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This paper explores the organizational and management consequences of the changing policy environment facing public sector education in England and Wales over the past 10 years. In particular it considers how far arguments about the replacement of older ‘bureau-professional' forms of organizational order by more ‘managerialist' forms in the public sector in general can be applied to the specific case of education. The paper begins by reviewing the major policy changes that have affected schools and colleges since 1988. Drawing on published studies from these sectors, it then considers a number of themes: changing roles of senior and middle managers; changes in managerial and organizational culture; and changes in specific aspects of management. Emphasizing the tentative nature of the evidence, the paper identifies some common trends which imply a movement towards managerialism in many institutions. However, it also identifies areas where the position is less clear and suggests a number of factors which may explain differences of experience. It emphasizes the importance of not reifying a previous ‘golden age' of collegiality and concludes that what is being experienced is a complex and dynamic process of adjustment between old and new organizational and managerial forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On coming to power in 1997, the New Labour government promised to move beyond the 'ruthless free-for-all' of the neo-liberals. However, rather than revisiting the 'stifling statism' of 'Old Labour', the government has claimed to be developing a so-called 'third way' in which policies are put forward on the basis of 'what works' rather than being driven by any one ideological approach. Through drawing on Giddens' outline of 'first', 'second' and 'third way' politics, this paper looks at a range of New Labour's education policies and examines the extent to which they can be seen to embody a distinctively different approach. It finds that, despite some remnants of old Labour 'first way' thinking, the government's strategies have largely been an extension of second way 'neoliberalism'. Education action zones are identified as the initiative which comes closest to representing a 'third way'. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of this initiative for addressing and overcoming the failures of first and second way policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers studying the impact of parliamentary devolution conclude that education policies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are diverging. They attribute this to five factors: the redistribution of formal powers associated with devolution; differences in values, ideologies and policy discourses across the four territories; the different composition, interests and policy styles of their policy communities; the different ‘situational logics’ of policy-making and the mutual independence of policy decisions in the different territories. This article reviews trends in higher education (HE) policy across the UK since parliamentary devolution. It focuses on policies for student fees and student support, for widening participation, for supporting research and for the HE contribution to economic development, skills and employability. On balance, it finds as much evidence of policy convergence, or at least of constraints on divergence, as of policy divergence. It argues that each of the five factors claimed to promote divergence can be associated with corresponding pressures for convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of 'translation', reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE undertakes in placing numerical values on the quality of research outputs. How do we measure our 'pounds of flesh'? As a practical 'hermeneutics of suspicion' it seeks a 'provocative validity' in that its aim is to provoke clarity and reassurance from the authors of such RAE documents. In that ambition it has had some success, as the response from Margaret Brown, Chair of the Education sub-panel, demonstrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an account of the latest official attempt in the UK to generate both a new analysis of the underlying causes of under-investment in workforce development and a new policy to rectify the weaknesses. The account is based on the participation of the present author who was a member of the Performance and Innovation Unit's (PIU) Academic Panel on workforce development during 2001. First, the establishment and remit of the PIU are briefly introduced, and the methods and outcomes (so far) from the particular project on workforce development are then described and assessed. At the very least, this article may help to dispel the erroneous speculations about the work of this PIU team (on workforce development), which have already been published in the educational press (e.g. Beckett 2001). The separate normative worlds of policy-makers and researchers are then explored; and finally, some general conclusions are drawn from the author's experience about the competing models of Britain's future, which lie behind the policy debates and which are likely to have relevance beyond the specific field of workforce development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a framework from which to critique orthodox assumptions about the processes of collaboration, especially in relation to the concepts of public space and power. Key issues are the private-public distinction and the metaphor of 'public space'. The critique is rooted in alternatives to orthodox, Liberal humanist political perspectives in philosophy and draws on real examples of collaboration. Some of these are from my own experiences of a number of small-scale, policy-oriented, research projects and evaluations, both commissioned and university-originated. Suggestions are made about implications for the genesis of a politics of connection leading to collective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary education policy is dominated by a seriously flawed intellectual framework (school effectiveness) which will inevitably fail as a means of educating persons for the 21st century or, indeed, any other. Drawing on the work of the Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray, the paper sets out not only to understand why this is so, but also to offer a positive alternative in its place, namely, transformative or person-centred education. Central to this endeavour is an emancipatory, inclusive notion of community and a complementary understanding of its relation to the necessary demands of organizational and functional life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the UK Secretary of State for Education's proposed revisions to the national curriculum at the turn of the century. The author argues that the proposed changes towards a more flexible and less prescriptive curriculum framework are a direct attempt to address the significant problem of student disaffection, which is currently haunting educational policy-interventions aimed at 'driving up standards'. He hypothesizes that the scale of the problem is much greater than the traditional indicators suggest and, whilst approving of the general direction in which the proposed changes are moving, questions whether they are radical enough to meet the challenges which social change is presenting to schools at the turn of the century. The author argues for a curriculum design which is more explicitly driven by pedagogical values and principles, and finds that the outcomes-based framework for citizenship education is a missed opportunity in this respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of British Labour Party policy on educational selection between 1996 and 1998. The exercise is conceived as one of policy scholarship and the benefits of a sociological imagination are advocated. This imagination is rooted in a relational insight and particular emphasis is placed upon distributional relations. This conceptual framework is then used to examine key documents from before and after the 1997 General Election. It is argued that, in such themes as 'standards not structures' and 'intervention in inverse proportion to success', policy largely underpins existing structural relationships which maintain the significant educational inequalities which are the supposed targets of policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most notable developments in post-compulsory educationand training in recent years has been the establishment of GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualification) policy in England and Wales. Although the new qualifications have attracted a considerable amount of popularity in the few years since their launch, they have nonetheless been the subject of much critical comment. Drawing principally on in-depth interviews with key informants in the policy process, an account of how GNVQ policy originated is provided in this paper. It is argued that the presence of four interrelated 'policy tensions' during the development phase- the tendency for 'academic' education to be privileged over 'vocational' education and training, the potential for conflict in government between longterm strategic imperatives and short-term political objectives, the differing aims of the education and employment departments and the contours of the relationship which a quango like the NCVQ has with its sponsoring department(s)- shaped the way in which GNVQs progressed and thus contributed to their subsequent weaknesses on implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The language of austerity has been widely used to characterize policy-making in post-industrial nations since the financial crisis. Youth services in England are a noted example of the effects of austerity, having suffered rapid and severe cuts following a period of record investment prior to 2008. In this article, I argue that ‘austerity’ is an inadequate conceptual basis for critical analysis of policy-making since 2008, and that youth services are better understood as an exemplar case of the reforming effects of a ‘late neoliberal regime’. The late neoliberal regime describes a regulation of production through a finance capital imaginary, as distinct from the productive capital imaginary of the quasi-marketising neoliberal regime. I argue that late neoliberalism has effected the disassembly of quasi-marketised youth services and simultaneously the emergence of a new youth sector founded on norms of investment and return. I trace the reforming force of this regime through the productive relations of capital distributions, policy discourse, and organizational forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a massive online data bank, produced by Pearson Education, which deploys highly sophisticated digital interactive data visualizations to construct knowledge about education systems. The second case considers ‘learning analytics’ platforms that enable the tracking and predicting of students’ performances through their digital data traces. These digital policy instruments are evidence of how digital database instruments and infrastructures are now at the centre of efforts to know, govern and manage education both nationally and globally. The governing of education, augmented by techniques ofdigital education governance, is being distributed and displaced to new digitized ‘centres of calculation’, such as Pearson and Knewton, with the technical expertise to calculate and visualize the data, plus the predictive analytics capacities to anticipate and pre-empt educational futures. As part of a data-driven style of governing, these emerging digital policy instruments prefigure the emergence of ‘real-time’ and ‘future-tense’ techniques of digital education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent emergence of new venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs and neoliberal policy advocates and the new ways in which they configure and perform their political agendas have brought important changes in the way in which education policy is enacted. This study takes some of the ideas sketched in previous work further and develops what was termed there as 'philanthropic governance'. The first section analyses the transition to a new political framework characterised by new forms of coordination or 'heterarchies'. These transformations represent new forms of governmentality and power regimes and are deeply rooted within the political economy and political philosophy of neoliberalism. The second section of the study focuses on a set of new policy actors, the 'new' philanthropists and explores the organisational model of a group of these philanthropic individuals and enterprises, their discourses, connections, ideological influences and agendas on the ground. Finally, the study reflects on the new ways through which philanthropic activity has gained an increasingly important political dimension, becoming a central explanatory variable to understand the recent changes and directions of national and international political agendas in different parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free school policy claims to partly decentralise to local proposers decisions over who provides a free school, where and for what reasons, within the constraints of a government approval process. This article analyses empirically the people and organisations doing the proposing and their interactions with the approval process. The article begins by locating free schools within Big Society and quasi-market policies. The emerging free school landscape is then mapped and the motivations, aims and demography of a sample of 50 proposers are explored. A key distinction emerges between two analytical clusters. First, proposers able to negotiate the approval process are shown to draw on a range of professional networks, to have strongly academic educational aims and to on average not seek to specifically serve disadvantaged communities. Second, and conversely, the majority of proposers located in highly disadvantaged areas have aims and expertise that do not fit well with what the government is willing to accept. This is not conceived as a simple dualism but highlights the significance of both a lack of critical engagement with inclusion among accepted proposers and the effects of an approval process that has prioritised an unequal distribution of particular forms of professional expertise and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking recent policy on education and social mobility as a working example, this article examines developments in the mechanisms for realising policy over the past ten years, as indicative of changes in the neoliberal state. This initial analysis suggests that, despite similarities in the process of policy formation before and after the General Election of 2010, the changing nature of the policy levers chosen by the Coalition Government represents a move from a rationalist, directing state towards a more hybrid bul nevertheless neoliberal model. The Government still intends to 'steer' the education system through data, however, but in a more developed market system with little supervision, its effects will be less predictable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the increasing internationalisation of higher education, there is a pressing need to think through how demands for educational equality and justice, that currently tend to be framed at the national and sub-national level, should be conceptualised at a global level. This article compares two recent media and policy debates in the UK, over admitting wealthy students off-quota to university and restricting international student visas, in order to demonstrate the contradictions that are created when demands for educational equality stop at the national border. Based on a discussion of these debates, the article calls for the principle of educational equality to be extended outwards, beyond the national border, to apply to domestic and international students alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by ‘bad jobs’ and the evidence for the existence of a set of mutually reinforcing factors that reduces the incentives acting on individuals in such work, and in many cases their employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to engage in work-related learning are weak. More broadly, our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and low-quality employment have been misdiagnosed and the subsequent public policy solution of up-skilling interventions is relatively ill-fitted to achieving the desired policy goals. Imaginative re-thinking on how policy might help those in low-wage, dead-end jobs is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines education policy and the policy process in the light of two key concepts. The first is the concept of 'governmentality' from the work of Michel Foucault (1991). The second is the concept of 'political spectacle' from the work of Murray Edelman (1985, 1988). Taking note, further, of recent work by Fairclough (2000) on political 'spin' and rhetoric, the article suggests that education policy needs to be seen in the light of a more modern stress in governance which recognises that 'the conduct of the conduct of conduct' (the management and presentation of policy - the conduct3 of the title) is not only of electoral relevance but has considerable implications for education and policy. The article probes the ways in which current education policy in the UK is affected by conduct3 and attempts to place it within the Foucauldian governmentality framework. It suggests that while conduct3 can be understood as a modern variant of the Machiavellian concern with sovereignty, it is also associated with the neoliberal marketisation of democracy. On this reading, it can be considered as a mutation of liberal governmentality, serving to undermine some of its key principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concept of emotional labour to understand some of the changes that are ongoing in the teaching profession. While research has explored the impact of the new performance culture upon teachers' work and identified a marginalisation of the caring and emotional aspects of teaching, the concept of emotional labour allows us to extend this argument. Using interviews with teachers who have had their capability questioned, in the majority of cases through the threat or implementation of capability procedures, this article draws upon newer conceptualisations of emotional labour to analyse some of the changes teachers are experiencing with the introduction of new accountability and performance systems. Utilising Bolton's typology of different forms of emotion management in the workplace, we argue it is possible to recognise the distinctiveness of the emotion work carried out by teachers and identify why teachers' emotion work is particularly vulnerable to the educational reforms associated with the standards agenda. We suggest that not only is there a shift away from the caring aspects of teaching, but also the emotional work teachers are expected to perform is becoming increasingly prescribed in ways that mirror the management of emotional labour carried out in the service sector. This is particularly the case in the primary sector where the majority of teachers in the study were working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, the vocabulary of public services is becoming infused with the prefixes 'inter'-, 'multi-' and 'co-'. Public-sector agencies are being encouraged to adopt 'multi'- or 'inter-agency' configurations; 'workforce reform' seeks to dissolve once-impermeable professional boundaries; leadership is to be 'distributed'. This tendency is referred to as the 'inter'-regnum in education policy. (This does not mean that we are dealing with an 'interregnum' in the sense that we are somehow between modes of governance.) The term 'regnum' is used to emphasise that this propensity for the 'inter' is asserting itself as a new 'reigning philosophy'. Examples of the 'inter'-regnum are presented from the UK (mainly England), and these are located conceptually within an analysis of hierarchies, markets and networks. Thereafter the cultural, intellectual and economic contexts which allow for the 'inter'-regnum to emerge as policy are explored. The 'inter'-regnum draws its legitimacy from a number of sources. First, it resonates with the culture of consumerism, and it takes further that earlier market-based regime of governance which was associated with the new public management. Second, it is functional for the 'new capitalism' as a new work order of affinity- and solution-spaces. Third, it has important intellectual supports: that is, in addition to its association with recent marketing theory, it can appeal to emerging theory and research in organisational learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy agenda of the UK government has repositioned the voluntary sector as a key player in the delivery of locally responsive, 'bottom up' services to address the complex problems of social exclusion, reaching out to sectors of the community which are beyond the grasp of traditional state or market providers. This has drawn many voluntary sector organizations into new forms of partnership with statutory bodies. This article draws from a Scottish study to explore the role of voluntary sector organizations working in schools to support the mental well-being of children and young people. A framework to interrogate the data from case studies is provided by the Scottish Executive, who rehearse four main advantages of such partnerships between state and the voluntary sector. The article concludes that whilst voluntary sector organizations can and do deliver support to children and young people in innovative ways on the margins of school life, the power differential within the school structure makes their position too vulnerable to bring about quick or substantial change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academy schools programme in England is presented by Government as the means by which increased diversity and private participation in the provision of public education can be used to solve educational and wider social problems. The entrepreneurial features of academy schools are examined, through a study of the sponsors and the ethos, values and specialisms of academies. Data on 58 academies (open or in development), gathered from secondary sources, are analysed. Four types of entrepreneurialism are used to review the findings and it is found that business entrepreneurialism strongly features as a normalising presence, with forms of cultural and social entrepreneurialism also apparent. Public entrepreneurialism is represented but is less evident than the other forms. The emerging pattern of participation in the academies programme suggests that existing structural advantages in the fields of business and the church are being replicated and strengthened, and so academies are predominantly being constructed as sites intended to enhance the growing influence of private versions of entrepreneurialism. It is also recognised, however, that academies represent an unfolding programme and that how it develops over time is subject to complex national and local factors, including the agency of groups and individuals differently positioned in their fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moral panic concerning ‘boys’ underachievement’ is well established in the UK and Australia, and is spreading to other countries. Feminists have articulated concerns that this debate has reflected a ‘poor boys’ discourse with negative permutations for girls’ schooling; and there is much evidence to support this claim. However, it is argued here that as a result of the location of underachievement in the individual rather than with social structures by neo-liberal policy movements, in England certain groups of ‘failing’ boys are increasingly being problematized rather than valorized. Boys generally are presented as vulnerable and ‘at risk’. The ‘poor boys’ discourse position these boys as in need of help and attention. But within these practices certain groups of boys are beginning to be demonized for their apparent wastefulness of resources and failure to take responsibility for their own achievement. The article draws on work by Bauman and Foucault as well as feminist theory in order to tease out some of the complex inter-weavings of gender and neo-liberal discourses at work in English educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu’s tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self‐held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about the ways in which field theory might be applied to explain the abrupt public policy shift effected by the Thatcher government and the adjustments made to it by the Blair government. I suggest that a Bourdieuian approach shows policy working as a means of codification, as a doxa of misrecognition and as currency exchange within and across fields. I conclude with some thoughts about the difficulties of explicating interactions between fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The DfES’s Five-year strategy for children and learners sets out the intentions of the Labour Government for its third term. Where necessary, its provisions will be subject to legislation in 2005. This article argues that the Five-year strategy, like much education policy since 1997, ignores important reasons for inequality of educational outcome in urban areas. Moreover, it may make matters worse. And its prime emphasis on school improvement measures will ensure that staff will be blamed if their schools falter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article on restrictive-expansive approaches to education policy in Great Britain is presented.

Provides an overview of the relationship between educational policy and social class in Great Britain. Formulation of educational policy in the nineteenth century; Variables causing societal fragmentation of educational policy; Impact of social class segmentation on the overall quality of education.