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Shortly after taking power following the May 2010 UK general election, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government published its education white paper, The Importance of Teaching. In this, certain features for primary school pedagogy can be discerned. Using the lens of the “position call”, this article examines the discourses implicated in the white paper to highlight the position calls offered to the primary profession concerning pedagogy. These are compared to those made by New Labour in its previous 13 years in power. Accordingly, the article proposes that whilst the previous administration offered the position calls for primary education of pedagogy as collective craft and pedagogy as collective performance, continuity and discontinuity can be seen in the recent white paper, namely that the position calls now being made are for pedagogy as individual craft and pedagogy as individual performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the impact of the Beacon schools initiative on the social and academic characteristics of secondary schools in England. The Beacon schools programme ran from 1998 to 2004 and epitomised the (then) Labour government’s focus on school improvement through diversity, collaboration and partnership. This paper looks at variation in the academic and social characteristics of the 322 secondary Beacon schools over a nine-year period. The findings show that Beacon schools were among the most advantaged state schools in England and while they continue to outperform the general school population, the data suggest that the performance gap has decreased and there is little evidence that Beacon status conferred an advantage on schools, in terms of standard measures of academic success. The Beacon school initiative exemplifies some of the key issues with policy based education reform. First, its emphasis on collaboration provokes tensions between schools that are increasingly in competition with each other. Secondly, clearly defined and measurable medium and long term outcomes for the initiative were not prescribed, thus making it difficult to determine the efficacy of the intervention. Finally, that the initiative did not appear to have any appreciable effect on the social and academic characteristics of the Beacon schools raises issues about the usefulness of externally prescribed interventions and the potential that they have to make a real difference to educational equity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analyses continuing vocational education and training policies in the UK in the period 1979–2010 with a focus on regulation and governance. It reviews Conservative and Labour party policies to ascertain their principal components and explore their evolution through time. More specifically, the paper reviews the paradoxical existence of three seemingly opposed accounts of recent dynamics in the management of continuing vocational training: one that sees it moving inexorably to the political right, one that emphasises the singularity of social-democratic policies and one that focuses on the difficulties of any movement, towards the political left or right. The paper concludes that while there has been a degree of convergence between right and left, differences remained in terms of their favoured institutional decision-making structures. However, Labour played a two-level game, which combined the establishment of new channels for dialogue and coordination with key stakeholders, with a limited scope for meaningful stakeholder input to policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to draw out the continuities and ruptures in current English education policy. In particular it considers the relationship between Coalition policy rhetoric and that of the Labour Party. Although the paper is concerned with the British and more specifically English context, it examines a range of questions that move beyond that particular setting. It explores the way in which we can understand crisis and the manner in which this informs policy discussion and the re-ordering of neo-liberalism. In conclusion, it argues that the presumed radicalism of the Labour Party can only take us so far, and that an examination of policy for its progressive and radical possibilities, whatever their origins, is an important site of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines Fresh Start, a New Labour flagship initiative to raise education 'standards' in a radical and innovative way. Drawing on a qualitative study of a comprehensive school in England, I argue that the initiative added to the problems faced by the 'failing school' and promoted rather traditional ways of raising 'standards' due to the close surveillance that Fresh Start schools were subjected to. In the case studied, the needs of the pupils that the initiative was meant to address were being sacrificed in the school's construction of a 'successful' identity. While the initiative has now lost momentum, some lessons can still be learnt. This paper illustrates the complexity of creating a new school, as well as the need to attend to the specificities of the local context and experiences in raising 'standards for all' pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The December 2008 special issue of the Oxford Review of Education provided a review of education policy during Tony Blair's tenure as Prime Minister. This paper forms a response to the ten contributions to that special issue and discusses some of the issues raised in them. While a few positive aspects of education under New Labour were identified in the special edition, it focused more on the failures of New Labour than its achievements. A common theme to emerge from the papers included the government's pursuit of neo-liberal market policies at the expense of its professed commitment to social justice. While accepting that the government's failure to tackle the differences in educational outcomes between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils constitutes a major failing, the present author argues that significant achievements, such as early years provision, were neglected in the special issue. He also discusses the electoral considerations facing New Labour and the personal role of Tony Blair in determining policy. The paper goes on to consider whether New Labour's education policy has changed since the departure of Blair and identifies some hints of a potentially more progressive approach developing under Brown. It concludes by suggesting that contributing towards a debate about alternatives to Blairite policies should now become a priority for the 'educational establishment'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two aspects of the New Labour's Education Action Zone policy; first it explores the financial and managerial contribution that the private sector is making in zones. Second, it considers what impact, if any, the involvement of the private sector in EAZs may be having on new thinking about the governance of education. Evidence, collected through detailed analysis of zone applications, action plans and audited accounts, together with telephone interviews with 34 of the 73 project directors, suggests that the policy making and implementation processes have already dampened the innovatory potential of EAZs. Far from representing a 'Third Way' in education reform, the average zone appears to have become a combination of a traditional school improvement service and an educational business partnership. In terms of education policy, EAZs have moved from flagship to backseat. The paper considers a range of options for a third round of zones. These options build on a growing realism about the contributions of different stakeholders within zones and the need for clarity about the conditions that must be in place if the original aims are to be met. Although a third round now looks unlikely, the recommendations are relevant to any future partnership and 'joined-up' initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secondary school system in England has undergone a radical transformation since 2010 with the rapid expansion of independent academies run by private companies (‘academy trusts’) and funded directly by central government. This paper examines the development of academies and their predecessors, city technology colleges, and explores the extent and nature of continuity and change. It is argued that processes of layering and policy revision, together with austerity measures arising from economic recession, have resulted in a system-wide change with private, non-profit-making companies, funded by central government, rapidly replacing local authorities as the main providers of secondary school education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the case of a relatively low-profile policy initiative that has been successively reframed as part of larger policy ensembles within UK schools over a six-year period, and translated during this time at national and school levels. The policy examined is that of study support or out-of-hours learning. The trajectory of this policy is traced as it is first launched within an educational policy ensemble around the raising achievement agenda and then re-framed as part of the then New Labour government’s major educational and social policy agenda of Every Child Matters. Drawing on interview data from head teachers and teachers, the ways in which study support policy was translated in two contrasting schools over this period is explored, highlighting different tensions with national policy and local agendas. The ‘fate’ of study support as an initiative is questioned following a change of government in the UK and in the context of global education policy developments. This analysis of the re-framing of a low-profile policy adds to our understanding of the cycles of policy ensembles and their translation by different agents in different sites over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the connections between the school building programme in England and the raising of the school leaving age (ROSLA) from 14 to 15 in 1947 and then to 16 in 1972. These two major developments were intended to help to ensure the realisation of ‘secondary education for all’ in the postwar period. The combination led in practice to severe strains in the education system as a whole, with lasting consequences for educational planning and central control. ROSLA was a key issue for the school building programme in terms of both finance and design. School building was also a significant constraint for ROSLA, which was marred by temporary expedients in building accommodation both in the 1940s with ‘HORSA huts’ and in the 1970s with ‘ROSLA blocks’, as well as by the cheap construction of new schools that soon became unfit for purpose. Together, school building needs and ROSLA helped to stimulate pressures towards centralisation of planning that were ultimately to undermine postwar partnerships in education, from the establishment of the Ministry of Education’s Architects and Building (A&B) Branch in 1948, through the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963, to the assertion of central state control by the 1970s. The pressures arising from such investment and growth in education again became a key issue in the early twenty-first century with the Labour Government’s support for raising the participation age to 18 combined with an ambitious ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme. The historical and contemporary significance of these developments has tended to be neglected but is pivotal to an understanding of medium-term educational change in its broader policy and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Barker argues that in England under New Labour, school leaders and teachers have been ‘bastardised’ and suggests that the situation in 2010, with a general election afforded an opportunity in education policy for the ‘pendulum to swing’. In this article, the key points about ‘bastard Leadership’ are briefly summarised. The article then develops a view of schools as sites of complexity and ‘wickedity’ as an alternative to the linear reductionist approaches of managerialists. These two perspectives present the extremes of a spectrum against which the trajectory of school leadership can be viewed as it emerges from the New Labour years and is now being developed by the Coalition Government. Evidence from ministerial speeches and the Coalition Government's flagship White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, are used to examine key issues of freedom and trust, reducing bureaucracy and increasing autonomy for schools as ways of exploring the extent to which the new government's policies on school leadership are, or are not, moving away from those of their New Labour predecessors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the mid-1960s, the Labour government established a Commission to devise the best way of integrating Britain's elite independent schools with the state-financed school system. Despite-and because of-the left's scepticism of private education, the Commission faced enormous obstacles and their solution of state-subsidised boarding places was seen as unworkable, unaffordable and unpopular. Government papers help to explain the various reasons why the Commission's proposals were not implemented: in particular, the public schools were regarded as a low spending priority. The lack of reform is key to understanding the continuing importance of independent schools in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour and New Labour alike have been the enemies of education. Consider the brutalism of Charles Clarke--'history for display purposes only'; statistics of achievement based on the soft marking of soft subjects to achieve soviet pig-iron statistics; fat inspection and thin curriculum; compulsory lesson plans and paper plagues; foreign languages as too difficult. Before all that, remember Anthony Crosland 'destroying their schools if it's the last fucking thing I do' and the consequent rise of the public schools as bought excellence. What to do : Follow Housman's dictum, 'Knowledge is happiness'; rescue good minds in bad places with state places in boarding schools; utilise the quiz nationally the as a pop method to stimulate the study habit; get back to French and German; take the educationalism out of education especially in training colleges; thin inspection down from terror to weather-eye mentoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether predictions about a greater centralization and control in educational policy-making, made after New Labour's election to power in 1997, have been realized since that time, and particularly with respect to educational leadership. It also asks whether recent changes in New Labour policies are likely to provide greater freedom for head teachers in English schools. It does this by means of investigating evidence at global, national and school levels, and in particular draws upon recent interview research by the author with head teachers. The article suggests that whilst the architecture of central steerage and control is still very much in evidence, there are strands of greater policy flexibility, though these may be as much about empowering external sponsors as anything to do with greater professional discretion. However, the research suggests that, whatever happens, there will almost certainly be room for resistance and personal manoeuvre at the school level, which is ultimately dependent upon context and personality. [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]