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This paper considers the consequences of, and tensions within, New Labour's quality agenda for schools. In particular, it draws attention to the way in which official versions of quality, characterised by a narrow, economistic instrumentality, are being promoted in schools by various forms of quality control that are marginalising broader, more humanistic conceptions of quality. It is also argued that, despite New Labour's rhetorical emphasis on education for citizenship, the mechanisms of quality control favoured by the government tend to produce patterns of association which are authoritarian and, therefore, unconducive to giving teachers, students and parents opportunities to participate actively in key decisions in and around schooling. The analysis presented in this paper is underpinned by a concern to bring a consideration of educational politics back into education policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]