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Reports the transformation of school headship in the education marketplace in Great Britain. Heuristic separation between welfarist and managerial headship; Focus on the case of Beatric Webb, an inner-city comprehensive school; Benefits arising from the task-centeredness of new management.

In this paper we look at the relationship between political, cultural and economic change, the 'position' of parental choice in the various policy texts (in particular, it's centrality to The Parent's Charter) and what we have termed the context of practice (Bowe et al., 1992). In particular, we raise some issues and concerns that arise from research to date, in terms of their methodologies, their analysis and their representations of choice. It is the failure, in all these respects, to consider the complexity and inter-relatedness of choice-making and political and economic change that gives rise to our concerns. We tentatively suggest a heuristic device, the metaphor of landscapes of choice, that we think might help us to explore the relationships between the various policy contexts, whilst recognising the embeddedness of the research process in precisely these contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education Action Zones and their forums seek to draw together diverse constituencies of interest in order to develop and implement local plans for school improvement. As such, it has been suggested that they may better empower parents and communities (Blunkett 1999) than existing forms of school governance. This article, which is based on a textual examination of the first 25 applications for zone status, interviews with forum members, including seven EAZ Directors, and observation within two EAZs, explores the extent to which the early evidence suggests that EAZ Action Forums are offering a new way to democratise education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]