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Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper establishes and explains the important role of the Conservative Government of 1959–1964 in supporting the raising of the school leaving age in Britain from the age of 15 to 16. This was a significant and high-profile national issue that generated much educational, social and political debate around conflicting priorities during this period, and was emphasized in both the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963. The Treasury was strongly opposed to the proposal due to its high financial cost. There was a large element of electoral opportunism involved in the Conservative Government’s approval of raising the school leaving age (ROSLA), announced in January 1964, but it also highlighted deeper complexities and reservations in Conservative attitudes to ROSLA as well as a long-term ambition to consolidate education as a Conservative issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The proliferation of policy think tanks and more broadly the rise of 'policy networks' can be viewed as indicative of important global transformations in the nature of the state. That is, the emergence of new state modalities, with a shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance, where policy is produced through multiple agencies and multiple sites of discourse generation. This paper addresses some particular aspects of this shift by focusing on a set of relationships and sites which have had some kind of influence upon the social and educational policies of UK New Labour governments. It has two main concerns. First, focusing on the generation and circulation of some of the key policy 'ideas' of New Labour, it maps out a related and overlapping set of policy networks which join-up government, think tanks and some individual interlockers, who 'straddle sectors and policy fields and settings'. Second, it highlights some of the main discursive elements that flow through these networks, in particular those of innovation and enterprise. They give particular emphasis on the role of 'social enterprise' and social entrepreneurs in the modernisation of public service provision and in providing solutions to intractable social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some particular aspects of the privatisation of public sector education, mapping and analysing the participation of education businesses in a whole range of public sector education services both in the UK and overseas. It addresses some of the types of privatisation(s) which are taking place 'of', 'in' and 'through' education and education policy, 'in' and 'through' the work of education businesses. This entails a traversal of some of the multi-level and multi-layered fields of policy: institutional, national and international. Such an approach is important in demonstrating the increasing diversity and reach of some of the education businesses and their different kinds of involvements with different institutions and sectors of education. It also makes it possible to set local rhetorics, such as 'partnership', within the context of corporate logics of expansion, diversification, integration and profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]