculum influenced teachers to the benefit of children, including those who are socially disadvantaged? In this context, it is important to note that the National Curriculum policy always intended that teachers should have a degree of curriculum freedom. Academies and free schools were not required to follow the Curriculum at all and even in local authority-maintained schools, the second aim of the National Curriculum declared that The national curriculum is just one element in the education of every child. There is time and space in the school day and in each week, term and year to range beyond the national curriculum specifications. The national curriculum provides an outline of core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills as part of the wider school curriculum. (DfE 2015: 6)

This second aim is an expression of the widely held view that teachers were being stifled by excessive policy prescription. New incoming governments, such as the Coalition government

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in 2010, tended to promise less prescription and less ‘paperwork’, although their practices in power did not always live up to these promises. Thus, as a policy the new National Curriculum tried to achieve two things:  on the one hand, the new freedoms enjoyed by teachers would usher in an age of curriculum creativity; on the other, it set out a programme of ‘powerful’ subject knowledge which once acquired by children, would enable them to be socially mobile in a way denied to their parents. The extent to which policies can still succeed in spite of what on the face of it looks like a contradiction, or simply fall over into incoherence, is still being worked through in the case of the 2014 National Curriculum. In the end, it is how teachers understand a policy through the prism of their professionalism which defines policy success or failure as will be explored in the final chapter.

Summary Curriculum policymaking reveals several of the major characteristics of contemporary educational policymaking more generally. First, the curriculum has become the major instrument to move schools into the world of competitive marketing. What is most important in the curriculum is what can be tested and measured. What can be measured can also be compared as the basis of the judgement between schools. Secondly, it is possible that the focus on what can be tested and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum is dysfunctional to policymakers’ major ambition to ensure that education enhances the nation’s global economic performance. If creativity and innovation are marginalized in pursuit of ‘standards’, the long-term impact on the economy is bound to be negative. Curriculum policy has also helped to generate a level of antagonism between two of the most important policymaking agents, politicians and academic educationalists, which must be detrimental to effective policymaking. In one sense, abuse of those with educational expertize is not new. We saw in Chapter 1 how Ralph Lingen in the 1860s was anxious to marginalize educational ‘enthusiasts’ from policymaking. Kenneth Clark (Education Minister 1990–2) was warned by Prime Minister Thatcher that his Department was full of ‘lefties’ (2016: 264). However, mostly such views remained off the public record at least until the publication of autobiographies. Modern politics and the modern media is more publicly abrasive. Thus, Michael Gove famously dismissed teachers, educational academics and even his own civil servants as ‘the blob’, a phrase which originated in 1980s American educational politics and was used by Chris Woodhead, the first Ofsted Chief Inspector (see www.spectator.co.uk/2010/01/michael-gove-vs-the-blob/). Not that educational academics were averse to replying in kind. Thus, Stephen Ball (2015) dismisses curriculum changes under the Coalition as looking backwards to a golden age, a sort of mythologized period remembered by politicians, from their days in public school, which Ball famously calls ‘a curriculum of the dead’. A certain tension between politicians and academic contributors is inevitable given that the latter deal in complexity while the former requires policies which can be straightforwardly enacted. In the end, though they need each other, policies require the kind of groundedness and scrutiny academics provide, while academic life cannot prosper without a well-founded education system.

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Finally, a much more fundamental tension though which curriculum policy has failed to address is between ‘academic’ and ‘practical’ or technical education. The failure to challenge the assumed distinction philosophically has led to an oscillation in policy between the notion of the curriculum as a shared universal entitlement for all children and creating specialized routes for ‘different’ children. Curriculum policymaking is challenging precisely because it raises so many other educational questions: what counts as educational success? How should educational achievement be measured? What educationally benefits individual children, their communities and the country? And ultimately, what is education for? No curriculum policy can resolve these issues in itself which means that it will continue to be the object of fierce debate.

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8 Caring for and educating young children Introduction Children, particularly very young children, require the support and care of adults in order to thrive and prosper. The responsibility for their health, physical and cognitive development, early socialization, education and safe keeping has traditionally lain with the family. The prevalence and persistence of the notion of a traditional, nuclear family consisting of a male ‘breadwinner’ and a female ‘care giver’ who provide the love, care and support for their offspring’s successful growth and development, is testament to a long-held societal view that ‘parents bring up children’ and that parents, and in particular (as the old adage states), mothers ‘know what is best’. One consequence of this notion, of the ‘primacy’ of the family in providing for the needs of their children – particularly for the very young, was a conviction that any state provision of care and education should not seek to ‘usurp’ that parental role (Kamerman 2006). While most parents were happy to relinquish the role of educating their children to the state when compulsory elementary education was introduced, mothers were particularly reluctant to relinquish their caring roles in a similar fashion. The state, too, was reluctant to intervene, recognizing the ‘privacy of the family as an institution’ except where ‘families . . . failed in their duty of care’ (Baldock et al. 2009: 48) and children were viewed as ‘needy’ as a result of neglect or abuse. Thus, even in the 1960s there was little state involvement in the provision of childcare and later in the 1970s and 1980s any provision remained targeted at the ‘not normal family’ (Moss 2003: 27). Childcare, therefore, remained a private responsibility (Cohen et  al. 2004) and as Moss highlights, although ‘ “childcare” is all the rage today . . . for many years . . . (it was) surrounded by public and private hostility or, at least ambivalence’ (2003: 25). This ambivalence was further exacerbated by a traditional dichotomy in terms of governmental responsibility for the delivery of education and social care between different government departments and different groups of professionals. Anning (2006) suggests that a legacy of this ambivalence and lack of integration has been a disparate range of social care and educational services – particularly for very young children that is extremely fragmented and lacking in cohesion and coordination.

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Education and care: 1997 – the context for change Prior to 1997, under the then Conservative government, policy relating to children’s education was well developed but had become highly politicized. Childcare policy, on the other hand, was largely neglected. To many, ‘the very term “childcare” (had) a dispiriting and dutiful heaviness hanging over it . . . as short on colour and incisiveness as the business of negotiating the wet curb with the pushchair’ (Riley 1983 in Brannen 1998: 3, cited in Ball and Vincent 2005: 558). As Cohen et al. point out, By 1997 . . . a system of services had evolved in England that was both diverse and fragmented. Some services were open all day, some part of the day; some took all ages up to five years of age, others took narrower age ranges, some focused on providing ‘childcare for working parents’, others on ‘education’, a few on family support; some were free, others relied entirely on parental fees; some were publicly funded, others privately provided, on either a profit or a non-profit basis. Some were the responsibility of the welfare system . . . others were the responsibility of the education system, local education authorities and school boards of governors. (2004: 52)

At the time, the responsibility for school age and some pre-school educational provision rested with the government department responsible for education – the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). Children’s education was delivered by highly trained teachers  – graduate professionals, with a single qualification, a relatively high social status and a high rate of pay. On the other hand, the responsibility for childcare, in its various forms, resided with the Department of Health. Such childcare services included those for very young children, that is, day nurseries, playschools, kindergartens, childminders and those for school-age children; namely, holiday clubs and out of school activities. This diversity of provision was delivered by a highly gendered workforce with a range of competency-based qualifications, low status and low levels of pay (Baldock et al. 2009). Despite its ambivalence, the Conservative government finally succumbed to pressure to act on early childhood education and care and, in 1996, its Nursery and Grant Maintained Schools Act introduced universal, part-time nursery provision for all four- to five-year-olds. Childcare provision, however, was to be highly marketized, with a heavy reliance on a mixed market economy of state, private and voluntary sector provision. Parental choice and the market were driven by the introduction of Nursery Vouchers, which parents could use to purchase childcare. The result was the growth of private childcare and education bolstered by state subsidies. An unexpected consequence of the initiative was the unofficial lowering of the school starting age to four, as many primary schools increased their nursery provision in order to take advantage of the additional funding, in what Wadsworth and George term a ‘dash for cash’ (2009: 309). Many women, however, particularly working-class women and those from certain ethnic groups, continued to distrust formal childcare, preferring, as they still do, to rely on informal childcare provided by grandparents and other relatives (Ball and Vincent 2005: 564).

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By the late 1990s there was a general political consensus that childcare was struggling and in need of reform due to a general lack of investment, a lack of available places and an ‘uneven patchwork’ of provision (Penn 2007: 194). Kamerman (2006) suggests the factors that were providing the impetus for change were not necessarily unique to the English context, however, as Cohen et al. point out, the reform process that took place ‘inherited a very particular demographic, economic and political context’ (2004: 51). The drivers for change in 1997 included the following: 1 2 3 4 5

A declining child population. Increasing family diversity. High levels of child poverty with nearly a one-third of young children living in poverty. Increased numbers of women participating in the labour market. Research that provided clear evidence of the lasting and worthwhile benefits of high-quality early intervention and pre-school education, particularly for disadvantaged children, their families and communities.

In addition, a number of ‘significant events’ (Baldock et al. 2009: 58) in the form of the tragic deaths of Victoria Climbié, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells provided the stimulus for policy reform and played a major part in influencing and shaping legislation.

New Labour 1997–2010 – a long-term strategy When New Labour came into power in 1997, the stage was therefore set for change and major reforms were on the agenda. As Cohen et al. point out, the previous Conservative government had adopted a policy of ‘benign neglect’ (2004: 53) with respect to childcare, however, with the change of government ‘for the first time in peacetime, childcare became a recognised policy priority alongside education’ (2004: 56). For New Labour, early childhood education and care provided a unique platform for the development of policies and initiatives that enabled them to reshape services to be more flexible and responsive so that they could also be targeted at other agenda areas. New Labour’s childcare agenda, therefore, was predicated on a desire to eradicate poverty, improve educational standards and enhance employment opportunities, particularly for lone mothers. It was also predicated on notions of a mixed market economy of private and state provision, of parental choice, of support for parents to carry out their parenting roles and of universal rather than targeted provision (see Ball and Vincent 2005: 558). Importantly, it was also based on a desire to provide an integrated approach to service provision (Cohen et al. 2004). New Labour chose to move away from more traditional, liberal approaches to childcare provision. Its adoption of a more social democratic approach resulted in an expansion in the provision of childcare, the targeting of children and families living in very deprived areas by making childcare more readily available (Sure Start and Children’s Centres) and making childcare more affordable through a system of tax credits. However, rather than pursing a truly social democratic model of childcare, New Labour was loath to raise taxes to fund its expansion and consequently remained heavily reliant on the private sector for its provision. It attempted to pursue a policy that seemed

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‘to ameliorate the worst effects of laissez-faire economic policies in the most vulnerable groups’ (Baldock et al. 2009: 52). In addition, it also pursued ‘gender sameness’ within policy, with policies designed to enable women to work through the provision of ‘non-parental’ childcare together with financial support (Mahon 2001: 5). However, as New Labour moved towards a more futureorientated, social-investment state, the expansion of childcare services was based on advantages for the economy, rather than on benefits for children themselves (Baldock et al. 2009). There was, therefore, ‘a plethora of policy initiatives and legislation (too many to include them all) that have sought to move the “early years” sector from a “patchwork quilt” to a “seamless cover” of joined up services’ (Taggart et al. 2007: 12). As Cohen et al. pointed out, under New Labour, ‘services are expected not only to enable mothers to work but to reduce poverty by breaking a presumed “cycle of deprivation” through “early intervention” and increasing cash transfers’ (2004: 24). Soon after New Labour came into power in 1998, it announced its first National Childcare Strategy. This was followed in 2004 by a revised strategy – Choice for Parents: The Best Start for Children:  A Ten Year Strategy for Childcare, while further revisions in 2007 saw the emergence of the Children’s Plan. While pledging to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and to provide goodquality childcare for all children aged 0–14, the government’s main strategic focus was clearly the economy and on measures that would enable women to take up employment. The key elements of the strategy (see Baldock et al. 2009; and Cohen et al. 2004), therefore, included the following: 1 2 3 4

Integrating education and childcare – providing better quality provision. Making childcare more widely available and accessible especially in deprived areas. Making childcare more affordable. Promoting partnerships with business and allowing the private sector to help fill the need for childcare.

As the then Chancellor Ed Balls proclaimed the plan was to enable England to become ‘the best place in the world for our children and young people to grow up’ (DCSF 2007: 4).

Sure Start and Every Child Matters During its administration the New Labour government introduced over twenty interventions and initiatives as part of its long-term strategy. One of its first initiatives in 1998 was the provision of free early years’ education for four-year-olds, which was later extended to all three-year-olds and two-year-olds in deprived areas. In the same year it introduced the ‘jewel in the crown’ (Parton and Frost 2009: 115) of its policies the Sure Start programme. The aim of the project was to enhance the health, development and future prospects of young children living in deprived communities. Each Sure Start was a ‘one stop shop’ of ‘joined up’ services for children under five and their families, living in the most deprived areas of the UK. They brought together health, childcare, education, play, parental support and home support for parents together with a range of other services such as employment and benefit advice dependent upon local, community needs. In 2003, the New Labour government introduced its Green Paper – Every Child Matters (ECM). With the advent of ECM all agencies providing services for children would have to work together in order to achieve five outcomes for children, in order to ensure that children were able to:

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1 2 3 4 5

Be healthy Stay safe Enjoy and achieve Make a positive contribution Achieve economic well-being

Every Child Matters and the subsequent Children’s Act 2004 extended the remit of Sure Start. As a consequence, in 2005, in order to mainstream the kind of work that was taking place, Sure Start Local Programmes were transformed into integrated Children’s Centres. Significantly too, control of the centres was transferred from central government to Local Authorities to ensure that they became part of the welfare state, and as such could not be easily eradicated by future governments (Baldock et al. 2009: 43). However, as Norman Glass (2005) the former Treasury economist and architect of Sure Start, pointed out, little if anything of the original philosophy of Sure Start remained in the re-conceptualized Children’s Centres but the ‘brand name’ (cited in Ball and Vincent 2005:  560) and that the ‘initial child centred focus (was) in danger of becoming of becoming a “New Deal” for toddlers captured by the employability agenda’ (cited in Lister 2006: 322). As Chitty (2009) pointed out, many aspects of Sure Start could be viewed as a success, while others, like Penn, suggested that Sure Start was a ‘social engineering experiment’ that had ‘grandiose, but vague, policy aims to reduce poverty . . . (which were not) operationalized in any systematic way’ (2007: 196). In fact, Penn goes on to suggest that there was research evidence that actually indicated that ‘levels of child poverty are rising again, despite the government’s efforts’ (Brewer et al. 2007 cited in Penn 2007: 196).

Integrating care and education Recognizing that the ‘split between childcare and education was invalid and dysfunctional’ (Moss 2006:  77), as part of their modernizing agenda to make government departments and services more flexible and efficient, the government moved quickly to place childcare under the auspices and lead of education. Responsibility for childcare, therefore was moved from the Department of Health to the then Department for Education and Employment. The move was to prove significant, because the government’s plans for integration did not stop there and gradually, therefore, a number of state services were reorganized and coordinated around the provision of integrated, holistic services for children. Within government, this approach culminated in the bringing together all services for children and their families, except health, together under the auspices of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the amalgamation of civil service teams working in early years in to the Sure Start Unit, the establishment of a Children’s Minister and also a Children’s Commissioner for each of the UK’s regions. At a local level, as a result of the Children’s Act (2004), Children’s Trusts, Children’s Services Authorities and Safeguarding Children’s Boards led by a Director of Children’s Services were established, again to organize children’s services in a coordinated and holistic fashion. In addition, there was a new duty of cooperation between the different children’s services that was strengthened by a Common Assessment Framework for establishing children’s needs, an integrated system of inspection under Ofsted and a common set of performance indicators.

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Wadsworth and George suggested that while ‘there have been some positive interventions . . . with integrated provision of a range of services e.g. health care, education and welfare being readily available through a “one stop shop” ’ such interventions had ‘not been pursued in a coherent and systematic way and there has been an over reliance on the private sector’ (2009: 315). Although multiagency, integrated working was not a new concept, as Straker and Foster suggest, ‘what clearly emerges from the Every Child Matters initiative is a commitment in terms of both practice and policy to maximize integration between agencies in order to improve communication and encourage the sharing of practice’ (2009: 121). As Roche and Tucker highlight, The impact of Every Child Matters certainly appears to be influential in terms of the way it is transforming structures and processes at both the national and local levels. Every Child Matters has provided government with a framework for shaping practice, particularly as it relates to multidisciplinary working and the expectations of teachers and their managers within schools to support both the preventative and protection elements of safeguarding work . . . yet at the same time this new agenda carries with it a range of problems and challenges that will need to be proactively managed’. (2009: 221)

A curriculum for the early years In 2000, New Labour replaced the earlier Conservative government’s Desirable Learning Goals with its Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage which Chitty suggests met with a very favourable response from many teachers and educationalists’ (2009:  223). The new curriculum guidance heralded a return to an emphasis on learning through play and a greater focus on the outdoors, as the old Desirable Learning Goals were replaced by more ‘child friendly’ Early Learning Goals. However, many educationalists were also critical of the fact that in reality the guidance was neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘enlightened’ (2009: 223). When the Foundation Stage became part of the National Curriculum in 2002, it became more prescriptive and detailed. In 2002, the government also introduced the Birth to Three Matters Framework that was developed to support professionals working with very young children. The Framework was based on four ‘aspects’ that highlighted the interrelationship between children’s growth, learning, development and the environment in which they are cared for. Later, in 2008, the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) was introduced in order to ensure that there was a consistent approach to care and education from birth to the end of the Foundation Stage and also to ensure that children achieved the five outcomes enshrined in Every Child Matters. The EYFS was central to the government’s ten-year Childcare Strategy and brought together The Birth to Three Matters framework, the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, and the National Standards for Under 8s Day Care and Childminding. Focusing on the stages of children’s development rather than on chronological age and adopting a play-based approach to learning, the EYFS provides a statutory set of standards for all registered providers of Early Years care that relate to the development, learning and care of children from birth to five (Teachernet 2009b). While some people welcomed the EYFS, due to its focus on raising the standards of education and care for very young children and for its aim to ensure that children were ready to start school, it has also attracted numerous critics. For example, the media labelled the EYFS a ‘nappy

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curriculum’ (Bingham 2009) and soon after its inception a campaign was established, that included many leading childcare experts and children’s authors, because it was felt that EYFS was overly prescriptive, potentially harmful to the development of children and posed a breach of the human right of parents to have their children educated in accordance with their own philosophies (Open Eye 2010).

The professionalization of the childcare workforce Care work has always been viewed as ‘inferior’ to teaching. In the main this has been due to the fact that, traditionally, the childcare workforce has been characterized by low pay and status, low qualification levels and consisting of a mainly female workforce (99%), generally under twenty-five years old and working in the private sector (see Baldock et al. 2009: 106). When it came into power, New Labour was highly critical of the workforce, suggesting that it was failing to meet the needs of children and that many practitioners were under qualified, with candidates of the right calibre being difficult to recruit. In addition, childcare workers were not considered to be ‘professionals’ due to the often ‘casual’ nature of their work and the fact that they were viewed as having a natural predisposition to their role, which could simply be viewed as substitute mothering (Osgood 2009). With its ambitious targets for the expansion of early childhood care and education, coupled with its drive to raise the quality of such provision, New Labour therefore focused on raising, both the level of qualification and the status of the workforce (Osgood 2009), together with a recognition that the reformed workforce would require new knowledge, skills and competencies (Roche and Tucker 2007). In addition, evidence from research highlighted the correlation between levels of qualifications and the outcomes for children and thus the need for more staff with graduate level qualifications. In 2005, the government established the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC), a non-governmental organization tasked with developing the childcare workforce and enabling the delivery of Every Child Matters. This led to a ladder of qualifications being developed; the identification of a common core of skills and knowledge for all professionals working with children and young people all staff in settings, including managers, to have higher qualification levels and the development of the ‘Early Years Professional’. The professionalization of the early years’ workforce and the emergence of the Early Years Professional were however, met with a considerable degree of controversy, in the main because it was a model of professionalism that was imposed by the government. As Osgood points, out the government’s model values technical competence and a narrowly defined focus upon neo-liberal principles, which can assure transparency, accountability and measurable outcomes (Rose 1999). What this model obscures from view is that ‘professionalism’ in ECEC might exist for its own sake . . . and might expose (the) intrinsic and collective benefits (of such work). (2009: 747)

The development of the Early Years Professional had the potential to complicate the position of the traditional Early Years Teacher. Although both the Early Years Professional and the Early Years Teacher had a similar level of qualification (Level 6), the former came under the aegis of the CWDC while the latter under the aegis of the Teacher Development Agency (TDA) and more importantly

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brought with it the award of ‘qualified teacher status’. Kirk and Broadhead (2007) suggest that, due to their separateness, there was the potential for inter-professional rivalry and tension, especially over roles and responsibilities when both types of professional are employed in the same setting.

Coalition and Conservative governments 2010–17 – continuity and change According to Lloyd (2015:  144), early childhood education and care was slow to appear on the Coalition government’s policy agenda and ‘would prove to be one of the more toxic policy areas in terms of the Coalition partnership’. Between 2010 and 2012, several influential reports were published that were to inform the Coalition government’s policy (Faulkner and Coates 2013: 30): 1 2 3 4 5

Field Report (2010) provided recommendations designed to lift families out of poverty. Allen Report (2011) reported on the impact of early intervention. Munro Review (2011) reported on issues relating to child protection. Tickell Review: The Early Years:  Foundations for Life, Health and Learning (2011) provided recommendations for the revision of the EYFS. Nutbrown Review (2012) provided recommendation related to early education and care qualifications.

Stewart (2015: 2) suggests, ‘Taken together, their reports made a powerful case for more investment in services and support for young families . . . and the social mobility strategy published in April 2011 emphasised the “Foundation Years” as a key focus for government attempts to boost [social] mobility’. In 2012, the Coalition government produced its strategic plan  – Supporting Families in the Foundation Years. The report, based on the recommendations of the various reviews mentioned earlier, set out the government’s vision for an early years’ provision that had ‘early intervention at its heart’ (DfE/DoH 2012: 5, cited in Faulkner and Coates 2013: 32). The Coalition government’s aim for early childhood policy was to create ‘a society where opportunities are equal regardless of background’ by providing good-quality early years’ education, affordable and easily accessible childcare and a stronger and better-qualified early years’ workforce (DfE/HM Treasury 2015: 2). The problem for the Coalition was that this had to be achieved against a backdrop of austerity measures that the Treasury introduced in order to reduce the debt left behind by the previous government in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007. Lloyd (2015: 146) suggests that ‘the Coalition’s stance to early years and childcare reform has been to respond to the legacy it inherited rather than to enter the family policy arena with a strategic programme.’ While we do see a degree of continuity in the Coalition’s policymaking in the retention of some aspects of the previous government’s reforms, we also see the eradication of policies and new policy directions that display a change of emphasis with initiatives that are more focused on the economy and which are more market orientated (2015: 146). So, for example, while the Coalition government pledged to retain Sure Start, many centres were eventually closed due

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to a lack of funding because Local Authorities were required to divert monies away from such initiatives into Coalition initiatives such as the funding of education for two-year-olds (Faulkner and Coates 2013). The Coalition also found subtle ways in which to change or abandon the previous governments’ policy initiatives. Every Child Matters, the flagship of New Labour, was one such policy which was quietly dismantled. As Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State, reported to the Education Select Committee, ‘I’ve got no problems with Every Child Matters as a list, but I do think it’s important that we recognize that it should be policed in a hands-off way’ (https://www.teachingtimes.com/ kb/23/working-with-other-agencies-htm. Accessed 27 January 2018). Thus, there was a gradual moving away from the rhetoric and language of Every Child Matters with phrases such as ‘Every Child Matters’ or ‘the five outcomes’, ‘safeguarding’ and ‘children’s trusts’ being replaced by ‘help children to achieve more’, ‘child protection’ and ‘local areas, better, fairer, services’ (Puffett 2010). In addition, the state started to take a less prescriptive role in multiagency working and the focus of education started to shift away from notions of well-being to focus on children’s achievement. One of the first things the Coalition government did was to expand free early education to include, not only two- to three-year-olds, but also two-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds. Later, in 2013, the More Great Childcare report extended the offer of free ‘early learning’ to 40 per cent of two-year-olds. To facilitate the growth in the required number of places the government the proposals included the following: 1

Helping parents arrange more informal childcare by allowing them to pay a neighbour or relative not registered with Ofsted for up to three hours of childcare a day. 2 Introducing new childminder agencies. 3 Encouraging more schools to offer nursery provision and to extend provision from 8 am to 6 pm. Helping schools to offer affordable after-school and holiday care 4 5 Helping good nurseries expand their business. (See DfE/DoH 2015: 2)

In response to policy initiatives such as these there has been a huge growth in early years’ provision over the past twenty years. While state provision is still relatively small (about 9%) private sector provision has grown significantly to meet the demand. As a result, there is a mixed market economy consisting of ‘a variety of providers, with a number of different underlying aims, structures and models’ (Hillman and Williams 2015: 20). According to Lloyd and Potter (2014), England now has the most privatized and marketized early childcare provision in Europe. This expansion of free early education and care has been accompanied by an increase in government expenditure to help make childcare more affordable for parents. In 2013, the Coalition published the More Affordable Childcare strategy which detailed several measures to help parents including a new tax-free childcare scheme for working parents, support for childcare for lower income families via the new Universal Credit scheme and from 2015 the introduction of a new Early Years Pupil Premium giving extra funding to providers (DfE/DoH 2015). To ensure the quality of the provision Ofsted was tasked with reforming the inspection system.

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Policy initiatives under New Labour increased the focus on the quality of the early years’ workforce and put in place a process of professionalization of the workforce with the introduction of the Early Years Professional. The Nutbrown Review (2012) however, revealed a chaotic system with over four hundred early years’ qualifications covering a range of different standards and made recommendations for a more streamlined framework. The review also raised concerns about standards of literacy and numeracy among workers. While the government only accepted a few of the report’s recommendations it introduced new reforms aimed at raising the quality of the early years’ workforce. In 2013, in their More Great Childcare strategy the government introduced two new qualifications: 1

The early years’ teacher (EYT) – a specialist in early childhood development, working with babies and young children from birth to five years in schools and early years’ settings. 2 The early years’ educator qualification – a level 3 (A level standard) qualification that meets the early years’ educator criteria set by the National College for Teaching and Leadership. The reforms, like those of the previous government, initially came in for considerable criticism, particularly the new EYT qualification because it did not confer qualified teacher status (QTS). Many felt that the introduction of a non-QTS qualification was ‘a retrograde step, perhaps not quite a return to a “Mum’s Army”, but an undermining of the hard-fought battle to keep parity of status for all areas of the teaching profession’ (Faulkner and Coates 2013: 21). Further criticisms were levelled at the changes the Coalition government made to the EYFS in 2014. With a greater focus on preparing children for school, the revisions retained much of the 2008 framework although the curriculum was simplified and made less prescriptive by reducing the learning goals to seventeen and by having fewer points of assessment points.

Impacts of the reforms Availability, affordability and quality What we do know is that quality  – in terms of content, delivery and organization  – is of central importance to the outcomes of early years education and childcare. This is particularly true for disadvantaged groups. Yet the rapid expansion of provision seen over the past two decades may have privileged quantity over quality, and not given adequate consideration to the detailed aspects of early years settings that drive positive outcomes. (Hillman and Williams 2015: 30)

According to Hillman and Williams, ‘The past two decades have seen nothing short of a revolution in the priority and pace of change in public policy for childcare’ (2015: 6). There has been a considerable expansion in childcare provision, however, because successive governments have been wedded to the notion of a mixed market economy in provision and parental choice, most of this increase has been provided by the private sector (2015: 6). Despite this increase in provision, childcare options are still often dependent upon where people live, resulting in a sort of ‘post code lottery’ in terms of choice (Murphy et al. 2009). While New Labour pledged to provide ‘a

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childcare market in which every parent can access affordable, good quality childcare’ (Ball and Vincent 2005: 559), successive governments’ attempts to do this have failed to provide ‘meaningful choice’ for many parents, particularly those on low incomes. Therefore, although there has been a growth in provision and an increased uptake of childcare by parents, Hillman and Williams (2015) suggest that there is evidence that participation is still proportionally much lower in disadvantaged groups and also among minority ethnic groups. Another issue that successive governments have had to address is the affordability of childcare. Government spending on childcare has risen considerably over the past twenty years, although more recently there has been a slight downturn in expenditure due to the impact of the Coalition government’s austerity measures. A large proportion of government expenditure in the early years has gone into the provision of free education and care, which has been greatly extended over the years so that it now includes all two-year-olds. Working parents have received the money for free childcare through a variety of measures that have included Nursery Education Vouchers, Tax Credits, Childcare Tax Credit as part of the Working Tax Credit and now Universal Credit and they are able to ‘choose’ to use it to pay for any regulated form of childcare provision. In reality however, the money is paid directly to the provider. Thus, Hillman and Williams (2015: 23) suggest the funding of early education and care is in effect ‘supply-side’ funding albeit ‘demand-led’. Hillman and Williams also point out that there have been questions as to whether the additional money for free early education and childcare announced as part of the Conservative government’s More Affordable Childcare strategy is actually value for money, because the recipients are mainly parents who would have paid for childcare anyway. While the cost of childcare to parents as a percentage of disposable income has actually decreased, England still has some of the highest childcare costs in the OECD (2006). Ensuring the quality of early years’ provision has also been a major thrust of the policy agenda, particularly, in light of the rapid expansion that has occurred within the sector. According to Hillman and Williams (2015: 27), three main mechanisms have been used by governments of all persuasions in order to improve the quality of provision: 1 2 3

Specification of staff quality, qualification or ratios Monitoring and inspection regimes Specification of curriculum or expected child outcomes

Research evidence (see Hillman and Williams 2015) has shown that the quality of early years’ provision is inextricably linked to the quality of the practitioners who deliver it and particularly the level of qualification that they hold. Improving the quality of the childcare workforce has, therefore, been central to successive government reforms and has resulted in the development of new criteria for non- graduate entrants (who are now termed early years’ educators), a rationalized qualifications framework and the professionalization of the workforce. While graduate level qualifications such as the Early Years Professional, and more recently the Early Years Teacher, have been introduced, they lack QTS, and the workforce, therefore, continues to lack equity with the teaching profession and, as a consequence, is unable to benefit from the pay, conditions and staff development that such status would confer. Early years settings that are graduate led have been found to be the most effective, with a better quality of provision and better outcomes for the children in their care

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(Taggart et al. 2007; Hillman and Williams 2015). However, despite their domination of the childcare market private and voluntary sector providers tend to employ fewer graduates and have lower staff to children ratios than school-based provision and overall quality of provision is lower among such providers. Hillman and Williams therefore question whether the mixed market model of early education and childcare provision can ‘provide consistently high-quality childcare’ (2015: 6). Governments have also invested in other measures to ensure the quality of early years’ provision including enhanced quality control and accountability mechanisms and an improved regulatory system under the aegis of Ofsted. This has placed the early years’ sector under the same critical gaze as the rest of the education sector and it is now subject to the same rigorous standards and accountability regime in the name of quality. Raising the quality of children’s’ learning experiences through curriculum reform has been part of successive government’s reforms. Despite many misgivings and controversies over the development of a curriculum for the early years, the EYFS is now widely accepted and respected (Hillman and Williams 2015). Devised as a method to ensure standards and consistency in terms of focus and outcomes across the sector, the curriculum framework has undergone a number of revisions by successive governments. While concerns regarding the curriculum being too prescriptive have been addressed over time other concerns, such as school starting age and the downgrading of play-based activities continue (Hillman and Williams 2015).

Parents, families and the economy The radical reforms to early childhood education and care have brought both benefits and changes for children and their families. There is strong research evidence to suggest that goodquality early childhood education has a positive effect on child outcomes, particularly children from disadvantaged backgrounds and that this positive effect can be sustained well into teenage years. Research also points to the fact that only good-quality early years’ education and care has a short-term, and in some cases, a longer-term beneficial effect on social mobility (Lloyd and Potter 2014: 78). According to government statistics in 2017 there were 3.7 million children (27% of all children) in the UK are living in poverty, a slight increase on the previous year but, overall, since 1997 the number of children in poverty has gradually been declining. The vast majority of children in poverty live in lone parent families (see http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/ SN07096/SN07096.pdf, accessed 20 February 2015). According to Lloyd and Potter (2014), the evidence relating to the reforms impacts on maternal employment (and therefore family incomes) are difficult to determine, but Hillman and Williams (2015) suggest that they have been modest. Hillman and Williams argue that This is perhaps unsurprising given that so much provision is not necessarily designed to fit working patterns, and the design of work incentives could be improved to reduce the very high marginal deduction rates (where, for example, a high proportion of additional earnings is lost in reduced tax credits or benefits) faced by some subgroups. (2015: 7)

Lloyd and Potter (2015) point to the fact that research evidence from the United States and Norway points to the fact that promoting maternal employment through a rapid expansion of early childcare

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can only deliver good outcomes if quality of provision is maintained. They suggest that if the government continues to use investment in early childhood education and care as a vehicle for social mobility and economic prosperity then there should be no ‘trade-off between quality and quantity’. England has, however, been more successful than other European countries in using early education and care to tackle disadvantage. Concerns have been raised about the direction that some of the policies have taken and their agenda in terms of the views of children and their parents that they promoted. Policies for example, have on the one hand been seen to ‘invest’ in children’s futures, but on the other they have served to ‘regulate’ and control them and their parents (Lister 2006: 315). Lister suggests that there has been a ‘strong whiff of authoritarianism about the reforms’ that has been made ‘to ensure that parents (typically mothers) turn their children into responsible citizens’ (2006:  326). Families have been viewed simultaneously as being the main source of care for their children and also as the main reason for them failing. As Faulkner and Coates (2013) point out, while improving social mobility and educational outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged children have been key policy drivers, more recently there has been increasing concern on the emphasis within the revised EYFS on preparing children for school and particularly the extension of education to all twoyear-olds and feel that this is leading to what the OECD (2006) has termed the ‘schoolification’ of early childhood: In the past two decades I think we’ve seen English children becoming . . . ever increasingly subject to adult agendas, very often to the exclusion of their own. . . . Schoolification is evident in the pressing down . . . of literacy and numeracy on children’s lives in early childhood education and care settings. Adultification is evident in commercialization, lack of opportunities for children to play, and . . . this focus on school readiness, this focus once they’re in primary school of having to meet their targets all the time. (WIES 2012: 17, cited in Faulkner and Coates 2013: 31)

Summary Since 1997, dramatic changes have occurred in the way services for the care and education of young children have been delivered. While governments together with their particular political whims come and go, the main thrust for the plethora of policy initiatives that have emerged has been a desire to improve educational outcomes for children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The focus, however, has been on policies designed to increase social mobility and economic competitiveness rather than an increase in children’s well-being. Initiatives therefore, have focused mainly on families living in the most deprived areas and in facilitating women, particularly those demonized lone mothers, to enter into the labour market through the provision of free or affordable, high-quality childcare. By drawing parents into a partnership with the state, the government has become engaged in a ‘social engineering project’ that sought to alter parental attitudes and aspirations, in order to move them out of poverty and benefit dependency and to improve the future life chances of their children. In order to achieve this, the private sector was enlisted to help to provide the necessary growth in provision, the workforce was professionalized, Ofsted was brought in to regulate services and ensure that

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quality was maintained, and a new EYFS Framework was implemented to ensure a consistency of children’s experiences so that children could achieve their potential and were prepared for school. Despite all the reforms and vast sums of money that have been invested in the initiatives there is still little evidence of real success. Child poverty has declined, the initiatives have had little effect on employment rates in the target groups and England remains a very unequal society which was considered to be one of the ‘worst places in the world for children to grow up’. While there have been attempts to raise the status and professionalism of those working in the childcare sector, a two-tiered workforce still exists, one that is overloaded by change and initiatives, bedevilled by standards and accountability, dogged by a notion of professionalism that simply relates to competence, relentlessly scrutinized, accused of being shambolic and disorganized yet, as Osgood (2009) suggests, simultaneously viewed as the ‘saviour of the economy’. Perhaps, as the rhetoric of government around eliminating poverty and increasing social mobility changes those working in early childhood and care may be seen as the architects of a future meritocracy.

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9 Teachers’ professionalism, practice and policy Introduction The 1950s are considered to have represented a ‘golden era’ for teachers and for teacher professionalism. At this time, teachers were viewed as ‘partners with the State in the deliberations of policy, able to influence the direction and control of the system’ (Lawn 1999, cited in Gillard 2005: 176). Teachers were free to decide what to teach and how to teach it, albeit within parameters influenced by the requirements of public examinations. By the late 1970s, however, that golden era was over. As we have argued in Chapter 2, economic recession fuelled concerns about the failure of the education system. Teachers and their adoption of so-called progressive teaching methods were held responsible for the failings of the system. From 1979, the Conservative government set about ‘putting teachers in their place’ and instigating an ‘era of name and shame’ (Gillard 2005: 177) in which teachers were no longer partners with the state but became its servants. As Ball highlights, Conservative neoliberals saw [teachers] as dangerously self-interested, a producer lobby resistant to change and risk averse, while for neoconservatives they were dangerously radical and progressive, responsible for too much change and politically motivated, not to be trusted . . . Such ‘blaming’ was tied to a supposed ‘lack of accountability’ and provided the legitimation for greater oversight, control of and intervention into teachers’ work. (2008: 143–4)

Throughout the Conservative years the teaching profession was held in derision by many of those involved in policymaking and, under New Labour, teachers fared only slightly better, with policies continuing to ‘undermine teacher morale and status’ (Gillard 2005). As a result, as Ball points out, ‘Inside classrooms teachers are [now] caught between the imperatives of prescription and the disciplines of performance. Their practice is both “steered” and “rowed”. It is still the case that teachers are not trusted’ (2008: 150). According to Beck, the policy packages that New Labour in particular used to reform the teaching profession – professional standards, performance management, target setting and professional development – were formed into a sort of ‘governmental

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project’ that has ‘sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and the agencies of the state’ (Beck 2008: 119 cited in Storey 2009: 2). Policymakers could not remain entirely indifferent to the risks attached to ‘de-professionalizing’ teachers. Placing education at the heart of modernizing policy agendas implied that teachers should enjoy high professional status best served by a measure of autonomy. As we shall see with reference to the Coalition government elected in 2010, policymakers can give voice to both a rhetoric of educational standards, replete with the close supervision of teachers, and a rhetoric of the need to free teachers from ‘bureaucracy’. The effect can be to create policy paradoxes and a kind of schizophrenia when it comes to how teachers are regarded.

Teacher professionalism ‘How should we understand the role of the teacher?’ (Whitty 2006b: 1) and how appropriate are existing notions of teacher professionalism in the current context. Professionalism is not an easy concept to define and has more recently become a word that is ‘synonymous with occupation’ (Morrell 2003: 1). Indeed, the word is often used these days to mean doing your job well, whatever kind of job that may be. Pickard and Powell argue that traditionally professionalism has been defined somewhat benignly and simplistically as the possession and exercise of exclusive skills related to a body of knowledge onerously acquired and, in the public sector at least, an altruistic attitude towards those who are the object of professional attention. (2005: 2)

In similar fashion, Leaton Gray (2006: 309) argues that evidence from the literature suggests the following characteristics of a profession:  the possession of an exclusive body of knowledge; the ability to determine own fees; autonomy with respect to working practices; self-regulation by members of the profession; promotion of members interests within society; guaranteed integrity, standards and ethical codes of practice; and altruism. When defining what constitutes a professional role therefore, we often include such notions as having undergone theoretical training, having a dedication to service and possessing a degree of autonomy (Morrell 2003). This privilege is often accompanied by the acceptance of working long hours, going beyond the ‘norm’ and having a special agreement and trust between the professional and the ‘clients’. Whether teachers quite meet  all these professional criteria is a matter of some debate. Leaton Gray suggests that ‘teaching is not necessarily a profession in the traditional sense of the word’ (2006: 310). While some aspects of teachers’ working practices can be viewed as professional, other aspects, such as, for example, the fact that teachers do not determine their own pay, nor do they have autonomy over their working practices, together with the lack of trust invested in them actually deny them true professional status. In fact, teachers have never been able to exercise the degree of professional autonomy to regulate their own affairs that other professions like medicine and the law have enjoyed (Whitty 2006b). Professionalism itself has been critically reappraised in recent years. Professionalism is not considered in contemporary literature to be a fixed category but is one that changes and shifts

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according to the social and political context (Ozga (2008). Whitty (2006b) acknowledges that recent views on teacher professionalism have become less fixed while noting the growing feminist critique of a concept of professionalism that it is exclusive and patriarchal. Some teachers themselves, dislike the term as being essentially elitist. However, over the past decade, the government’s own model of professionalism has come to dominate the agenda by demanding certain forms of behaviour in return for salaries. Whitty (2006b citing Sachs 2003) defines the modern professional as one who does as s/he is told efficiently while being fully accountable for their actions. Nevertheless, notions of teacher professionalism remain many and varied. According to the ATL Union, ‘teaching is an intellectual profession, based on a high degree of general and systemised knowledge’ (2008: 1). However, they acknowledge that the teaching is also practical, and has a wide range of practices and methods while also having a basis in care and responsibility. As a consequence, as professionals, teachers have to be highly adaptable. Hargreaves (1998, cited in Hill 2007: 7) refers to teaching as ‘emotional practice’ which needs ‘emotional understanding’, while Mahony and Hextall insist that ‘teaching involves relationships between people whose persona, social, economic, cultural and political identities and positionings are complex’ and that to manage such relationships requires ‘sophisticated professional skills’ (1997:  152). The awareness that, as professionals, teachers have to reconcile their own values with those of the institutions, in which they work, could be key to understanding some of the tensions within the teaching profession. Those who try to hold on to old ideas of what it means to be a good teacher have sometimes had difficulty in embracing ‘the new managerial role expected of them’ Hill (2007: 17). However, the somewhat gloomy appraisal of teacher professionalism which has dominated policy-related analysis, has been tempered by other accounts emphasizing teachers’ continued subscription to traditional professional ideals. Dawson (1994) has argued that teachers’ professionalism is both an outside/in and an inside/out process. The former is when teachers’ professionalism is defined by the extent to which they succeed in meeting policy requirements. Inside out professionalism on the other hand, refers to success which comes to teachers, for example, from continuing to work collegially rather than competitively, or from seeing children as more than their SAT scores. Stronach et. al. (2002) took these arguments further to argue that teachers rarely locate themselves in one professional camp or another. Instead, they juggle the requirements of external policy with a sense of professional self-worth vested in classrooms and staffrooms. Policymakers too sometimes juggle two competing notions of teachers as skilled knowledgeable professionals and/or as misguided workers who need to be told how to teach and kept constantly under surveillance to ensure the right practices are followed. It is a paradox which helps to explain some of shifting patterns of educational policy.

New Labour, new professionalism? The importance New Labour attached to education as the driver for its ‘modernizing’ agenda, meant that teacher professionalism was highly significant. An insight into the Blair government’s thinking on the issue is provided by Michael Barber, a key figure in policymaking at the time.

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Barber (2005 cited in Whitty 2006b:  2; see also Dainton 2005:  161) presents an often contested narrative of four distinct phases with regard to the development of teachers’ professional status: 1

Uninformed professionalism – up to the 1980s (alternatively seen as the golden age of teacher autonomy). 2 Uninformed prescription – during the Thatcher years leading up to the National Curriculum (compliance). 3 Informed prescription – under New Labour where we see the beginnings of ‘evidence-based’ policies and the introduction of standards for teacher training. 4 Informed professionalism – from 2005 to the present where, having decided that teachers were to be trusted again, they are once more be granted a degree of freedom. Needless to say, Barber’s views have been challenged. Thus, Whitty (2006b) observes that this final phase of ‘Informed Professionalism’ has never materialized due to the failure of phase three. As early as 1997, Whitty and Mortimore had predicted the outcome of the reforms embarked upon by New Labour and had warned particularly against the continuing tendency to blame teachers that had begun in the early 1980s. Yet, the ensuing reforms were a response to this perceived failure by teachers to deal successfully with society’s ills (Whitty 2006b). New Labour’s education policies were designed to modernize and transform all aspects of the education system and the teaching profession was no exception. In 1998 it launched a Green Paper, Teachers: meeting the challenge of change in which it set out its proposals for the ‘most fundamental reform of the teaching profession since state education began’ (DfES 1998 cited in Furlong 2008: 728). The government’s concerns about the teaching profession were numerous and many were longstanding (see Furlong 2008 and Whitty 2006c). They considered the ‘Old Professionalism’ that emphasized status based on years of service and exclusivity to be outdated and so, while addressing these concerns, the government also sought to transform the teaching profession and to bring about a ‘New Professionalism’, one they considered more relevant to teaching in the twenty-first century (Furlong 2008; Storey 2009). This was to be achieved, according to Furlong (2008), through a series of measures aimed at the following: 1

Make teaching a more attractive career in order to improve the supply and retention of good quality teachers. 2 Reforming the workforce and working practices in schools to facilitate teachers working in partnership with others in the school and to also offer them greater flexibility and career progression. 3 Reforming Continual Professional Development (CPD), to make it more school based and to ensure that there was a strong evidential base for any changes in practice  – so-called ‘Extended Professionalism’ (see Trowler 2003: 22). 4 Making teachers far more accountable, not only to their schools but also to parents, pupils, the wider community and, more importantly, to the government. According to Storey (2009: 4), this ‘New Professionalism’ was ‘about an exchange’. He goes on to say that by accepting the proposed reforms the government offered, teachers were given ‘more “rights”. . . an assurance of rewards for success for high performers in the classroom as well as in formal leadership

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positions, career-stage promotion opportunities within a structured framework; and professional development to underpin this’. In addressing these concerns and in the name of ‘raising standards, the New Labour government, therefore, put in place a series of measures to facilitate the transformation of the profession which resulted in new forms of training, new working practices, new workers in the classroom and a new language of performance and appraisal’ (Ball 2008). This included the following: 1 Changes to teacher education (see below). 2 Better pay but also performance-related pay – an end to national pay bargaining with the establishment of the School Teacher’s Review Body to advise on pay and conditions, bursaries to attract trainees to shortage subject areas like maths and science and the potential for teachers to be rewarded with higher salaries for skills and experience by passing the ‘threshold’ or by becoming an ‘Excellent’ or ‘Advanced Skills Teacher’ (AST). 3 More opportunities for promotion – an emphasis on school leadership with the establishment of the National College and Fast Track Teaching Programmes to encourage teachers to take up leadership roles. 4 ‘Workforce remodelling’  – providing teachers with more time to prepare lessons and also more ‘help’ in the classroom. This involved the deregulation of teaching to allow non-teaching staff to undertake activities that had previously been the ‘exclusive’ domain of the teacher, for example, Higher Level Teaching Assistants undertaking teaching activities. A more ‘collaborative professionalism’ was suggested with teachers working together and with others. 5 The Every Child Matters agenda which introduced a range of other professionals into the classroom setting, removing again some of the autonomy of the teacher. ECM introduced the notion of ‘inter-professional’ working and also provided an opportunity for teachers, and other professionals working with young children, to conceive their practice and role in a ‘multi-professional’ context in which the traditional excluding barriers of role, code and practice are removed. In addition, ECM also introduced new ways of teachers engaging with the wider community, for example, through the Extended Schools Initiative. 6 A more ‘managed professionalism’  – with the government taking control over teachers’ working lives by ensuring a direct alignment of professional goals and standards with government policy through the use of government targets based on national testing, national strategies with national training to facilitate compliance, professional standards, continuing professional development linked to targets and standards, constant appraisal, observation of practice, individual targets and performance-related pay – making education a profession governed by the highest levels of surveillance and accountablity (George and Clay 2008).

The Coalition government and teacher professionalism The general election result of 2010 was indecisive. The Conservatives won the most seats but insufficient to form a government and therefore agreed to a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. David

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Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, became prime minister, and he appointed Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education. Gove had been shadow Education Secretary before the election and had already set out his policy stall in a series of speeches in 2009–10 (see, for example, ‘what is Education for? Gove 2009). In essence, his beliefs which were to shape Coalition government policy were as follows: 1

Teachers priorities should be focussed on education rather than the expansive agenda set by New Labour and exemplified by Every Child Matters. 2 Schools needed to teach ‘subject disciplines’ centred upon a traditional content which constituted every child’s intellectual inheritance and cultural capital. 3 The powers of teachers to guarantee good behaviour were to be increased. Gove believed that reform of education along such lines would ensure each child received the kind of education which enhanced social mobility, thereby countering the evidence that growing inequality was becoming a major feature of contemporary society. Delivering these reforms was dependent on recruiting and retaining talented teachers, something Gove was convinced was more likely to happen in Academy schools, free from all those troubling local authority teacher pay and conditions of service requirements. Once in office, Gove trod the familiar policy path of issuing a White Paper, The Importance of Teaching (2010), setting up an independent review into teacher standards (reported 2011), and then issuing new Teachers’ Standards (effective from September 2012). The initial White Paper made much of the role of education as a mechanism for social mobility and the growing international evidence that seemingly once again, schools in the UK were falling behind standards in other countries. The Standards Review (2012) however, placed greater emphasis on ‘good teaching’ (high expectations, a commitment to progress/secure subject knowledge/effective assessment, managing behaviour to ensure a learning environment) and good personal and professional conduct. The latter were ‘non-negotiable’ in that they were required to be met by all teachers, irrespective of position while the Teaching Standards could be used to assess teachers at various points in their career, from teacher trainee through to outstanding teacher. The Personal and Professional Conduct standards were largely a statement of the obvious (high expectations, tolerance, understanding of statutory responsibilities, etc.) except that teachers were now required to uphold ‘British values’ and to monitor pupils’ beliefs to ensure that they were not being exploited or breaking the law. The Coalition government’s Teachers’ Standards policy was therefore something of a microcosm of the themes of this book. They exist because policymakers regard education as absolutely central to both the economic and social well-being of the country: economic because an educated workforce will out produce less well-educated workers elsewhere; and social because schools are mechanisms through which social mobility can be achieved, thereby addressing issues of inequality. Policy has to command support, though, and Gove was convinced that the teacher standards he inherited from New Labour were over complicated. Simplification would ensure that not just teachers would understand the criteria on which they were being judged but parents too would more readily appreciate the work that teachers were doing. As we have seen, ideology and contingency always intertwine with policy. ‘British values’ was a clear reference to current concerns

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about Islamic extremism and were an ideological land grab to declare widely held liberal values as distinctively British. At one level, the Coalition government’s Teachers’ Standards were but the latest step down the road of de-professionalizing/re-professionalizing of teachers familiar since the 1980s. However, it has also been argued (Goepel 2012) that in making the more technical and assessable aspects of teaching (good lesson planning, managing behaviour, etc.) the criteria for entry to teaching and promotion, the essence of professionalism contained in the non-negotiable professional conduct criteria was marginalized. In seeking to simplify the standards by which teachers are judged, Michael Gove has bequeathed an eviscerated version of teacher professionalism to his successors. It is worth noting that this has been an intensely English policy experience. Scotland has retained its General Teaching Council and continues to give prominence to social justice as the sine qua non of education and, therefore, a defining characteristic of professionalism. Wales too, has resisted narrowing the professional qualities of teacher professionalism. In neither country, though, are policymakers entirely free from the itch to link educational standards to measurable teacher qualities through which teachers can be held to account.

The impact of policy on teaching To what extent and in what ways policy has impacted on classroom practice in the last thirty years is difficult to assess. The National Curriculum in all its forms has clearly prescribed what teachers can teach in maintained schools although not academies. The teaching of mathematics and English in particular, have been shaped by the pressing need for all schools to produce good SAT results in order to be judged at the very minimum as satisfactory by Ofsted. The picture for more specific policies is more mixed. Thus, Brain et al. (2006) in their study of the implementation of New Labour policies make two telling points: first, teachers can still be located on a continuum of those who conform to policy and those who resist it; secondly, policy implementation depends partly on accessibility. Support, especially by commercial companies producing effective resources, can be crucial. New Labour’s emphasis on Every Child Matters and the move away from the focus on teachers’ skills to a principle of more collective responsibility may not have been entirely negative. However, it was pursued in a manner that actually deskilled teachers or de-professionalized them. A generation of young teachers who have been told what to do, how to download lesson plans and how to follow national guidance on behaviour management may be incapable of defining their own role and may, in fact, accept their new status as merely that of a ‘technician’. At a more fundamental level, both practice and professional identities have been adversely affected by policies which have denied the distinctive expertise of teachers. If a professional group is not seen to possess distinctive knowledge and skills, their professional status is thrown into doubt. Thus, the New Labour policy of ‘workforce remodelling’ whereby teaching assistants could teach whole classes, has, according to Thompson, ‘undermined the professional status of teachers [and continues] to challenge both the serenity and the identity of teachers wherever and whenever there is pressure on resources’ (2006: 199). She suggests, for example, that permitting Higher Level

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Teaching Assistants to take lessons devalues the professional training and knowledge base of the teacher. It also, she points out denies the fact that the level of training and the knowledge base of the teacher is predicated on the notion that it will return the best outcomes for children and young people. The Coalition government took the policy of workforce remodelling to a whole new level by simply abandoning the requirement that academy and free school teachers be professionally trained at all. As Whitty (2006b) points out, having people without teaching qualifications left in total charge of classrooms suggests that there is nothing special about teachers’ professional expertise. According to Gunter (2007), allowing others – bursars, technicians, classroom assistants and so on – to carry out roles that have traditionally been undertaken by teachers, results in a struggle between teachers who wish to retain their traditional professional identity and privilege, and the culture of business management that now pervades schools. It is a culture which seeks to abandon old professional identities by opening them up to market forces in the name of flexibility and efficiency. The focus too of the ‘Professional Standards’ (whichever version we consider) remains firmly on subject knowledge and classroom practice and also tends to ‘marginalise professional knowledge and understanding which go beyond those limitations’ (George and Clay 2008: 107). Thus, Pickard and Powell (2005) comment on Early Years’ colleagues’ feelings that government has ignored the knowledge of a largely female workforce in favour of ‘auditable skills’, while Hill (2007) poses the question of whether or not the much-quoted emphasis on the ‘reflective practitioner’ is, in fact, just another form of self-surveillance. Small wonder that an inevitable effect of constant criticism and distrust has been the growing uncertainty teachers are experiencing about their own ability, identity and role in a twenty-first education system.

Changing identities It is clear that policy has a profound impact on teachers’ professionalism in both how they are regarded by others and how they see themselves. The latter becomes caught up with issues of identity which will ultimately determine the quality of their classroom practice. There is a rich sociological tradition examining teachers’ work and identity (see, for example, Nias 1989, Ozga 1988, Hargreaves 1994) which help to explain teachers’ worlds. As we have argued earlier, educational policy exists in both a world as it is believed to be and how policymakers want it to be. So it is with teachers. Thus, Korthagen argues, teachers ‘have long sought to question “what kind of teacher am I?” and also “what kind of teacher do I want to be?” ’ (cited in Black 2008: 4). Providing an answer to such questions has generated considerable research interest. One such study, the VITAE (Variations in Teachers’ Work, Lives and Effectiveness Project: DfES 2001–6), highlighted a number of conceptualizations or ‘scenarios of being a teacher’ (Day and Saunders 2006: 267–8): 1 2 3

The Ideal – teaching as service – wanting to make a difference. The Cynical – teaching as compliance to external designated standards and prescriptions. Reality – teachers as professionals, committed to making a difference and having to sustain that commitment against all odds and often at some personal expense.

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4 Sustained commitment – teachers who are able to maintain their professional identity and commitment throughout the different phases of their career. The findings of the VITAE study suggest that teachers with greater commitment and a greater sense of personal identity tend to be more effective teachers. The scenarios presented could also be interpreted as representing aspects of the contemporary teachers’ potential ‘lifecycle’. Many teachers enter the profession with an idealistic view of what it is to be a teacher – they want to make a difference, to have a positive effect on the lives of their pupils. They have either been inspired by good teachers or wish to address the poor teaching they encountered by becoming a good teacher themselves. Later, many teachers find, that in order to survive, they simply have to comply – the constant regimes of appraisal, testing, standards and inspections force them to conform and to mould their practice to suit the government’s whim of the day, rather than to their own needs and those of the individual pupils whom they teach. For many teachers then, the reality of teaching becomes a subjugation of their own identity as a teacher which can result in stress and disillusionment and may eventually result in them leaving the profession. Facing up to the reality of teaching and to disillusionment has inevitably led to an exodus of large numbers of teachers from the profession. Reasons cited for the decision to leave teaching often relate to school management systems, feeling unsupported by management in the face of an excessive workload and pupils’ unreasonable behaviour. Many teachers move to jobs outside teaching where they feel they would be able to show more creativity and independent thinking; ironically both these aspects were previously thought to be part of the attraction of teaching as a profession (Ross 2002). Ross also points out that this may be an indication that we are losing our most creative teachers. The imposition of targets and performativity were also cited as having a negative impact on professional autonomy while others seek to reconcile the dramatically different image of the teacher as technocrat with the teacher as instinctive and imaginative practitioner, causing a fracturing of identity. Interestingly, more men than women seem to be leaving the profession. Could this be, interpreted as women’s greater ability to adapt, or, in fact, be evidence of their greater compliance? Some teachers however, manage to sustain their commitment as a teacher by redefining themselves and thereby may avoid leaving the profession altogether. A study by Troman and Woods (2000) identified three strategies that were adopted by primary teachers who had all experienced sufficient stress to necessitate a career-break of some kind. The strategies were defined as retreatism, downshifting and self-actualization. A number of studies have charted the dramatic increase in stress-related illness affecting teachers since 1988 and suggest that Intensification leads to reduced time for relaxation and re-skilling, causes chronic and persistent work overload, reduces quality of service and separates the conceptualisation from the execution of tasks, making teachers dependent on outside expertise and reducing them to technicians. (Troman and Woods 2000: 3)

Increased casualization of teaching, characterized by temporary and short-term contracts with increased reliance on supply teachers, especially in inner-city and challenging schools, has led many teachers to retreat to the position of abandoning ambition in favour of just being able to

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cope – ‘What for some people had once been a vocation now became just a job’ (2000: 8). This was deemed to be a retreating strategy, that is, teachers were submitting to and accepting change as inevitable. Some decided to ‘downshift’ by accepting a reduced workload and demotion, while others sought to redevelop their identities by escaping altogether. Sometimes this might involve seeking out a school with values more similar to their own while others found greater satisfaction transferring to a job outside of teaching, yet, ironically, retaining their ‘teacher identity’ in that new locus of employment, taking on a nurturing or training role for colleagues. As Troman and Woods conclude, perhaps teaching is no longer a profession that should be embarked upon as a lifelong commitment due to the emotional, physical and psychological demands of the job. Recruiting more ‘high-quality’ graduates and well-qualified ‘career changers’ into the teaching profession is one of the government’s priorities. As many assert, the quality of the education system is dependent upon the quality of its teachers. The low status of the profession (ranking alongside social work and nursing) together with low salaries and stressful working conditions are potential deterrents to many well-qualified graduates, particularly those with degrees in maths, science, engineering and technology who can easily claim much higher salaries and better working conditions elsewhere. Such deterrents may outweigh the factors that generally attract people into teaching – a sense of vocation, a desire to ‘give something back’ and the opportunity to help others.

Teacher education: A case study in educational policymaking Policymaking on teacher training embodies many of the themes and processes examined in this book in relationship to education as a whole: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Preparing students to become teachers has become dominated by assessment against a set of national standards. Those involved in training teachers are subject to a rigorous process of inspection and accountability. The teacher training curriculum has been transformed to make it more ‘practical’ and less ‘theoretical’ (both concepts are hugely problematic). Policy making power has shifted away from the traditional providers of teacher education to central government. As with schools, institutional diversification has become a feature of teacher training. Policy change has involved language shifts, notably in substituting teacher education with teacher training. Policy change has been accompanied by an episodic discourse of derision of teacher education tutors especially under Conservative governments.

The professional training of teachers has a somewhat chequered history. Nineteenth-century elementary school teachers in so far as they were trained at all, did so as ‘pupil teachers’ under the guidance of a practising teacher. A small number attended training colleges beginning to be set up

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from the 1840s, often modelled on Scottish institutions where there was a more robust tradition of teacher training. This began to change at the beginning of the twentieth century when the study of education at universities began to emerge. Local education authorities also began to set up centres, initially for pupil teachers and then to ensure a supply of trained teachers. In 1944, the McNair report advocated that teacher training be organized under the auspices of university departments of education and from 1945, the emergency teacher training programme aimed at demobbed military personnel, created a new raft of teacher training colleges. Nevertheless, it was still the case that at the beginning of the 1960s, many secondary teachers had degrees but no professional training, while their primary colleagues were often trained but degreeless. This was about to change. The 1960s heralded a massive expansion in the teaching workforce and also changes to teacher education programmes. First, existing certificate programmes were lengthened to three years and then replaced with Bachelor of Education Degrees of three or four years’ duration, delivered by Higher Education Institutions. Such courses did much to define the nature of the profession and later, with the establishment of the Postgraduate Certificate in Education, helped to develop teaching as a graduate profession. As Gillard (2005: 176) highlights, in addition to ‘school experience’ such courses also included education studies – the study of the history and philosophy of education together with learning theory, psychology, child development and behaviour management – as well as subject and/or curriculum studies. In 1972, the James Report recommended that all teachers should have a degree and from 1974 in order to teach in a State school, a person also had to achieve Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). Over time, a variety of routes into teaching, currently numbering sixteen, have been developed. They include the following: 1 Undergraduate teacher training routes – the BEd and BA/BSc routes with QTS. 2 Postgraduate teacher training  – University-based  – Postgraduate Certificate in education (PGCE) or School-centred initial teacher training (SCITT). 3 Employment-based teacher training – initially as the Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) and subsequently renamed by the Coalition government as Schools Direct, with greater power being vested in schools as opposed to Higher Education Institutions. 4 The Registered Teacher Programme (RTP) and Teach First. The latter is aimed at encouraging ‘high flying’ graduates into teaching. The former enables more mature would be teachers to work as unqualified teachers while also studying for a degree. 5 Assessment-based teacher training for individuals with substantial teaching experience but not QTS. 6 Overseas Trained Teacher Programme (OTTP). 7 And most recently under the Conservative government, ‘degree apprenticeships’ whereby teacher trainees can work for a teaching degree via four days a week in school and one day in university. The plethora of routes led even the National Audit Office to wonder whether the complexity of pathways into teaching was off-putting rather than encouraging to teacher recruits (Guardian 17 October 2017: 37).

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The development of teacher education not unexpectedly, mirrors wider educational policymaking. The post-war settlement was about establishing a system whereby university oversight would guarantee professional and intellectual quality; teacher numbers would be increased as in the 1960s or reduced as in the 1970s in accordance with demography and judgements about class sizes; professional status and quality would be enhanced by high level qualifications. The principal policy agents, through which policy was set out, were the academic-led reports of committees of inquiry, notably McNair (1944); Robbins (1963); and James (1972). Within the policy parameters they established, teacher educators were largely allowed to determine their own approaches, subject to meeting the quality criteria of the universities or their equivalent in the Council for National Academic Awards. All of this began to change in the 1970s. For critics of the post-war educational policy settlement, teacher trainers were responsible for the failings of the education system and were blamed for ‘inculcating generations of teachers with “woolly ideas” about equality at the expense of training teachers to teach the basic skills and to impart a fixed immutable body of knowledge’ (George and Clay 2008: 103). Successive governments have therefore, sought to regain more control over the ‘education’ of teachers and to gradually move to more school-based ‘training’. Since 1979, both Conservative and New Labour governments have pursued similar objectives with respect to teacher education. New Labour in particular saw initial teacher education as having a major role in the ‘re-tooling of the teacher profession’ (Furlong 2008: 730). The reforms have included (see Ball 2008 and George and Clay 2008: 107–8) the following: 1

A change in emphasis from ‘education’ to training. Teaching is now viewed more as ‘craft’ and training as an ‘apprenticeship’ in which competence is gained through observation and repetition of observed good practice. 2 A diversification of routes into teaching – the system of teacher training in the UK is one of the most diverse in the world (Husbands 2008). 3 The establishment of central agencies for teacher training and development  – first the Teacher Training Agency (1994) as a non- departmental, public body that oversaw, managed and funded teacher training and also controlled the supply of recruits into the profession. The TTA was re-designated as the Training and Development Agency for schools in 2005. In keeping with policy moves since 2010, the TDA was closed in 2012 and its functions taken ‘in house’ into the Department for Education. Responsibility for recruiting and developing teachers currently resides with the National College for Teaching and Leadership under the auspices of the DfE. 4 The development of ‘Partnership’ as a conceptual model for teacher training. Schools and higher education institutions now have to work together to deliver training, with schools now playing the central role. However, as Husbands (2008) observes the real, critical school – university partnerships that were desired have failed, on the whole, to emerge. 5 The introduction of centrally prescribed ‘Professional Standards’ for teachers. The Standards have undergone a number of reviews since their inception and now include sets of standards for each stage in a teacher’s career. The Standards apply to areas of teacher’s knowledge and

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understanding, professional attributes and values and teaching. Some, like Ball, claim that the introduction of Standards ‘finally eradicated the intellectual and disciplinary foundations of teacher education [replacing them with] . . . a skills and classroom management curriculum (2008: 145). 6 The introduction of quality control in the form of Ofsted Inspections – HEIs are regularly scrutinized and inspected to ensure that they comply with the centrally contrived standards. Student numbers are awarded to institutions on the basis of the ‘quality’ of their provision, so there is a pressure on providers to comply. 7 The development of fast routes into teaching, for example, Teach First – a fast track, short training course for high quality graduates. The government’s policy regarding teacher education has, according to Husbands (2008: 5), two main policy objectives which are to control the supply of ‘quality’ teachers and to ensure the effective delivery of the National Curriculum and other national educational priorities. In order to achieve this the government have exercised considerable control over the process of Initial Teacher Education/Training. According to Husbands, this has resulted in Initial Teacher Trainers being under ‘intermittent, if occasionally ferocious attack’ (2008:  7). He goes on to suggest that with New Labour ‘an activist government pushing on with radical change meant that most teacher educators were forced to be reactive’ (2008:  7). A  consequence, Husbands suggests is that while there has been considerable government-led innovation in terms of pedagogy (National Strategies), collaborative working (ECM) and the introduction of new technologies into the classroom, universities have, surprisingly, not played a central role in such innovations. In fact he suggests that ‘it is difficult to identify a sustained innovation which has emerged from within the ITE structure over the last decade’ (2008: 7). This degree of ‘risk aversion’ in ITE is becoming a policy concern, however, it is also, as Husbands suggests, paradoxical: ‘ITE has been a conduit for the management of change at a time of rapid policy and practice change in education, but it has largely been centrally managed and directed change’ (2008: 7). The notion of ‘Partnership’ has also proved problematic. According to Husbands, the rationale for more school-based training came from the work of McIntyre (2009) who suggested that schools provide the ‘locus for the professional craft knowledge of teaching’ while universities provided both access to this craft knowledge in schools but also to the evidence base on which such school practice was derived (2008: 4). However, although schools have been given the lead role in the training partnership, they have often been a reluctant partner, slow to take up their lead role and happy, even with employment based routes, to relinquish their responsibility to universities (Husbands 2008). This focus on ‘professional craft knowledge’ is also problematic and according to Wrigley, results in a ‘contradiction at the heart of teacher education’ so that training is ‘torn between the poles of imitative apprenticeship and initiation into reflective practice’ (2006: 297). Wrigley suggests that while teachers need initiation into school practices – to observe more experienced teachers, to experience the practice of teaching, they also need to be able to critically reflect on those experiences in a meaningful way. Indeed an ‘imitative apprenticeship’ should not be pursued at the expense of

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providing future teachers with an opportunity to explore the intellectual and ideological aspects of their practice. As Wrigley comments, Because the world is changing so dramatically and even the planet from which we drink and on which we draw breath seems increasingly precarious, we cannot evaluate schooling to how closely it approximates to the National Curriculum. The entire discourse of standardization is radically out of tune with the challenges young teachers face . . . it would criminally irresponsible simply to ‘train’ new teachers to follow orders, so that they can foist uncritical attitudes onto another generation of young people in schools. (2006: 303–4)

The recent and current policy position on teacher training The election of the Coalition government in 2010, as with other aspects of education, intensified and deepened the direction of teacher training policy travel under New Labour. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, declared that, we will reform teacher training to shift trainee teachers out of college and into the classroom. We will end the arbitrary bureaucratic rule which limits how many teachers can be trained in schools, shift resources so that more heads can train teachers in their own schools and make it easier for people to shift in mid-career into teaching. Teaching is a craft and it is best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman. Watching others, and being rigorously observed yourself as you develop, is the best route to acquiring mastery in the classroom . . . Nothing should get in the way of making sure we have the best possible cadre of professionals ready to inspire the next generation. (2010)

Gove’s rhetoric demonstrates the continued formidable presence of ideology in educational policymaking in two respects: first, it had long since been stop being the case that teachers spent most of their time ‘in college’. Postgraduate teacher training students (by far the largest supplier of teachers) were mostly in schools under the guidance of experienced teachers. As for teaching being a ‘craft’, the government’s own source of data on education, Ofsted and before them HMI, suggested it was more than this. Their reports reaching back to the 1980s, emphasized the importance of subject knowledge, for example, as one key to good teaching. The ‘college’ was important in both providing this and in tandem with good subject teachers, showing how it could be made to work with a class of children on a wet Friday afternoon in Oldham or Hackney. None of this prevented the Coalition government from declaring that ‘School Direct’ was the new approach to teacher training. This involved schools receiving funding for the training of teachers with higher education institutions competitively bidding directly to the schools to support them in the work. Such arrangements were consistent with the growing ‘marketization’ of higher education more generally. However, as we have established in earlier chapters, educational policy is rarely determined by ministers alone. At the very least, they are answerable to parliament and the House of Commons select committees have often proved able interrogators of ministerial decision-making in recent

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years. This no less true of the way in which the Education Select Committee has scrutinized teacher training policy and provided a platform for more critical voices. In 2012, it published a report ‘What Makes a Great Teacher’, discovering that it was actually rather difficult to define what made for great teachers and calling for more research. It was broadly supportive of the teacher training policy direction but emphasized the importance too of the role of universities. The teacher training universities who were most at risk from the funding changes contained in School Direct organized a ‘round table’ under the auspices of the Education Select Committee to discuss their concerns. Their subsequent report offered an alternative perspective on teacher training from that of Michael Gove. Their major points can be summarized as follows: 1

Current policy was based on a misrepresentation of recent history given that the universities had been involved in partnership with schools since 1992. 2 These partnerships were subject to Ofsted inspection who consistently reported that HEI-led partnerships were the most successful teacher training programmes. 3 Funding volatility threatened the future of university involvement in teacher training with likely adverse effects on teacher recruitment. The policy also had adverse implications for the continuing professional development of 4 teachers who continued to look to the universities for research based provision. The intensity of debate was such that a familiar step in the policymaking process was deployed – a review of teacher training was announced under the auspices of Sir Andrew Carter. The subsequent Carter Review of Teacher Training (2016) represents one of those moments when those involved in policy making attempt to pour oil upon the troubled waters of educational policy. For a generation, teacher education had been the subject of intense political scrutiny and policy innovation in which issues around theory and practice and the role of schools and universities in the training of teachers had swirled. Carter attempted to draw a line under this at least for now, by offering a balanced appraisal of the current state of teacher training. The report offered eighteen recommendations and the major findings were as follows: 1

90 per cent of trainees were positive about their training experiences but head teachers still complained that classroom management and subject knowledge are weaknesses in beginning teachers. 2 On the whole, training had improved as a consequence of School Based Training but variation in provision was a problem. 3 A core content was required for training programmes based on subject knowledge, engagement with research in order that teaching was evidence based, and an understanding of the theory of assessment (work on a curriculum for teacher training is ongoing). There are indications in this that Carter and his colleagues were reaching for a new policy settlement on teacher training whereby the contributions of both schools and universities in the effective preparation of teachers were recognized. It was certainly greeted with some relief by the higher education institutions who had feared that the Carter review would further reduce their presence in teacher training (see theguardian.com/teacher-network-blog/2014/may10/).

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Unfortunately, as is often the case with policymaking, other aspects of teacher recruitment were pulling in a different direction. For much of the past decade, insufficient numbers of teachers have been recruited or retained within the profession. Ensuring that there are teachers to teach children is a fundamental responsibility of the Secretary of State for Education and failure to do so opens up the holder to criticism. In February 2017, the Education Select Committee published a report arguing that retention was a more immediate concern than training. The solution was to ease excessive workloads and offer career long professional development to encourage teachers to stay in the profession. Significantly, it also called for more ‘evidence-based’ planning by the DoE with the implication that teacher training had been subjected to rather too much ideologically driven policy change, divorced from what mattered practically. (See House of Commons Recruitment and retention of teachers Fifth Report of Session 2016–17 www.parliament.uk/ business/committees.) The Select Committee reports and the Carter review suggest something of a policy consensus has emerged by which a ‘mixed economy’ of university and school-led provision is deemed to be effective. That is not to say there are not issues lurking beneath the surface. Both universities and schools require long-term funding security in order to plan effectively. A competitive market approach makes that difficult and results in teacher shortages in some key subject areas. More importantly, though, the who and what issues of teacher training (schools or universities, theory or practice) have now been overtaken by the much larger issue of whether teachers need training at all. The award of Qualified Teacher Status whether through a university or school-led programme, was always the hallmark of the arduous training on which the professional status of teachers in part depended. Now there are 24,000 unqualified teachers teaching in state-funded schools and half of vacant posts were filled by teachers without QTS in the last year (see https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/Education/2017/02/21/school). Untrained teachers have become a new policy fault line between the Labour Party who insists that all teachers should be qualified while the Conservative government prefers to address the issue by trying to increase the number of trained candidates for teaching posts. In summary therefore, teacher training policy has been dominated for a generation by two issues: who should provide the training with schools taking greater and greater responsibility; and ensuring that new teachers meet standards of varying kinds which in turn have impacted on the content of training. What has been neglected in all of this are essentially philosophical issues to do with becoming and being a teacher. As Pickard (2016) has argued, successful teachers need knowledge about the subjects they teach, about children, about classroom management (the epistemology of teaching); but teaching is personal too, involving experience and values both of which move about over time (the ontology of teaching). Policymakers have fixated on the former while neglecting the latter. Professional development for teachers has remained the policy Cinderella with only occasional suggestions that it should be provided in a systematic way for all teachers. As a consequence, teachers are denied the opportunity to examine their experience or acquire new knowledge in a formal sense. It seems probable therefore that future policy makers will continue to bemoan the inadequacy of teacher training.

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Summary: Redefining teacher professionalism We have seen how: 1

Teachers have been subjected, especially in the 1980s, to a ‘discourse of derision’ which led to unparalleled supervision and classroom intervention by government. 2 The effect of this has been variously interpreted as de-professionalizing teachers by denying their expertise, re-professionalizing them through the provision of new expertise, or somewhere in between as teachers hold to older professional values while meeting the demands of greater accountability. 3 The particular case of teacher education policy illustrates both the power of ideology in education but also the restraining effects sometimes exercised by constitutional procedures. So where do teachers stand now as professionals? At the height of New Labour, Whitty (2006b) argued that all was not lost for the teaching profession and that some of the reforms may indeed actually enhance professionalism. He referred to three stages in the process of this redefinition of teacher professionalism, with the first being an inevitable and desirable move away from outmoded constructs of the professional with its emphasis on elitism and ‘secret’ knowledge. Whitty also acknowledged New Labour’s attempt to reconstruct an identity for teachers in a managerialist model which some teachers have grappled with, what Sachs refers to as the ‘entrepreneurial identity’ (1999, cited in Hill 2007: 9). However, Whitty (2006) also put forward the notion of a further reconstruction based on the possibility of a new kind of partnership with parents and pupils, which results in a more collaborative and reflective practice that he calls a ‘democratisation of professionalism’. He argues that teachers do not need to cling to an outdated and exclusionary notion of their professionalism in order to defend their position. Whitty is not the only researcher to call for a new form of collaboration between teachers and their communities, including those marginalized groups often at greatest risk. As Mahony and Hextall had recognized, ‘social inequalities both impinge on teachers and are to some extent reconstituted or challenged by them’ (1997: 141), while ‘it is vital that we educate future teachers to see the connections between schooling, education and the wider society’ (George and Clay 2008: 110). Others suggest that a ‘redefined professionalism’ is an ‘imperative’ for teachers, particularly in the context of globalization. They suggest that such a form of professionalism would be ‘manifested in the qualities that require teachers to value and sustain the intellect, to work collaboratively with other stakeholders in education, to be responsible and accountable and to be committed to lifelong learning and reflexivity’ (Gopinathan et al. 2009: 36). Gill and Pryor (2006: 286) observe that ‘the construction of teachers’ professional identity is often inextricable from their sense of self, and they present a model of professional development that is not dictated by government agendas, restricted to the prescription of ‘good practice’ or the cognitive domain. Teachers, they suggest, need to be given opportunities to ‘question and rearticulate their assumptions, values and beliefs, their pedagogical underpinnings and educational

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visions’ (2006: 293). This reflects Sachs’ notion of the ‘activist identity’ for teachers who are willing to collaborate in new partnerships to help realize specific projects in a changing community of practice (Whitty 2006b:  14). Hargreaves, as long ago as 1994, had commented that at the heart of the community lies the potential for a new professionalism (Hargreaves 1994 cited in Gill and Pryor 2006: 294). Teachers need to reposition themselves as enablers to take forward the goal of education as encouraging a holistic experience, which leads to the development of each individual’s full potential. In such a way, we can engineer: ‘a shift from seeing teachers’ professional learning as acquiring knowledge and skills to exploring the question of what it means to become a teacher’ (Gill and Pryor 2006: 291).

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177

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academic influences 28 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 77 academies x, 13, 60, 85, 105, 106, 107 convertor 105 sponsored 105 Academies Act (2010) 108 Academy Programme 106–8 achievement x, 30, 32, 33, 36, 55, 63, 78, 81, 99, 102, 119, 125, 128, 137 see also underachievement admission 108 11-plus test 19, 25–6, 27, 29, 40 fair 103–104 Advanced Skills Teacher (AST) 147 affordability of childcare reforms 139 Alexander, Robin 123–4 Allen Report (2011) 136 altruism 4, 144 American War of Independence 4 Apple, Michael 125 Arnold, Matthew 10, 125 Assisted Places Scheme 101 Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) Union 145 Atlee, Clem 20 Attainment 8 (A8) 63, 102–3 attainment gap, closing 59–61 authoritative parents 56 autonomous schools 111–12 availability of childcare reforms 138–9 Bachelor of Education Degrees 153 Balfour, Arthur 12 Ball, Stephen J. 73 Bank of England 25 Barber, Michael 145–6 Bellairs, Henry 10

‘benign neglect’ policy 131 Bevan, Aneurin 25 Beveridge Report (1942) 19 bipartite system of schools 25, 29 Birth to Three Matters Framework 134 Blair, Tony 27 Board of Education 10, 12, 16, 17 green book 20 bonding 93 Boyson, Rhodes 31 Brazil 70 bridging 93 Britain in the Sixties: Education for Tomorrow (John Vaisey) 28 British Council 76 Broadfoot 119 Building Schools for the Future 63 Bullock, Alan 32 Bullock Report (1975) 32 bullying 88 bureau professionalism 113 Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) 121 Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee 51 business takeover of schools 110–11 Butler Act 20, 28 Callaghan, James 32–3, 54 Cambridge Primary Review 123 Cambridge University 77 Cameron, David 91 ‘The Big Society’, vision of 83 Campaign for State Education 50 Canada 80 capitalism 54, 107 care and education, integrating 133–4 Carter Review of Teacher Training 157, 158

178

178

Index Carter, Sir Andrew 157 Central Advisory Body for Education 31 Centre for the Economics of Education 57 Chapman, Jessica 131 Charity Commission 12, 13 Chartism 3–4, 5, 8 Chartist revolution 8 childcare 129–42 workforce, professionalization of 135–6 Childcare Tax Credit 139 child centredness 36 child-centred primary schools 40 child labour 17 ‘Children and Their Primary Schools’ see Plowden Report (1967) Children’s Act 1989 55 2004 133 Children’s Centres 133 Children’s Services Authorities 133 Children’s Trusts 133 Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) 135 China 70, 76 choice and fair admissions 103–4 outcomes of 103 parental 99, 100 promotion 101–2 school 99 Choice for Parents: The Best Start for Children: A Ten Year Strategy for Childcare 132 Churchill, Winston 19, 20, 23 Church of England 14 Circular 10/65 29 City Challenges 59 City Technical Colleges 36 City Technology College (CTC) 105, 106, 110 Clark, Kenneth 127 Climbié, Victoria 131 Coalition government 17, 19, 20, 30, 45, 49–50, 60–4, 81, 83, 84, 87, 90, 91, 101, 108, 119–23, 126–7, 136–8 and curriculum reform 119, 120–1 and teacher professionalism 147–9 Coalition policies 62–4

Cockcroft Committee 32 Cockcroft Report (1982) 32 Code of Practice on Fair Admissions 104 Commission for Social Justice Report (1994) 84 commodification 58, 82 Common Assessment Framework 133 competence 55 comprehensive schools policy 28–9 ‘The Comprehensive School’ (London County Council) 27 compulsory education 11, 72 Conservative Coalition 49 Conservative Party 18, 23, 110, 148 critique of education 32 Conservatives 13, 16, 18, 20, 28, 31 choice promotion 101 continuity and change 61, 62 educational policies 1979–1977 33–4, 35 government 38 leadership 112, 113 marketization 98 policies 62–4 privatization 111 tripartite model 26 see also Coalition government contemporary policymaking process 46 contextual value added (CVA) 102 Continual Professional Development (CPD) 146 convertor academies 105 corporate responsibility 107 Council for National Academic Awards 154 Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015) 91 County Boards 9 creationism 107 credit accumulation 54 Critical Quarterly 54 Crosland, Anthony 27 cultural literacy 125 curriculum 6, 14–16, 18, 19, 30–4, 36, 62, 64, 67, 80, 85, 88–9, 93, 107–9, 115–28 defined 115 for early years 134–5 English Baccalaureate 122–3 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) reforms 123

179

Index knowledge debate 124–7 reform, Coalition government and 119, 120–1 White Paper and policymaking processes 119–20 see also National Curriculum Curriculum Council for Wales 119 Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage 134 Daily Mail 31 dash for cash 130 Davies, Vaughan 15 Dearing Report (1996) 36, 76 deliverance 55 democratic professionalism 94 democratization of professionalism 159 Denmark 80 denominational teaching 20 Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) 132, 133 Department for Education (DfE) 63, 81, 91, 102, 109, 112, 119, 121, 125, 126, 136, 137, 154 Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) 130, 133 Department for Education and Science (DES, DfES) 36, 146, 150 Department of Education (DoE) 59, 158 Department of Health 133 derision 54–5 Desirable Learning Goals 134 Diocese of Bath and Wells 9 Disability Discrimination Act 90–1 disabling 89 discourse(s) 8, 11, 15, 40, 48, 53–4, 64, 78, 83, 100, 112, 113 defined 53 economistic 54–6 globalization on education 68–70 distributed leadership 113 diversification 106–8 diversity, in school system 104–6 Dock Strike of 1889 5–6 Early Learning Goals 134 early years curriculum 134–5 The Early Years: Foundations for Life, Health and Learning 136 Early Years Professional 135, 139

Early Years Pupil Premium 137 Early Years Teacher (EYT) 135, 138, 139 economistic discourse 54–6 parents, as partners or consumers 55–6 schools and teacher’s derision and redemption 54–5 education and care, integrating 133–4 compulsory 11, 72 elementary 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 129 further 51, 121 globalization on 67–82 higher 31, 51, 53–4, 75–8, 84, 89, 91, 121, 156 initial teacher 154, 155 market 34 nationalization of 33–4 nursery 17, 20, 31, 130, 137 primary 80, 123 secondary 3, 13–21, 26, 27, 36, 39, 76, 118, 120 self-education 4 for social justice 83–95 teacher 152–6 technical 12, 16, 19, 25, 28, 122, 128 vocational 116, 119, 121, 122 Education Act 1902 15–16, 17 1918 17 1944 20–1, 25, 26, 28, 37 Educational Excellence Everywhere 101 educational governance 69, 72, 106, 113 making of 11–13 educational ideology 39–40, 52 educational ladder 18 educational policymaking and social change 3–21 Chartism 3–4 Dock Strike of 1889 5–6 Education Act (1902) 15–16 Education Act (1944) 20–1 educational governance, making of 11–13 elementary education 6–7 Hadow Committee 18 secondary education for all 13–14, 16–18 Second World War 19–20 Spens Committee 19 teacher professionalism 6–11 Williams, Rogers 14–15

179

180

180

Index educational policymaking, history of 37–40 educational press 7 ‘Educational Reconstruction’ 20 Education at a Glance 72 Education Committee 6, 7, 51 Education Department 12 Education Endowment Foundation 60 Education for All (EFA) 49, 68, 71, 82 Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) 84 Education policy, defined 46 Education Priority Areas 31 Education Reform Act (1988) (ERA) 35, 36, 58, 112, 116, 118 Education Select Committee 157, 158 elementary education 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 129 elementary school 3, 4, 6, 7, 10–13, 16, 152 11-plus test 19, 25–6, 27, 29, 40 Emmanuel Schools Foundation Academies 107 Endowed Schools Act 13 Engineering Model 57 England see United Kingdom (UK) English Baccalaureate (EBacc) 120, 122–3 English Education system 65 Enlightenment Model 57 enterprise 52 entrepreneurial identity 159 Equality Act 90 equality through redistribution 85 equal participation 86 European Union (EU) 70, 75 Every Child a Reader 59 Every Child a Writer 59 Every Child Counts 59 Every Child Matters (ECM) 49, 60, 63, 80, 83, 132–5, 137, 147–9, 155 evidence-based policymaking approach 56–8 Excellence in Cities 59 Excellence in Schools 112 Expected Progress (EP) 102 Extended Schools Initiative 147 Extra Mile initiative 59 Fabian Society 50 fair admissions, choice and 103–4 faith schools 105, 109

families reforms to early childhood education and care 140–1 Fast Track Teaching Programmes 147 Field Report (2010) 136 Finland high-performing education systems 82 as a source of inspiration 80 First World War 16 Fisher, H. A. L. 17 Forster, William 10, 11 14–19 curriculum 121–2 Fraser, James 8 free school meals (FSM) 59, 60 Free Schools 49, 81, 85, 102, 105, 108–9, 126, 150 French Revolution 4 Fundamental British Values (FBV) 91–2 further education (FE) 51, 121 The Future of Socialism (Anthony Crosland) 27 Gaitskell, Hugh 29 gender sameness 132 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) 74–5, 77 General Associated Body of Church Schoolmasters in England and Wales 7 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), 59, 102, 122 reforms 123 General Strike 18 General Teaching Council (GTC) 149 Germany policy borrowing in 80 Gibb, Nick 125 Glass, Norman 133 globalization on education 67–82 higher education 76–8 policy borrowing 78–81 policymaking by international organizations 70–8 theoretical perspectives 68–70 glocalization 68 good citizenship 14 good enough children 56 good enough parent 56 Gove, Michael, Secretary of State for Education 30, 63, 64, 84, 85, 90, 108–9, 119, 120, 123–7, 137, 148, 149, 156, 157

181

Index governance educational 11–13, 69, 72, 106, 113 self-governance 78 Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) 153 grammar schools 13, 18, 19, 25, 27–9, 40, 104, 109–11 diversity in 110 privatization and business takeover 110–11 Greenwood, Arthur 19 Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities 87–8 Hadow Committee 18 half-time system 11 Harvard University 77 Head Start 49, 80 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) 6–8, 10, 33, 34, 36, 51, 156 higher education (HE) 31, 51, 53–4, 75–8, 84, 89, 91, 121, 156 higher education institutions (HEIs) 77, 120, 153, 154–7 Higher Level Teaching Assistants 149–50 Hirsch, E. D. 125, 126 home–school alliance 56 House of Lords 4, 18 ideological perspectives 51–3 ideology characteristics of 40 defined 51 educational 39–40, 52 political 40, 52 see also neoconservatism; neo-liberal/neo-liberalism; Third Way The Importance of Teaching 81, 112, 119, 148 India 70, 76 initial teacher education (ITE) 154, 155 Inner London Education Authority 34 intelligence quotient (IQ) 25, 28 Interactive Model 57–8 International Adult Literacy Survey 72 international governmental organizations (IGOs) global policymaking by 70–8 policy borrowing 79 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 67, 71 Isaacs, Susan 31

James Report (1972) 154 Japan 70 Joseph, Sir Keith 31, 32 Kay-Shuttleworth, James 6, 8 Kidbrooke School 27 knowledge as cultural heritage 124 debate 124–7 economy 76 Knowledge and Control (Michael Young) 125–6 KS4 programme 121 Labour government 18, 24–7, 29, 31, 32, 36, 38, 119, 123 see also New Labour Labour Movement 5, 20, 26, 27 impact on secondary education 16–18 Labour Party 13, 17–20, 23, 25–7, 29, 38, 39, 158 Labour Representation Committee 16 A Language for Life (Alan Bullock) 32 leadership 27, 112–13 distributed 113 league tables 34, 49, 58, 72, 77, 79–81, 93, 98, 100–3, 113, 118, 119 Learning for All 71, 72 Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (Paul Willis) 38–9 Liberal Democrats 63, 91 Liberal government 16 local authorities (LAs) x, 17, 20, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 47, 48, 87, 93, 103, 106, 109, 112, 113, 118, 126, 133, 137, 148 local education authority (LEA) 25, 26, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 99, 101, 130, 153 Local Government Act (1888) 12 local management of schools (LMS) 36, 112 London County Council 26–7 ‘The Comprehensive School’ 27 Lowe, Robert 9, 10 managed professionalism 147 managerialism 58, 111–13 autonomous schools 111–12 leadership 112–13 marketization 58, 93, 98–9, 156

181

182

182

Index market reforms 58 May, Theresa 29, 64, 109 Mckinsey Report (2010) 79 McNair Report (1944) 153, 254 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 71 Ministry for Education ‘The Nation’s Schools’ 25 Ministry of Health 17 Ministry of Labour 17 Ministry of Pensions 17 Ministry of Reconstruction 17 Ministry of Transport 17 mixed market economy 131 ‘Modernizing Government’ 57 Morant, Robert 16 More Affordable Childcare 137, 139 More Great Childcare 137, 138 Morgan, Nicky 108 ‘multiplier effect’ of investment in education 76 Narrowing the Gap 59 National Association of Labour Teachers ‘Social Justice in Education’ 26 National Cadet Corps (NCC) 51 National College for Teaching and Leadership 50, 147, 154 National Curriculum 33, 36, 116, 149 design and significance of assessment 116, 118–19 Initial Teacher Education/Training 155 revisions to 117 2014, 123–4 see also curriculum National Educational Reform Act (1988) 34, 36–7 National Health Act (1948) 25 National Health Service 25 National Insurance Act (1946) 25 National Standards for Under 8s Day Care and Childminding 134 ‘The Nation’s Schools’ (Ministry of Education) 25 neoconservatism 52, 64 see also ideology neo-liberal/neo-liberalism 45, 52, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 78, 82, 93, 135 see also ideology Newcastle Commission 9, 10 New Code 9, 10

New Labour 27 Academy Programme 108 childcare policies 49 childcare reforms 138–9 childcare workforce, professionalization of 135 choice promotion 101 coalition policies 63–4 Code of Practice on Fair Admissions 104 diversification agenda 106 education policy 90 government 45, 58, 63, 64, 80, 104, 108, 121, 132, 147, 154 grammar schools 109–11 ideology see Third Way modernization reforms 112 new professionalism 145–7 1997–2010, 131–6 policy borrowing 80–1 policymaking 57, 62 policy solution 59–60 Prevent Strategy 91 social justice, as redistribution 84 Sure Start Local Programmes 58 teacher education 154 Third Way 83 workforce remodelling policy 147, 149 see also Labour government new professionalism 145–7 No Child Left Behind 49, 80 Noddings, Nel 73 Nonconformists 14 Norway reforms to early childhood education and care 140–1 Nuffield Foundation 30 Nursery and Grant Maintained Schools Act (1996) 130 nursery education 17, 20, 31, 130, 137 Nursery Education Vouchers 130, 139 Nutbrown Review (2012) 136, 138 Office for Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) 123 Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) 36, 50, 51, 55, 92, 101–3, 107, 111, 122, 133, 137, 140, 141, 149, 156, 157 Inspections 155 old professionalism 146

183

Index one stop shop 134 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 45–6, 49, 70, 72–5, 79, 81, 82, 91, 99–101, 139, 141 Programme for International Student Assessment 49, 71–4, 79–82, 93, 95 Overseas Trained Teachers Programme (OTTP) 153 Oxford University 77 parents authoritative 56 as choosers 100–1 as consumers 55–6 as partners 55–6 parental choice 99, 100 reforms to early childhood education and care 140–1 Parent Teachers Association (PTA) 101 partnership in teacher training 154, 155 party political context 23–4 performance management 98 performativity 58 Personal and Professional Conduct standards 148 Phillips, Sir Trevor 88 Piaget, Jean 31 Plowden, Lady Bridget 30, 31 Plowden Report 1967 30–1, 56, 80, 123 1978 80 policy borrowing 78–81 community 49 defined 53 focus 90–1 goals 99–100 implementation 48 learning 80 premium 59–61 technologies 58 policy, in practice 45–65 attainment gap, closing 59–61 change 61–2 Coalition and Conservative policies 62–4 contemporary policymaking process 46 continuity 61–2 contradictions 61–2

economistic discourse 54–6 ideological perspectives 51–3 implementation 48 influences on policymakers 48 influential stakeholders 49–51 international influences and comparisons 49 New Labour 62 policy technologies 58 rational policymaking 46–8 research evidence 56–8 Select Committees 51 texts and discourses 53–4 Policy Exchange 50 political ideology 40, 52 Political Model 57 postcolonial theories of globalization on education 70 Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) 153 post-war consensus 38 Prevent Strategy 91–2 primary education 80, 123 primary schools 18, 36, 40, 81, 118, 130, 141 progressive education in 29–33 private schools 99, 105, 106 privatization 58, 82, 110–11 Privy Council 4, 6, 12 professionalism bureau 113 democratic 94 managed 147 new 147 old 146 teacher 6–11, 144–5, 147–52, 159–60 Professional Standards for teachers 150, 154–5 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 49, 71–4, 79–82, 93, 95 Progress 8 (P8) 102–3 progressive education 37 in primary schools 29–33 progressivism 52 public–private partnerships 73 pupil premium policy impacts 61 policy in practice 60–1 policy problem 59 policy solution 59–60

183

184

184

Index Qualifications Credit Framework 121 Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) 121 qualified teacher status (QTS) 136, 138, 153, 158 quality of childcare reforms 139–40 quasi-market 99 Queen’s scholarship 7 Race Relations Act 90 racism 88 radicalism 4, 5 rational policymaking 46–8 Reagan, Ronald 39 redemption 54–5 Registered Teacher Programme (RTP) 153 Regulations for Secondary Education 16 regulatory barriers 74 research evidence 56–8 Revised Code 10, 13 Robbins Report (1963) 80, 154 Rogers, William 14–15 Roman Catholic Church 14 Rose, Sir Jim 123 Royal Commission 9, 11 Russia 70, 76 Safeguarding Children’s Boards 133 salvation 55 Sandon Act (1876) 11 Schleicher, Andreas 73 school(s) 97–114 autonomous 111–12 bipartite system of 25, 29 choice 99 choice and fair admissions 103–4 choice promotion 101–2 comprehensive policy 28–9 contemporary context 98 derision 54–5 diversification 106–8 diversity 104–6 elementary 3, 4, 6, 7, 10–13, 16, 152 faith 105, 109 Free Schools 49, 81, 85, 102, 105, 108–9, 126, 150 grammar 13, 18, 19, 25, 27–9, 40, 104, 109–11 league tables 102–3

managerialism 111–13 marketization 98–9 outcomes of choice 103 parents as choosers 100–1 policy goals 99–100 primary 18, 29–33, 36, 40, 81, 118, 130, 141 private 99, 105, 106 redemption 54–5 secondary 12, 14, 16–19, 24–6, 27, 29, 102, 108, 116 special 105 state boarding 105 studio 105 School Boards 12, 13 school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) 153 School Direct 156 Schools Council Project 30 Schools in Challenging Circumstances 59 Science and Art Department 12, 13 Science Citation Index 77 Scotland General Teaching Council 149 SEAC 51 secondary education 3, 13–21, 26, 27, 36, 39, 76, 118, 120 reorganization of 28–9 secondary education for all 13–14, 19, 20, 23, 27, 28, 39 war and Labour Movement, impact of 16–18 secondary schools 12, 14, 16–19, 27, 29, 102, 108, 116 system, building 24–6 second industrial revolution 13 Second World War 16–17, 19–20 Select Committees (House of Commons) 51, 156–7 selection 104 self-education 4 self-governance 78 settlements 38 Sex Discrimination Act 90 Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities 77 Singapore high-performing education systems 82 skills audits 54 slow learner 31 social capital, deconstruct aspects of 84 social class 13–15, 59 and school choice, link between 100

185

Index Social Class and Educational Opportunity (Floud, Halsey and Martin) 28 social democracy 52 socialism 8 social justice as democracy 86–7 impact on education 89–90 as recognition 85–6 as redistribution 84–5 teaching for 93–5 theories of 84–5 social justice, education for 83–95 Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities 87–8 policy focus 90–1 policy in action 91–2 young carers 88–9 ‘Social Justice in Education’ (National Association of Labour Teachers) 26 social reconstruction 52 special schools 105 Spens Report (1938) 19, 26, 27 sponsored academies 105 stakeholders, influential 49–51 Standard Attainment Tests see Standardized Assessment Tasks Standardized Assessment Tasks 118 Stanford University 77 state boarding schools 105 Statutory Assessment Tests (SATs) 118, 119, 145, 149 studio schools 105 summative assessment 118 Supporting Families in the Foundation Years 136 Sure Start 46, 60, 80, 132–3, 136 Sure Start Local Programmes 58, 133 Sweden 80 Taiwan interactive whole class teaching 81 Taunton Commission 13 Tawney, R. H. 18 Tax Credits 139 teacher(s) 26–7 associations, formation of 7 changing identities 150–2 Coalition government and 147–9

derision 54–5 education 152–6 educational reforms 154–5 impact of policy on teaching 149–52 professionalism 6–11, 144–5, 147–52, 159–60 professional status, phase of 146 redemption 54–5 training, recent and current policy position on 156–8 workforce remodelling 147, 149 Teacher Development Agency (TDA) 135 Teacher Education Standards (2012) 91–2 Teachers: meeting the challenge of change 146 Teachers’ Standards 148, 149 Teacher Training Agency (TTA) 154 Teach First 153 teaching 7, 10, 25, 26, 30, 33, 36, 45, 55, 77, 80, 81, 92, 103, 118 denominational 20 as emotional practice 145 of English 32 impact of policy on 149–52 informal 32 of mathematics 32 religious 11 science 13 for social justice 93–5 Teaching and Learning Research Programme 57 Teaching of Mathematics 32 technical education 12, 16, 19, 25, 28, 122, 128 Technical Instruction Act (1889) 13 Temple, Frederick 15 texts 53–4 Thatcherism 33 Thatcher, Margaret 29, 32, 33, 56, 63 think tanks 56 Third Way 83 Tickell Review (2011) 136 Times Higher Education – QS World Rankings (THE-QS) 77 Tory government 18 Tory policies 62 Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) 75 Trades Unions 13, 19 Trade Union Council 19, 27 trade unionism 8 traditionalism 52

185

186

186

Index Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) 49 tripartite system 20, 21, 25–8, 38, 39, 109, 110 underachievement 88, 106 see also achievement United Kingdom (UK) child well-being 95 curriculum reform 119 Free Schools 109 GRT communities 87 half-time system 11 National Curriculum 116 policy borrowing in 80–1 policy in practice 45, 61, 67 policymaking 82 reforms to early childhood education and care 140 school system 98 young carers 88 United Nations (UN) 73 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 49 United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 49, 72, 73 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 49, 95 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) 49 United States 70, 76, 80 reforms to early childhood education and care 140–1 school system 97 Standardized Assessment Tasks 118 Universal Credit 139 University of Warwick Commission 122 University Technical College (UTC) 105, 122

Vaisey, John 28 Value Added 2 (VA2) 102 Variations in Teachers’ Work, Lives and Effectiveness Project (VITAE) 150–1 vocational education 116, 119, 121, 122 war, impact on secondary education 16–18 welfare state 19, 25, 28, 34, 61, 103, 106 Wells, Holly 131 ‘What Makes a Great Teacher’ 157 Wilkinson, Ellen 27 Williams, Shirley 33 Wolf, Alison 121–2 Wolf Report (2011) 121 Woodhead, Chris 36, 127 workforce remodelling 147, 149 working class 5 Working Tax Credit 139 World Bank 45, 49, 67, 69–72, 82 World Culture Theory 69, 70 World Education Indicators 72 World System Analysis 69, 70 World Trade Organization (WTO) 70–2, 74–5, 82, 119 young carers 88–9 young children, caring for and educating 129–42 Coalition and Conservative governments 2010–2017 136–8 context for change (1997) 130–1 impacts of the reforms 138–41 New Labour 1997–2010 131–6 Young, Michael 125–6