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This article explores UK attempts to boost ordinary citizens' participation in government policy formulation through 'open policy making'. Drawing primarily on an analysis of government documents dating from 2012–2018 and focusing on the case of the Department for Education in England, the article highlights elite network control of policy making which works to depress ordinary citizens' democratic input. Groups who do not fit with depoliticised, 'top down' understandings of what counts as valid citizen participation become delegitimised and excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from a study carried out on the evolution of specialist schools under New Labour in England in order to illustrate changes in educational governance. Shifts in policy-making power are highlighted, away from increasingly marginalised traditional corporatist partners, towards 'denocracy' (Seldon, 2004) or greater political centralisation. 'Presidentialisation' under Prime Minister Tony Blair was accompanied by fast-growing policy networks, lending legitimacy to centralised policy ideas while intensifying connections and blurring lines between state and non-state. However , while spaces and sites for policy activity became more extensive, they remained exclusive, with insiders and outsiders clearly defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 examines regulating discourses 'spoken' within the complex multi-sector network of educational policy and provision that has grown from a recent introduction of choice advisers in England. Choice advice documentation from across the network is examined and four discursive themes are identified: equity; parental responsibility; independence/impartiality; and realism. The paper suggests that choice advice - as an English policy case illustrating broader social and political trends - superficially promotes empowerment for disadvantaged parents with a depoliticised, managerial approach while disempowering them by diverting attention away from wider stratification and shifting responsibility for educational quality away from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims are often made in British education about the extent to which policy reforms have been ‘borrowed’ from overseas. Based on interviews with senior civil servants and HMI, this paper addresses the extent to which such claims apply to central government educational policy‐making at school level in England between 1985 and 1995. This was a period which saw the collapse of traditional ‘partnership’ modes of educational reform (central and local government, schools, teachers, educationists), which was replaced by major centrally directed legislation from Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act onwards. It was also a period in which the OECD promoted the use of educational ‘performance indicators’ to facilitate cross‐national comparisons of educational quality. The paper finds that, while overseas developments were frequently cited during this period of radical legislative change, these were largely convenient examples from countries with particular ideological closeness to the English climate, promoted by ‘New Right’ think tanks, to lend legitimacy to what were primarily ‘home grown’ policy solutions. Overall, their effect was marginal. Reforms in England took place both prior to and in parallel with similar reforms elsewhere; hence examples from overseas were more often used to confirm developments in England rather than to initiate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]