‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’: diversity, institutional identity and grant‐maintained schools

The 1996 education White Paper on self‐governance confirms the government's long‐standing commitment to diversify educational provision and to employ grant‐maintained schools to take that agenda forward. This paper considers the extent to which self‐governing schools have contributed to diversification of the system and argues that there is little evidence that they have provided programmes which are innovative or mould breaking. Why this is the case is explored through interviews with headteachers of nine grant‐maintained schools. It suggests that school responses are crucially shaped by the headteachers’ interpretations of the conflicting demands of national policy frameworks and local competitive markets in education. In curriculum terms they show a propensity to consolidate their schools’ identities around what the schools have done in the past rather than embrace the opportunities to modernise presented through the government's funding priorities.