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First published in 1993, Specialisation and Choice in Urban Education explores how city technology colleges (CTC) have managed the task of selecting intakes representatives of their catchment areas and explore their impact on local schools. From their announcements in 1986, CTC have been presented both as a new choice of school for the inner city and as pointing the way to a more diversified education system. This account of their development uses interviews with key architects of the initiative to identify more clearly the objectives CTCs were designed to serve. It then draws on interviews and observation in CTCs themselves to discover how far these schools are becoming centres of innovation in school management, curriculum and approaches to teaching and learning. Throughout, the CTC policy is considered in the context of Government's broader political project to challenge ‘welfarism'and to encourage entrepreneurship, competition, and choice. This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of education policy, sociology of education, and education in general.

This book looks in detail at the strong contrasts in the provision traditionally made for'academically'and'vocationally'minded students, and looks at differences and similarities in practice. The chapters report evidence of how students on both sides think they have been taught. They also report on how those students prefer to learn, how their teachers define the kinds of learning appropriate for particular qualifications and how the organisation of learning for'different but equal'qualifications was observed in forty schools and colleges. The book's main focus is on the objectives and processes of learning at a stage which is certainly being transformed, but which is still powerfully shaped by myths about the sixth form and education of'leaders'.