Trowler, 2003 Education Policy

Education Policy
In this up-to-date introduction to a key policy area, Paul Trowler

puts current education policy into context by showing how it has
evolved over time and in response to different political ideals. He
examines what education policy is, how it is formulated and,
crucially, how the processes of implementation affect outcomes. He
looks at the key issues facing the government today and at how the
research process feeds into policy-making. This concise guide is
suitable for both students and professionals and features:
• policy landmark tables

• illustrative case studies
• summaries of key points
• guides to further reading
• useful websites and addresses
• a glossary of key terms
Paul Trowler is Reader in Higher Education, Lancaster University.

The Gildredge Social Policy Series provides introductory textbooks
to key areas of policy for the growing number of students of social
policy at A level, A/S level, on GNVQ courses, in their first year at
university or following a professional diploma course. Written by
experienced teachers, the books are short, tightly structured texts
designed to be aids to learning.
Series editor: Pete Alcock, Professor of Social Policy and
Administration, University of Birmingham.
Also in this series:
Crime and Social Policy Mike Stephens
Family Policy Fran Wasoff and Ian Dey
Housing Policy Jean Conway
The Environment and Social Policy Michael Cahill
Social Work and Social Care 2nd edition Lester Parrott
Health Policy 2nd edition Ann Wall and Barry Owen
Education Policy
Second edition
Paul Trowler
First published 1998
Second edition 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 1998, 2003 Paul Trowler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Trowler, Paul.
Education policy / Paul Trowler.–2nd ed.
p. cm. – (Gildredge social policy series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Education and state–Great Britain. I. Title. II. Series.
LC93.G7 T658 2002

379.41–dc21 2002068243
ISBN 0-203-41785-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-41933-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–27553–9 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–27554–7 (pbk)
Contents
List of tables and figures viii

Foreword ix
1 Policies and structures: schools 1

Outline 1
Background to the current system 1
The situation in 1997 5
Policy and policy-making 1979–97 35
Case study: extending parental choice 38
Conclusion: policy outcomes are highly variable 42
Key points 43
Guide to further reading 43
Useful address 45
Useful websites 45
2 Policies and structures: post-compulsory education 47

Outline 47
Background to the current system 47
The situation in the mid-1990s 76
Case study: the new vocationalism 85
Key points 91
Useful addresses 93
Useful websites 93
3 Making education policy 95

Outline 95
What is education policy? 95
How is education policy made? 96
Two case studies of policy-making 98
vi Contents
Case study: policy-making on grant-maintained schools 99

Case study: national curriculum policy-making 100
Understanding policy-making 103
The New Right 104
Educational ideology and policy-making 105
Some contradictions and gaps in the ideology–policy link 105
Key points 119
Useful websites 122
4 Reception and implementation of education policy 123

Outline 123
Managerial approaches to policy implementation 123
Phenomenological approaches to policy
implementation 128
Case study: using grant-maintained school policy
politically 137
Case study: the Social Justice Strategy 140
Key points 145
5 Government intervention in education 149

Outline 149
Labour inherits a Conservative legacy 149
Five key issues in education policy 152
Four lessons for New Labour 163
Conclusion 172
Key points 173
Useful websites 174
6 Educational research and education policy 176

Outline 176
Modelling the relationship between educational
research and education policy 176
The engineering model 177
The enlightenment model 184
Case study: scheming for youth 186
Contents vii
Key points 191

Useful website 193
Glossary 194
References 206
Index 217
Tables and figures
Tables
1.1 Compulsory education policy: some landmarks
since 1979 6
1.2 Changing roles in the structure of education l944–2001 36
2.1 Post-compulsory policy: some landmarks since 1979 50
2.2 Enrolments on further education courses leading to a
qualification: by type of course and gender, 1994/5 78
3.1 Political ideologies 106
3.2 The contradictory strands in New Right thinking 112
3.3 New Right ideology and education policy 113
3.4 Educational ideologies 115
3.5 The linkages between political and educational
ideologies 118
3.6 Ideological repertoires of education 120
4.1 What managers should do to implement policy
successfully – the ‘top-down’ approach 125
5.1 The shift from bureau-professionalism to new
managerialism 161
5.2 Postmodernity and education 164
6.1 The engineering and enlightenment models of research 177
Figures
3.1 Policy encoding and decoding 97
4.1 The implementation staircase 129
5.1 The impact of context on outcomes 170
Foreword
This book seeks to present the background to education policy for

the novice or near-novice reader, contextualizing it in a theoretical
understanding of how policy is made and the processes involved
in its implementation. Ball and Shilling (1994, p. 1) have noted that
this field has given rise to large numbers of concepts, often dis-
located from contexts or explanatory frameworks. This book seeks
to locate important concepts in a series of case studies for you, so
that their application can be understood. You should bear in mind,
however, that in every field of social science concepts tend to shift
in their meaning both over time and according to context.
The structure of the book is as follows. Chapters 1 and 2 set out
the historical background to education policy in the compulsory and
post-compulsory sectors respectively, and each presents case studies
to allow the exploration of some important policy issues in more
depth. Chapter 3 seeks to give insight into how education policy is
made and into some of the influences on the policy formulation
process. Chapter 4 looks at the important questions of how policy
is received on the ground, how it is implemented and the significance
of this for outcomes. For clarity I have used the traditional language
of ‘policy-making’ and ‘policy implementation’, with its implica-
tion that these are distinct phases in the policy process. Again, you
should be aware that ‘policy-making’ happens at a number of points
in the policy process, including at the point of putting it into effect.
Chapter 5 examines some key issues for education policy that face
governments. Finally, Chapter 6 considers the relationship between
education research and education policy. The Glossary explains
at least some of the terms which may be new to a novice reader.
Most chapters contain a list of useful addresses and websites, as well
as suggestions for further reading. These websites were operational
at the time of going to press but because of the nature of the World
Wide Web they may move to new addresses or no longer be in
operation. Updates to them, information on current education
x Foreword
policy and links to new relevant websites can be found at: http://
www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/trowler.
The book was first published in 1998. For the 2003 edition I have
updated some of the readings and the website addresses and
included the latest information about policy developments which
occurred during the Labour government’s 1997–2001 term of office.
The book attempts to discuss the education system across the
whole of the UK. However, this has not always been possible both
for reasons of space and because the education systems in the four
countries of the UK have become increasingly diversified with the
effects of devolution of government. England, or England and
Wales together, probably receive more attention than Scotland and
Northern Ireland here, though where there are very significant
differences these have been identified.
Having read the book you should:
• understand the nature of education policy

• appreciate the processes involved in education policy-making
and the important factors which impinge on them
• understand the ways in which the policy implementation process
can lead to an ‘implementation gap’ between what is intended
by policy-makers and what actually happens
• have a grounding in policies in both compulsory and post-
compulsory education, particularly those put into effect since
1979
• be aware of important contemporary issues in education policy
• appreciate important links between policy and education
research, as well as understanding the reasons for the often
tenuous nature of those links.
In short, having read the book, you should be able to understand,

interpret and discuss educational policies in a more sophisticated
way. I hope you enjoy it too.
Paul Trowler
Lancaster University, March 2002
Chapter 1
Policies and structures
Schools
OUTLINE
This chapter first outlines the background to the present system
of compulsory education in the UK. It then goes on to give a
summary of the landmarks in formal education policy on schools
between 1979 (the year of the Conservatives’ election to gov-
ernment) and 2001. An overview of the situation in 1997, when
the Labour government was first elected, and then in 2001, is
provided together with a discussion of education policy-making
during the eighteen years of Conservative administration prior
to that. A case study of one of the key aspects of education policy
during that period is provided, namely parental choice of
schools, and through it some of the important aspects of New
Right educational ideas are explored. The chapter concludes with
a summary of key points covered. It is important to note that,
while this chapter and Chapter 2 concentrate on legislative and
other formal policy events, subsequent chapters go on to show
that policy should be conceived in broader terms than simply
the formal actions of government and other official agencies.
Background to the current system

Before 1870 the role of the state in education was limited to the
provision of grants to some church schools, some teacher training
responsibility and the education of pauper children in schools
associated with some workhouses. Church, private and voluntary
schools were the only important sources of education. Only the
middle class and the upper class could afford an education of any
quality, and this was usually limited to their male children.
The 1870 (Forster’s) Elementary Education Act set up elected
authorities, School Boards, to establish schools where existing
2 Policies and structures: schools
provision was inadequate. These were funded from the rates, and
education was made available for 5 to 13 year olds, although it was
not compulsory. Compulsory education to the age of 10 years was
introduced in 1880; fees for elementary education for most children
were abolished in 1891, allowing the further extension of the school
leaving age. This was extended to 11 years in 1893 and 12 years in
1899. In 1893 it became compulsory for school authorities to make
provision for blind and deaf children up to the age of 16 years.
The 1902 (Balfour’s) Education Act made local authorities rather
than School Boards responsible for schools, including church
schools. The basis of today’s organization of education, run by
local authorities, was thus laid. The County Councils and County
Borough Councils had been created in 1888 under the Local
Government Act.
The 1918 Education Act raised the school leaving age to 14 years.
Increasing national control of education was established, with
central government also accepting more of the burden of cost. Local
authorities had now to report to a central Board of Education.
Free secondary education for all

Butler’s 1944 Education Act was based on three reports:
• The 1926 Hadow Report recommended increasing the school

leaving age to 15 years, selective secondary education beginning
at 11 years and parity of esteem – equal status – for different types
of school.
• The 1938 Spens Report recommended a diversification of types
of secondary schools.
• The 1943 Norwood Report recommended the tripartite system:
the division into what would become the grammar, secondary
modern and secondary technical schools.
The 1944 Act ensured compulsory and free state education from
5 to 15 years, and set up the primary (5–11 years), secondary (11–15
years) and further (16–18-plus) schools and colleges. It also marked
the introduction of the tripartite system of education: the grammar,
secondary modern and secondary technical schools, although few
Policies and structures: schools 3
of the last were built. The goals were parity of esteem and easy
transfer between the three types of schools, but neither was
achieved.
However, the system set up by the Butler Act soon ran into
criticism. The selection process, the 11-plus examination, was shown
to be inefficient and biased towards the middle class. Four postwar
reports on schools were very critical of the education system of the
time.
The 1954 Gurney-Dixon Report (Early Leaving) looked at the
factors which prevented children from staying at school beyond
the statutory leaving age. It concluded that pupils’ performance,
and their likelihood of staying on at school, was strongly linked to
parental social class. The Report offered some ideas about why this
should be the case; it cast serious doubt upon the extent to which the
1944 Act had achieved its stated aim of establishing a meritocratic
system in which a child’s potential was identified and nurtured in
appropriate circumstances.
The 1959 Crowther Report (Fifteen to Eighteen) pointed out that
most 15–18 year olds received no formal education despite the
expansion of courses in further education and technical colleges.
The Report recommended that there should be more further educa-
tion to prevent the wastage of talent of those who left school at 15
years to follow a craft or technical career. It also recommended the
raising of the school leaving age to 16 years.
The 1963 Newsom Report (Half Our Future) found that accom-
modation was deficient in 80 per cent of schools attended by average
and below-average ability students. These were mainly secondary
modern schools. While not disagreeing with the tripartite system, it
recommended more spending on secondary modern schools in slum
areas. Newsom confirmed the Crowther recommendation for the
raising of the school leaving age.
Finally the 1967 Plowden Report (Children and Their Primary
Schools) pointed out the deficiencies in schools in poorer areas.
These included noisy environments, high staff turnover, inadequate
facilities and large class sizes. The Report recommended positive
discrimination for schools in deprived areas, which would be termed
Educational Priority Areas (EPAs). Extra money was to be made
available for better staff–pupil ratios and facilities. Suggestions were
also made to improve school management, to abolish corporal

punishment and to appoint specialists to look into the particular
problems found in these schools.
The move to comprehensive schools

The election of a Labour government under Prime Minister Harold
Wilson in 1964 marked a turn in central government’s attitude
towards the tripartite system. The Ministry of Education issued
Circular 10/65 asking all local education authorities (LEAs) to
submit plans for a reorganization of the tripartite into a compre-
hensive system. This is a system of non-selective schools which
accept all children from their catchment area. Already in 1962 one
secondary school pupil in ten was in a comprehensive or near-
comprehensive school. In 1964 71 per cent of all LEAs had or
intended to have some form of comprehensivization in their area.
Circular 10/65 was consolidating a trend which had begun locally in
the 1950s. By 1982 well over 80 per cent of secondary school pupils
were in comprehensive schools. This was despite the Conservative
Party’s hostility to comprehensives and, upon being elected to
government in 1970, its issuing of Circular 10/70 recommending the
re-establishment of selectivity.
The 1970 Education Act improved provision for children with
disabilities and learning difficulties. In 1972 the school leaving age
was raised to 16 years. A Labour government was returned in
1974; its 1976 Education Act imposed a non-selective system on all
LEAs, although some refused to implement it. (This Act was
repealed by the 1979 Education Act.)
The origin of the new vocationalism

In 1976 the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan gave his
famous Ruskin speech, at Ruskin College Oxford. Amongst other
things he said:
I am concerned in my journeys to find complaints from

industry that new recruits from schools sometimes do not have
the basic tools to do the job that is required [and] . . . that many
of our best trained students who have completed the higher

levels of education at university or polytechnic have no desire
or intention of joining industry . . . The goals of our education,
from nursery school through to adult education, are clear
enough. They are to equip children to the best of their ability
for a lively, constructive place in society and also to fit them
to do a job of work. Not one or the other, but both . . . The
balance was wrong in the past. We have a responsibility now
in this generation to see that we do not get it wrong in the other
direction . . . Both of the basic purposes of education require
the same essential tools. These are to be basically literate,
to be basically numerate, to understand how to live and work
together, to have respect for others and respect for the
individual.
(Callaghan 1976, pp. 10–16)
This speech was the keynote for education policy that would follow,
particularly in the eighteen years of Conservative government that
were to begin only three years after Callaghan made that speech.
Callaghan’s articulation of these ideas publicly at this time marked,
essentially, the end of the Butskellite consensus (see Glossary) and
a new ideological underpinning for education policy-making.
The situation in 1997
Pre-primary school education

Over 90 per cent of 3 and 4 year olds received some form of pre-
primary provision. About a quarter went to state (maintained)
nursery schools and classes, another quarter to infant classes in
maintained primary schools and the bulk of the rest went to
privately run playgroups.
Compulsory education
Most areas had a two-tier system in which pupils changed from
primary to secondary school at around the age of 11 years. Most
areas had comprehensive secondary education, although some
Table 1.1 Compulsory education policy: some landmarks since 1979
Key policy events Selected key content Commentary
1979 Education Act Repealed the obligation on LEAs to make The Conservatives’ opposition to the
plans for comprehensivization of secondary comprehensive principle is demonstrated by
schools. this very rapid legislation, repealing the
Labour government’s 1976 Act.
1980 Education Act ■ Assisted places scheme put in place. This Act sets the foundations for
■ Parents given right to choose the Conservative legislation on education in the
school they wanted (though LEAs years to come. Assisted places allowed
could refuse on grounds of inefficient ‘bright’ pupils from the maintained education
use of resources). sector to transfer to private schools with all or
■ Parents given rights to be represented part of their fees paid by government. In the
on school governing bodies. eyes of critics this scheme demonstrated the
■ School governors required to provide government’s view that maintained schools
information to parents on a variety of were not good enough to cater for bright
matters (exam results, criteria for pupils and its lack of determination to
admission, curriculum etc.). improve them. The rights and powers given to
■ Restricted certain powers of LEAs and parents and to governors mark the initiation
gave Education Secretary more powers of a series of policy measures designed, on
in certain areas of policy. the one hand, to introduce market rigours to
the education service by empowering
parents as consumers and, on the other,
empowering schools (rather than LEAs) to
take action to compete in a market
environment. Essentially this Act and later
ones was predicated on the idea of shifting the
balance of power in the education system
towards parents and individual schools and
away from LEAs and shifting the nature of the
system away from a ‘command’ (planned,
directed) towards a ‘market’ one.
1981 Education Act ■ Gave LEAs responsibilities to define the Largely implemented the recommendations of
needs of special needs children and the 1978 Warnock Report, particularly the idea
determine appropriate provision. of mainstreaming and ‘statementing’ special
■ Affirmed the idea of ‘mainstreaming’ needs children. A statement is a report
special needs children (i.e. teaching them drawn up by a multi-disciplinary team
in ordinary schools where possible). concerning the nature of a child’s special
■ Gave parents of special needs children needs and how best to address them.
the right to be consulted on and to appeal
against decisions concerning their child.
1982 Announcement of the Pilot schemes set up in 1983 by the Initial doubts and uncertainties among LEAs,
Technical and Vocational Manpower Services Commission (MSC). schools and colleges began to disappear as it
Education Initiative (TVEI) by TVEI would run for over ten years. Its became clear that locally it was possible to
Margaret Thatcher aims were: develop and control TVEI projects and that
■ to focus on and improve technical and they brought useful sums of money. Local
vocational education for 14–18 year olds TVEI co-ordinators and their steering groups
in schools and colleges remained in control. By the mid-1980s TVEI
■ to include planned work experience involved most LEAs and provided
■ full-time programmes to be delivered ‘unprecedentedly large amounts of money
which combined general and technical for those involved’ (Dale 1985b, p. 44).
and vocational education. When it wound down in the early 1990s it
continued
Table 1.1 continued
1982 Announcement of the TVEI was split up into a number of local was widely considered to have been a
Technical and Vocational projects rather than run as a centrally success and early fears that it would
Education Initiative (TVEI) by directed scheme. The projects were to excessively vocationalize the curriculum
Margaret Thatcher be carefully monitored to establish good proved unfounded. Around 1.3 million
(continued) practice for the whole ability range. 14–18 year olds participated in TVEI in 1993/4,
roughly 78% of the total population of that
age.
Dale (1985b) notes the unusual features of TVEI:
■ Its genesis was unusual: there was no

consultation, no legislation and no
committee of enquiry: Margaret Thatcher
surprised everyone when she announced it.
It was introduced into education from
outside.
■ It was bigger and more extensive than most
other education initiatives.
■ It represented an obvious break with what
had gone before and was introduced at
tremendous speed with very ambitious
goals.
■ Project management, finances and other
aspects of TVEI were outside the normal
patterns: for example the steering groups
were outside the normal LEA management
structures.
1985 White Paper Stated that the government would not Written while Keith Joseph, one of the leaders
Better Schools assume greater powers over the school of the neo-liberal faction of the New Right (see
curriculum. p. 104), was education secretary, this was later
to become something of an embarrassment as
the government was only three years later to
set up the national curriculum, and a range of
other legislation gave strong powers to the
Secretary of State for Education. This
illustrates the way policy does not necessarily
advance incrementally but is subject to
negotiation, compromise and hence change.
1986 Education Act (there ■ Set out a formula by which the Built on the foundations laid by the 1980 Act to
were two, but only one is of composition of the governing body of give parents more control over schools and to
interest here) every maintained (LEA) school is ensure that parents as consumers of
calculated: determining how many education should have adequate information
parents, voluntary body and LEA on which to base their decisions. Prepared
representatives should be the ground for later legislation by firming
included. up the structure and role of school
■ Increased parent representation on governing bodies.
governing bodies.
■ Required more information to be given
by governors to parents, for example
detailed annual reports.
continued
Table 1.1 continued
1988 Higginson Report A committee set up by the government This subject has has stimulated political
under Dr Gordon Higginson to look at controversy and continues to do so. On the
education in the 16–18 age range. The one hand the argument runs that the A level
committee considered that the education system is too narrow and specialized for the
provided by the current A level system was needs of a modern economy. On the other
too narrow: students specialized too early the A level is regarded as the ‘gold
and it should be broadened to become more standard’ which underpins the quality of
like the French Baccalaureate. Specifically a education above and below it. The
five subject structure was proposed. Higginson proposals were rejected. Margaret
Thatcher favoured the A level ‘gold standard’.
However the idea proved popular in some
education circles and it was given fresh
impetus by the publication in 1990 of the paper
‘A British Baccalaureate’ (Finegold et al.), one
co-author of which was David Miliband, who
was to become chief policy adviser to Tony
Blair in 1997 and school minister in 2002.
1988 Education Act ■ Gave the Education Secretary powers to The most important Education Act
prescribe a national curriculum for pupils concerning schools since 1944. This further
to the age of 16 in maintained schools. extended the idea of ‘parental choice’ of
■ Set up the National Curriculum Council schools both by reducing the powers of the
(for England) to oversee the content and LEAs to restrict where children go (they
assessment of the national curriculum. could now go to any maintained school that
■ Gave greater freedom for parents to had room for them provided it catered for
select the maintained school of their their age and aptitude). Again, this built on
choice. earlier Acts. Now, however, the idea of
■ Ensured that maintained schools should extending the options available to parents
not artificially limit the number of pupils. was given greater force by the plans to
It did this by setting the normal school roll permit grant-maintained (GM) schools,
as that of 1979 (when rolls were at their which were more or less self-governing
highest). (i.e. free of LEA control), and the city
■ LEAs required to delegate ‘hiring and technology colleges, which were designed
firing’ of school staff to schools’ governing to have more of an emphasis on technology,
bodies. languages and business and commerce
■ Set up mechanisms for schools to opt out than other types of schools. By 1995 there
of LEA control to become grant- were around a thousand GM schools.
maintained (GM) schools if the majority They must implement the national
of parents who voted in a secret ballot curriculum and are subject to OFSTED
desired this. inspection (see below).
■ Set up the mechanisms for the
establishment of City Technology Even maintained schools which did not want
Colleges (CTCs). or achieve GM status would now have greater
■ Staff appraisal schemes made a legal powers to control their own affairs under this
requirement. Act, a position usually referred to as LMS:
local management of schools. Schools, or at
least their governing bodies, now had more
power to control their own financial affairs and
to hire and fire staff. Conversely the role and
powers of the LEAs, already weakened by
earlier legislation, were further reduced.
continued
Table 1.1 continued
1988 Education Act This reflected a fundamental animosity

(continued) towards LEAs on the part of central
government. They were seen as self-interested,
overblown, inefficient and expensive
bureaucracies. Moreover, during a period in
which the Conservative government had a
large majority in Parliament and, in the main,
the support of the House of Lords, local
government in general was the only
stronghold of opposition. Much of local
government, and therefore LEAs, was in
Labour hands at the time.
It is worth noting the way in which this Act

contains strong elements of dirigisme:
directing education from the centre (e.g.
through the national curriculum) and market
liberalism (e.g. through setting up different
‘flavours’ of schools). In this it was reflecting
the tension between neo-conservatism and
neo-liberalism in New Right thinking. Chapter
3 addresses this issue in more detail as well as
giving background information on the policy
processes underpinning the development of
the national curriculum and GM schools
policy.
1992 The ‘Three Wise Men’ The authors were tasked to ‘review Widely interpreted as an attack on
report published: Curriculum available evidence about the delivery of ‘progressivist’ methods of teaching in primary
Organization and Classroom education in primary schools’ and to schools and a call for a return to whole-class
Practice in Primary Schools ‘make recommendations about didactic teaching of subjects, not topics, the
(see page 178–9). curriculum organization, teaching methods reception of this leant weight to the
and classroom practice appropriate for traditionalist educational viewpoint and the
the successful implementation of the New Right attack on ‘progressivism’
National Curriculum, particularly at Key in schools.
Stage 2’.
1992 Education (Schools) Act ■ Set up new school inspection This Act demonstrates the neo-liberal strand of
arrangements by establishing the Office Conservative thinking (see p. 104). Instead of
for Standards in Education (OFSTED), a the official body of Her Majesty’s Inspectors
department independent of the DfEE and, (HMI) who previously inspected schools and
in England, under the direction of Her wrote private reports, school inspection is
Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools – effectively privatized. Inspection teams,
currently (2002) Mike Tomlinson. once trained and registered, now bid for a
■ OFSTED was charged with identifying, contract to inspect schools, thus imposing
training and registering teams of school some market discipline in terms of cost,
inspectors, under a registered inspector efficiency and effectiveness (in theory). The
(‘regie’) who will go into schools (once teams must include at least one lay inspector
every four years in theory) for around a (not involved professionally with education),
week and write a publicly available thus opening up what was previously seen
report. as a professional ‘closed shop’ (the
Conservative government felt that the HMI
had been in the pockets of the teaching
profession: an example of ‘producer capture’
continued
Table 1.1 continued
1992 Education (Schools) Act in which those who provide a service control
(continued) and run it in their own interests, not those of
the consumer). Reports are publicly available
in libraries, on the World Wide Web and
elsewhere, thus empowering the parent as
consumer with the data they need to make
informed choices. (See the end of this chapter
for the OFSTED website address.)
1993 Dearing Report This government-appointed review into The government accepted Dearing’s
the national curriculum recommended that: recommendations. Subsequent changes to
■ the curriculum should be slimmed down the national curriculum cost £744 million. It
■ the time given to testing should be had by this time become clear that the
reduced national curriculum had grown into an
■ around 20% of teaching time should be unwieldy structure which was almost
freed up for use at the discretion of impossible to implement and which was
schools proving in some cases detrimental to good
■ for Key Stage 4 (i.e. 14–16 years) the teaching and learning because teachers’
school’s discretion should be extended time was increasingly being spent on
even further, with art, geography, history paperwork and testing rather than teaching.
and music made optional The Dearing Report gave the government
■ curriculum choice at Key Stage 3 an opportunity to try to improve the
■ National Curriculum Council (NCC) and curriculum and its associated tests
Schools Examination and Assessment without losing too much face.
Council (SEAC) should become one
body: the Schools Assessment Authority
(SCAA).
1993 Education Act ■ Set up the Funding Agency for Schools This ‘tidied up’ a number of features put in
(FAS) which would finance GM schools. place by earlier policies and took even further
■ FAS also directed to eventually take over the erosion of powers of the LEAs, which by
some of the powers of LEAs to plan now were becoming worried about their
provision in their areas. future role in education (Morris et al., 1993).
■ Simplified ‘opting out’ procedures for
schools to become GM.
■ Introduced methods to deal with ‘failing
schools’ when these were so identified by
OFSTED inspectors.
■ National Curriculum Council and School
Examinations and Assessment Council
replaced by a single School Curriculum
and Assessment Authority.
1994 Education Act ■ Established the Teacher Training Agency Widely seen in the university sector as a threat
(TTA) for England and Wales. to their control over the provision of teacher
■ The TTA funds teacher training in training, this policy was designed to make
England and promotes teaching as a teacher education more ‘practical’ and less
career. ‘theoretical’. This was based partly on
■ Schools are to be centrally involved in government distrust of teacher educators
delivering courses for initial and in-service in higher education and partly on a desire
education and training of teachers and to tackle the supposed problems within
managers. This may be on their own or schools (such as those addressed by
in partnership with others, including with the ‘Three Wise Men’ report) at their roots.
higher education institutions.
continued
Table 1.1 continued
1996 Nursery Education and ■ Extended nursery vouchers to the whole The nursery vouchers aspect of this would be
Grant Maintained Schools Act nation from April 1997. the first of the Conservative education policies
■ Enabled schools to borrow from to be axed by the incoming Labour
commercial markets for capital projects. government in 1997. Plans were also quickly
developed by Labour to change the nature and
funding of GM schools, set out in the White
Paper Excellence in Schools (see Chapter 5).
The provisions of the 1996 Act, then, were
extremely short lived.
1996 Changes to school ■ School inspections to become more This was designed to rectify some of the
inspections announced and manageable and less bureaucratic. unintended consequences of the new system
the new Framework and ■ Sharper focus on standards and teaching. of inspection which had become apparent.
Handbook for School ■ For inspectors less form-filling; fewer These are vividly illustrated in a quotation
Inspection in England but more explicit criteria on which to from a researcher studying the effects of
published assess performance. inspection in one school: ‘I am moved by
■ Better format for small primary and the pain of it all, by the stress, by the
nursery schools. plummeting of self esteem, by seeing how
■ Judgements to be expressed more their cherished values in terms of
clearly and in a more focused way. pedagogy are being marginalized, by the fear
of failure, and by the tensions created. I am
particularly moved by the way in which these
people who have committed themselves to
their pupils and their work, and gained over
the years some measure of confidence about
what they do and can contribute to society,
find themselves as no more than units to be
examined and observed, scrutinized and
assessed. This particular week was the lowest
time for them as they entered into the fringes
of the central spotlight of power – the OFSTED
inspection’ (Woods 1996, p. 102).
1997 Education Act ■ Allowed GM schools to expand. The last piece of Conservative government
■ Enabled schools to be more selective education legislation before the general
without having to gain central approval election of May 1997. Labour would initially
to do so. leave the OFSTED powers in place, believing
■ Permitted exclusions of pupils for up to that LEAs had to prove they added value to
45 days. educational provision and that the principle
■ Children to be tested upon entry to of ‘zero tolerance of failure’ should apply to
primary school. them too. The QCA came into existence
■ OFSTED given powers to inspect LEAs. and the testing of children on admission also
■ Assisted places scheme extended to came into effect, as did the provisions on the
prep schools (40 institutions). exclusion of pupils. Other measures were
■ New Qualifications and Curriculum quickly changed by Labour, however (see
Authority (QCA) set up to combine NCVQ Chapter 5).
(see p. 203) and SCAA (see p. 203).
continued
Table 1.1 continued
1997 The new Labour This White Paper announced the following: Excellence in Schools was based on six key
government publishes ■ setting up of a Standards Task Ford principles:
Excellence in Schools ■ instituting a Standards and Efficiency ■ Education is at the heart of government.
White Paper unit at the DfEE ■ Education should be for the benefit of the
■ setting a target for 2002 of 80% of all many, not the few.
11 year olds to reach the required ■ Standards, not structures and institutions,
standard of literacy and 75% to reach the need to change.
required standard of numeracy ■ Intervention in what is wrong, not what is
■ requirement on all schools to establish working well.
challenging targets for themselves in ■ Zero tolerance of failure.
their development plans, and LEAs to ■ Commitment to work in partnership with all
do likewise interested parties.
■ introduction of General Teaching Council
to represent the education profession These marked a clear change from what had
■ creation of posts for advanced skills gone before, at least in terms of rhetoric. The
teachers incoming Labour government declared that its
■ funding for more and better in-service three priorities for government would be
training for teachers who have shown ‘education, education, education’ and this
special abilities and can act as models refrain was repeated in the months after the
of excellence election (Blair 1997). The first Labour budget,
■ policies for valuing teachers and in July 1997, allocated a total of £2.3 billion
celebrating good practice and excellence of extra resources for schools in the UK; £1.3
■ developing a new curriculum for initial billion on capital spending and £1 billion on
teacher training revenue. In education policy, as in other
■ making qualifications for head teachers areas, Labour insisted it would be ‘firm but
mandatory fair’, providing resources where needed
■ establishment of education action zones but requiring results in the form of
which give additional support for improved standards. Meanwhile the Labour
struggling schools, usually in inner-city government’s Welfare to Work programme
areas meant that 18–24 year olds would have only
■ a policy to establish a ‘national grid for one of the following options: take up a job;
learning’: an internet system for schools do a six-month placement with the
■ phasing out of GM schools and Environment Task Force or an organization
introduction of a new system in which in the voluntary sector, or become a full-
schools fall into one of three categories: time student. Refusal to take one of these
aided, community or foundation schools options would mean loss of benefit. This
■ allocation of more seats to parents on policy on unemployment and benefits
governing bodies promised to have important knock-on
■ allowing parents to decide the future of consequences for post-compulsory
grammar schools. education with a potential flood of new (and
under-qualified) students moving into
colleges and universities.
November 1997 Connecting Set out plans for information and Here the new Labour government set out its
the Learning Society: National communication technology (ICT) plans to modernize the education system,
Grid for Learning published revolution in schools: bringing to it the benefits of ICT that had
■ All schools and colleges to be connected already been realized by commerce and
to the internet by 1998. Full industry. Although the White Paper
implementation of plan set out in this recognizes the formidable task of bringing
paper by 2002. teachers up to date with this technology,
■ Technology to be used for management the more subtle implementation and
information and teacher preparation as teaching and learning issues are not
well as learning. addressed here.
continued
Table 1.1 continued
November 1997 Connecting ■ Students to be able to find and download In some cases the use of ICT is not an
the Learning Society: National information to help them in their studies. appropriate tool for teaching and learning and
Grid for Learning published ■ Government to encourage development has unwanted effects if used wrongly (e.g.
(continued) of appropriate software as well as funding loss of face-to-face interaction). Many
hardware links. teachers are not only unskilled in the use of
■ Teacher education to be acknowledged ICT, they are quite strongly opposed to its
as an important task. use in the educative process. Pupils and
students have a tendency to subvert the
intended uses of technology and to use it for
games, illicit communication and other
purposes not intended, or approved of, by
teachers and policy-makers.
School Standards and ■ Class sizes to be thirty maximum for Gibson and Asthana (1998) in their critique of
Framework Act (1998) infants. this White Paper note that it appears to mark a
■ Education Action Zones to be run by ‘rediscovery’ of the importance of social
local authorities and business – raising background and structured patterns of social
standards is the aim. advantage or disadvantage in affecting the
■ LEAs to draw up education development performance of schools. However, they note
plans and early years development that the concept of Education Action Zones is
plans and have statutory duty to raise ‘extremely limited, both in scope and
standards. ambition’ (p. 205). The focus of the
■ Government to have powers to take programme is too narrow and the resources
over failing LEAs. directed to it inadequate to address the scale
■ Secretary of State to be able to shut of disadvantage that needs to be addressed.
failing schools and reopen with new However, the main difficulty which these
head, new name and many new staff. and other critics identify with this thrust of
■ Code of practice defining roles and policy is the fact that it is expects individual
responsibilities of LEAs to be introduced. schools to address patterns of social
■ Abolition of GM schools, new framework disadvantage when the evidence is that
of community, voluntary and foundation schooling predominantly operates to reflect,
schools put in place (heralded in even reinforce, patterns of advantage and
Excellence in Schools White Paper). disadvantage.
■ More parents on governing bodies and
LEA committees.
■ Ballots for local parents to abolish
grammar school status.
■ Adjudicator for admissions and schools
reorganization to be appointed.
■ Partial selection allowed to continue
where it exists.
■ Specialist schools to be allowed 10%
selection by aptitude.
■ Regulations on nutritional standards
for school lunches.
■ Duty for local authority to provide nursery
education.
■ Abolition of FAS.
■ LEAs banned from setting up assisted-
places-style schemes.
(See the Times Educational Supplement

13 March 1998 for more details.)
continued
Table 1.1 continued
National Literacy Strategy Sets out the programme of teaching This development can be interpreted as
published, March 1998 literacy in primary schools for the next five another attack on teachers’ claims to
years. professional status or an enhancement of it.
Details the amount of time to spent and what The ‘deprofessionalization’ argument runs like
is to be done in very specific terms. this: there has been a gradual de-skilling of
teachers in Britain and abroad. Particularly
Those involved in literacy education will be identifiable has been a separation of
trained in the prescribed approaches – this conception from execution (Apple 1989). The
will take about two days per person. national curriculum has told teachers what to
teach, when to teach it and how to test what
they have taught. The books and materials
which support the national curriculum have
taken the imaginative work of teaching away
from them. Now, at last, central government
is telling them not just what to teach, but how
to teach it. The process of turning teachers
into technicians continues.
The ‘extended professionalization’ argument

runs that teaching is increasingly becoming
an evidence-based profession with skilled
practitioners using proven techniques,
rigorously evaluated and assessed, to achieve
the best results. Professor Michael Barber
says of the National Literacy Strategy: ‘Here’s
the best practice, based on solid international
research and experience’, while the DfEE says
‘this is the first time that every primary teacher
in the country will understand and use
best practice’ (quoted Ghouri 1998). The
supporters of the extended professionalization
argument suggest that teachers will be
enabled to become more creative and
professional. The critics argue that this is a
blueprint that will not apply in many
situations: teaching is about using
professional judgements in specific contexts,
about being a ‘reflective practitioner’, and that
the notion of proven universal solutions is
simplistic and unworkable in educational
contexts. (See Hammersley and Scarth 1993.)
June 1998 The setting up of ■ £1 million per year being spent. The big carrot is the funding which the Action
twenty-five Action Zones ■ Each zone to have around twenty Zones will attract. Certainly the zones
announced for England: schools, primary and secondary. represent a real attempt to tackle social
first twelve to be operational ■ A number of ‘stakeholders’ involved disadvantage and to create equality of
at the beginning of the new in the running of each zone: LEAs, opportunity. In total around £56 million will
academic year. 140,000 pupils business etc. be spent on around 140,000 of the children
will eventually be educated in ■ Zones expected to develop and who most need it. However, concerns
an Action Zone and Action implement innovative educational about the zones include the following points:
Zones are targeted at some of ideas which will spread through the ■ They represent the privatization of
the most deprived areas system. education by the back door.
continued
Table 1.1 continued
National Literacy Strategy ■ These to include, for example, ■ Business will have too great a hand over
published, March 1998 specialist teachers; new curriculum ideas; children’s education.
(continued) better use of ICT; improved pupil ■ There is a contradiction between
records; extended school days and devolution of power to schools and control
improved management. of schools within Action Zones.
■ The financial contribution from business
has been too limited.
July 1998 Announcement £19 billion extra for education in total: The extra resources for education were
of the Government’s £3 billion in 1999; £6 billion in 2000; welcomed by those in the education system
Comprehensive Spending £10 billion in 2001. and saw a shift towards increasing the share
Review outcomes of the GDP devoted to education after some
years of decline.
Teaching and Higher Though primarily to do with higher

Education Act 1998 education, there are some provisions which
relate to compulsory education. See p. 67
for a summary and commentary.
23 March 1999 Government This involved: Welcome focusing on needs of inner-city

announces a three-year ■ extra tuition to be available for the most schools but assumption that schools can
£350 million allocation for able children – initially, 100,000 pupils in tackle the problems of society. Also rather
inner-city schools 450 schools in London, Manchester, strange that so much of this money is
Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, focused on higher achievers.
Sheffield and Rotherham
■ the appointment of 800 ‘learning mentors’
to work in the 450 target schools. These
were designed to help underachievers
make the most of educational
opportunities – especially children
from minority, ethnic and disadvantaged
backgrounds.
■ more ‘learning units’ for disruptive
youngsters, to serve each of the 450
target schools.
March 1999 Government This involves: The aim here is to broaden the ‘too-narrow’
announces outcome of ■ new AS qualification (Advanced education beyond 16 and to bring the UK
Qualifying for Success Subsidiary) to be equivalent to the first into line with other countries. Wider skills
consultation. ‘The government half of a full A level acquisition is an important aim too.
believes that the traditional ■ a new broader A level syllabus
post-16 curriculum in England ■ new ‘synoptic’ assessment at A level
is too narrow and inflexible ■ limits on amount of assessment by
in the modern world’ (letter coursework
from DfEE to educational ■ new higher level tests to be more
institutions, 19 March 1999) accessible than current S levels
■ revisions to GNVQ
■ separate certification of ‘key skills’
in GNVQ
■ new key skills qualification.
continued
Table 1.1 continued
March 1999 Green Paper: ■ All teachers to be appraised by senior Elements of managerialist ideology clearly
Teachers – Meeting the staff. apparent in these proposals. Portfolio
Challenge of Change ■ Pay scales and teachers’ career preparation is fraught with already-
published development to be determined by documented problems. Clearly there is
outcomes. going to be a certain amount of
■ Teachers must prepare a portfolio creativity in relation to how these policies are
providing information about their actually implemented at the ground level
performance, analysis of pupils’ results if this Green Paper becomes law in this form.
and evidence of commitment to their
own professional development.
■ Opportunities available for higher pay
than at present.
■ Heads to be appraised also by governing
body.
■ £1 billion announced to pay for the start
of the new system.
May 1999 Government Follows from the Qualifying for Success Widely criticized as too complex, with
announces proposals for consultation, discussed above. Curriculum insufficient time for implementation.
‘Curriculum 2000’, a 2000 to be implemented in September However, there was wide support for the
slimmed-down version of the 2000 when finally agreed. Implements measures which were in line with those
national curriculum the broader A level structure set out above. proposed by DES (1988) but rejected by the
Thatcher administration.
March 1999 Excellence in Targeted at Key Stages 3, 4 and 5. Planned Initiative broadly welcomed, with head
Cities initiative announced to: teachers in particular responding
■ develop and expand the number of enthusiastically to extra resources. The first
beacon and specialist schools annual report in 2001 on the scheme
■ extend opportunities for gifted and identifies considerable success. This is
talented children available from:
■ launch a new network of learning centres http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/excellence/.
■ encourage setting by schools (i.e. a form
of internal selectivism) Details of beacon schools are available at:
■ give a new emphasis to literacy and http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/
numeracy teaching beaconschools/.
■ introduce a scheme of low-cost home
computer lease for pupils and adults who
face particular disadvantages
■ strengthen school leadership
■ turn around the weakest schools
■ modernize LEAs
■ tackle disruption in schools more
effectively by ensuring every school has
access to a Learning Support Unit
■ provide a ‘learning mentor’ for every
young person who needs one, as a single
point of contact to tackle barriers to pupils’
learning
■ introduce new, smaller Education Action
Zones to focus on low performance in
small clusters of schools
continued
Table 1.1 continued
March 1999 Excellence in ■ provide subsidised loans to teachers for

Cities initiative announced the purchase of computers
(continued)
September 1999: Phase One covers
secondary schools in 25 LEAs.
September 2000: a further 22 areas join up,
along with primary pilots in Phase One areas.
September 2001: a further 10 areas joined.
Programme covered more than a thousand
schools – about a third of all secondary-age
pupils in the country.
November 2000 National Immediately took charge of leadership Broadly welcomed by the profession, though
College for School Leadership training for schools which had since the the underlying philosophy of management
announced mid-1990s been dispersed in regions education underpinning the college appears to
around the country. continue to be a rather dated competence-
based one. The college website is at:
http://www.ncsl.org.uk.
September 2001 Schools – The government plans to: These proposals are presented under the
Achieving Success White ■ amend legislation to enable many more following broad headings:
Paper published students to take Key Stage 3, GCSE and
advanced qualifications earlier in their ■ modernizing education law
school lives to allow them to broaden or ■ high minimum standards for all
deepen their studies, spend more time ■ deregulation and diversity
on vocational options, undertake
voluntary activity or move on to ■ meeting individual talents and aspirations
advanced level study early at 14–19
■ amend existing legislation to promote ■ building for excellence
greater rigour in tackling poor behaviour, ■ early years and childcare
in parallel with policies to encourage ■ deregulating teacher employment
children, their parents and their schools provisions
to contribute to improved behaviour ■ teachers’ pay.
while learning
■ introduce legislation that allows schools
greater freedom to establish governance
arrangements that suit them
■ where legislative constraints prevent
chools from sharing resources and
expertise, loosen them so that schools
can more easily work together, for
example sharing an excellent team of
subject teachers
■ legislate to allow for all-age City
Academies and for schools on the City
Academy model in disadvantaged rural
as well as urban areas
■ take powers to allow successful schools
greater freedoms to innovate, for example
greater flexibility within clearly defined
limits on pay and conditions and the
curriculum, if this would support them to
raise standards
continued
Table 1.1 continued
Key policy events Selected key content
September 2001 Schools – ■ introduce a right of appeal to the Adjudicator

Achieving Success White where a successful school’s proposals for expansion
Paper published are rejected by the School Organisation Committee
(continued) ■ legislate to enable excellent schools to support
and partner weak or failing schools in new ways
■ legislate to require LEAs to advertise widely when
a new school is required, and for decisions on these
competitions to be taken by the Secretary of State
■ provide a reserve power for the Secretary of State
to require an LEA to involve an external partner in
turning round a failing school
■ in cases of school weakness or failure, allow for a
governing body to be replaced by an Interim
Executive Board as part of a turn-around solution
■ legislate to make sure that there is sufficient curricular
flexibility at Key Stage 4 to implement our proposals
for 14–19 education
■ remove any legislative barriers to collaboration
between schools and between schools and FE colleges
so that, for example, there may be greater sharing of
teaching staff
■ take legislative powers to remove any structural
barriers to the creation of the 14–19 phase, including
in its organisation, funding and inspection
■ make sure that students have access to high quality
advice and guidance at key points of choice in order
that they are better placed to take charge of their own
decisions. Legislate to secure this if necessary.
■ legislate to assist new teachers, working in
shortage subjects in both schools and Further
Education, who enter and remain in employment
in the state sector, to pay off their student loans
over a set period of time
■ take powers to enable certain groups of teachers,
for example trainees and teachers qualified abroad,
to be registered with the General Teaching Council
as well as strengthening the GTC’s powers more
generally
■ take powers to require school place allocation to
be co-ordinated by LEAs and all areas to have
Admissions Forums. Also clarify and simplify key
aspects of admissions law and guidance.
■ legislate to refine powers that tackle failure and
under-performance in LEAs
■ legislate to define separate budgets for schools and
LEA central functions, and for a Schools Forum to
exercise functions in relation to the schools budget
■ take a reserve power to allow the Secretary of
State, in exceptional circumstances, to direct a
local authority to set a budget for expenditure on
schools at a level determined by the Secretary of
State, having regard to all the relevant circumstances
continued
Table 1.1 continued
Key policy events Selected key content
September 2001 Schools – ■ simplify and consolidate the Secretary of State’s

Achieving Success White grant-making powers
Paper published ■ legislate to free school governors to run a wide
(continued) range of family and community facilities and
services, including childcare
■ amend legislation for Early Years Partnerships
to reflect their responsibilities for childcare
■ take powers to make the status of nursery
schools more like that of other schools, for
example as regards their governance and
funding and to consolidate the Foundation Stage
■ legislate to replace the current baseline
assessment arrangements with a single
national end of Foundation Stage Profile based
on the Early Learning Goals
■ enable co-operative approaches with other
schools and institutions in Further and Higher
Education by removing the assumption that
schools provide education only through
employing teachers
■ increase flexibility for permitting innovative
approaches by providing for the main staffing
provisions to be in secondary legislation and
guidance
■ deregulate to allow more responsibility
for staffing decisions in schools to shift from
the governing body to the head, in line with
the proposals of the Way Forward Group on
governance
■ take forward the Way Forward Group proposal
that the head should take decisions to dismiss
staff, with an appeal to a committee of governors
■ take power to set by order any standards to be
attained by teachers at certain stages of their careers,
subject to consultation but not to the pay machinery.
This would take threshold, AST (Advanced Skills
Teacher) and Fast Track teacher standards out of the
STRB (School Teachers’ Review Body) machinery. Take
power to put into force, again subject to consultation,
any administrative arrangements or procedures
necessary to give effect to provisions relating
to statutory pay and conditions.
■ clarify the existing ‘fast-track’ procedure of
consulting the Chair of the STRB to bring into
force minor or consequential pay and conditions
provisions, without formal reference to the STRB
■ update the 1986 Act provision empowering
the Secretary of State to make teacher appraisal
regulations so that there is an explicit power
for schools to use appraisal data in pay decisions,
as well as technical updating
■ make sure that head teachers can assess teachers’
performance for pay purposes within the overall
budgetary framework set by the governing body
■ correct the removal of point 0 from the teachers’
pay spine in 1999.
retained grammar and secondary modern schools. Some areas had

a three-tier system, with a middle school stage between the primary
and secondary stages. There were 34,000 schools in the UK. At both
primary and secondary levels there were four main categories of
maintained (state) schools in England and Wales. These were
governed and funded in distinct ways:
• County schools: funded wholly through the LEA. After the

advent of local management of schools (LMS) in 1988 LEAs
delegated spending power and other responsibilities to governing
bodies but retained powers of oversight and funding for various
services.
• Voluntary controlled schools: owned by charities, usually
churches. The LEA, however, retained considerable power over
the schools.
• Voluntary aided schools: also owned by charities, usually
churches. More control over school policies lay with the
governing bodies of these schools than was the case with
voluntary controlled schools.
• Grant-maintained schools: free from LEA control and funded
(in England) by central government through the Funding Agency
for Schools (FAS), an agency of the Department of Education
and Employment. There were around 450 grant-maintained
(GM) primary schools (3 per cent) and 650 GM secondary
schools (20 per cent) in England.
Additionally at secondary level only there were city technology

colleges which were also free from LEA control. They were funded
by the Department for Education and Employment but promoters
owned or leased the premises and were responsible for their manage-
ment. There were only fifteen CTCs in existence, considerably fewer
than the Conservative government planned for.
Parents could send their children to private schools if they could
pay the fees. The assisted places scheme was designed to allow low-
income families to take advantage of this option. Around 35,000
assisted places were made available annually in England and Wales.
Provision for most children with special needs was made in
mainstream primary and secondary schools and, where possible,
this was the favoured option. There were, however, special schools
and colleges available to cater for special needs where necessary.
Policy and policy-making 1979–97

Policy-making is often thought about in terms of it being either
rational or incremental in nature. The rational model assumes
that policy-makers become aware of a problem, consider alternative
ways of solving it and then choose the best (Etzioni 1967, p. 385).
The incrementalist model by contrast sees policy-makers as
‘muddling through’ (Lindblom 1959). Policies change in reaction
to changing circumstances and they can appear (and be) unco-
ordinated, even contradictory. At one level it appears that the
incrementalist view most closely models education policy-making
during the 1944–79 period when there was broad consensus between
Labour and Conservatives over many aspects of social policy (the
‘Butskellite settlement’). There was only a limited ideological
‘drive’ behind policy-making, so decisions were arrived at through
negotiation and compromise. However, after 1979 there was a clear
shift in policy and policy-making away from that settlement towards
a new, more radical vision for education and to a more rationalistic,
co-ordinated, goal-oriented approach to policy-making in general.
Even after 1979 the rational model did not exist in a pure form.
Policy-making is always a political process; competing groups,
interests and ideologies continued to fight over the shape of educa-
tion policy. In this context there was a clear tension between those
who wanted central control and those who were more concerned
with deregulation. Since the New Right (see p. 104) was politically
and ideologically dominant and enjoyed a strong parliamentary
majority, and many of the interest groups formerly involved in the
policy process (e.g. teachers and the LEAs) were progressively
marginalized, the ground over which this battle was fought was
defined almost completely by New Right thinking and essentially
involved the different factions within the New Right.
Table 1.2 shows how the respective roles of the players in
education policy formulation changed over the years, with the trend
being towards dominance at the centre.
The more co-ordinated, rationalist, nature of education policy
Table 1.2 Changing roles in the structure of education 1944–2001
1944–74 1974–88 1988–97 1997–2001
Education Department Overseers (chair) Limited assertiveness Minister’s instrument One among several
interested departments
Political party in Reserve power Electorally opportunist Dominant Dominant
power
LEA Active partners Squeezed Marginalized Need to prove worth
(managing director)
Teachers Active partners Problems Proletarianized Need to prove worth
(executive director)
Parents Who? Constructed as ‘natural Consumers Consumers
experts’ or moral
guardians
Industry Indifferent (full Concerned (increasing Consultants Partners
employment) unemployment)
Source: Adapted from Dale 1989, p. 115

during this period is most evident in the links between the 1980,
1986 and 1988 Education Acts. What linked them was the idea of
bringing market forces to education policy, with parents in the role
of consumers. The case study below explores this key aspect of Tory
education policy of the period.

After four years of Labour government, 1997–2001, remarkably
little had changed in terms of compulsory education, the period
seeing a continuation of much that the Conservatives had put in
place. Ball (1999) notes that the basic organizing principles of
Conservative policy remained in place:
• choice and competition: the commodification and consumeriza-

tion of education
• autonomy and performativity: the managerialization and
commercialization of education
• centralization and prescription: the imposition of centrally
determined assessments, schemes of work and classroom
methods.
The policy of encouraging schools to develop specialisms,

linked to the theme of choice and competition, led to a trebling in
the number of ‘specialist’ schools in that period, and this policy
continued into Labour’s second term (from 2001). The
Conservatives’ focus on the basics was retained too, with national
strategies on literacy and numeracy in primary schools adopting
what was, for their critics, a centralist and traditionalist approach to
teaching and learning at that level.
One main difference was that the level of spending increased:
the share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) devoted to education
overall increased from 4.6 per cent to 5 per cent, with total education
spending increasing from just over £37 billion to nearly £50 billion
between 1997 and 2001. Another was the special focus on dis-
advantaged schools: Labour’s Excellence in Cities programme gave
additional support to those schools which faced special issues
associated with social and economic disadvantage in the areas from
which they drew pupils. A third difference was a concern to update

schools and to take full advantage of new technologies in education
as was happening extremely rapidly in the economy as a whole.
The government realized, however, that while investment in tech-
nological infrastructure, particularly through the National Grid for
Learning (a government-funded resource aiming to make schools
into a networked learning community through the internet), could
be implemented relatively easily, the patchy levels of knowledge
about and confidence with information and communication tech-
nology (ICT) among the teaching profession meant that getting it
used well in schools was a more difficult task.
Case study: extending parental choice
Why extend parental choice?

Three key ideas underlay this aspect of Conservative policy:
• Teachers, local authority officers and others were running the

education service in their own interests, not those of children and
parents (summed up in the phrase ‘producer capture’).
• Schools had ceased to look outwards to their communities and
had become insular.
• The combination of these factors had led to a complacent attitude
in the education service, where low standards were accepted and
motivation to improve was lacking.
Extending the rigours of the marketplace to the education service,

it was thought, would force the service to look outwards to its market
– parents. Schools would learn to offer what parents wanted
or would go under, with good schools driving out the bad through
the power of their success in the new education marketplace. The
best schools would become dynamic, distinctive and beacons of
excellence. The worst would simply close as parents took their
children elsewhere.
How was it done?

• Empowering governing bodies. The powers, duties and respon-
sibilities of governing bodies were expanded under the Education
Acts of 1980, 1985 and 1986. Simultaneously parents gained more

seats on governing bodies. Interesting proposals very similar
to these had been set out in the Taylor Report (1977), led by the
Labour leader of Blackburn City Council reporting to a Labour
government.
• Opening school doors to parents. Parents were given the right to
select the school their children would attend, and schools were
obliged to admit pupils up to a pre-defined number: this was called
‘open enrolment’. Whether a child lived in the school’s catchment
area was now less important. Schools could reject children only
on the grounds that they did not meet the entrance criteria or that
the school was full.
• Making information available to parents. Schools now had to
make public their aims, procedures, selection criteria, examination
and test results, levels of truancy, etc. Parents had the right to see
records about their children and receive a written report. School
governors’ reports also had to be published and a meeting held
with parents at least once a year. Parents would now be able to
make an informed choice.
• Imposing rigorous school inspection. Regular reports by indepen-
dent inspectors were also partly intended to inform parents
about the strengths and weaknesses of local schools and therefore
to act as a basis for choice. Open meetings allowed parents to
discuss their findings. Parents were sent a summary of the report
and the full report was freely available (e.g. in local libraries).
• Extending parental right of appeal. Independent assessors on
panels were appointed to hear appeals from parents unsuccessful
in getting the school they wanted for their child.
• Creating different types of school. Setting up new forms of school
such as grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges
was designed partly to increase diversity and so give parents a
greater range of choice.
• Rewarding success. The way schools were funded also changed.
Most of the money schools received was now calculated on the
basis of how many pupils they could attract. Successful, popular
schools would thrive, unsuccessful ones would go into a cycle of
decline and eventually close.
• Giving parents the right to vote. Parents were given the right to
vote for their child’s school to opt out or not, i.e. to become grant-
maintained or to stay under local authority control.
Did it work? The good news
The parents and school choice interaction (PASCI) project (Woods
1992; Woods et al. 1996) and the study by Gewirtz et al. (1995) found
some evidence of success in these policies. Schools were now more
likely to market themselves as ‘a caring institution’ or ‘an academic
institution’, seeing this as providing what parents wanted. In other
ways too the schools were catering for perceived parental demand,
for example in seeking to provide extracurricular activities for
children, being more aware of the need to protect children’s
belongings and taking action more quickly when pupils were
disruptive or likely to disturb the education of others. The aim of
rewarding excellent schools and highlighting those which need
improvement also appeared to have met some success according to
data from McPherson and Raab (1988a). Their study of parental
choice in first-year admission to ten schools in Dundee and ten in
Edinburgh found that:
• There has been a large outflow from secondary schools serving

the least popular housing schemes into adjacent, often previously
selective, schools; 70 per cent of placement requests were made
by parents wishing to avoid the local catchment school.
• Substantial inequalities were developing among secondary
schools which formerly had had equal status: magnet and sink
schools were developing. The theory was that this would lead the
‘sink’ schools to improve their practices, to be taken over by a
more effective ‘task force’ of managers and teachers or to close
completely.
Did it work? The bad news
There are a number of problems with the ideas underpinning this
strand of Conservative education policy. First is the very notion of
education as a marketplace. Choosing a school, or deciding to take a
child to another one, is unlike buying a new car, for example, in a
number of important ways. Buying a car is not compulsory, and if
something is wrong you can require the supplier to put right any
defects. Your actions as purchaser do not affect the nature of the car.
Cars come in a wide range of styles and prices and you can shop
around very effectively. The car itself has no say in the purchase
arrangements. For these and other reasons the education system is
at best a ‘quasi-market’. Moreover there is a problem in trying to
change the parent–school relationship into a market one: instead of
a relationship of partnership and co-operation in which parents have
a say in the education of their child, it becomes almost a conflictual
one. Power et al.’s (1996) study of grant-maintained schools found
that parents were marginalized and devalued by these supposedly
market-driven schools. Deem (1996a) found that the attempt to
empower governors had been neutralized by the increased power of
state control over the national curriculum, assessment, funding and
teachers’ conditions.
However, critics of the Conservatives’ parental choice policy have
concentrated most on its detrimental effects on equality of
opportunity, and the continuing importance of social disadvantage
in conditioning educational achievement. Many commentators see
such policies as developing an educational underclass, largely
concentrated in the inner cities, who are unable to exercise a choice.
They point to a number of reasons why this happens.
• In an effort to achieve high standards and so become more

attractive to parents, schools become choosier too. During the
1990s they were allowed to select more children by ability; these
procedures will disadvantage the already disadvantaged in much
the same way as the grammar/secondary-modern system did. The
PASCI project found clear evidence of this happening. Gewirtz et
al. (1995) found that schools were using subtle methods to select
parents and pupils, for example making application forms difficult
to complete, setting early deadlines and making parents sign
contracts of co-operation. All these meant that the more
motivated, knowledgeable and literate parents were more likely to
be successful.
• For the same reason schools will move quickly to exclude difficult
pupils. The number of exclusions from school increased markedly
in the 1990s as schools attempted to protect their reputations for
discipline and good order locally. Disadvantaged children in
particular will suffer from this.
• These policies reward success rather than offering support for

disadvantaged schools. Schools situated in areas where parents
do not want to send their children will suffer financially. A 1993
OFSTED (see Glossary) report found standards ‘inadequate’ and
‘disturbing’ in schools, colleges and other educational centres in
a variety of city areas visited where there were ‘pockets of severe
disadvantage’.
• The market-driven emphasis on testing and streaming results in
children being labelled at an early age, reinforcing teachers’
expectations based on stereotypes about ethnicity and social
class.
• Disadvantaged parents cannot exercise choice easily: lack of
resources means they have to send their child to the local school.
Some children from minority ethnic groups will not be able to
attend schools with entry criteria related to religion.
• Parents who understand and know how to use educational
information may be empowered by these policies. Others are not.
The possession of cultural capital (see Glossary) becomes very
important.
Conclusion: policy outcomes are highly variable

Most studies agree that large generalizations about the outcomes of
policy such as that on parental choice are impossible. Local
conditions have very important effects on whether a policy ‘works’
or not and can often result in unintended consequences. In some
GM schools parental involvement has increased, in others it has
diminished. In some areas LEA schools are highly attractive to
parents, in others the GM schools are more attractive (Power et al.
1996). In some areas there is a highly active quasi-market, in others
there is not (Woods et al. 1996). Conservative policies have
increased equality of educational opportunity in some aspects of
the educational service and reduced it in others (Arnot et al. 1996).
Chapters 3 and 4 will show how this local reception of policy, its
(re)interpretation and subsequent implementation are extremely
important in (often) changing policy as it moves through its ‘career’.
Key points
• There has been a shift away from the Butskellite settlement on
education achieved after 1945 to a set of policies influenced by
New Right ideology and largely excluding input from interest
groups such as teachers and LEAs. This ideological position is
found in the final years of Labour administration in the 1970s as
well as in Conservative government policies in the 1980s, 1990s
and 2000s. Their critics argue that the Labour governments of
the late 1990s and early 2000s retain too much of the New Right
legacy in the New Right/Social Democratic mix that characterizes
New Labour.
• As the above point indicates, political ideology rather than
negotiated settlement became increasingly important in
education policy-making as well as in other areas of policy during
the 1980s and 1990s.
• Partly as a result of this, policy-making achieved greater
coherence and consistency in recent decades, though internal
contradictions in education policies and ‘muddling through’ also
continued to characterize the 1980s and 1990s.
• One key aspect of education policy, the introduction of market
forces to the education system through the enhancement of
parental choice, has had a number of unintended outcomes.
• Legislation has become more all-encompassing in character over
the years and the rate of policy development and change has
become increasingly frenetic.
• But outcomes are complex and tend to be shaped by ground-
level characteristics as well as by the policy itself.
Guide to further reading

For a good summary of reports, legislation and the education system as
a whole see:
Mackinnon, D. and Statham, J. (1999) Education in the UK: Facts and
figures, London: Hodder and Stoughton, in association with the Open
University (3rd edition).
continued
For a collection of important documents see:

Maclure, S. (ed.) (1986) Educational Documents, England and Wales, 1816
to the Present Day, London: Methuen, 5th edition.
For an overview of the 1988 Education Act see:

Maclure, S. (1989) Education Re-formed: A Guide to the Education Reform
Act, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2nd edition.
For a summary of the latest legislation see:

Croner (no single date) The Teacher’s Legal Guide, Kingston-upon-
Thames: Croner.
Taylor, G., Saunders, J. B. and Liell, P. (annually) The Law of Education,
London: Butterworth.
For current information about education in the UK and Europe see:

Government Statistical Office (annually) Social Trends, London: HMSO.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (annually)
Education at a Glance, Paris: OECD.
For a series of interesting studies on the impact of policies in schools

see:
Pole, C. and Chawla-Duggan, R. (eds) (1996) Reshaping Education in the
1990’s: Perspectives on Primary Schooling, London: Falmer Press.
Pole, C. and Chawla-Duggan, R. (eds) (1996) Reshaping Education in the
1990’s: Perspectives on Secondary Schooling, London: Falmer Press.
For a discussion of the contradictions within the 1988 Education Act

see:
Coulby, D. and Bash, L. (1991) Contradiction and Conflict: The 1988
Education Act in Action, London: Cassell.
For an insight see:

Lawton, Denis (1994) The Tory Mind on Education, 1979–94, London:
Falmer Press.
Lawson distinguishes between three strands of Tory thinking on
education: the privatizers, the minimalists and the pluralists. Using some
interesting primary material Lawton sets out the views of politicians who
represent each of these, often in their own words. Providing a useful
analytical framework, Lawton traces the development of Tory education
policy over the period he covers and then discusses the future in a way
which provokes the reader into considering the options carefully. Thus,
while giving a readable account of policies, the book contextualizes and
structures them in a way which is extremely valuable.
Useful addresses
OFSTED Publications Centres
Free Publications
OFSTED Publications Centre
Orders: 07002 637833
Fax: 07002 693274
E-mail: freepublications@ofsted.gov.uk
Priced Publications
The Stationery Office – TSO (formerly HMSO)
Offices throughout the country. Look in the phone book for your
local branch.
Orders: 0870 600 5522
Fax: 0870 600 5533
Internet: http://www.official-documents.co.uk
Useful websites
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/
The education standards website gives full details of many initia-
tives, particularly those undertaken between 1997 and 2002
http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts.htm
Acts of the UK Parliament: full text of all public and local Acts going
back to 1988 and 1991, respectively
http://www.labour.org.uk/
This is the Labour Party website
http://www.niss.ac.uk/
The NISS information gateway, for schools, FE and HE funding
bodies, libraries, etc. National Information Services and Systems is
an online information service for the UK education sector
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/
SOSIG (pronounced ‘sausage’) is the gateway to a number of
extremely useful social science resources
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/
The page for details on TSO (formerly HMSO) publications
http://www.parliament.uk/hophome.htm
The Parliament page
http://www.ofsted.gov.uk
The home page of the Office for Standards in Education. OFSTED
reports on specific schools can be downloaded from here
http://www.ukonline.gov.uk/
The website from which a large range of information about
government activities can be accessed; there is a very useful search
engine here which will locate documents and information on a huge
range of issues
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/
The website of the Department for Education and Skills
http://www.tes.co.uk/
The Times Educational Supplement’s website for the latest news
and commentary on compulsory (and some post-compulsory)
education
http://education.guardian.co.uk//
The home page of the Guardian newspaper’s education website
Chapter 2
Policies and structures
Post-compulsory education
OUTLINE
This chapter sets out the background to the current post-
compulsory education system in the UK, focusing on higher and
further education and adult education, as well as, to some
extent, youth training. It gives a summary of some policy
landmarks of the eighteen years of Conservative government,
1979–97, as well as the first term of Labour office following that,
1997–2002. It then explores a case study of post-compulsory
policy during that period. Finally the key points of the chapter are
highlighted. It is important to note that although this chapter
and Chapter 1 concentrate on legislative and other formal policy
events, subsequent chapters go on to show that policy should
be conceived in broader terms than simply the formal actions of
government and other official agencies.
Background to the current system

In the late seventeenth century there were only two universities
in England (Oxford and Cambridge), and four in Scotland
(Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Aberdeen). Even by the late
eighteenth century there were only fourteen universities in total in
the UK, although by now there were twenty thousand students
(Scott 1995). The ‘redbrick’ universities, such as Leeds and
Manchester, were founded in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Likewise the expansion of adult education towards the current
situation in Britain began only in the nineteenth century. In 1821
the first technical (‘mechanics’’) institute was set up (in Edinburgh).
By 1850 there were 610 of these institutions, the precursors of
today’s further education colleges, around the country. Many would
later become museums, libraries or polytechnics as well as technical
or further education colleges. They were often funded by private
48 Policies and structures: post-compulsory education
donations and their aim was to improve the skills and knowledge of
working people, particularly working men.
It is clear that the development of post-compulsory education
was linked to the rise of industrial capitalism in the UK; the earlier
forms of economic systems did not require large numbers of people
with an advanced education, although from the seventeenth century
onwards there had been a movement to educate adults so that they
could read the Bible, especially amongst Quakers and Methodists.
Indeed, a suspicion of the possible consequences of educating large
numbers of the working class continued to pervade discussions
about the expansion of education throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. These fears were diminished somewhat by the continuing
religious function of education of adults and children: ‘education
for salvation’ (Kelly 1983).
Other institutions, such as London Working Men’s College and
Leicester College (now the extra-mural teaching centre for
Leicester University), were set up during the nineteenth century
with a liberal arts focus, sometimes as a reaction to the vocation-
alism of the mechanics’ institutes. From the 1870s university
extra-mural work became increasingly important in non-vocational
adult education. (Extra-mural, literally ‘beyond the walls’, means
education for the community outside the university.) Subjects such
as Greek, Latin, history, logic, literature and modern languages
were taught.
The Workers’ Education Association (WEA) was created in
1903, supported by the co-operative movement, trade unions and
universities. The work of the WEA was rooted in the liberal humane
philosophy of the universities. From 1924 the WEA gained funding
from central government and began to split from the universities.
In 1919 the University Grants Committee was established. Its
task was to distribute Treasury funds to the universities, at first
on a small scale. It effectively acted as a buffer between the govern-
ment and universities, ensuring that their work was free of political
interference while allowing them the freedom which would enable
them to become the important force they were to become later in
the century. By 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, 2 per cent
of 18 year olds attended university, but the figure for female 18 year
olds was only 0.5 per cent (Blackburn and Jarman 1993).
Policies and structures: post-compulsory education 49
Postwar expansion
The period after the war saw a large expansion in post-compulsory
education. Section 41 of the 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act)
made it:
the duty of every local education authority to secure the

provision for their area of adequate facilities for further
education, that is to say, (i) Full-time and part-time education
for persons over compulsory school age; and (ii) Leisure time
occupation in such organised cultural training and recreative
activities as are suited to their requirements, for any persons
over compulsory school age who are able and willing to profit
by the facilities provided for that purpose.
(Emphasis mine)
Section 42 required local education authorities to co-operate with

other providers, and section 53 emphasized the need for ‘adequate
facilities for recreation and social and physical training to be
established in co-operation with voluntary agencies’.
The 1945 Percy Report considered the need for and provision of
higher technological education in England and Wales. Its recommen-
dations included the expansion of science teaching in universities
and the creation of colleges of advanced technology. It also recom-
mended that organizations should be established to co-ordinate the
work of the various institutions involved in higher technological
education at local and national levels. There was, simultaneously,
a concern for the expansion of education as a recreation. The 1944
Education Act set up adult education centres offering a wide
range of provision. The number of adult students in evening
institutes rose from three hundred thousand in 1947 to more than
a million in 1967, many studying on non-vocational courses. By that
time the university system was undergoing rapid change. The newer
civic universities, such as Newcastle and Leicester, were founded
after the Second World War, often through the ‘promotion’ of an
existing college.
Table 2.1 Post-compulsory policy: some landmarks since 1979
1981 Expenditure White Paper The University Grants Committee was The unintended effect was to push
announced cuts in university sector faced with the having to apportion a cut students across the binary divide into
imposed by University Grants of around 15% in total across the the polytechnics where the government
Committee university sector. The intake of students had not been able to control the
was cut. number of places offered. Polytechnic
student numbers expanded as a result.
1981 White Paper: A New Training Youth Training Scheme (YTS) replaced Successful in terms of number of
Initiative a variety of schemes for 16–17 year olds trainees (376,000 by 1988 but declining
who would otherwise probably have thereafter) and beset by problems (see
been unemployed. Began as a one-year p. 90).
scheme, subsequently (1986) increased
to two.
1985 Jarratt Report Charged with reviewing and making Widely seen as the start of the
recommendations about university application of managerialism (Pollitt
management, it recommended a raft of 1990 and 1993 – see below) to the
measures designed to make university sector. Though it had little
universities more effective and efficient measurable effect at the time, it marked
through clearer management structures a change in attitudes and discourse
and styles. about university management.
1985 Green Paper The Development Accepted the polytechnics and A move towards accepting expansion of
of Higher Education into the 1990s universities funding bodies’ redefinition the higher education system after the
of the Robbins principle to become cuts of the early 1980s, but within clearly
‘courses of higher education should be limited spending. The government was
available to all those who can benefit attempting here to tackle the dilemma of
from them and who wish to do so’ with catering for the demand for higher
the proviso that the benefit justifies the education while containing escalating
cost. costs now that it was moving beyond a
small ‘elite’ system. This issue proved to
be an ongoing one into the 1990s and
would be tackled by the 1997 Dearing
Report (see p. 63).
1986 National Council for Vocational NCVQ established after the 1986 Set up a system of vocational
Qualifications (NCVQ) set up after the MSC/DES Review of Vocational qualifications ranging from Level 1 (basic
White Paper Working Together: Qualifications. Its remit was: craft) to Level 5 (equivalent to
Education and Training is published ■ the establishment of a National postgraduate professional vocational
Vocational Qualification framework qualifications) which were approved but
which is comprehensible and not directly offered by the NCVQ. Based
comprehensive, and facilitates on the demonstrated achievement of
access, progression and continued vocational competence, identified in a
learning series of explicit learning outcomes.
■ the improvement of vocational Subsequently expanded to cover most
qualifications themselves, based on vocational qualifications with a total of
standards of competence required in over a million National Vocational
employment. Qualifications awarded by 1995
(Robinson 1996, p. 5). However, this
proved to be a highly contentious
approach to training which, if extended
to higher education, will be even more
so.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
1987 White Paper Higher Education: The priority throughout was to reform This reviewed the whole spectrum of
Meeting the Challenge the HE system to meet the economic higher education, the fullest review
needs of the country. ‘Meeting the since the 1963 Robbins Report and until
needs of the economy is not the sole the 1997 Dearing Report. Many of its
purpose of higher education nor can proposals were translated into
higher education alone achieve what is legislation through the 1988 Education
needed. But this aim, with its Act.
implications for the scale and quality of
higher education, must be vigorously
pursued . . . The Government and its
central funding agencies will do all they
can to encourage and reward
approaches by higher education
institutions which bring them closer to
the world of business.’
1987 DES/Welsh Office publishes Recommends: A further move towards managerialist

Managing Colleges Efficiently ■ the use of ‘efficiency indicators’: ethos, this time in the further education
clear quantitative measures of sector. This built on the work of the
inputs and outcomes Audit Commission Obtaining Better
■ the use of ‘efficiency targets’ to be Value From Colleges which indicated
able to measure achievement by that efficiency savings could be made
making objectives clear but was not tasked to indicate how this
■ improvements to information could be done. This paper, however,
systems and statistics gives clear proposals which lay the
ground for legislation.
1987 DES/Welsh Office publishes ■ that managers should have the
Managing Colleges Efficiently power to control and allocate
(continued) resources with freedom from
detailed external control (for
example by the LEA).
1987 Announcement of the Enterprise Like TVEI (see p. 7) set up under the This paralleled TVEI not just organ-
in Higher Education initiative Manpower Services Commission (now izationally but in terms of its aims. The
TEED) this aimed to increase the supply idea was to vocationalize higher
of university graduates ‘with education, integrating ‘enterprise’ into
enterprise’. A series of five-year degree schemes more generally so that
schemes ran in universities and every student has experience of the
polytechnics with considerable economy and becomes ‘a person who
amounts of pump-priming money has belief in his [sic] own destiny,
attached to them. These began to wind welcomes change and is not frightened
down in the mid-1990s. of the unknown, sets out to influence
events, has powers of persuasion, is of
good health, robust, with energy and
willing to work beyond that which is
specified, is competitive, is moderated
by concern for others and is rigorous in
self-evaluation’ (MSC Press Release,
1987).
continued
Table 2.1 continued
1988 Education Act ■ Polytechnics freed from LEA control. This Act laid the foundations for the
■ Universities Funding Council and 1992 Act by moving the polytechnics’
Polytechnic and Colleges Funding status towards that of the universities.
Councils established (UGC Continued the managerialist thrust
(Universities’ Grant Committee) within universities by undermining one
abolished in 1989 and these two of the safeguards to academic freedom.
councils merged in 1992).
■ Tenure can no longer be granted to
protect academics’ jobs.
1988 White Paper: Employment for the Set out the nature and functions of the TECs set up over a 3-year period from
1990s new Training and Enterprise Councils 1989. There were 76 TECs in England
(TECs; Local Enterprise Councils, and Wales and 22 LECs in Scotland.
LECs, in Scotland), charged to meet They each had between £15 million and
community’s needs and government £55 million to devote to training in their
objectives with regard to vocational area under the direction of the Training,
education and training. Enterprise and Education Directorate
(TEED) nationally. The TECs were
disbanded in 2001, their functions being
taken over by Small Business Service
(SBS) areas, Learning and Skills
Councils and Welsh Economic Regions.
In Scotland, however, the LECs
continue their work. No similar bodies
exist in Northern Ireland.
1989 CBI paper Towards a Skills The Confederation of British Industry A training credit is an individual
Revolution advocated the introduction of Training entitlement to train to approved
Credits for 16–18 year olds. standards for 16 and 17 year olds who
have left full-time education to join the
labour market. Each credit displays a
monetary value and can be used by a
young person to obtain training with an
employer or training provider. The aims
of training credits are:
■ to expand and improve training by
motivating more young people to
train and to train to higher standards
■ to increase the quantity and quality
of training provided for young
people by employers
■ to establish an efficient market in
training (Hall 1994, p. 194).
1990 Education (Student Loans) Act Empowers Secretaries of State to make An important piece of legislation which
arrangements for higher education marked a shifting of the burden of the
students to receive and repay loans costs of the expanded higher education
towards their maintenance while towards the ‘consumer’: students.
studying. Again this attempted to address the
issue of how to pay for the enlarged
system.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
1990 RSA paper More Means Different Stressed the need to widen access to Often used as a reference point by
higher education in a competitive those keen to promote the expansion of
international economic environment. higher education.
Returns to the theme of the Higginson
Report (see p. 10) about the
inappropriateness of A levels in that
context.
1991 White Paper Higher Education: Reaffirmed the views set out in Meeting Described by Martin Trow as ‘a
A New Framework the Challenge and signalled the move document of hard managerialism’
to ‘cost effective expansion’: ‘the (Trow 1994, p. 13), this concentrated on
general need to contain public the ‘human capital’ functions of
spending, the pattern of relative costs in universities rather than their liberal
higher education, and the demands for ideals and stressed the need for strong
capital investment, all mean that a management in the pursuit of effective
continuing drive for greater efficiency and efficient provision.
will need to be secured’ (DES 1991b,
pp. 10–12). According to Pollitt (1990)
‘Managerialism is a set of beliefs and
Many of the structural and other practices, at the core of which burns the
‘reforms’ set out in the 1992 FHE Act are seldom tested assumption that better
announced here. The aim is for 30% of management will prove an effective
age grade to attend university by end of solvent for a wide range of economic
century.
and social ills.’ It stresses increased
productivity through stringent control
of the production process by managers
who are given the power to manage.
The three Es are paramount: economy,
efficiency and effectiveness. Careful,
measurable, target setting,
quantification of inputs and outputs and
of performance is stressed, as is
rewarding increasing efficiency.
1991 White Paper Education and Set out the rationale and Underpinned by neo-liberal thinking,
Training for the Twenty-first Century recommendations for the the two parts of the White Paper claim
independence of college and changes that ‘the individual is at the heart’ of the
to funding of adult education set out in policies they set out. The 1992 Act
the 1992 Act. Also set out the rationale which followed aimed to further
for the further development of NVQs establish a vigorously competitive
and training credits. further and higher education system.
Training credits and Youth Credits
would begin to take over from
conventional Youth Training, with
Modern Apprenticeship schemes being
funded through them rather than
directly from central government or its
agencies.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
1992 Further and Higher Education Act ■ Polytechnics permitted to change The most important single Act to affect
name to University. further and higher education during the
■ New funding bodies set up (Higher Conservative administrations. In this
Education Funding Councils and sense it is the equivalent of the 1988
Further Education Funding Council). Education Reform Act for schools. It
■ Council for National Academic abolished the binary divide between
Awards abolished. polytechnics and universities, signalling
■ Further Education becomes a reduction in funding for the latter as
independent of LEAs. the playing field is levelled downwards.
■ Funding of adult education tied to
The incorporation of further education
limited range of courses:
colleges would herald a period during
– vocational qualifications; GCSE or
which many of them would suffer great
GCE A/AS levels
financial hardships and a fundamental
– access courses preparing students
restructuring of their staffing as many
for entry to a course of higher
staff are encouraged to leave and are
education
replaced by part-time or short-term
– courses which prepare students
contract staff.
for the previous three categories
– basic literacy in English Adult education was forced to
– teaching English to students ‘vocationalize’ its provision so as to
where English is not the language continue to receive funding after this
spoken at home Act. Many adult students object to this
– basic principles of mathematics; and to the fact that awards (and
independent living and examinations and other forms of
communication skills (Hall 1994, assessment) now become attached to
p. 87). what were simply courses enjoyed for
their own sake.
November 1993 ‘Autumn Statement’ on ■ Government announces cut of 45% The government’s response to the
funding in student fees to universities. escalating costs of the free market in
■ Universities to be penalized for higher education which it had
under- or over-recruiting target established was now to put on the
numbers of students, making it brakes through this funding strategy. It
financially unattractive to recruit now planned for stasis in student
more students. numbers for three years after a period
■ The planned number of places to be of very rapid expansion in the early
offered in 1994 was reduced by 1990s.
10,000.
■ Funding council grants and student
grants also to be cut (Richards 1993;
CVCP 1993).
1994 White Paper Competitiveness ■ Proposed ‘accelerated modern By 1997 the government had
apprenticeships’ for 18 and 19 year introduced the Modern Apprenticeship
olds with A levels or GNVQs. These scheme for the work-based training in
will lead to qualifications at NVQ skills needed by technicians and
Level 3. supervisory staff. The apprentice, the
■ Proposal to spend £300 million on employer and the TEC sign an
this expansion between 1997 and ‘apprenticeship pledge’ describing the
1998. training to be provided and committing
all parties to it. The training is based on
the competence model. Around 90% of
expenditure on employment training
for young people was spent on Modern
Apprenticeships, with Youth Training
accounting for the rest by 1997.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
1996 Dearing Report on Qualifications This report concluded that: A key theme of this report is the sheer
for 16 to 19 Year Olds (second Dearing ■ a number of education and training complexity of education and training at
Report – see p. 14 for first and Chapter 5 initiatives have had modest success. this level, the unnecessary
for third) In particular Youth Training and multiplication of agencies, names,
National Records of Achievement awards, awarding and assessing bodies
need to be re-structured and and the proliferation of jargon. This
re-launched. makes the system very difficult to
■ the framework for all qualifications understand for students, teachers and
for 16–19 year olds needs to be potential employers and undermines its
simplified into a system of National effectiveness. From a policy sociology
Levels. All certificates issued by point of view this is the almost
awarding bodies should show which inevitable result of the micropolitics of
of four National Levels the award is education policy-making and its
at (advanced; intermediate; implementation. Agencies vie with one
foundation; entry). another, impose their own agendas and
■ quality assurance structures and interpretations on policy initiatives and
procedures with this national seek to maximize their own gains. The
framework should be simplified and result is a highly complex set of
rationalized. SCAA and NCVQ structures and processes. The report
should be merged for example. recommends that government should
(This was incorporated into the 1997 attempt to impose order on this chaos.
Education Act.) The National Council for Vocational
■ a distinctive diploma at advanced Qualifications (NCVQ) attempted to do
level should be introduced which this for vocational qualifications in
would give access to breadth of particular, imposing a five-level
study at this level (see the structure on qualifications from a
commentary on the Higginson variety of awarding bodies. It has,
Report, p. 10). In addition to two however, only been partly successful in
A levels or a full GNVQ or NVQ, its attempt to simplify vocational
students would have qualifications (Robinson 1996). Entropy
complementary ‘breadth’ studies appears to be endemic in the British
at AS level. education system.
■ the term GNVQ should be replaced
by ‘applied A level’ and some
changes should be made to GNVQs
to improve rates of completion.
■ NVQs should be further developed
to incorporate ‘key skills’ (IT,
communication and number) and
more underpinning knowledge and
understanding rather than just
ability to perform tasks.
1996 Education (Student Loans) Act Allowed students to borrow from banks A move toward ‘privatizing’ student
on the same terms as from the Student loans after criticism of the Student
Loans Company. Banks bid to provide Loans Company and its handling (and
loans through competitive tendering recovery) of the loans. By now it was
process. becoming clear that the burden of
higher education was going to be
shouldered by students and that HE
was increasingly seen as a ‘positional’
rather than a ‘public’ good: i.e. one
which primarily benefits the individual
rather than society as a whole and
therefore should be paid for by the
individual.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
1997 Election of Labour government. Published by the Further Education The report argued strongly that learning,
Kennedy Report Learning Works Funding Council, the report of the particularly in further education, is the
committee chaired by Helena Kennedy key to economic prosperity and social
QC proposed that: cohesion. In this it probably
■ there should be a greater level of overestimated the power of education to
participation in further education compensate for social and economic
■ further education should attract circumstances (see pp. 164–7 for more
more funding and students should on this). The report created concern in
be properly provided for higher education circles that funding
■ ambitious targets should be set, would be channelled away from higher
with NVQ Level 3 becoming the and towards further education, which
norm was in a period of crisis at this time.
■ the government should take an Though there was some evidence that
important strategic as well as the government did shift the emphasis
funding role in this, partly by of funding in this way, this was not a
creating coherent systems of result of the report. Although the
information and a common credit government is committed to an
system. additional half million students, mostly
to FE, and has found an extra £110
million for FE and £140 million for HE
since it came to office, there are still
doubts about the commitment to fund
the vision in the Kennedy Report.
The Government’s response to the
report is at: http://www.lifelonglearning.
co.uk/kennedy/index.htm.
1997 Dearing Report Recommended: The new Labour government was quick
■ the expansion of the higher to implement funding changes which
education system with more of the placed more of the burden on students.
national income spent on it These changes have since been heavily
■ students should bear part of the cost criticized for their negative effects on the
of their higher education widening participation strategy.
■ there should be greater selectivity in Government announced the introduction
funding for research of tuition fees for students of £1,000 per
■ universities should collaborate, not year, to be introduced from 1998. These
compete to be means-tested and repaid when the
■ a new qualifications framework to individual was in employment. The
be established maintenance grant to be phased out.
■ greater provision for lifelong
Announcement of 500,000 new places in
learning
higher education by the end of the
■ better teaching and more ICT to be
century by the Prime Minister, but
introduced into universities
universities subsequently had difficulty
■ objectives and outcomes of higher
filling places.
education to be made clearer to
students, employers and others. The government’s full response to the
report, published in 1998, is available at:
http://www.lifelonglearning.co.uk/
dearing/index.htm. For further discus-
sion see Times Higher Education
Supplement, 27 February 1998, pp. 1, 7,
10, 11, 18.
For a discussion of the progress towards
the goals set out in the Dearing Report
since its publication, see Times Higher
Education Supplement, 24 July 1998,
pp. 4 and 5.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
September 1997 Announcement of an This was aimed at fulfilling the Universities continued to threaten to
additional £165 million for higher government’s promise to make good introduce ‘top-up’ fees, arguing that
education to make good in part the the funding gap in higher education: they were not seeing enough of the
funding gap resources had been declining relative to money which resulted from
student numbers for some years and it government measures, and that this
seemed that the new arrangements for announcement of £165 million would
funding higher education (student fees be insignificant given the number of
plus the gradual abolition of student institutions and students in the system
grants) would not benefit higher by the late 1990s.
education financially.
November 1997 Government The financial crisis hitting further The Further Education Funding Council
announces additional funding of £83 education since incorporation in 1992 had made it clear that the FE sector was
million for further education was severe (see p. 58). This in a serious state, with a dramatically
announcement went some way to increasing number of colleges in
addressing this issue. financial trouble. The unit of resource
(funding per student) had declined by
around a third since incorporation. By
1997 the sector had changed in
important, and often negative, ways.
February 1998 The Learning Age Government sets out its vision of ‘a
Green Paper on lifelong learning learning society in which everyone,
from whatever background, routinely
expects to learn and upgrade their skills Key criticisms of the Green Paper are:
throughout life’. ■ Cost implications of proposals have
Key principles of the Green Paper are: limited what is envisaged (the paper
■ 500,000 extra people in FE/HE by has been ‘written by the Treasury’
2002 according to Phil Willis, Lib Dem
■ creation and launch of the University spokesman.)
for Industry (UfI) by late 1999 (see ■ The paper envisages turning
http://www.ufiltd.co.uk) universities into FE colleges, concerned
■ individual learning accounts to be with lower-level skills and knowledge.
set up to encourage people to save
to learn For further discussion see Times Higher
■ more young people to continue to Education Supplement, 27 February
study beyond age 16 with 1998, pp. 1, 7, 10, 11, 18.
government help
■ financial support for basic literacy The individual learning accounts
and numeracy skills amongst adults scheme, set up in 2000 following this
to be doubled. Half a million people Green Paper, had to be abolished by
to be involved by 2002 late 2001 because it gave rise to a
■ participation to be widened in considerable amount of fraudulent
further, higher, adult and acitivity and loss of public money.
community education
■ new Training Standards Council to
be set up to raise standards in post-
compulsory teaching and learning,
inspection in further and adult
education to be instituted
■ targets for the nation’s skills and
qualifications to be published
continued
Table 2.1 continued
February 1998 The Learning Age ■ business, employees and trade

Green Paper on lifelong learning. unions involved in developing and
(continued) supporting workplace skills
■ simplify the post-compulsory
qualifications system and give equal
value to both academic and
vocational learning.
At the last minute this was demoted

from the status of White Paper (well
worked-out proposals prior to the
publication of a Bill) to Green Paper. It
was also several months late. The
reason seems to have been
government qualms about the potential
costs.
Learndirect evolves from the University

for Industry initiative. Learndirect is
designed to deliver learning to people
at a place and pace to suit them, with
considerable emphasis on information
and communication technology
helping this to happen. See
http://www.learndirect.co.uk/.
Education (Student Loans) Act 1998 Transfers public sector student loans to Follows severe criticism of the
the private sector, though under administration of student loans since
conditions set out by the government. they were instituted.
Teaching and Higher Education Act ■ Sets up and defines the functions of Interestingly the ‘University for
1998 the General Teaching Councils for Industry’ (see above) falls foul of the
England, for Wales and for Scotland. new regulations on the use of the
■ Sets out the scheme for ‘university’ title, being effectively part
qualifications for head teachers. of the further education provision.
■ Sets out new scheme for
qualifications for teachers and
induction arrangements for them.
■ Sets out new arrangements for
financial support for HE students.
■ Sets out scheme for student fees at
higher education institutions.
■ Introduces new legislation on time
off work for study or training.
■ Sets out new powers for funding
councils.
■ Legislates on the issue of the
‘university’ title, raised by the
Dearing Report.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
Budget March 1998 An extra £250 million announced for Despite worries that other measures in
education, bringing the total to an extra the budget concerning National
£2.5 billion since Labour took office. Insurance contributions would prove
expensive for education institutions,
More money announced for
these measures were broadly
information technology skills training
welcomed. There appears to be
(most affecting further education) and
congruence between these financial
for research and commercial
measures and educational policy,
development (£100 million and £50
particularly in terms of lifelong
million respectively).
learning.
An additional £100 million announced
for the New Deal for over 25 year old
unemployed people. Some of this will
involve further education training.
July 1998 Announcement of the £445 million extra for higher education See Times Higher Education
government’s Comprehensive over 1998–2000. Supplement, 17 July 1998, for full
Spending Review (CSR) outcomes account and discussion of the CSR as it
University research to receive an
applies to HE. The following week’s
increase of £1.4 billion over three years,
edition (24 July) contains a
some to come from the Wellcome
commentary. Critical comment centres
Trust.
on the fact that the costs of these
Further education and sixth form increases will fall largely on students
colleges to receive an additional £225 via tuition fees.
million – an 8.2% cash increase on
previous plans.
November 1998 Announcement of Government now plans to spend an The announcement failed to meet the
expansion of FE and more funding extra £584 million on FE in 2000–1 but hopes of colleges, but comes some way
for that sector will expect an extra 200,000 students: to meeting the difficult financial
this is an increase on earlier situation of many of them.
announcements of the outcome of the
CSR (see above). Total to be invested in
FE over 1999–2001 is now £908 million.
Aim is to widen participation, improve
standards of teaching and
management, invest in ICT and support
students with costs such as childcare.
4 March 1999 The Higher Education Change of funding mechanism This policy likely to benefit ‘new’
Funding Council for England (HEFCE) designed to recognize the role of universities in particular. A welcome
earmarks £95 million out of next year’s universities in broadening and recognition of their particular mission
settlement to encourage universities to deepening access, and the particular and the costs this mission has for
provide more places for poorer costs of this function. institutions.
students
July 1999 Learning to Succeed: A New It proposes:

Framework for Post-16 Education ■ setting up a Learning and Skill
White Paper Council for England in 2001 with
local Learning and Skills Councils
too. Training and Enterprise
Councils (TECs) to be replaced.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
July 1999 Learning to Succeed: A New ■ new system of funding and planning
Framework for Post-16 Education post-16 education involving
White Paper Regional Development Agencies
(continued) (RDAs)
■ new inspection arrangements
overseen by OFSTED
■ a ‘Learning Gateway’ for 16 and 17
year olds who need additional
support
■ a new service of personal advisers
to post-16s
■ close involvement of the University
for Industry (UfI) with these
developments
■ local businesses to be closely
involved with these developments
also
■ new Learning and Skills Councils to
be closely involved in promoting
Lifelong Learning.
Full details are available at:
www.lsc.gov.uk
June 1999 Bett Report on pay and Recommended the setting up of an Very little response and no action was
conditions in UK higher education. independent pay review body, immediately evident from government
addressing the low pay of women in on the basis of findings or
higher education and rectifying the recommendations. Prior to the 2001
decline in academic pay relative to election the government began to
other professions. move on the pay review body issue.
Sets out ideas for the future direction of

15 February 2000 David Blunkett
higher education. Globalization, ICT and
delivers Greenwich speech
the knowledge economy are key
themes.
The speech is available in full at:

http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/dfee/#speech
Mid-October 2000 DfEE publishes Proposes setting up collaborative Times Higher Education Supplement, 6
EUniversity report e-university to compete with foreign October 2000, leads with story ‘Elite
universities establishing a strong Universities Log Off From EUniversity’.
e-presence. There is commentary on the policy in
the next issue, 13 October. That
headline indicates that there is
suspicion about the viability of the
scheme, especially among the more
prestigious of the pre-1992 universities.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
November 2000 HEFCE reports seven Report by NUS Equal Access or Elitist The paradox of government policy
thousand full-time university places Entry? identifies fall in 1999 of 7% in which, on the one hand, seeks to widen
unfilled applications from males of skilled, participation and support lifelong
semi-skilled or unskilled background learning while, on the other, making
compared to 1997. Applications from students pay more, has these quite
black males from African and Caribbean predictable outcomes.
backgrounds fell by 11% and 9%
respectively. The imposition of student
fees and withdrawal of means-tested
maintenance grants was blamed by the
NUS. More details in the Times Higher
Education Supplement, 17 November
2000, ‘Rising Debt Hits Access Efforts’,
p. 1.
2000 Scottish Parliament acts on Cubie Scottish parliament (Holyrood) decides This decision places other countries
proposals (the Independent Committee the following: within the UK in a difficult position. It is
of Inquiry into Student Finance) that ■ the abolition of tuition fees paid in now clear to potential students that it is
student payment of tuition fees for advance from October 2001 possible to have a good university
universities should be abolished ■ the introduction of a graduate system without the burden of tuition
endowment scheme – students have fees falling on them. A further problem
to pay back fees after graduating is that the scheme will discourage
and getting a job that pays over a Scottish students from studying outside
specified annual limit (though some Scotland.
classes of students to be exempt)
■ students in Scotland to be entitled Some disappointment was expressed
to an income of which a proportion within Scotland that the Cubie
would be available in the form of a proposals had not been implemented in
means-tested grant or bursary for full. Many saw them as being watered
those eligible down in the Scottish parliament.
■ low-income students would have
the right to claim unemployment The Cubie inquiry website is at:
benefit during the summer holidays. http://www.studentfinance.org.uk/.
Late 2000 to early 2001 The Excellence Government consults on proposals for
Challenge widening the participation of young
people in HE. HEFCE has a similar
consultation exercise on funding
widening participation.
Sets up the Learning and Skills Council

Learning and Skills Act 2000
for England and a series of local
councils. Replaces the TECs and the
FEFC. The local learning and skills
councils will have a £2.6 billion budget
to fund the systems in 2002–3.
continued
Table 2.1 continued
Learning and Skills Act 2000 National body: The White Paper Learning to Succeed
(continued) ■ is responsible for the education and talked of a Learning and Skills Council
training of 16–19 year olds ‘to drive forward improvements in
■ assesses priorities and establishes standards and bring greater coherence
plans and responsiveness’ to post-16
■ oversees work-based training – the education and training. The legislation
successor to youth training – comes has been interpreted as an extension of
under a national formula and set of government control. Secretary of State
rules. These plans will determine the for Education and Employment can
funds for work-based training. direct the Council on a range of issues.
■ oversees the work of the sixth-form
and FE colleges.
■ school sixth-form funding also
moves under skills council control
(in April 2002) but does not change
the management or legal status of
school sixth-forms. Schools stay
with local authorities. The budget
(£1.2 billion in 2000–1) moves to the
Learning and Skills Council, giving it
important controlling power.
The Robbins Report and 1960s expansion

By 1963 there were still only twenty-four universities in the country,
with 15 per cent of all students going to only two, Oxford and
Cambridge. However, the 1963 Robbins Report on higher educa-
tion, which had been appointed to review the provision of full-time
higher education and make proposals for its development, recom-
mended expansion to tap the ‘pool of talent’ which was not yet
going into higher education, particularly from the working class.
(Other excluded groups received less attention from the Robbins
committee.) It proposed more than doubling full-time student
numbers (to 560,000) by 1980, as well as setting up a body to oversee
the granting of degrees in non-university institutions. (The Council
for National Academic Awards (CNAA) was set up in 1964 to
do this.)
The Open University was established in Milton Keynes in 1969,
and a group of new universities was built in the 1960s. The new
institutions became known as the ‘Shakespearean universities’
because of their names: York, Lancaster, Warwick, Sussex, Essex,
Kent. Other institutions were promoted to university status at
around the same time (e.g. Bath, Aston and Salford). Meanwhile,
as a result of the 1966 White Paper A Plan for Polytechnics, which
continued the expansionist philosophy of the Robbins Report, many
colleges of advanced technology were being promoted to become
degree-awarding polytechnics (twenty-nine in total by 1980). Unlike
the chartered, and therefore independent, universities, they
were under the control of their LEAs. The 1972 White Paper Higher
Education: A Framework for Expansion promoted the continued
expansion of higher education student places.
Non-vocational and leisure education

By 1970 vocational education was under the control of LEAs and
colleges of commerce, art and technology. Non-vocational educa-
tion was taken care of by LEAs, university extra-mural departments
and the WEA, all with financial assistance from central government.
Around half of adult education became oriented to ‘leisure’, with
courses such as cooking, flower arranging, yoga, painting, arts and
crafts and assorted hobbies. The year 1973 probably marks the high
point of this phase of adult education; the Russell Committee’s
report proposed that non-vocational adult education should
expand to give a comprehensive service to enable education to
be continued throughout a person’s lifetime. By then, however,
the political climate was changing and few of the Russell Report’s
recommendations were implemented.
The situation in the mid-1990s
Higher education
In 1996 there were 176 higher education institutions in the UK, of
which 115 were titled universities (which included the various
constituent parts of the University of London and the University of
Wales) (Dearing 1997, para. 3.84). This figure included thirty-four
‘new’ universities, which adopted that title after the 1992 Further
and Higher Education Act, to join the forty-six ‘old’ universities.
By 1995 total expenditure on education had reached £38 billion,
compared to £28 billion in 1981 (at 1995 prices) (OPCS 1997, p. 118).
There was mounting concern about the costs of higher education
in particular, despite the fact that students were being asked to pay
an increasing proportion of the costs of their education. Spending
on higher, further and continuing education had reached £9.3 billion
by 1994/5 (OPCS 1997, p. 69).
The student maintenance grant had decreased in real terms since
the late 1980s. The cash value of the grant was frozen at the 1990/1
level until 1994/5, since when it has been reduced by around 10 per
cent each year. Meanwhile the proportion of students taking out
loans increased to 55 per cent in 1994/5, with the average amount
being borrowed increasing year on year (OPCS 1997, p. 69).
By 1995/6 there was a total of 1,720,000 higher education students
in the UK (HESA 1997) compared to 618,000 in 1970/1 (OPCS 1997,
p. 64).
Further education
In 1995 there were 465 colleges of further education with a total of
2,607,000 part-time and full-time students (OPCS 1997, p. 64).
Funding through the Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs, see
Glossary) had by now become particularly important for further
education, as had the national vocational qualifications framework.
Colleges began concentrating on full-time students as they
responded to the government’s desire to increase full-time further
education participation rates. This trend was reinforced by a
continuing recession and the lack of apprenticeships in industry. As
a result the proportion of students on day-release fell considerably
(Hall 1994). Table 2.2 gives information about the types of
enrolments in further education. More recent data are not strictly
comparable with those in the table because of changes in definitions;
however, there has been a steady increase in enrolments to further
education, with a total of 2.5 million in 1997/8 (OPCS 2001, p. 65)
Adult education
Adults can enrol on a wide variety of day and evening courses:
academic, vocational and leisure-oriented. Around 1.1 million
adults in England and Wales were enrolled on courses in adult
education centres in 1994/5 (OPCS 1997, p. 66). Additionally there
are hundreds of other agencies involved in adult education, e.g.
correspondence colleges, women’s institutes, the Workers’
Education Association and the National Extension College.
Universities are now autonomous bodies responsible for managing
their own curricula, assessments and finances. Adults can improve
their literacy and numeracy skills by enrolling on a basic skills
course. The numbers doing so increased steadily over the ten years
to 1994/5, with a total of 208,000 receiving tuition in this area in
England and Wales in that year (OPCS 1997, p. 67).

The Labour government was elected in 1997. At that point there was
an increase in government spending on HE from £4.7 billion in 1997
Table 2.2 Enrolments on further education courses leading to a qualification: by type of course and gender, 1994/5
Thousands
Full time Part time

Males Females Males Females
NVQs
Level 1 13.9 6.9 40.7 26.0
Level 2 25.7 34.4 62.4 54.1
Level 3 10.0 12.7 35.0 27.8
GNVQs
Foundation 2.2 3.4 0.3 0.9
Intermediate 22.4 22.3 1.8 2.3
Advanced 34.6 39.0 3.4 3.6
Other vocational qualifications 139.8 139.5 256.2 371.1
GCE A/AS 76.3 91.0 50.2 76.7
GCSE 13.1 11.8 50.7 88.8
All courses leading to specified qualifications 338.0 361.0 500.8 651.3
All courses leading to unspecified qualifications 30.3 27.2 222.1 430.4
All further education courses 368.3 388.3 723.0 1,081.7
Source OPCS 1997, p. 64, table 3.17

to £5.8 billion in 2001 (a real-terms increase of 18 per cent). This

compares with a real-terms cut of 36 per cent over the Conservative
period of office. The funding per student between 1997 and 2001
remained roughly steady. Again, even this seems favourable com-
pared to the cut in the unit of funding (pounds per student) of 36 per
cent between 1989 and 1997. However, expressed as a proportion
of GDP, it declined from 0.99 to 0.96 per cent during that period of
Labour office.
For students as individuals the situation deteriorated. Government
spending on maintenance grants declined from £932 million to
£140 million, student–staff ratios increased from 16:1 to 17:1, staff
spent more of their time (around 30 per cent) preparing for teaching
quality assessment exercises rather than actually teaching, and
the average student debt on completing an undergraduate degree
reached £2,500, a real-terms increase of almost 200 per cent over
the first term of the Labour government, 1997–2001 (Thomson
2001).
Into the twenty-first century: mass higher education

The idea of a ‘mass’ system of higher education builds on Trow’s
classic formulation of elite, mass and universal systems (Trow 1970).
The transition point from the first to the second occurs when the
proportion of the 18–21 year olds attending HE surpasses 15 per
cent. In Britain this happened in 1988 when the age participation
index reached 15.1 per cent (DES 1991b). Once the figure passes
40 per cent the system evolves into its universal stage (Trow 1970).
The 1980s and 1990s saw intense and accelerating change in
higher education, leaving a difficult legacy for the twenty-first cen-
tury. Four main areas of change have been associated with the move
to a ‘mass’ system in the UK: its size; changing patterns of access;
a relative decline in resources and a change in the functions that
higher education is expected to fulfil.
The expansion of higher education

The growth in the higher education system is the most obvious
change. Some of the key data about this are as follows:
• In the thirty-two years between 1960 and 1992 the percentage of

18–21 year olds attending university increased from 6.9 per cent
to 13.3 per cent in 1982 and 27.8 per cent in 1992 (DES 1991b and
DfE 1994). By 2000 it had reached 33 per cent.
• The fastest period of growth occurred between the early 1980s
and the early 1990s. There was a slowdown in 1993 when the
funding system changed. The replacement of student grants with
loans, and then the requirement for many to contribute to
university fees, meant a decline in demand for higher education.
There were just under seven hundred thousand home part-time
and full-time students in the UK in 1988/9 (DES 1991b) compared
with one and a half million in 1995/6 (HESA 1997): more than
doubling in seven years, but the figure remained at around that
point subsequently.
Changing Patterns of Access: gender, age, part-time

students, social class, disability, ethnicity
Only 42 per cent of first-year higher education students were
women in 1982, rising to 47 per cent in 1989 and staying at that figure
between 1989 and 1992 (DfE 1994, p. 1). The sexes continued to
be unevenly distributed around different curriculum areas. By
1994 the sexes became equally represented among first-year full-
time undergraduates for the first time (HESA 1995) and stayed
roughly equal thereafter. By 2001 around 55 per cent of students
were women, though their distribution was heavily dependent upon
subject area and type of institution.
The proportion of entrants aged between 21 and 24 years
increased from 7.2 per cent in 1982 to 9.5 per cent in 1992, though
it dipped to 6.4 per cent in 1990 (DfE 1994, p. 2). The proportion of
new entrants aged over 25 years increased from 0.2 per cent in 1982
to 0.6 per cent in 1992, with much of the gain being made in the final
two years of that period (an increase of 0.3 per cent) (ibid.). By 1992
the percentage of all students aged 21 and over in the UK was 42 per
cent, compared to 33 per cent in 1982, with most of the growth
occurring in the undergraduate population (DfE, 1994 table 3). By
2000 the figure had reached almost 66 per cent, and nearer 70 per
cent in some post-1992 universities (HESA 2001).
The number of part-time students rose rapidly in the decade

between 1982 and 1992: by 41 per cent in the Open University, by
101 per cent in other chartered universities and by 60 per cent in
polytechnics and colleges, though the percentage varied consider-
ably by level of course (HESA 1995, p. 5). By 2000/1 around 50 per
cent of undergraduates were studying on a part-time basis (Office
for National Statistics 2002).
The professional classes constitute 20 per cent of the population;
80 per cent of young people from these classes go on to higher
education. For the least skilled only around 10 per cent go on to
higher education and in no other social group does the figure exceed
50 per cent. Even when equipped with the necessary qualifications,
people from the lower three of five social classes are only 70 per cent
as likely to enter universities or colleges as those from the top two
social groups (and they are more likely to study locally and part-
time). Students from less skilled backgrounds account for only
20 per cent of students in universities established before 1992 (and
many are mature students). Post-1992 universities attract 60 per cent
more applications from these groups than pre-1992 universities do.
Despite three years of the Labour government’s widening participa-
tion policy, the number of students from unskilled backgrounds
had risen by only five hundred by the year 2000: from five thousand
in 1995 (Thomson 2001). However, the number of students from
partly skilled backgrounds grew more steeply: from nearly two
thousand to just over 24,000 in the same period. By 1999/2000, while
50,970 students of the total 113,470 came from a management,
administration or professional background, only 8,240 came from
plant/machine operative or sales occupations (HESA, 2001).
About 3 per cent of first-year students at all levels in the UK have
a disability (HESA 1995, 1997) compared with 20 per cent of the
general population who reported long-standing illness, disability or
infirmity in 1993 (OPCS 1995, table 7.10, p. 21).
Using the OPCS categories and looking only at full- and part-
time first-year students of known ethnicity in UK, 4.1 per cent were
black, 3.2 per cent Indian, 1.6 per cent Pakistani and 4 per cent from
other groups (HESA 1997, p. 184).
To summarize, then, we can say that there are more women,
older students, part-time students and members of some minority
ethnic groups (for example Africans, Indians, East African Asians

and Chinese) in higher education than previously. Disadvantages
remain, however, in terms of social class, disability and for some
other minority ethnic groups (for example Bangladeshis) and there
is little sign of the gap closing for these groups (Egerton and Halsey
1993; Modood 1993; Shiner and Modood 2002). Where access has
improved for social groups it has tended to mean access to less
prestigious institutions and qualifications.
Relative decline in resources

The increase in student numbers was not matched by an increase in
public resources in the 1980s and 1990s:
• The index of public funding per full-time equivalent student
between 1979 and 1989 rose from a base of 100 to 103 in the
universities and fell from 100 to 75 in the polytechnics (Watson
1996). In cash terms this translates into a fall for the polytechnics
from around £5,500 to just over £3,000 per student, while the
university figure stayed at around £6,500 (Brookman 1992).
• There has been a dramatic decline in the relative level of
resourcing provided for higher education more recently. With an
index set at 100 in 1989/90 the unit of resource fell to 75 points
by 1994/5 and fell to 69 by 1997/8 (Watson 1996).
• This meant an increase in student–staff ratios, rising from 9:1 to
12:1 in the universities and 8:1 to 16:1 in the polytechnics between
1982 and 1992 (Ball 1992), a reduction in resources available for
research, teaching and learning and a decline in physical structure
of universities themselves.
• However, looked at in absolute terms rather than relative to
student numbers, spending on higher education has grown enor-
mously: only £219 million of public money was spent per year on
higher education in England, Scotland and Wales combined in
the early 1960s compared to £7 billion on English universities
alone in 1992/3 (Scott 1995).
One of the ways in which universities have both encouraged
and coped with this under-funded expansion is to change their
curriculum structure, at the same time reducing the amount of
teaching time given to students. Large parts of the higher education

system have adopted the model of higher education used in the
United States, which had a mass system long before the UK. This
system works by awarding credit for modules of study successfully
passed with this credit being accumulated by the student until they
have enough for a degree. Students usually study within a two-
semester academic year when this model is adopted and can take
advantage of other features such as the accreditation of prior
learning, which makes their period of study shorter. The modular
credit structure is also claimed to be more efficient than the
traditional British system in other ways: generic modules can be
‘delivered’ to a mixed student group and a modular structure can
be ‘managed’ centrally much more efficiently. About 80 per cent of
universities had or were committed to developing modular
programmes by 1994, nearly 85 per cent had or planned to introduce
a credit accumulation and transfer scheme, 65 per cent had or
planned to adopt a two-semester structure and 70 per cent allowed
credit for work-based and other forms of experiential learning
(Robertson 1994, p. 10).
Changes in the functions of higher education

Robbins (Committee on Higher Education 1963) defined the
functions of higher education as including:
• instruction in occupational skills (to develop the nation’s
economy)
• the advancement of learning (to develop knowledge)
• promotion of the powers of the mind (to develop the intellect of
the person)
• the transmission of a common culture and common standards
of citizenship (to develop society).
Emphasis on the purposes of higher education tends to shift
between these functions depending on the economic and political
situation of the time. Beginning with the 1985 Green Paper The
Development of Higher Education into the 1990s, which emphasized
higher education contributing ‘more effectively to the improvement
of the performance of the economy’, there has been increasing
emphasis on the first of Robbins’s functions and a de-emphasis on

the others, particularly the last two. By 1991 government rhetoric
and the funding mechanisms in place made it clear that the emphasis
was now on the vocational relevance of post-compulsory education
and its contribution to ‘UK plc’ rather than on any personal devel-
opment it may involve for the individual or on the cultural and
intellectual development of society. This was re-emphasized in
David Blunkett’s speech at Greenwich University when he was
Education Secretary in 2000:
Higher education must also equip all graduates with the

skills and abilities they need to perform effectively in the work-
place and build rewarding careers. The public investment in
students is substantial – as indeed is the financial contribution
made by students themselves. So it is critical that graduates
should leave higher education able and prepared to make
an early and effective contribution to the knowledge-based
economy. That means possession, alongside specialist know-
ledge, of ICT and other key skills; a flair for enterprise;
the ability to think creatively, and an understanding of the
working environment.
(http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/dfee/#speech,
accessed 22 January 2002)
Critique of the expansion towards ‘mass’ higher

education
Trow (1994) notes that the 1991 White Paper Higher Education: A
New Framework anticipates growth yet says nothing about capital
investment, discusses ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’ yet is blind to the
real value of higher education, proposes economies yet creates
impoverishment. Barnett (1994), too, worries about the move from
propositional knowledge, ‘knowing that’, towards performativity,
‘knowing how’, in the university sector. Whatever one’s opinion
of it, however, there is no doubt that the view of the key role of
universities outlined in the 1991 White Paper has left its mark on
institutions as a result of the funding mechanisms used by the
government to achieve the desired outcomes. For Ritzer (1996) and
Jary and Parker (1995) for example there has been a ‘McDonald-
ization’ of universities in the UK: a concern with systematized
processes and managerialism which has led to increased instru-
mentalism on the part of staff and students and an overall decline
in the quality of higher education.
It is clear that higher education today in the UK is very
different from what it was. Lecturers work harder and many
have little time for research and careful thought. Students have
suffered increas-ing depletion of the resources available to them
and have had to bear more of the costs of their education. They are
also at the sharp end of the strategies that universities have adopted
to cope with increasing student numbers and fewer resources.
On the positive side higher education is no longer a privilege for
the elite alone. However, the important question for previously
excluded groups is ‘access to what?’ Privileged groups are extremely
good at gaining advantage in most situations and, as British higher
education becomes increasingly differentiated, these groups
are largely to be found in the better resourced, more prestigious
institutions. In reality the system has not become a ‘mass’ one
at all, nor even a ‘crowded elite’ one (Robertson, 1996). Rather
it is polarizing into a mass/elite framework, and here there are
clear parallels with the effect of ‘parental choice’ on the school
system, with the increasing division between ‘magnet’ and ‘sink’
schools.
Case study: the new vocationalism
Over the course of the 1980s the government developed policies to

tackle the steadily rising unemployment levels among the young. By
1986 the official figure was 12 per cent unemployed in total: 3 million
people, many of them school leavers. Three factors concerned the
government in this: the costs of benefits for the unemployed; the
social and economic costs of unemployment; and the long-term
effects on young people, particularly their employability in the future.
What became known at the time as the ‘new vocationalism’ was seen
by the New Right as a solution. It put human capital theory (Schultz
1961) into practice, the basic idea of which was that investment in
human resource ‘capital’ through training now would yield dividends

to the country later. It also attempted to strengthen the links between
education and the economy. The aims of the new vocationalism were
as follows.
First, vocational qualifications were to be rationalized so that
employers in Britain and abroad knew what they meant. The thou-
sands of vocational qualifications would be organized into a simple
structure; holders of those qualifications would have a record of
achievement which told prospective employers exactly what they
were competent to do. These principles underpin both the Modern
Apprenticeship scheme (see p. 57) and the setting up in 1986 of
the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, which quickly
established the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) framework.
The aim of the NVQ scheme was to simplify what had been a
confusing multitude of vocational courses and awards into a single
coherent system of qualifications at five distinct levels. Each
qualification states very explicitly what its holders can do by giving
clear statements of competence which they must achieve to be
awarded it. These competence statements have been formulated by
industry and commerce in ‘lead bodies’ to ensure that they match
what people need in the workplace. The qualifications are modular
in design. This means that the programme of study is broken into
separately assessed smaller pieces; people can achieve small sets of
competences at different times, until all those required for the
qualification are attained. For people with families or with shifting
work patterns or other responsibilities, modular programmes are
ideal, giving access to qualifications and easy part-time study. Also,
people who can demonstrate that they have already got some
competences can obtain certificates to prove it without needing to
follow a course. In 1997 around 80 per cent of the workforce were in
occupations which had NVQ qualifications.
The claimed advantages of the competence framework are the
following:
• Assessment of observable performance is far more reliable

than of non-observable characteristics such as knowledge and
understanding. It is better, therefore, to assess behaviour than
knowledge. If students can show themselves capable of carrying
out specified tasks, the necessary knowledge must have been

acquired and does not need to be separately assessed anyway.
• Assessment in NVQs is one-to-one and takes place only when
the individual is ready. Individuals can progress through their
studies at a pace appropriate to them. This is true personalized
training.
• Rigorous assessment and accreditation of small elements of
competence means that employers will know exactly what job
applicants are capable of doing.
• Explicitly setting out units and elements of competence with
associated performance criteria and range statements means that
assessment is fair and objective. What is being tested is clear to
all, including (and especially) the student.
• Competence statements are based on a careful functional analysis
of jobs. Employers are involved in this through the lead bodies.
The learning is thorough and job-related. There is neither too little
nor too much learning, and it is all relevant.
• Training institutions such as colleges are paid by results (the
number of students successfully gaining competence). This is
known as output-related funding. It means they are motivated to
achieve high-quality training so the pass rate is high and they
receive more money.
• Most vocational qualifications at the lower levels have now been
‘NVQd’. The NVQ approach is being applied in higher education
at Levels 4 and 5. This will have all the advantages of the currently
available NVQs, particularly their vocational relevance, clearly
stated learning outcomes and objective assessment.
Second, education was to be vocationalized in schools, further
education and adult education. Since Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin
speech there had been a public articulation amongst policy-
makers that the British education system was anti-vocational and
that this was detrimental to Britain’s competitiveness in the
international economy. This aspect of the new vocationalism was
oriented to injecting vocational courses into the curriculum as
pupils came close to leaving school, and also aimed at giving them
an understanding of and enthusiasm for industry and commerce.
The Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI, see
Glossary) is one example of how this was done.
Third, the unemployed were to be trained for work, giving them

‘key skills’ (now defined as information technology, numeracy and
communication) and a record of achievement in the process.
Government policy increasingly turned to training for unemployed
young people, rather than simply the payment of benefits. A
sequence of schemes for the young was the consequence: the
Youth Opportunities Programme; the Youth Training Scheme;
Youth Training; Employment Training and so on.
Fourth, the quality of vocational education and training was to
be improved. Here policy measures were designed to improve
both the status and the content of vocational education and
training. One of the ways of achieving this was through the
development of training credits. Underpinning this policy measure
was a set of neo-liberal ideas concerning the ‘marketization’ of
vocational education and training. If young people were given
what appeared to be a cheque or credit card, with a value of
around £1,000 to spend on their training, then they would become
selective consumers and the providers would have to ensure that
they offered top-quality training provision in order to attract them.
The critique of new vocationalism

A number of criticisms of the policies associated with new vocation-
alism have been made by academics. They include the following.
• Policy was concentrated on the lower levels of education and

training and on lower achievers, rather than areas of the economy
which would make British industry competitive abroad. Roger
Dale’s (1985b) study concluded that YT and similar schemes were
aimed at lower-ability 14–18 year olds and trained them for very
low-skilled, insecure employment. Hence, rather than training
them for employment, these schemes prepared them for a status
somewhere between work and non-work; they did not address the
real needs of the country for high-level skills. Peter Robinson’s
study concluded that NVQs:
are heavily concentrated in the clerical and secretarial and

the personal service and sales occupations, and in the (inter-
nationally) sheltered service sectors of the economy. They
are under-represented in the higher managerial, professional

and technical occupations, in the craft occupations, and in
the (internationally) exposed manufacturing and business
and financial services sectors of the economy.
(Robinson 1996, p. 34)
• Training has not enhanced social mobility for individuals and

groups undertaking it; rather it has tended to reproduce existing
social inequalities based, for example, on race and gender.
Gleeson concludes that:
in the specific case of female participation in nursing,

child care and other gender-specific courses . . . vocational
training represents little more than a reinforcement in
gender roles and apprenticeship in home crafts . . . [while]
evidence regarding black youth on [YT] courses indicates
that they are consistently more likely to be allocated to
schemes offering inferior opportunities of subsequent
employment.
(Gleeson 1989, p. 29)
David Lee and his co-researchers found much the same thing in their
study (1990, pp. 121–3).
• These policies have sometimes not achieved even their basic

aims, and have cost considerable amounts of money to set up and
monitor. Peter Robinson (1996) concludes that the NCVQ frame-
work has not rationalized the overall structure of qualifications
as was its intention. Awards of traditional vocational qualifications
in 1994–5 were still significantly higher than awards of NVQs (and
GNVQs), and there was by 1995 a wider array of qualifications
than was the case before the introduction of NVQs. He estimates
that around £107 million was spent directly on setting up the
framework, with additional costs for publicity and staff time.
• Much ‘training’ has in fact been preparation for unemployment.
Training schemes are simply a way of making the unemploy-
ment figures smaller and less politically damaging. Even one of
the Conservative government’s own ministers, Alan Clark, when
Minister of State at the Department of Employment, became
convinced that this was the case. As he wrote in his diary in June
1983: ‘a mass of “schemes” whose purpose, plainly, is not so
much to bring relief to those out of work as to devise excuses for
removing them from the [unemployment] Register’ (Clark 1993,
pp. 9–10).
• New vocational policies have shifted power into the hands of
employers and national politicians. Teachers, lecturers, parents,
students and the local community have lost control of education
and training. Professions too have lost their autonomy as a result
of central control of professional qualifications (Jones and Moore
1993). Industrial and commercial ‘lead bodies’ set the compe-
tences for NVQs, for example, largely excluding the former groups
from control over ‘syllabuses’. Even within the lead bodies more
powerful, larger, companies have exercised control (Eraut et al.
1996, pp. 2–4).
• While there has been a rash of vocational education and training
initiatives, these have often been short-lived and have worked in
isolation. The changes from the Youth Opportunities Programme
to the Youth Training Scheme and its variants are one example of
this. At each twist of policy, schemes came to an abrupt halt, staff
were made unemployed and young people faced insecurity about
their next step.
• The political nature of policy-making has resulted in confused
and changing policies with too many unclear aims. In the area of
higher education, the changing policies on funding have meant
that universities and other institutions have found planning
extremely difficult. Developing the facilities to accommodate
increased student numbers takes time. Many institutions have
found that by the time they have committed funds to building
programmes for student accommodation and teaching facilities,
policy has changed, increasing student numbers have attracted
financial penalties and the overall unit of resource (funding per
student) has been cut. In the post-compulsory sector in general
this has caused severe financial difficulties for many institutions,
with consequent effects in the quality of their provision, staff
redundancies and so on.
• There are numerous criticisms of the teaching and learning
principles underlying the whole competence-based approach (e.g.
see Ashworth and Saxton 1990). Though the details of this are not
relevant here, it seems that government policy may be based on
an inaccurate or inappropriate theoretical base.
• Output-related funding has tempted colleges to pass students who
would otherwise fail. BTEC (Business and Technician Education
Council) became aware of this happening in 1994 and had to
increase its monitoring of standards. Lecturers knew it was
happening but could not say anything for fear of losing their jobs.
• While a competence-based approach may be appropriate for
the lower levels of training, where observable skills are more
important, transfer to higher levels is very difficult and may actually
lower standards. Since NVQs were first applied to the lower levels,
this was not immediately apparent; but as attempts are made to
make Levels 4 and 5 competence-based it is becoming increasingly
obvious. Between the years 1990/1 and 1994/5 there was no growth
in the number of NVQ awards at Level 3 and a fall in the number of
awards at the two highest levels, 4 and 5 (Robinson 1996, p. 34).
Key points
• Governments have increasingly viewed post-compulsory educa-
tion in terms of its relevance for the economy and have attempted
to steer it in a vocational direction in recent years.
• Policies often have unintended outcomes, as was shown to be the
case with several aspects of the ‘new vocationalism’ of the 1980s.
• Policy-making in the area of post-compulsory policy since 1979
has been less coherent than policy in the area of compulsory
education. In the latter there is a clear progression in policy-
making from 1980 onwards (as we saw in Chapter 1). The post-
compulsory area is marked by changes in policy content (e.g.
encouraging expansion of higher education or restricting it) and
in the role of government, from dirigisme (the cuts of the early
1980s) to laissez-faire (the unregulated expansion of the later
1980s and early 1990s), back to dirigisme from the Autumn
Statement of 1993.
• The dilemma of how to pay for expanded post-compulsory
provision has been a key policy issue since the rapid expansion
of higher education in the mid-1980s. Governments have been

content to allow the relatively disadvantaged status and
resourcing of further and adult education students to persist.

For a good overview of the further education sector see:
Cantor, L., Roberts, I. and Pratley, B. (1995) A Guide to Further Education
in England and Wales, London: Cassell.
Hall, V. (1994) Further Education in the United Kingdom, London: Collins
Educational/Staff College.
For an interesting account of the implementation of youth training

schemes see:
Lee, D., Marsden, D., Rickman, P. and Duncombe, J. (1990) Scheming for
Youth, Buckingham: Open University Press.
For a discussion of the changing shape of higher education see:

Scott, P. (1995) The Meanings of Mass Higher Education, Buckingham:
Open University Press/SRHE.
Warner, D. and Palfreyman, D. (2001) The State of UK Higher Education:
Managing Change and Diversity, Buckingham: Open University
Press/SRHE.
For an insight see:

Halsey, A. H. (1992) Decline of Donnish Dominion, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
This traces the development of what Halsey considers to be the current
crisis in higher education. Halsey considers that the system is now too
bureaucratic and is under-funded, while at the same time the position of
the academic in British society has been undermined. Halsey’s survey of
academics, the most recent in a series he has conducted over the years,
reveals a situation of low morale, disappointment and decline. The book
provides a good background to reading and thinking about the
implications of the 1997 Dearing Report (see Chapter 5).
Useful addresses
Literature on a number of areas of government policy in the
vocational education and training (VET) area is available from:
Department for Education and Skills
Most of the Department’s publications can be ordered through:
PROLOG
PO BOX 5050
Sherwood Park
Annesley
Notts
NG15 ODJ
www.dfes.gov.uk/publications
Reports on Vocational Education and Training in Further

Education can be obtained from:
Learning and Skills Development Agency
Sales and Marketing Team
Tel: 020 7297 9123
email: registrations@lsda.org.uk
www.lsda.org.uk
Useful websites
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/
The home page of the Higher Education Funding Council for
England.
The site for the Welsh funding councils is at www.wfc.ac.uk and for
Scotland at www.shefc.ac.uk
http://www.thesis.co.uk/
The web service of the Times Higher Education Supplement
http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/
The home page of Universities UK: the organization of university
vice-chancellors and principals
http://www.srhe.ac.uk/srhe
The home page of the Society for Research into Higher Education
http://www.niss.ac.uk/
The gateway to many education-related sites, including most
university library catalogues in the UK
http://www.thebiz.co.uk/
Allows you to search for details of institutions and other information
to do with training and development in the UK
http://www.lsda.ac.uk/
The Learning and Skills Development Agency’s website, containing
details and text of their publications and other useful information
about further education
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/
The website of the Quality Assurance Agency, which aims to
promote confidence in the quality and standards within higher
education
http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/
The website of the Universities and Colleges Information Systems
Association, giving much useful information about post-compulsory
education and access to other websites, including a powerful search
engine
http://www.edexcel.org.uk/
The home page of Edexcel: the ‘foundation for educational excel-
lence’. Edexcel is an amalgation of BTEC and London Examinations,
one of the examination boards. A range of information about
training and development and examinations, among other things, is
available here
http://www.lifelonglearning.co.uk
The website for the encouragement, promotion and development
of lifelong learning
Chapter 3
Making education policy
OUTLINE
This chapter explores the nature of education policy and seeks
to give some insight into the policy-making process. It begins by
asking the apparently simple question ‘what is education
policy?’ and then goes on to explore the ways in which it is
made, concentrating on the national level (although education
policy is explicitly or implicitly made wherever there is an
educative process). Two case studies are provided to show in
some detail how policy was made, first, in the area of schools
being allowed to opt out of local authority control and, second,
in the development of the national curriculum. The discussion
then moves on to some conceptual tools for understanding the
forces that drive the policy-making process, particularly the
political and educational ideologies which provide guidance for
action. Finally, an attempt is made to show that, although there
is often a clear link between ideology and policy, the relationship
between them is very frequently mediated by a number of other
less predictable factors. Some illustrations of these are given.
What is education policy?

Education policy is often thought of as a thing: a statement of some
sort, usually written down in a policy document. Viewed in this way,
education policy could be defined as follows:
a specification of principles and actions, related to educational

issues, which are followed or which should be followed and
which are designed to bring about desired goals
In this sense policy is a piece of paper, a statement of intentions or

of practice as it is perceived by policy-makers or as they would like
it to be.
96 Making education policy
This view of policy is a very limited one. It is better to see policy

as a process, something which is dynamic rather than static.
This dynamism comes from a number of sources:
• There is usually conflict among those who make policy, as well

as those who put it into practice, about what the important issues
or problems for policy are and about the desired goals.
• Interpreting policy is an active process: policy statements are
almost always subject to multiple interpretations depending upon
the standpoints of the people doing the interpretative ‘work’.
• The practice of policy on the ground is extremely complex, both
that being ‘described’ by policy and that intended to put policy
into effect. Simple policy descriptions of practice do not capture
its multiplicity and complexity, and the implementation of policy
in practice almost always means outcomes differ from policy-
makers’ intentions (which were, anyway, always multiple and
often contradictory).
Ball takes these concerns into account when he says this about
policy:
Policy is both text and action, words and deeds, it is what

is enacted as well as what is intended. Policies are always
incomplete insofar as they relate to or map on to the ‘wild
profusion’ of local practice.
(Ball 1994c, p. 10)
Figure 3.1 illustrates the complex nature of policy-making and

interpretation.
How is education policy made?

Rein (1983, p. 211) argues that three basic steps are involved in
policy-making at the national level:
• problem (or issue) setting

• the ‘mobilization of the fine structure of government action’
• the ‘achievement of settlements [compromises which establish a
framework for policy and practice] in the face of dilemmas and
trade-offs among values’.
Making education policy 97
POLICY ENCODING POLICY DECODING

PROCESS PROCESS
Policy Policy as
statement received
Transmission to implementers (e.g.

teachers) usually ‘lossy’: documents
not available; others selectively Policy implementers
Competing selectively interpret policy
interpret the policy for teachers; not
interpretations, interests and make decisions about
enough time available to read policy;
and intentions of policy- how to put it into practice in
‘noise’ interferes with policy ‘signal’
makers their context
etc.
Figure 3.1 Policy encoding and decoding
Wherever policy is being made, in schools, counties or at the national

level, these three steps are important: a problem is identified, the
policy-making process is put into gear and the political process
begins.
Using Rein’s three steps we can say the following about
education policy-making in Britain.
Problem/issue setting: Defining something that needs to be done
is usually the work of more than one agency. Sometimes the civil
service is important in highlighting an issue, sometimes a think tank
such as the Institute for Economic Affairs, sometimes the press and
television, and sometimes an individual such as the Prime Minister.
Usually it is a combination of these. It was noted in Chapter 1,
however, that teachers and the local education authorities, who had
been influential in all stages of policy-making in the past, were
progressively excluded from these processes during the 1980s.
The mobilization of the fine structure of government (or other
agency) action: What form this takes will depend on the nature
of the policy being discussed and the context of policy-making
(government, school, local education authority, etc.). The two case
studies below illustrate the different ways in which the policy-
making process can occur at the national level.
The achievement of settlements in the face of dilemmas and trade-
offs among values: Even though some important players in the
policy-making process had been excluded, education policy-making
remained a complex, non-linear process in the 1980s, as it continues

to be today. Policies are always the product of compromises
between multiple agendas and influences (Ball 1994c, p. 16). The
actual outcome, the policy as articulated, will be the result of a
micropolitical process and ‘muddling through’.
Policy-making in practice, then, is usually far from the rational-
purposive model that many people imagine it to be: one in which a
distinct set of policy-makers consider sensible policies in a logical
way and carefully formulate them with a clear purpose in mind.
Bleiklie notes, for example, that frequently policy is far from simply
‘the mechanical application of means [by the policy architect or
engineer] in order to realise given ends’ (Bleiklie 2000, pp. 54–5).
Instead the process of ‘encoding’ policy is a complex one in which
policy texts are developed as a process of negotiation, compromise
and the exercise of power. As a result these policy texts are usually
laden with multiple agendas, attitudes, values and sets of meaning.
Policy encoding thus involves complex practices of interpreting,
negotiating and refining proposals. The consequence is that ‘pro-
cesses of change at the level of national policy, within academic
institutions and disciplinary groups, are only partially co-ordinated’
(Kogan et al. 2000, p. 30).
Two case studies of policy-making

To illustrate and clarify how policy is made at the national level (the
‘fine structure of government action’), it is useful to look in detail at
some case studies. Although the cases chosen here may not be
typical, especially as they both come from the school sector only,
they do give important insights into the policy process in two key
areas of Conservative education policy-making in the 1980s.
The first study concerns the policy which led to the creation
of grant-maintained (GM) schools: schools allowed to ‘opt out’ of
control by the local education authority to become virtually inde-
pendent state schools which, in England, receive their money direct
from the national Funding Agency for Schools (FAS).
The second relates to the policy process through which the
national curriculum was developed, that is the schemes of study and
related patterns of assessment which most children between the
ages of 5 and 16 years in the English and Welsh state schooling

system must follow.
Case study: policy-making on grant-maintained schools
The idea for schools opting out of local authority control to GM status
came originally from Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for
Education at the time (the mid-1980s). It fitted neatly with his desire
to increase parental choice of schools, to differentiate schools more
clearly in order to provide more alternatives for parents and to
undermine the power of the local education authorities, to which the
Conservatives were hostile. The idea was to permit individual schools
to leave the control of their LEA if the majority of parents agreed to
this, and for these schools to receive funding from a national agency,
the FAS, so that they would become almost self-governing, while
remaining in the state sector.
The civil servants in the DES had to respond to this proposal, but
they were presented only with the germ of an idea, a ‘sketchy policy’
in the words of one civil servant, because neither Baker nor Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher really knew how the idea of opting out
would work in practice. At this point the proposal entered the ‘policy
loop’: the series of meetings between ministers and civil servants at
which policy is progressively refined. One civil servant described the
process in the following way.
What we did was to take different aspects of the policy and

then work up proposals and options on those. When we had
something that constituted a reasonable package we put that
up to ministers . . . We then had a discussion with them and
they commented on various aspects with us. Then we went
away and got on with it. On some occasions it might be a
couple of times a week. At other times, we might be doing
a substantial amount of work in between and it would be
perhaps three to four weeks.
(quoted in Fitz and Halpin 1991, p. 138)
Ministers rarely wrote anything during this period; they either agreed
with what had been developed or asked for alternative approaches.
The interpersonal and interactive nature of the policy loop provided

an opportunity for civil servants to feed a ‘departmental view’ into the
formulation of policy, although proposals stemming from this were
sometimes vetoed by ministers. For example, by insisting that the
chance for GM status should be given only to schools with more than
three hundred pupils, the DES effectively limited the application of
the policy to middle and secondary schools (although in 1990 the
government extended the possibility of GM status to all primary
schools). This kind of policy input from the civil service, and the
conflicts with politicians that can sometimes arise from it, was
cleverly satirized in the television programmes Yes Minister and Yes
Prime Minister.
This example shows that even though the original idea for GM
schools came from a politician, civil servants were able to guide the
policy process as they converted a sketchy outline into a workable
policy. Determining the fine detail of policy on specific issues, such
as parental ballots, funding of GM schools, what should be taught in
them and so on, gave civil servants a good degree of power. This
was possibly even more true given the exclusion of the ‘educational
establishment’ (teachers’ associations, LEAs, etc.) from the policy
loop, which became increasingly restricted during the 1980s.
Case study: national curriculum policy-making
The origins of the national curriculum largely lie in the perceptions,

within government and the population at large, that teachers were
failing the country. The dominant image during the early 1980s was
of a profession in the grip of progressivist theories of education
which were resulting in generations of illiterate children. Teachers,
it was believed, allowed children to follow their own interests in an
unfocused way; pupils studied ‘topics’ rather than ‘subjects’ and were
allowed to spend too much time off-task, chatting with friends in
groups rather than listening to the teacher. Additionally, teachers
were not sufficiently concerned with fitting children for life and work
after school.
In the Conservative Party such criticisms were common; they were

analysed and discussed in right-wing think tanks and informal groups
of right-wing intellectuals, e.g. by Brian Cox and the other authors of
the Black Papers published between 1969 and 1977 (see Cox and
Dyson (eds) 1969a and b), and more recently within a variety of New-
Right think tanks, such as the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the
National Council for Educational Standards, the Social Affairs Unit,
the Adam Smith Institute, the Hillgate Group and the Institute of
Economic Affairs (IEA).
These groups, with the support of Margaret Thatcher, were
moving towards a policy involving a minimalist national curriculum
concentrating very heavily on literacy, science and numeracy. This
worried many, particularly in the Department of Education and
Science. Duncan Graham, who was to become Chairman and Chief
Executive of the National Curriculum Council (NCC), argued that:
somebody . . . in government or in the Education Department

. . . decided to head off that group from leading state educa-
tion to total disaster by inventing the national curriculum
which appeared to satisfy a lot of their demands.
(Graham 1993, p. 6)
Together the NCC and the School Examination and Assessment

Council (SEAC) were charged with fleshing out the curriculum which
became mandatory in 1988. These bodies were set up against the
desires of the civil service, which wanted to have control of the
curriculum. As a result they found their work undermined by some
senior civil servants. Again, the education establishment was largely
excluded from the policy loop.
The Education Act reforms were not born of these people

[education professionals], they were not consulted about
them, indeed the government considered them to be the
enemy.
(Graham 1993, pp. 12–13)
The fifteen or so members of the NCC working groups were asked to

determine the details of the curriculum in each of the ten subjects.
Many members of these groups were appointed for their political
and educational leanings. They were given only a few months to
determine the whole content of the curriculum, detailing what

children should know and be able to do at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and
16 years. Proposals were circulated to schools and other educational
institutions, but deadlines for replies were tight: proposals were sent
in the summer months when teachers were on holiday. What replies
were received appear to have had very limited influence; few
subsequent changes were detectable. This work was so tightly
controlled by the civil service that Graham had to arrange a virtually
clandestine meeting with the minister, Kenneth Baker, away from
their eyes and ears, to discuss issues which he, correctly, thought
Baker was not being told about (Graham 1993, p. 21).
Not everything, however, went the government’s or the civil
servants’ way. Despite the appointment of Brian Cox, the author of
some of the Black Papers, to chair the English working group, that
group did not propose a curriculum which politicians on the right
wanted. Instead of stressing grammar, spelling and the ‘correct’ use
of English, the group (including Cox) emphasized the importance of
imagination and creativity in writing, and the variety of spoken and
written English forms. Neither Baker nor (particularly) Thatcher was
happy. A compromise was reached, but Baker insisted that only Key
Stage 1 (English up to the age of 7 years) should be implemented.
This left room for further discussion about the English curriculum
which, in 1993, blew up into a confrontation with the profession on
the following issues:
• the central prescription of set books (and what they should be)
• whether to permit the use of class and regional dialects as against
‘standard English’
• the relative merits of grammar and spelling as against imagination
and creativity
• the study of modern writers as against dead ones
• the roles of critical and analytical abilities as against the
appreciation of ‘great writing’.
Teachers threatened to refuse to set and assess tests if the

proposed Key Stage 3 (tested at 14 years) English curriculum was
imposed. They were successful in gaining some compromise (a
‘settlement’) on these issues.
The outcome of the detailed policy-making on the national

curriculum was a large, heavily prescribed set of ten subjects with a
very heavy assessment workload. Everything was centrally deter-
mined, including schemes of work, what the children should know
and be able to do at each stage, the format and content of testing, etc.
Only the actual teaching methods were left to the teachers’ discretion.
Government control of these would later come to be tackled through
teacher-training policy, as set out in the 1994 Education Act. The
Conservatives’ emphasis on traditional educational values was
enshrined in the curriculum:
• an emphasis on admiration rather than analysis in English

• an emphasis on ancient rather than contemporary history
• an emphasis on subjects rather than topics
• an emphasis on rigorous conformity to grammatical and other
rules rather than creativity.
The national curriculum was so ‘traditional’ in nature that Stephen

Ball refers to it as the ‘curriculum of the dead’ (Ball 1990a), and Ivor
Goodson identifies very strong similarities between the 1988
curriculum and the Secondary Regulations of 1904 (Goodson 1990).
Moreover, the curriculum was so overloaded with content and
teachers were so ground down with work, much of it assessment and
bureaucratic form-filling rather than teaching, that the 1993 Dearing
Report had to recommend the slimming down of content and of
testing.
Understanding policy-making
In looking at the policy-making process it is useful to be clear about
the ideologies which drive both policy-makers and those who put
policy into practice. ‘Ideology’ is used here to mean:
a framework of values, ideas and beliefs about the way society

is and should be organised and about how resources should be
allocated to achieve what is desired. This framework acts as a
guide and a justification for behaviour.
(adapted from Hartley 1983, pp. 26–7)
In education two sets of ideological forces are at work: political

ideology and educational ideology.
The political ideologies at work in contemporary Britain are
summarized in Table 3.1. Marxist and other radical political
ideologies are not discussed here because of the limited impact they
have had on postwar education policy-making.
The New Right

The New Right can most usefully be seen as an amalgam of neo-
liberalism and neo-conservatism (Gamble 1988, pp. 28–9).
Essentially it characterizes a political grouping more than a coherent
political ideology itself. Some people think of Thatcherism and the
New Right as being synonymous, but Thatcher’s ideological posi-
tion leaned heavily towards the neo-liberal strand of the New
Right. As well as the internal division between neo-liberalism and
neo-conservatism within the New Right, a number of other contra-
dictions surround the concept (Ball 1990a, p. 41), including the
following:
• The ‘solid’ sounding term actually represents a loose aggregation
of points of view.
• Again, the solidity of the term creates the illusion that we can
‘read off’ education policy from ‘New Right’ ideology. Policy-
making is more complex than that, as this chapter demonstrates.
• Policy derives from other sources than political ideology,
including educational ideology, pragmatism, negotation and
compromise.
The two strands of New Right thinking are inherently contradictory,
as Table 3.2 demonstrates: on the left are the key issues for neo-
liberalism in declining order of importance, while on the right are
those for neo-conservatism, also in declining order of importance.
Note how one is the inverse of the other, both in representing
opposites and in their order of priority: the individual versus the
nation; freedom of choice versus hierarchy and subordination and
so on.
Table 3.3 shows the link between the key issues of New Right
ideology and specific education policy.
Educational ideology and policy-making

Sets of values and attitudes which relate particularly to the nature
of education and the educational process are also important in
education policy-making. Table 3.4 sets out the nature of educa-
tional ideologies operating in contemporary Britain. The fourth
educational ideology, social reconstructionism, is linked to more
radical political ideologies, such as Marxism and feminism, that have
so far had almost no influence in education policy-making in the
UK, at least at the national level.
Table 3.5 shows the linkage between the political and the
educational ideologies described in Tables 3.1 and 3.4.
Some contradictions and gaps in the

ideology–policy link
The account above might suggest to the reader that policy and
ideology are linked in a clear and smooth way: that education policy
can be ‘read off’ the ideologies of politicians and others involved in
policy-making. As indicated in Chapter 1, this rational model of
policy-making is rarely found in reality, even during the 1980s when
many of the groups and influences which were previously involved
in policy-making had been excluded. Political conflict, compromise
and ‘muddling through’ still took place.
Old conservative . . . interests are at odds with new, manu-

facturing capital with finance capital, the Treasury with the
DTI [Department of Trade and Industry], the neo-liberals
with the neo-conservatives, wets with drys, Elizabeth House
with Number 10, the DES with itself, Conservative Central
Office with the Shires.
(Ball 1990a, p. 19)
In addition, policy is sometimes made almost accidentally or as a

result of political necessity. Ideology becomes less important in
these circumstances. The independence of further education col-
leges, for example, came about partly by accident. The government
faced a local authority funding crisis caused partly by its disastrous
Table 3.1 Political ideologies
Name Key principles The principles applied to Education policy examples

education
Neo-liberalism ■ The free market should be ■ Schools should compete The Conservative government
left to its own liberalism with schools, individual justified the scheme to give
devices with the very pupils against each other. nursery vouchers worth around
minimum of government ■ Parents are consumers in this £1,000 to parents to ‘spend’
intervention (the provision context and should be given on the nursery of their choice
of a police force, army and the information they need in terms of ‘enhanced parental
a few basic services). to make intelligent choices. control over the use of public
■ Attempts at social planning ■ Diversity within the funds to pay for education’
are doomed to failure because education system should be (Conservative Research
of the complexities of society encouraged in order to Department 1996, p. 1).
and because of the basic provide extensive choice: Underpinning this statement are
selfishness of people. grant-maintained schools, neo-liberal ideas about the
■ Institutions such as schools city technology colleges, importance of market forces
and LEAs, initially set up to and support for the private in delivering good-quality
serve the community, end up sector can sustain this choice. education, in particular the
serving themselves (‘producer beliefs that:
capture’). ■ giving free rein to market
■ Institutions such as LEAs are forces with minimal state
not needed to offer strategic intervention will bring about
direction, because the ‘hidden an improvement in standards
hand’ of the market will and provision: ‘Vouchers for
ensure that the system the provision of education . . .
operates for the common emphasise freedom of choice
good. for parents . . . The scheme
■ This is an individualist (or will increase the supply of places
anti-collectivist) ideology; over time, extend choice for
it sees the individual pursuing parents and require all providers
his or her own interests as the taking part to work to consistent
key to happiness for all. This educational standards
notion was behind Thatcher’s (Conservative Research
famous comment that ‘there Department 1996, p. 3).
is no such thing as society’ ■ giving the opportunity to
(Woman’s Own, 31 October private providers of nursery
1987). education will lead to more
and better provision. The
Conservatives were pleased
that by June 1996 over 630
private and voluntary nursery
education providers had joined
the scheme (Conservative
Research Department 1996, p. 7).
■ giving more choice to parents as
consumers will push standards
up: ‘The vouchers give parents
the enhanced power to choose a
place that better suits their
child’s needs and to insist on
high standards. They will
increasingly allow parents who
are not satisfied with the
standards provided for their
children to go elsewhere’
(Conservative Research
Department 1996, p. 3).
continued
Table 3.1 continued

education
Neo-conservatism ■ Sees people as greedy, selfish ‘If pupils are to make the most The neo-conservative influence is
and criminally inclined. of [the opportunity that schools evident in national curriculum
■ The government has a duty to offer] they must attend school policy, particularly in the following
intervene in what would regularly, and be given a clear features:
otherwise be a war of each moral lead by the governing ■ its centralism: the curriculum
against all to ensure that body, the head teacher and the was determined at the national
morality and the social order staff of their schools. Pupils level and imposed on schools
are maintained. must be helped to recognise ■ its emphasis on conformity and
■ ‘Custom’, ‘tradition’ and their responsibilities to order: common standards for alI,
‘order’ are key words. Central themselves and to others’ regardless of background and
control is stressed and there (Department for Education region, were imposed
is suspicion of power in local 1992) ■ its stress on British nationhood:
government for example the curriculum tends to
and of people’s freedom to concentrate on British history
choose. and on English writers
■ Neo-conservatives believe in ■ its emphasis on the past rather
the state providing strong than on the present and the
direction from the centre. future: this is why Ball calls it
rather than the localized and ‘the curriculum of the dead’
pluralistic ‘referee’ role for it ■ its emphasis on testing, ranking
envisaged in social and sorting
democratic ideology.
Social democracy ■ There is a need for intervention ■ Education is an important The Labour government rejected
by state agencies into most means by which social inequality the nursery voucher scheme,
aspects of social provision, can be both mitigated and made arguing that ‘this reliance on the
including education. more meritocratic. market instead of a planned
■ Working with charitable and ■ An educated society can deliver expansion of provision means
private agencies is acceptable, improved economic that the government cannot offer
as these complement the work performance nationally; that a guarantee of a place for all
of the state if properly education leads to greater levels four year olds’ (Labour Party
supported and regulated. of social mobility based on 1997, p. 2). Labour used the
■ Without regulation social merit, particularly intelligence same amount of money to open
inequalities will become and hard work. new places allocated by the
exacerbated and the ■ State intervention is necessary Conservatives for the voucher
disadvantaged will become to achieve a key goal of equality scheme: ‘We will build on current
relatively, and in some cases of opportunity. This is defined provision, working with all the
absolutely, worse off. in terms of the ability of each partners in pre-school education –
■ Social democrats tend to individual and social group to LEAs, playgroups, private and
believe in the importance of achieve their full potential, voluntary sector providers’ (Labour
pluralistic decision-making, unrestricted by limitations Party 1997, p. 4). This stressed
with key players (teachers’ imposed by socio-economic strategy and planning, instead of
associations, LEAs, parents, background, prejudice or market forces, and an increased
business) all being involved discrimination. role for the state in order to
at both the national and local achieve objectives. Also important
levels in matters which in this statement is the idea of
affect them. consultation with interested parties
rather than simply giving power to
‘consumers’.
continued
Table 3.1 continued

education
Social democracy ■ The provision of early education

(continued) in nurseries is considered to be
extremely important for the
larger society and for mitigating
social disadvantage: ‘Half of a
child’s educational development
is believed to take place in the
first five years of life. Early
childhood education is of great
benefit to children, their families
and society at large . . . Recent
research by the Audit
Commission found that nursery
education had a clear positive
effect on pupils, more than
compensating for the effect of
coming from a disadvantaged
background’ (Labour Party
1997, p. 1).
■ National and local government
intervention and planning
complemented by the guided
work of private and charitable
institutions, not market forces, is
the best way to deliver nursery
education: ‘We will expect LEAs
to draw up development plans
for the under fives, in
conjunction with private and
voluntary sector providers,
setting out a local strategy
towards meeting our pledge for
all three and four year olds’
(Labour Party 1997, p. 4).
■ Equality of opportunity is
fostered by clear objectives and
planning for nursery education:
‘Studies in the United States
show that children who
experienced pre-school
education did better in school,
stayed in education longer, were
more likely to gain jobs and were
less likely to show delinquent
behaviour . . . Early years
education offers an excellent
opportunity to identify, at the
earliest possible moment,
children who have special
educational needs’ (Labour Party
1997, p. 1).
Table 3.2 The contradictory strands in New Right thinking
Neo-liberalism Neo-conservatism
The individual Strong government

Freedom of choice Declining Social authoritarianism
Market society importance Disciplined society
Laissez-faire Hierarchy and subordination
Minimal government The nation
poll tax policy, which was expensive to administer and difficult to

collect. One way of solving this problem and making the poll tax
appear to work was by removing colleges from council budgets. In
the end, however, the poll tax was changed, but colleges remained
independent.
Another factor is the difficulty of making policies that will work;
understanding causes and effects in the social world is extremely
complex and ‘solutions’ are not easy to find. Conservative govern-
ment policy on training was often incoherent and self-defeating.
Measures designed to save money, for example, actually turned out
to cost more than previous policy. National curriculum assessment
on its own cost £469 million between 1988 and 1992, with £35 million
spent on virtually unused tests in 1993 (Lawton 1994, p. 103). The
nursery vouchers scheme – a government scheme to support the
costs of nursery care through giving vouchers to parents of young
children – proved to be extremely expensive to administer, bureau-
cratic in operation and had rather limited effects. In fact in some
areas nurseries began to close as schools extended their provision
to take advantage of the scheme.
Perhaps the most important cause of the complex and contra-
dictory nature of education policy during the 1980s and 1990s,
however, was the inherently paradoxical nature of New Right
thinking. Some examples follow.
The centralization–deregulation paradox

The neo-conservative desire to centralize education policy-making
and control is in opposition to the neo-liberal desire to increase
choice and stimulate market forces. Thus simultaneously neo-liberal
Table 3.3 New Right ideology and educational policy

See the Glossary and chapters 1 and 2 for more details of these policies.
Neo-liberal thinking Policy example
The individual Parents’ charter: sets out individual

parental rights and responsibilities.
Statutory publication of
examination results: gives
individual parents the information
on which to base school choice.
Freedom of choice Parental choice of schools: parents

no longer directed by LEA as to
which school their child should go
to.
Diversity of schools: new types of
schools developed and schools
encouraged to establish unique
‘mission’ so that there is diversity
of choice.
Market society Competition between schools:

schools encouraged by financial
carrots and sticks to compete for
pupils.
Nursery and training vouchers:
parents and students encouraged to
‘shop around’ for education by
having vouchers to spend.
Laissez-faire Private schools: allowed to thrive

alongside the state system.
New universities: given powers to
accredit their own courses without
oversight by national body (the
CNAA).
Minimal government Reduced role of LEAs: powers taken

away with regard to opted out
schools, colleges of further
education and new universities;
even maintained schools have more
financial control under LMS.
continued
Table 3.3 continued
Neo-conservative thinking Policy example
Strong government The national curriculum imposed

from the centre.
Social authoritarianism Stress on cultural heritage in

curriculum rather than cultural
analysis.
Disciplined society Use of standard English in schools

rather than allowing diversity in
class and regional dialects.
Traditional approaches to teaching
stressed with teacher at the front of
disciplined and quiet class.
Hierarchy and subordination League tables and testing create

hierarchies among schools.
Streaming of pupils in schools
creates internal hierarchies.
The nation Nationalistic content of national

curriculum stresses parochialism
rather than internationalism.
policy, such as local management of schools and opting out to grant-

maintained status, is combined with a national curriculum which all
state schools must follow and which initially allowed no space for
anything else. Moreover, this was a national curriculum founded
on at least a rhetorical stress on the 3Rs: ‘back to basics’ and ‘market
choice’ make curious bedfellows. Overall the very strong central-
ization of policy-making in the years of Conservative government
combined with increasing levels of control placed in the hands of the
Secretary of State despite a rhetorical concern with devolving
powers to schools and parents (as consumers).
Table 3.4 Educational ideologies
Educational ideology Key points Policy examples
Traditionalism ■ Traditionalism is rooted in a belief in the The Education Secretary’s comments on the
value of a cultural and disciplinary heritage, ‘Three Wise Men’ report Curriculum Organization
of which academics are custodians. The role and Classroom Practice in Primary Schools, 1992:
of schools is to transmit this heritage to the
next generation who are expected to receive In responding to this government-commissioned
it passively and gratefully. report the Education Secretary stressed the
■ Elitism is justified in terms of the inherent following:
difficulties of achieving a good education ■ its critique of progressivist techniques found in
and limited distribution of talent in society. schools (group work, discussion, etc.)
■ The content of subjects is vitally important: ■ too much concentration on ‘topics’ rather than
learning about history, geography and the ‘subjects’ in primary schools – this often meant
rest is important in itself and helps develop just copying from books
the mind and personality. ■ the over-reluctance of teachers to tell pupils
■ Teachers are custodians of a great heritage. things – progressivist ideology wrongly
encouraged them to ask questions and elicit
information rather than tell. Didactic
approaches are often better than discovery
learning
■ an over-emphasis on equality of opportunity,
resulting in the fear of being ‘elitist’. This has
lowered standards.
continued
Table 3.4 continued
Educational ideology Key points Policy examples
Progressivism ■ Progressivism claims to be ‘student-centred’, The Plowden Report (1968) is often used as an
in the sense of valuing students’ participation example of progressivism. It recommended that:
in planning, delivering, assessing and ■ teachers and parents should be partners in the
evaluating courses. educational process
■ Disciplinary knowledge and traditions are ■ streaming in schools has deleterious effects and
considered to be relatively unimportant: should be stopped
students’ freedom of choice and personal ■ time should be given to children for imaginative
development take priority over subject and expressive work
knowledge. ■ books used and topics taught should make
■ This ideology rejects elitism and favours sense to children, and teachers need to
mass access in higher education. Where understand the child’s point of view.
there is concern about social inequality the
role of education is to give a ‘step up’ to
disadvantaged individuals and groups in the
largest numbers possible, not to reconstruct
society.
Enterprise ■ Education is primarily concerned with The Education and Training for the Twenty First
developing people to be good and efficient Century White Paper (1991) put forward:
workers. ■ the proposal to extend the educational voucher
■ ‘What will it help us to do?’ is the key in the form of a ‘training credit’ with which
question in deciding what should be taught. young people could buy vocational training
■ New technology and new approaches to ■ a philosophy of adult education which would
teaching and learning are valued both as lead to funding only where it is vocationally
more efficient and more effective tools than relevant or caters for adults with special
traditional approaches, and for their educational needs. Non-vocational adult
development of important skills in students. education would lose funding
■ There is considerable emphasis on ‘core ■ the proposal that colleges should become
skills’: communication, IT, literacy, etc. independent of LEA control. The intention
was partly to make them free to respond to
‘customers’ (mainly employers).
Social reconstructionism ■ Social reconstructionism claims that This ideology is not found in government policy,
education can be a force for positive social but is evident among some educationalists. It is
change, including (and perhaps especially) articulated in ‘What the Radical Right Is Doing to
for creating an improved individual who is Teacher Education: a Radical Left Response’ (Hill,
able critically to address prevailing social 1992), which argues that:
norms and help change them for the better. ■ the teaching profession is being proletarianized
■ It shares a change orientation with the by reducing the amount of training required and
enterprise ideology, but the nature of the by replacing theoretically based courses with
desired change is very different and more on-the-job training.
radical. ■ changes to teacher education mean that
■ It shares with the progressivist a preference teachers will no longer come to the job with a
for active, problem-solving pedagogy. concern for equal opportunities, multi-
■ The social reconstructivist favours a focus culturalism and antiracism, antisexism,
on subject disciplines, autonomous learning, discussion of issues of sexuality, or any sort of
but with strong guidance from the teacher, social justice. They will simply have subject
and a strong emphasis on emancipatory and knowledge and classroom skills.
critical projects, as well as on personal ■ the above factors plus increased
development over social and economic managerialism, low pay, job intensification
improvement. and increasing ‘teaching from the book’ mean
that not only are teachers suffering, but the
education system as a whole is becoming
impoverished.
■ the possibility of critically addressing
inequalities in society has almost disappeared.
Table 3.5 The linkages between political and educational ideologies
Political ideology Educational ideology Linkages
Social democracy Progressivism Emphasis on personal

development and social
co-operation
Neo-conservatism Traditionalism Emphasis on order,

hierarchies and cultural
transmission
Neo-liberalism Enterprise Emphasis on

competitiveness in a
market environment
both individually and
internationally
The enterprise–traditionalism paradox

Similarly, there was a paradoxical relationship between, on the one
hand, Conservative government rhetoric stressing the need for
education and training to equip ‘Great Britain plc’ to compete
effectively in the global market and, on the other, the setting up of
an old-fashioned national curriculum with a stress on traditional
teaching methods. Such a curriculum is unlikely to enable Britain’s
workforce to compete in an international environment.
The idealistic rhetoric–pragmatic practice

paradox
While government rhetoric stressed the need for training in high-
level skills to be competitive internationally, in practice it is largely
the low-attaining students who attend ‘vocational’ courses, which
are usually oriented to the low-status, low-skilled, occupations. The
reason behind this is that government had an urgent need to address
the unemployment problem, and the unemployed were largely
unable to benefit from training in higher-level skills.
However, it is not only New Right ideology which leads to
paradoxes of policy like these. One example is:
The widening participation while increasing

financial obstacles to learning paradox
Widening participation and enhancing lifelong learning have
been two key themes in Labour post-compulsory education policy
since 1997. However, while one set of policies has been designed to
achieve this aim, largely employing changes to funding instruments
for institutions, another set of policies has prevented them being
successful. The abolition of maintenance grants for students and the
introduction of contributions towards university fees, for example,
led to a dramatic slowdown in the recruitment of mature students
to universities in the late 1990s.
Key points
• The policy-making process is a complex one involving a contest
between competing interpretations of ‘the problem’, negotiations
and compromises during the policy-formulation stage.
• Between 1979 and 1997 there was a decline in the pluralistic
nature of education policy formulation, with teachers’ groups
and LEAs especially progressively excluded, but with New Right
think tanks increasingly drawn into the policy loop.
• Political and educational ideologies are important in the policy
process. Understanding them helps the analyst to grasp under-
lying consistencies in values and attitudes and what the various
players bring to the policy-making process. Table 3.6 provides a
summary of some of the issues discussed in this respect. However,
the linkages indicated in that table are loosely coupled ones. For
example, the new Labour government of 1997 espoused a social
democratic political ideology, yet some of its educational policies,
such as its stress on the 3Rs and critique of project work (Bright
1997, p. 1), lay in the traditionalist ideological camp.
• Outcomes of the policy process are often unpredictable and
contradictory, even when governments are strongly ‘ideological’,
as those of the 1980s were. For example, despite the intention
behind the national curriculum to lay greater stress on the 3Rs,
the time available for these was squeezed in primary schools by
a curriculum content over-full with other subjects.
Table 3.6 Ideological repertoires of education
Political ideology Social democratic Neo-liberal Neo-conservative Marxist, feminist and

other conflict models
Educational ideology Progressive Enterprise Traditionalist Social

reconstructionism
View of purpose of Personal and social Increase human capital Socialization into To empower
education development norms and values of marginalized groups
dominant culture and to change the status
quo in the interests of
equity
View of pupil or Entitlee Raw material Empty vessel Change agent
student
View of parents Partners Supporters Inadequate parents are Could be involved in
a problem pressing for change
View of teachers and Partners Some teachers too Teachers can be too Can represent an
other stakeholders anti-business. Industry permissive. Other obstacle to change or
and commerce should partners welcome if facilitate it
be partners they accept educational
philosophy.
Role of government First among equal Minimal Retains control Usually repressive
partners
Appropriate curriculum Student-centred Vocational Traditional Developing critical
thinking and linking
theory and action
Source adapted from Dale 1989


On the role and power of the civil service within the DES, and generally
for a discussion of pluralism and the changing role of government in
education policy-making see:
Gewirtz, S. and Ozga, J. (1990) ‘Partnership, pluralism and education

policy: a reassessment’, Journal of Education Policy, 5, pp. 37–48.
McPherson, A. and Raab, C. (1988) Governing Education: A Sociology of
Policy since 1945, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
For more analysis of behind-the-scenes policy-making see:

Ball, S. J. (1990) Politics and Policy Making in Education, London:
Routledge (especially Chapters 6 and 7).
Knight, C. (1990) The Making of Tory Education Policy in Post-war Britain,
London: Falmer Press.
Lawton, D. (1994) The Tory Mind on Education, 1979–94, London: Falmer
Press.
For some examples of the output of New Right think tanks see:
Ball, S. J. (1994) Education Reform: A Critical and Post-structural
Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press, Chapter 3.
For more on political ideology see:

Gamble, A. (1988) The Free Economy and the Strong State, London:
Macmillan.
Green, D. (ed.) (1991) Empowering the Parents: How to Break the Schools’
Monopoly, London: Institute for Economic Affairs.
Hillgate Group (1987) The Reform of British Education, London: Hillgate
Group.
Lawton, D. (1992) Education and Politics in the 1990s: Conflict or
Consensus?, London: Falmer Press.
For an insight see:

Graham, Duncan (1993) A Lesson For Us All? The Making of the National
Curriculum (with D. Tytler), London: Routledge.
A fascinating insider’s account of policy-making on the national
curriculum, a tell-it-like-it-was, step-by-step account from the inception to
the first stages of implementation of the curriculum. The fact that Graham
was forced to resign as a result of political manoeuvring makes him much
more frank than most people in senior positions so soon after the events
they descibe.
Useful websites
http://www.sosig.ac.uk
SOSIG (pronounced ‘sausage’) is the gateway to a number of
extremely useful social science resources
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/journal/vol1no1/index.htm
The journal Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning: The
Journal of the Institute for Access Studies and the European Access
Network includes a paper by Maggie Woodrow exploring some of
the policy paradoxes in Labour’s 1997–2001 term. Woodrow’s
article is at: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/journal/vol1no1/ed-2.htm
http://www.cps.org.uk/
The Centre for Policy Studies, an independent centre-right think
tank which develops and publishes public policy proposals and
arranges seminars and lectures on topical policy issues, founded by
Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974
http://www.iea.org.uk/
The Institute for Economic Affairs: another right-wing policy think
tank
http://www.ieps.org.uk.cwc.net/hillcole.html
The Institute for Education Policy Studies: a left-wing education
policy think tank
http://www.psi.org.uk/intro.htm
The Policy Studies Institute conducts ‘research which will promote
economic well-being and improve quality of life’
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/frontend/index.shtml
Department for Education and Skills
http://www.lsda.org.uk
The Learning and Skills Development Agency, ‘a strategic national
resource for the development of policy and practice in post-16
education and training’
Chapter 4
Reception and implementation
of education policy
OUTLINE
It was suggested in Chapter 3 that policy sociology applies
sociological analysis to the processes of policy formulation and
implementation, and to the relationship between them; that
chapter examined the formulation of policy. This chapter
focuses on the implementation of policy, and the links between
formulation and implementation. It begins by contrasting the
managerial approach, which adopts a top-down approach
to and understanding of policy implementation, and the phe-
nomenological approach, which adopts a bottom-up approach
to it. The case study illustrates and draws out important concepts
and theoretical points.
Managerial approaches to policy implementation
The ‘top-down’ approach
Leaders of the organization must have a clear vision of the

desired end state of the entire system [and] a clear commit-
ment to making significant personal investment in developing
and building commitment [among staff] to an inspirational
vision . . . All of this requires conscious and explicit planning
and managing . . . It cannot be left to chance or good
intentions.
(Beckhard and Pritchard 1992, pp. 4 and 15)
Education policies are formulated in a variety of locales: in central

government, in national bodies associated with government, in local
authorities or in educational institutions. However, they are always
124 Reception and implementation of education policy
implemented by individuals and groups within organizations: schools,

colleges and universities. Therefore aspects of the study of manage-
ment are relevant to understanding education policy, particularly
what is usually called Organizational Development (OD), which
focuses on change in organizations.
Within OD various positions have been proposed, one of which
may be called the ‘managerial’ or ‘top-down’ approach to policy
implementation. The quote from Beckhard and Pritchard above
sums up the central notion of the managerial approach to putting
policy into effect: that leaders at the top of organizations should
set goals within the framework of broader policy and, by pulling the
right levers, secure their staff’s commitment to them. If this occurs
it is assumed that, given sufficient available resources, policy can be
successfully implemented by direction from above.
From the managerial perspective, it is important to make sure
that managers know how to create the right conditions for success-
ful implementation, how to ‘make it happen’. Researchers in this
tradition have tried to help by compiling lists of the necessary
conditions for successful implementation. Table 4.1 gives a summary
of some of the factors they have identified.
Cultural manipulation is central to this kind of approach.
Managers are offered levers to shape the attitudes, values, expecta-
tions and behaviour of those involved within the organization,
including teachers and academic staff. Such approaches have been
variously termed ‘culturalism’ (Parker 2000) or ‘the new leadership
approach’ (Bryman 1999).
Much of the contemporary material emphasizes the need to

produce cultural change rather than merely structural change
(Beckhard and Pritchard 1992, for example). This involves
committing the organisation to attitudinal readjustment . . .
Institutional leaders are encouraged to ‘lead by example’ in
order to commit others to their vision . . . Our investigation
has convinced us that strategic change is cultural change, and
cultural change is related to institutional mission.
(Robertson 1994, pp. 314–5, emphasis mine)
Reception and implementation of education policy 125
Table 4.1 What managers should do to implement policy successfully – the

‘top-down’ approach
■ creating and sustaining the commitment of those involved

■ having clear and stable policy objectives
■ ensuring that the policy innovation has priority over competing demands
■ ensuring that there is a real expectation of solid outcomes inherent in
policy, not just a symbolic one
■ ensuring that the causal theory which underlies the policy reform is
correct and adequate
■ allocating sufficient financial resources
■ creating, as far as possible, a stable environment within which policy is
being implemented
Source adapted from Cerych and Sabatier 1986
Change is carried through, for example, by:
• socialization into the organizational culture through the use of:

– symbols and rituals (logos, mission statements, prize days,
etc.)
– improved communication strategies (in-house journals,
informal conversations, managing the flow of stories about the
organization)
– careful recruitment of new staff
• staff development and persuasion
• coercion and the use of threats (demotion, sacking)
• rewards for conformity, such as bonus payments, free holidays,
promotion.
Organizational development and functionalism

Underlying this approach in the top-down and some OD perspec-
tives is a functionalist view of organizational cultures. Rooted in the
anthropological study of ‘simple’ societies, this view sees successful
organizations as having a single, strong culture which is shared and
enacted by everyone in the organization and is essential to them in
their struggle with the environment. Organizational culture is
thought to give members a sense of meaning and identity which
provide significance and context for them. In short, it ‘defines their
reality through their myths, rituals and procedures’ (Barber 1984).

The ‘organizational saga’ (Clark 1972) (the stories about the organ-
ization, its founder(s) and its history) is considered an important
element in this; it acts as a means of uniting members in a shared
vision of past, present and future. From the functionalist perspective
organizational culture shapes behaviour and, if strong enough, can
facilitate united action towards common and agreed goals, thus
improving organizational effectiveness.
Organisational culture induces purpose, commitment, and

order, provides meaning and social cohesion and clarifies and
explains behavioural expectations. Culture influences an
organisation through the people within it.
(Masland 1985, p. 158)
Organizations which have weak, or multiple and conflicting, cultures

are ineffective and likely to fail. Thus the manager who wishes to
see education policy successfully transferred into practice should
work to build a strong, coherent culture in their school, college or
university. Given clear policy goals, a strong culture, sufficient
resources and an understanding of how to bring about change, the
strong manager relatively easily ensures that policy is carried out as
intended by the policy-makers.
Problems with the ‘top-down’ approach

Research into the implementation process demonstrated that,
even if managers made sure that all of the factors in Table 4.1 were
present, this would not be enough to ensure adoption. It became
clear that they are merely necessary, not sufficient, for policy to be
put into practice. This rethinking of the earlier work was most
famously expressed in Barrett and Fudge’s (1981) commentary on
the top-down approach.
Much of the existing literature tends to take a ‘managerial’

perspective: the problems of implementation are defined in
terms of co-ordination, control or obtaining ‘compliance’ with
policy. Such a policy-centred . . . view of the process . . . tends
to play down issues such as power relations, conflicting interests

and value systems between individuals and agencies respon-
sible for making policy and those responsible for taking action.
(Barrett and Fudge (eds) 1981)
The functionalist view of organizational culture in particular has

received sustained criticism. Researchers have noted that:
• Cultures are constructed as well as enacted, that is, people do not

simply act out the culture that they find in an organization: they
change it too (Tierney 1987).
• Organizational cultures are multiple rather than unitary, at least
in large organizations, and there are competing sets of values
and of understandings at work in the interpretation of policy
innovations. Each organization has a specific, and multiple,
cultural configuration which is highly unstable (Alvesson 2002).
• Organizational cultures are highly complex, they contain many
‘stages of action’ including front-of-stage (the public arena of
official statements, in-house journals and marketing literature),
back-stage (where deals are done behind closed doors) and
under-the-stage (where gossip is purveyed in quiet corners and
over coffee) (Becher 1988).
• Managers’ attempts to manipulate culture in the desire to
implement policy exactly as formulated is unethical.
If I view as essentially insulting an uninvited attempt
to make me over into someone else’s version of a better
human being, should it be any less offensive to the hired
hands?
(Fitzgerald 1988, p. 13)
• Even if successful, the imposition of a single set of norms
and values would undermine an educational organization.
Organizations such as universities need independent critical
thinkers and the ability to learn from mistakes rather than slavish
obedience to the ‘approved’ way of thinking and doing things
(Willmott 1993).
Phenomenological approaches to policy

implementation
Researchers increasingly acknowledged the importance of the phe-
nomenology of innovation. They showed that the earlier managerial
approach had given too much attention to the goals of central actors,
both government and managers of institutions. The values, attitudes
and perceptions of those lower down, who were doing the donkey
work of putting policy into practice, had been ignored. These people
often use strategies which in effect change policy. They inevitably
have discretion in order to cope with uncertainty; as a result policies
tend to evolve through the interactions of a multiplicity of actors.
Consequently policy becomes refracted as it is implemented, that
is, it becomes distorted and less coherent as it is interpreted and put
into practice by ground-level actors, such as teachers.
The postmodern viewpoint

Additionally, the postmodernist understanding of contemporary
society began to stress the existence of different ‘life-worlds’, small
communities within the larger society with their own understand-
ings of the nature of reality and of how to ‘go on’ in life. Moreover,
society itself, characterized as ‘postmodern’, was now seen as highly
fluid, constructed and reconstructed on a continual basis. Older ideas
of fixed structures conditioning behaviour and imposing regularity
and predictability on social life were undermined by postmodern
theory. This theoretical movement also had the effect of stressing the
unpredictablity of human behaviour in policy implementation, and
so the unpredictability of policy outcomes as against policy intentions.
The power of actors in the policy process

Researchers in this tradition, then, view policy implementation as
being at least partly a ‘bottom-up’ process. As Saunders notes,
elaborating on his concept of the ‘implementation staircase’:
policy is expressed in a number of practices, e.g. the

production of texts and rhetoric and the expression of project
and national policy management, in school, in classrooms, and
in staffrooms. Policy is also expressed by different participants

who exist in a matrix of differential, although not simply,
hierarchic power. Finally, participants are both receivers and
agents of policy and, as such, their ‘production’ of policy
reflects priorities, pressures and interests characterising their
location on an implementation staircase.
(Saunders 1986)
Central government makes

policy and allocates funds for it National
to be carried out.
Head teachers and LEAs meet to

decide on implications and how Regional
best to put policy into practice.
School heads and school co-ordinators

decide how to meet needs, avoid jealousies
among teachers and sort the practical from Local
the impossible. They produce written
rationales for what they decide.
Year teachers set classwork that is appropriate

to their pupils. Some trade off with them is
necessary to make things work smoothly. Classroom
Teachers adapt policy according to their
preferences, the context, their pupils etc.
Pupils get away with what they can,

balancing time and effort with risks
and rewards.
Figure 4.1 The implementation staircase

Source adapted from Saunders (1986) and Reynolds and Saunders (1987)
Policy, then, can be thought of as having a ‘career’, which begins

at the point of formulation and progresses through the various
stages of reception and implementation by the actors involved at
different locations on the implementation staircase. A consequence
of this is that researchers seeking to understand policy initiatives
in their entirety should track them through each phase of their
careers. Such studies are called policy trajectory studies, an example
being Lingard and Garrick’s 1997 study of the Social Justice Strategy
in Queensland, Australia, discussed in more detail below.
The phenomenological perspective has come to be increasingly
acknowledged in the study of education policy. In fact it underpins
the whole subdiscipline of policy sociology. It stresses the impor-

tance of recognizing the role of implementation in actually changing
policy. In a sense the implementation is actually part of the policy-
making process itself, rather than being ‘merely’ a second stage
of putting it into practice.
Another example of how policy is changed in its implementation
comes from Michael Apple (1989), who tracks aspects of the prole-
tarianization of school teachers in America, their de-skilling and
the impoverishment of their working conditions. Yet he notes that:
teachers have not stood by and accepted all this. . . . Militancy

and political commitment are but one set of ways in which
control is contested. It is also fought for on the job itself in
subtle and even ‘unconscious’ (one might say ‘cultural’) ways.
(Apple 1989, p. 48)
Similarly Michael Fullan’s important and well-known work (1991;

1993; 1999) has shown the importance of school teachers’ reactions
in the implementation of education policies, drawing attention to
the importance of the meaning of educational change (the title of
one of his works) held by those on the ground (Fullan 1991).
Policy as text, policy as discourse
Policy as text
Stephen Ball (1994c), in discussing the issue of the power of local
actors, distinguishes between policy as text and policy as discourse.
This is a useful attempt to keep in view both the way behaviour and
ideas are constrained by factors external to the individual (policy as
discourse), and the relative freedom of individuals to change things
(policy as text). The first is stressed by the ‘top-down’ approach, and
the second by ‘bottom-up’ ones.
Viewing policy as text refers to the contested, changing and
negotiated character of policy. Policy statements are always the
outcome of struggle and compromise between the different indivi-
duals, groups and interests involved in policy-making. As Chapter
3 showed, the contested character of policy is evident at the initial
stage of formal policy-making: the point of ‘encoding’ the ideas and

values of the actors involved, as Ball puts it.
The disputed character of policy is also evident at the point of
‘decoding’ the text. Here individuals on the ground, such as
teachers, interpret policy messages in the context of their own
culture, ideology, history and resources. There is a close parallel
with an audience watching and ‘decoding’ a television programme;
the process is highly unpredictable and differs according to the
characteristics of the audience viewing the programme (or policy)
‘text’. In fact, researchers interested in audience reception of media
texts have been engaged in the same sorts of debates about the
power of media messages as education policy analysts have about
the power of policy texts (see Trowler 1996, Chapter 2).
Ball sums up the idea of policy as text like this:
[Once formulated,] policies shift and change their meaning in

the arenas of politics; representations change, key interpreters
. . . change . . . Policies are represented differently by different
actors and interests.
(Ball 1994c, pp. 16–17)
Policy as discourse
Regarding policy as text stresses the importance of social agency, of
struggle and compromise, and the importance of understanding how
policy is ‘read’. This is balanced, however, by an understanding of
policy as discourse (Ball 1994c; Bowe et al. 1994), in which the
constraining effect of the discursive context set up by policy-makers
comes to the fore. By discourse is meant the language or other forms
of communication (e.g. pictures) that are used, the way ideas are
expressed. Postmodernists such as Foucault emphasize the way in
which the discourse available to us limits and shapes how we view
the world. Ball draws on Foucault, who argues that discourses are:
practices that systematically form the objects of which they

speak . . . Discourses are not about objects; they do not
identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of
doing so conceal their own invention.
(Foucault 1977, p. 49)
Adapting the postmodern approach, Ball is here suggesting

that discourse does not just represent reality, but helps to create it.
Moreover, discourse ‘disguises’ the ‘created’ nature of social reality
by denying the language resources needed to be able to think about
and describe alternatives.
Policy-makers, then, can and do constrain the way we think about
education in general, and specific education policies in particular,
through the language in which they frame policies. Hargreaves
and Reynolds (1989) illustrate this happening in schools in their
discussion of the discourse in which national curriculum policy
was presented. The notion that only ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects
need be addressed in the curriculum gave a solidity to those sub-
jects and marginalized alternatives, such as development education,
environmental education, political education. The latter are
‘naturally’ seen as peripheral, suitable only for less able groups.
Meanwhile, it is quickly taken for granted that the core and
foundation subjects are inherently superior.
What [was] contentious quickly become[s] normal, natural,

reasonable, taken for granted. New subjects [are] eclipsed,
forgotten, or consigned to older, less able groups. ‘Real’
subjects [are] distinguished from and thereby presented as
self-evidently superior to mere ‘clutter’.
(Hargreaves and Reynolds 1989, pp. 16–17)
Similarly Trowler (2001) shows how the discourse of New Higher

Education in the UK frames the higher education system as a
market catering to students as customers, situates knowledge as
a commodity to be acquired and accumulated like any other and
positions learning as involving the serial acquisition of learning
outcomes, all available on the open market. The use of discursive
repertoires drawn from business, marketing and finance is one of the
ways by which this is accomplished: ‘franchising’, ‘credit accumu-
lation’, ‘delivery of learning outcomes’, the ‘possession’ of skills
and competences, skills ‘audit’ and the rest can become part of
everyday discourse and begin to structure the way people think
about education. Perhaps most importantly they work to exclude
other possible ways of conceptualizing the nature of education. In
this way they can begin to affect the practices which students,
lecturers and others engage in, changing the nature of daily life in
higher education and the assumptions and values found there.
Trowler concludes, however, that this is not inevitable and that there
is considerable scope for resistance and reconstruction of dominant
discourses. Academic staff and students are not ‘captured’ by the
discourse of New Higher Education, or at least not inevitably so.
For Ball, though, we are ‘captured by the discourse’, at least to
some extent. This is where the real power of policy-makers and
managers lies, rather than in less subtle attempts to shift the levers
of cultural manipulation. Fairclough’s (2000) reading of New
Labour’s ‘new language’ casts some doubt on this conclusion,
however. His analysis of the discourse of the ‘Third Way’ (see page
151), for example, sees it as an ongoing process of representing
the social world from a particular position through New Labour’s
documents, speeches, interviews, etc. Labour’s Third Way is dis-
cursively presented as a policy direction which transcends the old
divisions between right and left, one that seeks out and finds what
works rather than one that is just acceptable to political factions.
Through the analysis of texts Fairclough shows the multiple ways
in which this idea is communicated. Yet this Third Way discourse is
not all-powerful: the gap between New Labour rhetoric and the
reality of its actions is the point at which discursive representations
of reality can be contested:
The politics of language, the politics of the gap between reality

and rhetoric, is a fundamental part of politics, and it includes
. . . various types of gap . . . between what people say and what
they do, between action which is linguistic and action which
takes other forms, between what people implicitly claim they
are through their styles of performing and what other evidence
suggest they really are. Political opposition to New Labour
focuses on all these types of gap – setting, for instance, the
discourse of ‘partnership’ against how New Labour actually
governs, new welfare or pensions regulations against the
experiences of claimants, or Blair’s relaxed and inclusive style
against evidence of ‘control-freakery’.
(Fairclough 2000: 155–6)
Criticisms of the bottom-up approach

In making the distinction between policy as text and policy as
discourse, between action and structure, Ball addresses some of the
criticisms made of early bottom-up or phenomenological studies,
summarized by Marsh and Rhodes (1992).
• Bottom-up approaches overestimate the discretion of the lower

level actors and fail to recognize sufficiently the constraints on
their behaviour.
• They do not explain the sources of actors’ definitions of the
situation, perceptions of the their own interests, etc. In fact these
may come, directly or indirectly, from above.
• The upper levels set the ground rules for negotiation: this is not
recognized by these approaches.
• Bottom-up theorists are not really engaged in ‘implementation
analysis’. They do not focus on the implementation of policies,
but on understanding actor interaction in a specific policy sector
(Sabatier 1986, pp. 35–6).
• The criticisms of the top-down model are overstated. One
criticism is that policy making at the top is characterized by
multiple agendas and ambiguities which create room for inter-
pretation and manoeuvre below. However, during the Thatcher
period for example, policies tended to have very clear objectives.
Retaining the notion of policy as discourse ensures that researchers

do not fall into such traps, most of which over-estimate the power
of actors locally, as compared to structural factors.
Management implications of the phenomenological

approach
Just as the top-down approach has clear implications for manage-
ment action, the phenomenological approach can be used as a guide
for managers. Its central message is that the pre-existing values and
attitudes of an organization’s staff need to be understood and
addressed when considering change. Individuals and groups have
deeply rooted values and attitudes, and these are reinforced by
behaviours repeated daily. In educational organizations particu-
larly, individuals draw on their ideas and values in order to think

critically and deploy arguments in support of their point of view.
Attempts to impose policy are likely to result in resistance, sub-
version, non-compliance and ultimately failure. The successful
manager and leader is likely to be the one who understands his or
her organization’s cultural patterns, someone who knows their way
around the cultural undergrowth:
Knowing your way around . . . certainly depends on knowing

that [propositional knowledge] and knowing how [procedural
knowledge]. But it depends on much more as well – having a
sense of orientation, recognising problems and opportunities,
perceiving how things work together, possessing a feel for
the structure and texture of a domain. It encompasses not
just explicit but tacit knowledge, not just focal awareness
but peripheral awareness, not just a sense of what’s there but
what’s interesting and valuable. . . . Better than knowing that,
knowing how or like names for knowledge, knowing your way
around resonates with the notion of a learning environment.
(Perkins, 1996, p. v)
The need for ownership of change

The alternative, as Senge (1992), Fullan (1993) and others point out,
is to encourage the development of a shared vision, one that attracts
broad commitment because it reflects the personal vision of those
involved. Establishing this kind of ownership of change is difficult.
Understanding is almost always fuzzy at first, and is clarified through
experience of change. A sense of ownership of policy developments
can quickly vanish, and needs to be sustained by hands-on experi-
ence, by experimentation and by adaptation of policies to local
circumstances.
Stressing the importance of establishing a consensual vision for
the future does not absolve senior management of the responsi-
bility for goal setting. Over-centralization leads to over-control and
resistance, but solutions which are too decentralized lead to anarchy
and chaos. Many authors stress the importance of ‘trialability’ in
introducing policy, and of initial small-scale experimentation, which
is one of the strengths of the incrementalist approach. Yet, without

support from above, this risks the danger of ‘enclaving’ (i.e. being
restricted to a small group of enthusiastic innovators) and of change
becoming stalled. Senior management needs to provide leadership,
but any goals provided need to be limited, achievable and to provide
room for local negotiation and accommodation. Change is more
likely to be successful when there is consensus above and pressure
below, a ‘change sandwich’, rather than when it simply flows from
above.
Writers in this tradition stress that the top-down/bottom-up
relationship needs to be one of dialogue, negotiation and learning
from experience. They believe that dialogue is best conducted on
the basis of mutual comprehension; for managers it is particularly
important to understand the nature of the cultural characteristics
of their institution. Indeed, gaining this understanding is the first
piece of advice which Fullan gives to head teachers committed to
building their school into a learning organization (Fullan and
Hargreaves 1992). Conversely, the attention of those at ground level
may need to be directed outwards, to the environment in which the
organization is operating and the constraints and forces which
are found there.
Policy implementation as evolution

Studying policy implementation in practice and reflecting on the
implications for managers has, then, led researchers to move beyond
the top-down/bottom-up polarity, and to focus instead on ‘directed
collegiality’, the ideal policy-making/implementation approach.
Top-down and bottom-up approaches are synthesized into a
third perspective, one which Majone and Wildavsky refer to as
implementation as evolution.
At one extreme, we have the ideal type of the perfectly

formed policy idea; it only requires execution, and the only
problems are ones of control. At the other extreme, the policy
idea is only an expression of basic principles and aspira-
tions. . . . In between, where we live, is a set of more or less
developed potentialities embedded in pieces of legislation,
court decisions and bureaucratic plans. This land of poten-

tiality we claim as the territory of implementation analysis.
(Majone and Wildavsky 1978, quoted in
Jordan 1982)
The implementation as evolution approach to implementation

analysis seems a sensible and moderate one. Its application is exem-
plified in the work of Hjern and Hull (1982) and Palumbo and
Calista (1990). Case studies of the implementation of actual
innovations, such as the Rand Change Agent Study (1974–8), have
confirmed that ‘mutual adaptation’ is a key to success: the adap-
tation of the innovation to fit the local setting and adaptations by
local users to fit the innovation (Hall 1995).
Case study: using grant-maintained school policy

politically
Deem and Davies (1991) provide an insider account of the responses

of one secondary school, Stantonbury in Milton Keynes, in using
government policy on opting out to grant-maintained status (GMS;
see p. 198) to achieve its own goals, which were quite different to
those envisaged by the national policy-makers who formulated the
GMS policy. Rosemary Deem was a county councillor and Chair of
the school governors, and Michael Davies a co-Director of the school.
In their paper they recount the process of how the school coped with
a difficult environment in an innovative way.
The school had been set up in 1974 with egalitarian ideals, and
many aspects of its provision were ‘student-centred’. In particular, it
rejected selectivism and attempted to achieve the integrative
comprehensive ideal, rejecting streaming and attempting to achieve
social mix and social tolerance. The LEA (Buckinghamshire), how-
ever, was a strongly conservative one which rapidly moved from
benign conservatism to right-wing interventionism during the 1980s.
There was considerable pressure for a grammar school system in
Milton Keynes, and a campaign was orchestrated by right-wing
pressure groups criticizing A level exam results in the city, linking
these to low-standard comprehensive education.
The response of Stantonbury school was to use the 1988 legis-

lation to opt out of local authority control, not in order to become
selective but as a way of retaining its educational ideals in a hostile
environment. There was opposition from the Borough Council,
from the Labour Party locally, and from LEA officers and members.
Most parents, however, were supportive, particularly after the
school campaigned for their vote for GMS. The school governors in
particular were very supportive of the school’s plan, despite the fact
that this made it difficult for those who were councillors; both the
Conservative Party and the Labour Party opposed the plan, and
the Labour Party tried to expel those who supported the opt-out plan.
The governors of the school ‘became a single united group prepared
to spend whole weekends as well as many evenings at school, writing
leaflets, delivering them and holding animated discussions’ (Deem
and Davies 1991, p. 166).
The tenor of that campaign was that GMS would ensure continuity
and stability at the school: the continuation of its egalitarian,
comprehensive philosophy, now reinforced by the increased power
and control that GMS would give to its head teachers and governors.
‘Safeguard Local Democracy’ and ‘A Stable Future for All Our
Students’ were two slogans that were used. The campaign proved
successful, with a majority of parents voting in favour of opting out.
The school left the local authority on 1 September 1990.
After opting out the school was visited by Thames TV for a This
Week programme, shown in December 1990. This was highly critical
of the school’s egalitarian climate and allegedly low educational
standards.
The main concern of the programme was seemingly to

demonstrate that comprehensive schools like Stantonbury
are full of progressive ideas about education and social
adjustment but do not teach the basic skills properly.
(Deem and Davies 1991, p. 168)
Subsequent press coverage was situated on the same ideological

ground: what Ball (1990a, p. 31) calls the ‘discourse of derision’: ‘Can’t
read, write or count . . . you must live in Milton Keynes’ (Today).
Even the ‘quality’ press accepted the agenda set by the This Week
programme and oriented their pieces around the progressive
schools’ failure to transmit basic skills. Despite this critique, however,

Stantonbury continued to stand by its principles, taking advantage of
the new independence conferred by grant-maintained status.
Commentary
This case study raises a number of important issues for our under-
standing of policy implementation.
• The first is the power of local actors to negotiate and adapt

centrally formulated policy.
We contend that a small number of people can, in circum-

stances such as the ones outlined here, influence the
direction of educational policy implementation, irrespective
of the intentions of the legislators and politicians . . . We
hope that this paper has demonstrated just how powerful
human agency can be in subverting the intentions of others
in the educational change process.
(Deem and Davies 1991, p. 154, p. 170)
Here there is a stress on agency rather than structure, or in Ball’s

terms, on policy as text.
• Second, however, the media ‘framing’ of the issues involved

nicely illustrate Ball’s point about the constraints imposed by
discursive repertoires. Stantonbury’s position was being dis-
cursively ‘fixed’ in ways which made it difficult, but not impossible,
to continue in the same mode.
• Third, the case study shows that the nature of change is con-
ditioned by what Deem and Davies call a ‘political’ rather than a
‘rational’ model. The rational model is based on a top-down
approach to policy-making and implementation: given that all the
necessary conditions are in place, policy will be successful and
there will be no ‘implementation gap’ between outcomes, as
originally envisaged, and those which actually occur. The political
model, by contrast, is located in a bottom-up perspective, and
stresses the importance of conflict and negotiation, of alliances
and emnities, and of competing definitions of the situation and
goals. All of this is important territory for policy sociology.
• Fourth, and linked to this, is the variety of change agents involved.

Many studies of change, such as Michael Fullan’s numerous
excellent works, stress the importance of teachers as change
agents. This study illustrates that others, particularly school
governors and parents, are also important actors in the change
process.
• Fifth, it is noticeable that the unintended or latent consequences
of policy can be at least as important as those intended by the
policy-makers. As Chapter 1 showed, the policy of opting out to
GMS was based on the idea of schools becoming independent,
market-driven institutions free of LEA control. The neo-liberal
ideology underpinning these ideas was a far cry from the pro-
gressive ideology of some of the key players in this case study.
Stantonbury combined the opting-out policy, originally framed in
an entirely different context, with an educational ideology which
valued the comprehensive ideal in a way unforeseen by those in
the policy loop. Such combinations and potential sets of events are
probably unforeseeable in the main, but can have extremely
important consequences.
• Finally, this study confirms Ball’s point introduced in Chapter 3:
Policy is . . . an ‘economy of power’, a set of technologies

and practices which are realized and struggled over in local
settings. Policy is both text and action, words and deeds, it
is what is enacted as well as what is intended. Policies are
always incomplete in so far as they relate to or map on to
the ‘wild profusion’ of local practice. Policies are crude and
simple. Practice is sophisticated, contingent, complex
and unstable.
(Ball 1994c, p. 10)
Case study: the Social Justice Strategy
Stephen Ball makes the point that one of the analytical consequences
of a dual understanding of policy, as both text and as discourse, is to
conduct what he calls policy trajectory studies. By this he means ones
which trace the progress of policy from its formulation stage (where
struggles, interpretations and compromises are mapped) through to
the recipients of policy at the ground level (where interpretations and
implementation strategies are similarly mapped). The policy
trajectory research strategy holds out the prospect of a much fuller,
more rounded, understanding of the processes and outcomes of
educational policy-making and implementation, of the constraining
effects of the environment as well as the power of actors. An example
is given here in this case study.
Lingard and Garrick’s study, conducted between 1994 and 1995,
follows the development and implementation of Social Justice
Strategy in Queensland, Australia. By researching both the formula-
tion of the Strategy within Queensland’s Department of Education
and its implementation in a Brisbane secondary school, ‘Brookridge
State High School’, they are able to trace the policy process through
its various stages and identify the nature and sources of ‘policy
refraction’. This term refers to the distortion of policy which takes
place as a result of the interaction of competing interests and sets
of values. Policy becomes disjointed and less coherent as it goes
through the ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ processes: it is refracted
(Taylor et al. 1997, p. 119).
Queensland’s government had been influenced by thirty-two
years of Conservative governments and, since 1989, by New Right
thinking within a Labor administration. This had led to a conservative
policy culture within the State’s Department of Education. By policy
culture Lingard and Garrick mean ‘the structures and policy goals,
and dominant discourses and practices within public bureaucracies
which frame the possibilities for policy’ (Lingard and Garrick 1997,
p. 2).
Within this unsympathetic environment the Social Justice Strategy
was aimed at maximizing access, participation and outcomes for
disadvantaged students, including girls, some minority ethnic
groups and the ‘gifted and talented’. The impetus for the Strategy
had come from the Commonwealth level of government. Thus the
push for this policy development was one external to the agency
centrally concerned with its detailed formulation, Queensland’s
Education Department: ‘equity concerns were largely funded by the
Commonwealth, peripheral to its core business and bureaucratically
buried in the bowels of the Department’ (Lingard and Garrick 1997,

p. 6).
Clearly too there was a tension between managerialism and
concerns for social justice in schooling within the Labor governments
at both the Commonwealth and State (Queensland) levels. Lingard
and Garrick note that putting those committed to market liberal
economic ideology in charge of social justice policies is like putting
mice in charge of the cheese shop. As a result the notion of ‘social
justice’ that was encoded into the Social Justice Strategy was
‘distorted, reconstituted [and] reworked’. One of their respondents
noted:
social justice in Queensland is a poor third to efficiency and

devolution, . . . because if it was important, if they felt it was
something that really had to be done, they would do it.
It would get a lot more response from the Department. They
would be pushing it more, they would make sure they would
have the money. Anything they really want to do, they do.
(quoted Lingard and Garrick 1997, p. 11)
Though the dice were loaded against the Strategy from the
beginning, the creation of an Equity Directorate with Queensland’s
Education Department and the appointment of a dynamic and
nationally respected ‘femocrat’ as its director helped to put some
dynamism behind this policy development. The importance of this
to the policy process was recognized by participants, especially by
those who had previously been frustrated by the policy culture in the
Department:
It just can’t be underestimated [sic] how significant it is

having the Equity Director on the Executive, both symbol-
ically and materially. For example, there would hardly be
a committee within this Department that would not have a
representative from the Equity Directorate . . . I find it hard
to summarise just what a huge improvement it is to get
something moving.
(quoted Lingard and Garrick 1997, p. 7)
The general aims of the Strategy were translated into twelve

actions which schools and the Department of Education should take
with expected outputs associated with each. Examples included a

non-discriminatory language policy and the establishment of a
database on access. The Strategy was distributed to all schools in
September 1993 and Brookridge got three copies (for a staff of forty-
five). Fewer than half of the teachers at Brookridge read it right
through and those who did read it either because they agreed with
its tenets or because they were considering applying for promotion
(demonstration of a commitment to social justice was at that time a
criterion of promotion).
During this period the teachers at the school had been bombarded
with policy-related materials: ‘you can’t read it all and you can’t
internalise the whole thing . . . it gets filed – sometimes in the waste
paper bin . . . Definitely, the volume of information you just can’t take
it all in’ (teacher quoted in Lingard and Garrick 1997, p. 10).
As in the UK at the same period, teachers were being flooded with
documents about a national curriculum, training reform, changes in
assessment, etc. which came from the local, regional and national
levels. The Social Justice Strategy was simply one more policy
development being thrown at them. Teachers found the document
too wordy, they had difficulty getting access to it and they considered
it to be the responsibility of others, primarily the school principal, to
implement it. Moreover they tended to interpret social justice in terms
of ‘fairness’, stressing the need for ‘fair competition’. Many argued
that the Social Justice Strategy made no difference because they had
always operated fairly towards all students.
There were though some practical developments which resulted
from the Strategy:
• Two teachers were elected and trained as Sexual Harassment

Referral Officers.
• Teachers formed a Special Needs and Social Justice Committee.
• They discussed or were ‘inserviced’ on the Sexual Harassment
Referral Process and the new Behaviour Management Programme.
• Equity issues were incorporated into the School Development
Plan.
• Beyond the school, Regional Assistant Co-ordinators (Social
Justice) were appointed as well as a Regional Contact Officer, and
regional workshops for teachers were organized.
However, all this meant increased intensification of teachers’ work,

and many of them were sceptical about the prospects for the
Strategy’s success: most had only minimal involvement with it and
only two Brookridge teachers rated their interest in it as ‘very high’;
10 to 15 per cent were explicitly against taking action to develop
equity, believing it to be ‘a lot of hogwash’ and ‘social engineering’.
Lingard and Garrick do not attempt to evaluate the achievements
of the Strategy, which would anyway become apparent only in the
longer term. It seems likely, however, that any achievements would
not meet the aspirations the Equity Directorate had for it given the
following factors.
First, much of the Strategy seemed tangential to the core concerns
of the classroom teachers, particularly at a time when managerialism
and efficiency were becoming the dominant concerns, as well as
during a period of large curriculum, assessment and other pedagogic
changes. Teachers were suffering from ‘innovation fatigue’.
Second, there was hostility to the central policy machine, particu-
larly at a time of reduced staffing, cuts to teacher release and to
professional development as well as general job intensification.
Third, an important factor in what engagement teachers had with
the strategy was the fact that a demonstrable commitment to social
justice was a criterion of appointment and promotion. When this
was abolished, an important incentive was removed. As Arnot et al.
(1996) point out, this kind of requirement is important in the success
of equality strategy outcomes. Its abolition also sent important
signals to teachers about the significance of the Strategy, as did the
resignation of the Director of Equity who had steered the Strategy’s
development.
Fourth, the Strategy had no clear implementation proposals
incorporated into it. Policy-makers had not learned the important
lessons that ground-level actors are important to the success of policy
and that they need time, involvement in policy production, profes-
sional development and a material interest in its implementation.
Simply sending the policy to schools is a long way from adequate
for success in this respect. As Lingard and Garrick state: ‘more energy
is expended in the internal state micropolitics necessary to the
production of a policy text than to its institutionalisation’ (Lingard
and Garrick 1997, p. 16).
Fifth, related to this, policy-makers tended to treat teachers as

‘empty vessels’, waiting to be filled with ideas and approaches
emanating from Central Office’ (p. 9). They are not.
Commentary
This study illustrates well the complexity and contested nature of the
‘encoding’ process during the policy formulation stage, with com-
peting interests, values and ideas in a hostile environment working
to achieve a ‘settlement’ around the Social Justice Strategy, but one
which still left room for considerable interpretation about what the
Strategy was about and how it should be implemented.
In addition it documents the considerable policy ‘refraction’ which
occurred as policy was converted into practice at Brookridge State
High School. It identifies too the local contextual factors which led
to that refraction and conditioned the shape it took: the overwork
of teachers, their attitudes towards the Strategy and its provenance
and the competing discursive constructions of social justice.
The study also illustrates the mistakes that policy formulators
often seem to make and repeat:
• They do not often take into account the need to support policy
implementation, thinking that once the hard job of policy-making
is done they can send out the finished documents and wait for
results.
• They do not realize that the constant accumulation of educational
policy leads to system overload.
• They develop an ‘innovation bundle’ and think of it as a single
policy (in this case with the name Social Justice Strategy). In a
bundle of loosely defined and loosely coupled innovations each
strand is subject to competing interpretations and alternative
viewpoints. Implementation in these circumstances becomes
extremely complex.
Key points
• The concept of policy is more complex than originally set out
in the basic definition given in Chapter 3. Policy must be viewed
as something which is in a state of constant interpretation,
negotiation and change in a number of sites. It should be viewed,

too, as both text and discourse. Education policy, then, is multi-
dimensional in character.
• The understanding of policy and its implementation needs to take
account both of the constraints on behaviour and of the impor-
tance of individuals and of free will. To pick up a metaphor used
by Ball in discussing his data collection with elite policy-makers
(Ball 1994b, p. 118), we need to follow the paths of individuals
as they move across the landscape, but we need to be aware of
the nature of the landscape too.
• The language of ‘implementation’ and the ‘implementation
perspective’ (viewed as the study of putting already formulated
policy into practice) needs to be used carefully. Policy is almost
always a compromise and can be read in a number of ways; the
encoding process is a contested one, as is the decoding process.
Policy is reinterpreted and changed as it is put into effect.
Therefore the distinction between policy-making and policy-
implementation is more blurred than the language of ‘implemen-
tation’ would suggest: ‘A response [to policy] must . . . be put
together, constructed in context, offset against other expectations.
All this involves creative social action, not robotic reactivity’ (Ball
1994c, p. 19).
• Ideology and culture play important roles in conditioning
policy-making and policy implementation. While Chapter 1
showed how political ideology is important in education policy-
making, this chapter has demonstrated the importance of
educational ideology in policy implementation. Education
managers’ and teachers’ attitudes towards educational issues
have an important impact on the way they interpret policy and
put it into effect. Accepted ways of thinking and behaving set
the context into which new policy flows, and act as a filter in the
policy-implementation process, shaping the interpretation and
negotiation of policy.
• The most effective innovations involve mutual understanding
and readiness to compromise (or mutual adaptation), by both
those propagating the policy and those implementing it. For
successful implementation, educational managers need to be
aware of the cultural configuration within their organization and
to consider likely responses to innovations.

For examples of implementation case studies see:
Bowe, R., Ball, S. J. with Gold, A. (1992) Reforming Education and

Changing Schools: Case studies in Policy Sociology, London: Routledge.
Carter, D. S. G. and O’Neill, M. H. (eds) (1995) Case Studies in Educational
Change: An International Perspective, London: Falmer Press.
Crawford, M., Kydd, L. and Parker, S. (eds) (1994) Educational Manage-
ment in Action, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Woods, P. and Wenham, P. (1995) ‘Politics and Pedagogy: A Case Study
in Appropriation’, Journal of Education Policy, 10, 2, pp. 119–41. (Gives
a fascinating account of the production, reception, mediation and
implementation of the ‘Three Wise Men’ report Curriculum Organization
and Classroom Practice in Primary Schools (see p. 178).)
For managerialist approaches see:

Beckhard, R. and Pritchard, W. (1992) Changing the Essence: The Art of
Creating and Leading Fundamental Change in Organisations, San
Francisco: Jossey Bass.
For phenomenological approaches see:

Jermier, J. M., Knights, D. and Nord, W. R. (eds) (1994) Resistance and
Power in Organizations, London: Routledge.
Lipsky, M. (1980) Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in
Public Services, Beverly Hills: Sage.
Robertson, D. (1994) Choosing to Change, London: HEQC.
For some good summaries of the field see:

Carter, D. S. G. and O’Neill, M. H. (eds) (1995) Case Studies in Educational
Change: International Perspectives on Educational Reform and Policy
Implementation, London: Falmer Press.
Ham, C. and Hill, M. (1993) The Policy Process in the Modern Capitalist
State, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 2nd edition.
Hill, M. (1993) The Policy Process: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf. (A collection of some of the classic papers on policy, policy-
making and policy implementation, though it follows the usual practice of
policy studies of ignoring education in the main.)
Marsh, D. and Rhodes, R. A. W. (1992) Implementing Thatcherite Policies,

Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open
University Press.
Sabatier, P. (1986) ‘Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches to Policy
Implementation Research’, Journal of Public Policy, 6, pp. 21–48.
Taylor, S., Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. and Henry, M. (1997) Educational Policy and
the Politics of Change, London: Routledge.
For an insight see:

Chitty, Clyde and Simon, Brian (eds) (1993) Education Answers Back:
Critical Responses to Government Policy, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
This provides an extremely readable series of extracts from speeches and
articles, written in the main by educationalists critical of government
policy. These include Eric Bolton, head of Her Majesty’s Inspectors until
1991, and several others who were once education insiders but became
critical of the government’s education policy. It thus gives an interesting
insight into policy reception from a range of people in different locations,
as well as interesting details from insiders on the actual impact of
education policy as against the claims made for it. Particularly interesting
and revealing are: Eric Bolton, ‘Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads’, Jim
Campbell, ‘The National Curriculum in Primary Schools: a Dream at
Conception, a Nightmare at Delivery’ and Sir Malcolm Thornton, ‘The Role
of the Government in Education’. Rather funny is John Patten’s speech to
the Conservative Party Conference in 1992 when he was education
secretary (‘I want William Shakespeare in our classrooms, not Ronald
MacDonald’). Also included is John Major’s famous ‘Call me old
fashioned’ speech on education to the same conference.
Chapter 5
Government intervention in
education
OUTLINE
This chapter sets out some of the key issues in education
that governments have addressed or need to address. It also
considers the legacy of eighteen years of Conservative admin-
istration prior to the Labour administrations of the late 1990s
and early years of the twenty-first century. It then goes on
to outline a number of pitfalls concerning education policy
that governments have often fallen into in the past. Each of
these represents a danger to the successful formulation and
implementation of policies.
Labour inherits a Conservative legacy
Education will be our number one priority, and we will increase

the share of national income spent on education as we decrease
it on the bills of economic and social failure.
(Labour Party Manifesto 1997)
The New Labour strategy is to move forward where Margaret

Thatcher left off.
(Mandelson and Liddle 1996, p. xx)
We have seen real improvements in the last four years.

We have laid the foundations with increased investment,
lower class sizes and rising primary school standards . . . Our
education manifesto starts with a commitment further to
increase the share of national income devoted to education
. . . The challenge for us – and for our nation – in the next four
150 Government intervention in education
years is to build on those foundations to see the investment

and reform that our schools, colleges and universities all
need.
(David Blunkett, Labour’s Education Manifesto, 2001)
On its election in May 1997 the New Labour government promised

that education would be its main priority: ‘education, education,
education’ was the key to Britain’s future, according to Tony Blair.
A historical perspective might have dampened his optimism: in the
1960s American president Lyndon B. Johnson declared that ‘the
answer to all our national problems comes down to a single word:
“education”’, but this proved not to be the case.
The education system which the Labour government inherited
had seen dramatic changes during the years of Conservative govern-
ment, as Chapters 1 and 2 showed. There were some successes, but
there were also numerous failures. In 1997 both higher and further
education were suffering a crisis of funding after years of expansion
in student numbers but relative reductions in funding. The unit of
resource (funding per student) in FE was cut by around 28 per cent
in further and higher education between 1992 and 1996 (Watson
1996; Thomson 1997). As a result, at least ten universities were on
the financial ‘sick list’; and the FE sector as a whole was £112
million in deficit with ninety-three ‘sick’ colleges. As the 1996
Dearing Report noted, a number of initiatives had been launched
in schools and colleges at considerable expense but with only limited
success. Examples included the national records of achievement
initiative, a variety of schemes for youth training, and the nursery
vouchers scheme. The new system of school inspections had caused
much additional work, anxiety and expense in schools. Levels
of truancy and permanent exclusions from school had increased
dramatically during the early 1990s; exclusions, for example, rose
from almost three thousand in 1990/1 to over eleven thousand in
1993/4 (Guardian, 26 June 1996). Some schools, such as the Ridings
in Yorkshire, were failing spectacularly. Some blamed the market-
ization of the school system as a whole for this, arguing that it was
creating a polarization of ‘magnet’ and ‘sink’ schools.
On the plus side, however, there were a number of successes. The
Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) was, by the
Government intervention in education 151
end of its life, widely thought to have been a ‘good thing’, with
many benefits for most students in the schools and colleges involved.
The initial problems with the national curriculum were largely
sorted out by the 1993 Dearing Report, and by 1997 it was operating
reasonably well. Even the troublesome interface between Key Stage
4, tested at 16, and GCSEs was being smoothed out by 1997.
Changes made to the inspection system had improved it, although
problems remained. Meanwhile, most heads and governors, and
many teachers, were enthusiastic about the benefits that local
management of schools had brought, despite the obvious draw-
backs (Marren and Levacic 1994). Labour retained much of the
Conservative legacy, and in some cases was probably right to do so.
In other cases, though, retention rather than change or abolition
was largely a bad idea. Aspects of policy which survived the change
of government relatively unscathed included the content of the
national curriculum (the ‘curriculum of the dead’); national tests;
school league tables (albeit with a planned ‘value added’ element);
the competitive school system; selectivism within schools; and the
OFSTED model of inspection. In these cases there were convincing
arguments for reform, at least.
The New Labour government itself claimed to be charting a
‘third way’ in its policy – a course which avoided the excesses of
Conservative marketization on the one hand and central control
of ‘old Labour’ policy on the other. Both the state regulation advo-
cated by the old left and the deregulative, market-based approaches
of the new right are rejected. With the Third Way policies are
presented as being developed on the basis of ‘what works’, particu-
larly when they are ‘joined-up’ policies: ones that reflect coherence
across the different government departments’ thinking. However,
Power and Whitty (1999) conclude that:
First, in terms of the balance between old left and new right,
there can be little doubt that the ‘middle way’ is skewed
heavily to the new right . . . It might be more accurate to
suggest that New Labour’s programme is based on a combi-
nation of ‘what’s popular’ and ‘what’s easy’ rather than ‘what
works’.
(Power and Whitty 1999, p. 541)
At the beginning of the twenty-first century there remain five key

issues for education policy to tackle; they are dealt with below. In
summary they are:
• improving educational provision

• tackling social disadvantage and improving equality of
opportunity
• lifting the education profession
• improving the management of education
• shaping a learning society.
Five key issues in education policy
Improving educational provision

The raising of educational standards generally is a central plank of
Labour government policies. The government has made clear its
belief that some of the nation’s schools have not so far helped
children to achieve their full potential. In post-compulsory educa-
tion the government is keen to maintain standards, and to support
and extend centres of excellence. In fact ‘excellence’ is the key word
throughout the education system and sums up the government’s
aspirations. The White Paper Excellence in Schools points out that:
• in the 1996 national tests only 60 per cent of 11 year olds reached
the standard in maths and English expected for their age
• well over a third of 14 year olds were not achieving the level
expected for their age in English, maths or science
• over 50 per cent of 16 year olds do not achieve five or more higher
grade GCSEs, two-thirds of them do not achieve a grade C in
maths and English, and one in twelve achieves no GCSEs at all
• international comparisons support the view that pupils in the
UK are not achieving their potential; for example, 9 and 13 year
olds were well down the rankings in the maths tests in the Third
International Maths and Science Survey, the most recent
international study
• OFSTED estimates that around 3 per cent of schools are failing,
one in ten has a serious weakness in particular areas, and about
a third are not as good as they should be.
The factors underlying this claimed failure to achieve potential

are numerous and interrelated. Funding is clearly an important
issue, and the Labour government in the early months of its first
term of office made a series of funding announcements to improve
resourcing in both compulsory and post-compulsory education.
For New Labour other important factors were the need for a new
partnership with all those involved in education, especially parents,
and the need to reward successful teachers and schools, but to take
action where there is failure. The introduction of new communi-
cation technologies in schools which would allow them to improve
was also important for Labour policy. The four years between 1997
and 2001 saw a significant rise in SAT and GCSE results and,
naturally, the government attributed these to the measures it had
put in place.
Largely absent, however, was a recognition of and a determi-
nation to tackle the socio-economic causes of underachievement,
located in structured class, ethnic and other patterned disadvantage.
In this Labour had accepted the Conservatives’ educational dis-
course of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ (e.g. ‘14 year olds’), which makes
invisible the fractured nature of these categories and hides
structured patterns of advantage and disadvantage, achievement
and underachievement. This is evident in the way the problem is
articulated in Excellence in Schools, as in the citation above; there
is no mention of which categories of children are underachieving.
Similarly, the policies on widening participation in post-compulsory
education adopted an individualistic approach, failing to recognize
the collective character of disadvantage and the socio-economic
roots of low participation levels among some groups. This leads
to the next point.
Tackling social disadvantage and improving

equality of opportunity
Patterns of disadvantage
It is clear that there are a number of gaps in educational opportunity
that need to be addressed by any government for which this is a
concern.
First there is the issue of general patterns of underachievement

by some groups.
• Boys generally tend to do badly in English and maths compared

to girls at the ages of 7 and 14 (SATs at Key Stages 1 and 3)
(Gipps and Murphy 1994).
• In general boys do worse than girls at public examinations (GCSE
and GCE A levels).
• Men are more likely than women to achieve first-class degrees,
though they are also more likely to fail and get third-class
degrees.
• Some minority ethnic groups do badly in public examinations
compared to others, particularly Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.
Others, e.g. Africans, do well.
• Afro-Caribbean pupils tend not to achieve higher grades of pass
in public examinations as frequently as some other groups.
• Schools with largely middle-class intakes have better public
examination and SAT results than those with largely working-
class intakes.
Second is the question of access to the whole curriculum and to

post-compulsory education.
• Afro-Caribbean students constituted 56 per cent of all permanent

exclusions in one local authority studied (Gewirtz et al. 1995).
This is disturbing given the rapid increase in the number of
permanent exclusions in the early 1990s.
• People from ethnic minorities are more likely to continue into
post-compulsory education than the ‘white’ population; but for
some it is more likely to be men that stay on, while in others it is
more often women (Labour Force Surveys). Many minority
ethnic groups are also better represented than the ‘white’
population in higher education (Modood 1993), as well as in
further education and training schemes.
• Students with fathers in non-manual occupations are more likely
to go to university, the chances increasing with the higher socio-
economic status of the father (OPCS 1989).
• The higher the social class of a student’s father, the greater is the
likelihood of that student attending a high-status course (e.g. law

or medicine) at university.
• In post-compulsory education there remains a clear distinction
between subjects predominantly studied by men and those
‘chosen’ by women. This has important implications for sub-
sequent careers, and levels of pay and status. The same applies
where choice is permitted in schools.
• Only around 3 per cent of the university population define
themselves as having special needs, considerably less than in the
population at large.
Coherence in policies to tackle disadvantage

Labour is concerned to raise the standards but tends to lack
coherence in its policies designed to reduce differentials such as
these: ‘To those who say where is Labour’s passion for social justice,
I say education is social justice’ (Tony Blair, Times Educational
Supplement, 18 April 1997). The early focus of the government
elected in 1997 was on raising standards for all: a laudable aim, but
one that makes patterns of privilege and disadvantage invisible.
Later policies, especially the Excellence in Cities initiative, did move
to focus resources and policy on the disadvantaged, yet others
(for example those concerned with widening participation in
higher education) lacked an equally targeted approach and were
individualistic rather than collective in their approach to the prob-
lem. Labour continues to be concerned with developing an inclusive
society, in which everyone gains from prosperity, and not, for
example, equality in outcomes. Thus there is no attempt to tackle
the privilege for some provided by the private education sector. The
Education Action Zones initiative released relatively limited
additional resources for city schools, with a failure to attract ade-
quate private funding into the venture. The effects of the targeted
resources were likewise small. Certainly the history of similar
initiatives in the past, such as the Education Priority Areas and
Community Development Programmes in the 1970s, suggest that
the prospects of their improving equity in education are not good
(Hayter 1997). Nor does the government appear to understand,
or have policies to tackle, the patterned nature of educational
advantage and disadvantage structured by different levels of posses-

sion of ‘cultural capital’, the resources available to some which
advantage them in all aspects of education from admission to exit.
These gaps in education policy are most evident in Labour’s
policy on selectivism. In the final years of the Thatcher government
selectivism was on the increase within the state school system. Early
limits on the degree of selection which schools could impose were
quickly lifted, so that 15 per cent of the entry could be admitted
after a test of ability. Proposals quickly followed to allow 20 per cent
of the intake of comprehensives to be selected by ability, 30 per cent
for city technology colleges and 50 per cent for grant-maintained
schools. Internally, selectivism by ability was encouraged, with
streaming or banding of year groups across the school and setting
by subject becoming the norm. This continues with the Excellence
in Cities’ stress on setting within secondary schools.
Labour has not mounted an attack against selectivism by schools
or within their walls. On the contrary, the government favours
selectivism both for entry to schools and within them. Grant-
maintained schools will become ‘foundation schools’, and will
undoubtedly continue to be perceived as more desirable by parents
than LEA-controlled community schools. Grammar schools, wher-
ever they exist, will almost certainly remain. Given that Labour will
allow parents to decide their future, it is highly unlikely they
will vote for comprehensivization. New specialist schools are to
be encouraged, selecting pupils by aptitude.
Within schools, selectivism (streaming, setting, banding or within-
class grouping) is to be the norm. ‘Diversity within one campus’ is
the catch phrase which the government uses, justifying its stress
on selectivism within schools on the grounds that mixed-ability
teaching is effective only when done by highly skilled teachers, and
that usually it does not bring out the potential abilities of most
children.
The problem with this is that the weight of research evidence
shows that selectivism by and within schools operates against the
already disadvantaged in education and in favour of those who
already have advantage. A review of the available literature on
the subject conducted by Harlen and Malcolm (1997) found no
consistent and reliable evidence of positive effects of setting and
streaming in any subjects or for students of particular ability levels.

The disadvantages of setting or streaming are well known, however:
social class and other divisions are reinforced, there is an increased
likelihood of delinquent behaviour in the later years of schooling,
and teacher expectations are lowered for those defined as less able.
Lifting the education profession

During the 1980s the education profession came under serious
attack from the government. Ball (1990a) talks about the ‘discourse
of derision’, referring to the way in which teaching was consistently
portrayed as an incompetent, politically motivated, self-interested
profession, unthinkingly attached to progressivist dogmas of teach-
ing peddled by university teacher-training departments. Those
on the left (e.g. Hill 1992) saw this as part of a social engineering
agenda: an attempt to mute those who wished to see education
developing critical faculties in children.
Changes to the education profession were interpreted in these
terms. The move away from theoretically based teacher education
in universities towards classroom-based training was seen as a move
to turn teachers into technicians with skills, rather than indepen-
dent and reflective professionals with a strong theoretical base to
their actions. The introduction of teacher qualification programmes
with very little preparation prior to classroom experience, such as
the licensed teacher and articled teacher schemes, were aspects
of the same agenda from this point of view.
Meanwhile, the development of the national curriculum and
the associated teaching and testing materials led to a separation
of conception from execution (Apple 1989), with the thinking and
planning increasingly being done by curriculum designers and
textbook authors, and teachers merely ‘delivering’ a product. As
well as having a political agenda, such developments were inter-
preted as aspects of Fordism: the application of production-line
methods to education with a consequent de-skilling of teachers, who
are now required to perform repetitive unskilled tasks.
In further and higher education there were clear signs of post-
Fordist patterns (Carter 1997). Professionals were increasingly
employed on temporary or part-time contracts, often not renewed.
The core of permanent professionals shrank while the periphery of

‘flexible’ workers, often poorly paid, grew dramatically in the late
1980s and 1990s. For some writers (e.g. Ball 1990a) these devel-
opments were explained in terms of a response to a financial crisis
in capitalism. Whatever the causes, it was clear that the combination
of Fordist and post-Fordist developments as well as a general
decline in resourcing for education had, by the mid-1990s, led to the
following for a significant proportion of educational professionals
across the sectors:
• work degradation: a decline in the conditions at work, the

materials available, the physical surroundings, the environment
• work intensification: an increase in the amount that was expected
to be done with a corresponding decline in the resources available
to do it: in short, more for less
• de-skilling: a decline in the level of skill required to do the job and
a consequent decline in professional standing: a move towards
technician status; this is increasingly reflected in changes in job
titles and levels of pay, particularly in the further education
sector, as well as in changes to teacher education
• bureaucratization: the increasing requirement to complete
paperwork, provide information, complete records, all of which
compound the processes of work intensification and de-skilling
• work ‘flexibility’: an increase in job contracts which are short-
term and part-time, with central agencies providing teachers and
lecturers for specific purposes
• loss of control over the work process and hence loss of job
satisfaction
• reduced control over the use of time as managerialist practices
increasingly controlling what teachers do and when they do it.
The effectiveness of the proposed General Teaching Council

in acting as a voice for the education profession in the face of such
pressures will almost certainly be hampered by the continuing
existence of the Teacher Training Agency. The TTA has taken
numerous powers to itself in the short period it has been in exis-
tence, powers which in Scotland belong to the Scottish equivalent
of the General Teaching Council. Clearly, there will be pressure
from the TTA to retain those powers; this is likely both to weaken
the GTC south of the border and to create tensions between the
two organizations.
Kogan points out that this kind of issue is particularly important
in contemporary educational change, which tends to be:
negotiated through conflicts between and within bureaucratic,

economic and social demands. In an increasingly complex
society group interests and the ideologies supporting them
are experienced chiefly through highly bureaucratised insti-
tutions which establish their own logic of development. But
nothing is automatic. Changes occur, sometimes accidentally,
when the right configuration of feelings, ideologies and power
coincide.
(Kogan 1982, p. 6, quoted in Ball 1990a, p. 16)
Labour’s discourse, and that of much educational research, appears

to centre on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teachers; the former to be lauded and
the latter to be chastised, even named and shamed. In this they
appear to be adopting, albeit in a more muted form, the ‘discourse
of derision’ which has undermined teachers’ status, self-confidence
and credibility. Such a policy cannot lead to improvements in the
education service.
Improving the management of education

During the 1980s a process of restructuring went on in educational
management. This involved a changing emphasis in a number of
areas. There was a move to the measurement and improvement
of the outputs of education, particularly examination results, rather
than on the processes of schooling. Performance indicators, such
as the number of A level passes, the post-16 staying-on rate, levels
of truancy and SAT scores, became the key to evaluating the
performance of schools and so became a prime concern of education
managers. Higher standards became defined in these terms, and
there was a shift of concern away from the development of the
individual and the quality of the educational process itself. The
establishment of a set of national training targets was mirrored by
similar local sets of quantitative targets. The question became not:

‘Is what we are doing the right thing and are we doing it well?’
Rather it was: ‘How efficient and effective are we at achieving the
goals that have been set for us?’ Educational management became
largely viewed as applying a set of tools, derived from management
approaches in other contexts, to the task that had been set. The
training of school and college managers likewise became seen in
terms of enhancing their understanding of these tools and their
ability to use them: the development of a set of skills. The National
College for School Leadership, set up in 2000, looks set to continue
this approach. It advocates the compentency-based approach which
sees good leadership as inhering in the personal characteristics
demonstrated by individual leaders and sees its task in terms of
enhancing desirable personal characteristics. Meanwhile ideas
and practices based on management in industry began to pervade
schools and other institutions, and the discourse of educational
management began to change. Head teachers and their colleagues
became ‘line managers’ and ‘directors’, performance objectives
were prescribed for teachers at appraisal interviews, charters and
service standards for ‘customers’ and ‘clients’ were developed.
Gewirtz et al. (1995) sum up some of the these changes in Table 5.1.
While this new managerialist ethos has brought some improve-
ments to the quality of educational provision, it has also brought
a new set of ideas and practices to the education service, many of
which are inappropriate to it. Education management involves
more than the attempt to achieve a set of imposed quantitative goals
as efficiently as possible. Good managers and leaders are involved
in formulating and evaluating goals, and they involve their col-
leagues in that task. They understand the staff and students in their
institution and are able to work with them. They are thinking, reflec-
tive practitioners, not merely the skilled users of a set of generic
management tools.
Although previous governments have rightly identified the
development of education management as a key issue for school
and college improvement, they have to date gone about it in the
wrong way. To date the Labour government has accepted the struc-
tures, approach and discourse of previous governments which, on
the whole, have been antipathetic to the education profession.
Table 5.1 The shift from bureau-professionalism to new managerialism
Bureau-professionalism New managerialism
Public service ethos Customer-oriented ethos
Decisions driven by commitment to Decisions driven by efficiency,

‘professional standards’ and values, cost-effectiveness and search for
e.g. equity, care and social justice competitive edge
Emphasis on collective relations with Emphasis on individual relations

employees through trade unions through marginalization of trade
unions, and new management
techniques
Consultative Macho
Emphasis on the educative process Emphasis on efficiency and

and on the quality of interaction effectiveness, the achievement of
between teacher and learners, planned outcomes
learners and learners
Co-operation Competition
Managers socialized within field and Managers trained in generic field

values of education sector of management
Source adapted from Gewirtz et al. (1995), p. 94
Shaping a learning society

The idea of a ‘learning society’ is one that emerges from a number
of educational reports as being of central importance for the future
of Britain and its education system (National Commission on
Education 1993, 1995b; Dearing 1997). It is also an idea that is
attracting much research attention owing to substantial funding
from the Economic and Social Research Council for research into
‘the learning society’. The phrase is intended to sum up a ‘preferred
future’: a form of society which it is thought desirable to begin
shaping now. Drawing from a number of sources, it is possible to say
that the main features of a learning society comprise the following.
• Individuals, communities and organizations, as a matter of

course, reflect on and learn from experience, and alter their
behaviour, ideas and purposes in appropriate ways as a result.

This process happens with the benefit of the required knowledge
and clarity of thought.
• Education and training are available to individuals throughout
their lives at work, at home, in the community and in educational
organizations, enabling them to achieve their potential.
• Individuals empowered by knowledge, skills and understanding
can contribute fully and continuously at work and in the
community.
• The benefits of a learning society include stronger communities,
more effective businesses, greater international competitiveness,
a richer culture and a more cohesive society.
What needs to be done? Again, drawing from a number of

reports, it is possible to identify the following steps which most or
all agree on.
• Conduct education policy-making in all education sectors with

the underlying strategic aim of achieving the learning society.
• Improve the quality of learning, teaching and management in
schools and colleges, and give teachers and educational managers
status and ownership again.
• Ensure that students at whatever level are encouraged to perform
beyond their own expectations: standards need to be set high.
• Be prepared to innovate in the educational field.
• Improve the provision and quality of early-years education.
• Improve the job prospects of low-achieving school-leavers.
• Undertake world-quality research and disseminate its results to
the nation.
• Ensure that lack of resources is not a barrier to continuing
education.
A good start has been made towards the achievement of a

learning society. The government is committed to funding nursery
places, there is a commitment to lifelong learning (a Green Paper
was published in March 1998) and there is a commitment to raising
the quality of teaching and learning, and to introducing (and
funding) information and communication technology in all schools.
Generally the resources allocated to education have increased
substantially under the New Labour regime. Further steps were

taken in 1997–2001. School-leaver training received the attention it
badly needed and the rather disparate funding arrangements for
further education were unified. In the second half of its period of
office that government stopped tinkering with the system it
inherited and began to make more fundamental changes in a series
of bold initiatives. However, the lifelong learning policy thrust is
based on an individualistic, market-oriented perspective. Occluded
in such a perspective is the structured nature of exclusion from
continuing education. Groups of people, not individuals, find
participation difficult for important socio-economic reasons.
Tackling the problem at the level of the individual ‘consumer’ of
education is unlikely to solve it. Also marginalized in current policy
is the notion of learning for other purposes than narrowly vocational
ones. The danger in this is learning which prepares people for last
year’s tasks, not next year’s, and at a more general level bringing
about a Philistine society.
From a postmodernist perspective, the need for change in the
education system is even more pressing and the required change
even more dramatic. As Britain moves closer to the condition
usually described as ‘postmodernity’, the education system becomes
increasingly anachronistic. The global, dynamic, individualistic and
playful nature of postmodern society is at odds with the staid
authoritarianism of the school sector in particular. Moves towards
the right-hand side of the table have been made in post-compulsory
education, most notably in the shape of LearnDirect (see page 66).
Table 5.2 summarizes some of the issues raised by this perspective
on a learning society.
Four lessons for New Labour

Governments are not much inclined to pay heed to what educational
researchers have to tell them, as the next chapter shows. This is a
pity, for there is much that governments could learn from academic
research both about the detail of education policy and about its
implementation. Below are set out four clear lessons that Labour
could learn from work that has been done by policy sociologists and
others about education policy. In summary they are:
• Education can’t fix everything: don’t expect it to.

• Policy implementation is tough.
• Expect different outcomes in different contexts. Continue to
devolve but provide direction.
• Be aware of the uses and limits of ideology.
Table 5.2 Postmodernity and education
Current education Contradictions in a More appropriate

system (modernist) postmodern society education system
Dull, fixed content of Contrast with choices Choice, interactivity,

national curriculum available through learner navigation
media and popular
culture
Knowledge clearly Mixing of ‘high’ and Edutainment,

divided into high and ‘low’ culture, standards educational games,
low status of judgement open to presentation of material
question through multimedia
Hierarchical Breakdown and Individual responsibility

relationship in schools questioning of authority, for learning, perhaps
– authority expected ‘crisis of legitimation’ with selected others
to be unquestioned
Regulation of Postmodernity = the Place and time of

behaviour through consumer society learning determined by
timetables, etc. the consumer of
knowledge
Fixed curriculum and Rapid change in Knowledge ‘consumed’

syllabuses knowledge – ‘future as needed – ‘just in time’
shock’ education
Education can’t fix everything: don’t expect it to

Like previous governments, Labour initially underestimated the
power of social structures, social divisions and disadvantage, while
overestimating the power of education to overcome these. The idea
of ‘zero tolerance of under-performance’, set out in the Excellence
in Schools White Paper, makes little allowance for those schools
with catchment areas in heavily deprived areas. Though the White

Paper admits that problems of low standards and underperformance
in some schools ‘have deep roots’, the expectation was that they
could be solved through improving teachers and improving schools.
Later in its term it began to recognize the scale of the problem: the
Excellence in Cities initiative sought to address the weaknesses
of the Education Action Zones set up early in the administration
and to target funds where they were most needed. We have yet to
see whether this has gone far enough. Later still, though, the notion
of ‘lifelong learning’ was seen as ‘a wonder drug which, on its own,
will solve a wide range of educational, social and political ills’
(Coffield 1999, p. 479).
In 1970 Basil Bernstein baldly stated that ‘education cannot
compensate for society’. What he meant by this was that social
inequalities were so intractable that the education system as a whole
does not exercise a powerful enough influence to mitigate the effects
of social disadvantage.
More recently a review of the evidence on how far effective
schools can compensate for society was conducted by Peter
Mortimore, one of the leading researchers on effective schools
(Mortimore 1997). He concluded that the best, most effective,
individual schools can compensate for society to a certain extent,
supporting individuals in their efforts to overcome the negative
effects of social disadvantage. However, the success of such schools
will be partial and limited, because those who are advantaged will
tend to benefit more from any improvement in schools; so that,
while all benefit from school improvement which derives from
government and other policies, the advantaged benefit most.
For Mortimore the answer lies in a fair distribution of educational
spending with, in some cases, additional spending directed towards
schools which serve the most disadvantaged groups. However,
critics of the school effectiveness or school improvement movement
point out that the emphasis on the school detracts attention from the
underlying social disadvantages: ‘the school is to take responsibility
for its ailments and its own cure’ (Ball 1990a, p. 90). The emphasis
on helping schools accepts uncritically the New Right model of
schools as autonomous agencies. For critical theorists and others,
tackling underachievement in schools is to tackle the symptom, not
the disease. Socio-economic inequalities, racism and other forms of

disadvantage are the priorities. Education cannot compensate for
society.
Like most governments, Labour appears to believe that educating
the population can solve many of the nation’s social and economic
problems, ranging from the excessive number of unwanted births to
single mothers, criminal behaviour and welfare dependency, to a
lack of international economic competitiveness. ‘Britain’s economic
prosperity and social cohesion . . . depend on [creating] . . . a society
in which everyone is well-educated and able to learn throughout
life’ (DfEE 1997, Excellence in Schools, p. 1).
Clark Kerr (1991) reviewed a range of evidence on the idea that
education is the key to a nation’s international competitiveness. He
concluded that probably in no other area of policy-making have
so many firm convictions held by so many been based on so little
proof. A good education system is one, but only one, prerequisite
for a successful economy and a more equitable society. Other inputs
are required, and in their absence education is unlikely to be able
to achieve the goals set for it by policy-makers. Some of the other
inputs required to bring this about include:
• more employment opportunities for more productive workers

• new investment to take advantage of more productive approaches
and new technologies
• new methods of work organization which take advantage of the
increased productive capacity of better educated workers (e.g.
ones that enable workers to exercise discretion in decision-
making)
• new managerial approaches which support worker participation
and create more integrated approaches to research, training,
product development, marketing, production and finance (Levin
and Kelley 1997)
• building motivation into policies so that, for example, employers
are encouraged by incentives and sanctions to take equal
opportunities seriously.
Peter Robinson in a study of education and economic perfor-

mance (Robinson 1997) calculates that only 37 per cent of jobs
require literacy to GCSE grade C and above, and 50 per cent of

pupils already attain this level. It will take forty years before demand
meets the supply, even assuming that the pass rate at GCSE
stays level. Education, therefore, may not be the central factor in
improving Britain’s economic performance.
Policy implementation is tough

Chapter 4 explored how policy is reinterpreted and changed as it is
put into effect. Policy-makers often forget that implementation of
policy is at least as important as policy formulation. They conse-
quently forget to plan for and adequately resource implementation.
As Raab (1994, p. 24) puts it: ‘the pudding eaten is a far cry from the
original recipe’. To avoid this there are a number of requirements
that need to be in place.
• There is a tremendous need to have a clear and deep under-

standing of exactly what the policy is intended to bring about.
The nature of the innovation should be spelled out in very clear
terms (Hall 1995, p. 112).
• Conditions that are supportive of implementation need to be
created and sustained. These include:
– resources
– sufficient time for innovations to permeate
– support and training for the professionals facilitating change.
• Clear guidance from above is needed, but room must be left for
local interpretation and adjustment to policy.
• Policies need to be developed, and their implementation planned,
with an understanding of the micropolitics that exist within
change contexts. This will increase the chances of successful
implementation at the ground level.
• Similarly the pre-existing values, attitudes, norms and under-
standings of those at the ground level need to be appreciated in
order to predict and take into account the potential trajectory of
policy as it moves from formulation to implementation.
The government’s plans for a national grid for learning (NGfL)

present an interesting case study of these issues. Its document
Connecting the Learning Society: National Grid for Learning (1997)

appears to show awareness of the level of resourcing required, and
a commitment to provide it. There is also a keen awareness of
teachers’ current lack of understanding of and confidence with
information and communication technology, and hence the need for
staff development in the area. What is lacking in the document is:
• an understanding of how teachers’ attitudes towards the role of

ICT in teaching and learning may lead to outcomes other than
those intended (many will not see it as desirable or appropriate,
for example)
• an understanding of how pupils and students will (mis)use the
technology
• a clear understanding of precisely what it will be used for and
how this will be an improvement over alternative uses of the
resources.
Simply providing the infrastructure will not bring about desired

outcomes, particularly if those outcomes are unclear to policy-
makers and participants in the first place. Selwyn and Fitz (2001)
have shown how the NGfL initiative stemmed from a very small
elite group in the government, including the Prime Minister Tony
Blair. There was a closely co-ordinated network involving the
government and civil service in conceptualizing, formulating and
steering the initiative. There was already in place a well-formed
and stable network of public and private organizations and actors
which had formed the basis of the educational ICT community
two decades before the NGfL initiative. Yet despite this strong top-
down direction and the stable basis for policy implementation
Selwyn and Fitz’s case-study research concludes that
the compatibility of the NGfL with schools’ objectives remains

to be seen. As yet schools’ reaction to the NGfL is unclear
above and beyond the initial spending of government and
lottery money. Whether the NGfL can be successful in
creating a culture of ICT throughout the whole school sector
is debatable . . . One foreseeable consequence of the Grid,
therefore, is merely an exaggerated version of the pre-1997
education ICT picture; with some schools as technologically

rich as others are equally as poor.
(Selwyn and Fitz, 2001, p 145)
Expect different outcomes in different contexts.

Continue to devolve but provide direction
It is a clear finding from numerous studies of the impact of education
policy in different locales that outcomes are rarely the same in
different places. Studies by Woods et al. (1996), Gewirtz et al. (1995)
and Arnot et al. (1996) on different aspects of education policy
all conclude that outcomes are heavily dependent on local circum-
stances. In their study of equal opportunity of education policies
during the Thatcher years, Arnot et al. reveal a very variable
pattern, with equality of opportunity for males and females being
advanced in some areas as a result of some policies, yet undermined
in others. Woods’ study of the impact of ‘parental choice’ policies
on schools’ behaviour shows that this very much depends on local
circumstances, a finding confirmed by Gewirtz et al.’s broader study.
Figure 5.1 illustrates some of the factors which condition local policy
outcomes in this area. Gewirtz et al. conclude that:
there is no one general market in operation in England.

Education markets are localised and need to be analysed and
understood in terms of a set of complex dynamics which
mediate and contextualise the impact and effects of the
Government’s policy.
(Gewirtz et al. 1995, p. 3)
Clearly, then, governments need to ensure that, while they set

the direction of education policy, there is sufficient power at the
local level to adapt it to local circumstances. Local education
authorities, governors, head teachers and teachers are best
placed to predict, evaluate and interpret the outcomes of policy,
and to shape it appropriately for the circumstances they have to deal
with.
Moreover, as Ball (1999) points out, the danger of central
direction in education, through the numeracy hour and literacy
Education Policy
UNDERFUNDING
SOCIO-ECONOMIC
CHARACTERISTICS
INCLINATION OPEN
LOCAL
OF GOVERNORS/ ENROLMENT
MANAGEMENT
OF SCHOOLS SENIOR
MANAGEMENT
LEA TEAM
POLICIES
SENIOR HISTORY OF
OVER/UNDER RELATION-
MANAGEMENT SCHOOL SUBSCRIPTION SHIPS
TEAM/STAFF RESPONSE
RELATION- BETWEEN
SHIPS SCHOOLS
VALUE
HISTORIES
TRANSPORT DEMOGRAPHY
PER-CAPITA NATIONAL
FUNDING CURRICULUM
AND
LEAGUE
TABLES
FORMAL MARKET STRUCTURE-EXTERNAL
LOCAL MARKET CONTEXT
SCHOOL-SPECIFIC FACTORS
Figure 5.1 The impact of context on outcomes

Source adapted from Gewirtz et al. (1995) p. 88
hour, national curriculum schemes of work and the rest, is that

learning is forgotten. School pupils are taught to pass tests and to
follow centrally prescribed schemes of work, but they are not
encouraged to process or apply this knowledge. Lauder et al. (1998)
agree:
the critical issue must surely be in part a question not only of

text results but how they are arrived at . . . In England the
problem of how to raise basic educational standards while
preserving or developing creativity is not even part of the
public debate . . . if we are not careful policy settings which
emphasise results at the expense of methods will lead to a

trained incapacity to think openly and critically about problems
that wil confront us in ten or twenty years’ time throughout the
system.
(Lauder et al. 1998, p. 15)
Be aware of the uses and limits of ideology

New Labour presents itself as free of the ideological thinking about
education which pervaded policy-making in the past. Indeed, the
‘new’ in New Labour is primarily there as a marker to distinguish
it from ‘old’ Labour, characterized (or caricatured) as blinkered by
class-based thinking. Naturally, New Labour distinguishes itself
from Margaret Thatcher’s ideologically laden years in power, and
the mistakes which were made as a result of similarly blinkered
thinking. Instead the image presented is one of a practical orien-
tation underpinned by a pluralist viewpoint: New Labour as the
honest broker which listens to competing voices and makes sensible
decisions based on sound common sense.
Certainly ideology does place limits on thinking. It defines what
the important questions are, where the priorities lie, how issues
should be viewed, and indicates the sorts of actions that can and
should be taken. In the past, thinking in ideological terms has meant,
for example, the exclusion of important actors on the education
scene from participation in policy and decision-making. It has led to
a lack of awareness of and an unwillingness to appreciate where
policies were not working or were fundamentally misguided, as was
the case with youth training policy and nursery vouchers. It has also
led to limited thinking about the likely unwanted effects of policy,
such as the consequences of ‘parental choice’ of schools, publication
of examination statistics and so on for pupils with special needs or
for schools in deprived catchment areas. Avoiding such detrimental
effects of ideological thinking can only be for the good.
However, ideological thinking cannot simply be avoided, nor
should it. Whether it is acknowledged or not, thinking about
education issues is always ideologically laden. To claim to be free of
ideology is simply not to be aware of its influence. There are dangers
in this. As noted earlier, it can lead to an unconscious acceptance of
the discursive repertoires associated with one ideological perspective

or another. The language of parents as consumers, an undifferen-
tiated group with viewpoints and motivations in common, is
one example. The ‘core’ and ‘foundation’ subjects of the national
curriculum (which exclude other issues which are by definition
peripheral or superficial) is a second.
Governments need to be aware, then, that ideology is important
in setting the agenda and structuring discourse. Ideology can lead
to an emphasis on equality of opportunity and structure the way
that phrase is interpreted. Alternatively, it can make such issues
invisible. Ideology can lead policy-makers to target particular
groups for attention – females, parents, members of minority ethnic
groups or teachers – and shape the way they are perceived. Ideology
can shape the discursive repertoires that are used, and hence the
ways in which education is thought about by the population at large.
New Labour’s thinking about education, therefore, is inevitably
ideological despite the occasional claims to the contrary. Both
the drawbacks and the benefits of ideological thinking need to be
taken into account: the limitations, as well as the possibilities for
change, need to be appreciated.
Conclusion
This chapter suggests that although Labour has learned a lot about
education policy, it continues to have unrealistic expectations of
what education can do and has a similarly unrealistic expectation
of how far deep-rooted social inequalities can be successfully
ameliorated through the educative process. Likewise, the notion
that policy-making and legislation are equivalent to achieving the
intended outcomes still persists.
However, what Labour has done, in sharp distinction from
previous Conservative administrations, is to work to build consensus
on its approach to education. In 1990 Ball wrote of the previous
Labour administrations: ‘There was no attempt by the Labour Party
to fashion a broad based national political discourse into which
comprehensive education would naturally fit’ (Ball 1990a, p. 30). It
appears that this is changing as New Labour attempts to establish
a vision to which most of the population can subscribe.
Evaluation of the actual policies themselves can be addressed at

the technical or the normative levels. At the technical level are
questions such as: How practicable were/are these policies? What
level of support did or will they elicit from stakeholders? Did or
will they achieve their goals? How much waste of resources was
or will be involved? How far did they or will they learn from past
experience? How relevant were/are they to the needs of those
involved? Some of these questions have been addressed in this
chapter.
Moving beyond this to the more fundamental normative issues
involves the mobilization of political and educational values. Here
the issues revolve around not whether the policies will work well,
but whether they are the right ones. Questions here include: What
has been identified as the ‘problem’ that needs to be addressed here
and what other interpretations are there? Who gains and who loses
from this policy? What are the likely consequences, intended and
unintended, of this policy for the education system and more
broadly? These are left for the reader to judge.
Key points
• While there are marked differences in political ideology and
policy-making approaches of New Labour and the New Right,
the differences in educational ideology are less distinctive.
• Similarly, while there are many ways in which the educational
policies after 1997 were new, there was also continuity in a
number of aspects.
• Policy-makers of whichever political complexion tend to make
common errors with regard to education policy and appear to be
resistant to learning from past mistakes; aspects of policy
implementation provide fertile ground in this regard.
• It seems more likely under a New Labour administration
than under a New Right one that Britain will begin to adopt
some of the characteristics of a ‘learning society’ which many
commentators consider necessary and desirable in the
contemporary world.

Coffield, F. and Williamson, B. (eds) (1997) Repositioning Higher Education,
Buckingham: Open University Press/SRHE. This book proposes a new
model for higher education based on a critique of current orthodoxies.
Consensus?, London: Falmer Press. This book looks into the future and
includes an interesting discussion on a General Teaching Council, as well
as looking at post-compulsory education.
Schuller, T. (ed.) (1995) The Changing University, Buckingham: Open
University Press/SRHE. This text also looks to the future, including
teaching and leadership. Further and higher education are both covered.
For an insight see:

Excellence in Schools White Paper.
This is available at the DfES website (see p. 46). This document clearly
sets out the vision for compulsory education which the Labour govern-
ment had when it entered office and its intentions for turning these into
policy. With the benefit of hindsight you will be able to assess the
following:
• whether the political tensions inherent in the policy-making process
referred to in Chapter 3 resulted in a legislative outcome very differ-
ent from the vision and policies contained in Excellence in Schools
• how far the post-implementation outcomes of that legislation on
the ground differed from the intentions expressed in Excellence in
Schools. That is, was there an ‘implementation gap’ and if so, what
was its size and nature?
Useful websites
http://www.geneseo.edu/~bicket/panop/home.htm
A site called ‘k.i.s.s. of the panopticon’ (k.i.s.s. stands for ‘keep it
simple, stupid’. The site itself explains what ‘panopticon’ means).
This is a user-friendly site which explains many of the concepts
involved in postmodernism.
www.ncsl.org.uk
The National College for School Leadership
http://ngfl.gov.uk
The National Grid for Learning
Chapter 6
Educational research and
education policy
OUTLINE
This chapter sets out two models of the relationship between
educational research and education policy: the engineering
model and the enlightenment model. It gives examples of both
of these, illustrating the diversity of approach within each broad
category. Each model is then subjected to critical examination.
Finally the key points of the chapter are summarized.
Modelling the relationship between educational

research and education policy
In her 1986 book Research and Policy Janet Finch makes a
distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches to
research. She compares and contrasts the different relationships
these have to education policy. This is a useful distinction, but it
concentrates on only one aspect of research: the methods of data
collection and analysis used. Also it sets up a rather black-and-white
set of opposites which, while useful as a way of conceptualizing the
relationship between policy and research, does tend to oversimplify
the situation.
Developing the idea a little further, we can distinguish between
the (social) ‘engineering’ and the ‘enlightenment’ models of the
relationship between education policy and educational research.
Again, this simple binary model masks a number of different
perspectives within each category and excludes possible additional
categories. However the engineering/enlightenment division at least
has the benefit of conceptual clarity, as Table 6.1 illustrates.
Educational research and education policy 177
Table 6.1 The engineering and enlightenment models of research
Engineering Model Enlightenment Model
Type of data collected Bias towards Bias towards

and analysis method quantitative qualitative
Ontological position Foundationalist: Relativist: considers

(i.e. view of the nature considers there to be an social reality to be
of ‘reality’) objective reality which socially constructed (to
can be apprehended by a greater or lesser
research. Research extent). Research
results have a results are true for
foundation in reality. particular social groups
only. They are
themselves constructed
in nature: stories.
Epistemological Absolute/positivist: ‘true’ Relative/interpretative:

position (i.e. view of knowledge which ‘knowledge’ is
the status of correctly describes conditional upon its
‘knowledge’ created reality can be achieved social context.
by research) given sufficient effort Absolute truths, at
and rigour and effort in least in the social
research. world, are not
achievable. Insight and
informed judgement are
among the important
goals of research.
Relationship to policy Informing policy-makers Giving policy-makers

about the ‘facts’. enlightenment or
Proposing solutions to challenging the
‘problems’. accepted definitions of
‘educational problems’
and reframing what is
problematic in
education.
The engineering model

The engineering model adopts a ‘scientific’ standpoint and a belief
that proper, rigorous educational research can give policy-makers
hard data and results on which to base their policy decisions. It
also implies that it is possible to formulate a rational, top-down,
178 Educational research and education policy
prescription for action on the basis of these decisions. It is linked,

in other words, to the managerial approach to policy implemen-
tation discussed in Chapter 4. In this view the role of educational
research is to explain how the educational world works and to
suggest action. Early work in this category is sometimes described
as being in the ‘political arithmetic’ tradition of ‘objective’ methods
of data collection and analysis used to inform political choices. Early
social reformers in this tradition included Booth and Rowntree, who
studied the nature and extent of poverty, as well as (later) Glass and
Halsey, who studied social mobility and education.
One example of how research and policy-making can be linked
in this way is in the work of the Robbins Committee on higher edu-
cation (1963). The Committee commissioned a large programme of
research, comprising six major surveys of students, lecturers and
young people, as well as several smaller studies. A famous statis-
tician acted as adviser to the Committee and all the research they
relied on was quantitative in character. Much use was made of these
data in justifying the recommendations of the Committee, which
called for an accelerated expansion in higher education provision.
Another example of this approach is the ‘Three Wise Men’ report
(Alexander et al. 1992). This arose out of the appointment by
Kenneth Clarke (then the Conservative Education Secretary) of
three leading academics whose task was to review the current state
of primary education and to make recommendations. The authors
were given only a few months to do their work and, partly for this
reason, did not conduct any original research, confining them-
selves instead to a review of the available literature. Their report
was published in January 1992 and was sent to local education
authorities, teacher training institutions and elsewhere. The ‘Three
Wise Men’s’ conclusions were that, although there was much to
commend in primary schools, there was too much ‘patchiness’ in
standards between and within schools, and that teachers needed to
be more systematic in their planning and to create a better balance
between whole-class and individualized teaching strategies. A key
paragraph contained the following words:
Teachers will need to abandon the [progressivist] dogma of

recent decades. They will need to focus firmly on the outcomes
of their teaching . . . They will need to direct close attention to

the balance of whole class, group and individual teaching
strategies . . . [and of] . . . subject and topic teaching.
(Alexander et al. 1992, p. 49)
The report was sent out with a press release from the DES
entitled ‘Three Wise Men’ Report Calls for Big Changes in Primary
Education. This emphasized the Report’s criticisms of ‘highly
questionable dogmas’ and stressed that topic work had led to
‘fragmentary and superficial teaching and learning’, that there was
not enough whole-class teaching being done, and that grouping by
subject ability was a desirable strategy.
The quotation from Kenneth Clarke in the press release empha-
sized the need for ‘fundamental changes’ in primary education
and that although all of the proposals were ‘being practiced [sic]
somewhere in the country’, not enough schools were following what
was now known to be best practice. The ‘wise men’ themselves
and Kenneth Clarke assumed that the report presented a definitive
account of ‘the facts’ about primary school practice and could be
used as a guide for all teachers throughout the country.
The need for a greater linkage of research

and policy
From the engineering perspective it is a sad fact that there has only
been at best a loose linkage between educational research and
education policy. There are five main reasons for this.
Research fads
First, the topics focused on by the research community have not
always been much use to policy-makers. The topics researchers
pursue tend to be driven not only by the funding available but
by academic and publishing trends. At the moment, for example,
ethnic disadvantage in education is hot, social class inequality is
not. Globalization, postmodernism and personal identity are in,
classroom interaction studies are out.
Jargon
Second, researchers frequently do not speak a language that is
accessible to policy-makers and others. Few researchers seem to
take account of effective dissemination of research results to policy-
makers. The same is true of communication with practitioners:
a study by Dai Hounsell et al. (1980) showed that most teachers (82
per cent) felt that there was a gulf between teachers and researchers,
with 44 per cent of teachers poorly informed about educational
research and development. Most (86 per cent) felt that research
reports are tedious to read, with too much jargon (70 per cent) and
not often communicated to schools (81 per cent.) Around 40 per cent
felt that researchers were not really interested in or informed about
topics that were relevant to teachers. According to Hargreaves
(1996) and Tooley and Darby (1998) the situation had not improved
nearly twenty years later.
Politicians’ suspicions about researchers

Third, politicians often distrust educational researchers, seeing them
as simply another self-interested lobby. Kenneth Clarke is reported
to have said that researchers rarely reach any other conclusion than
that more research is needed.
Poor-quality research
Fourth, from an engineering model point of view, there is the
current inadequacy of the social sciences to gather data and test
theory in the kinds of reliable and verifiable ways that the natural
sciences do these things.
The political nature of policy-making

Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that political
ideologies and the micro-politics of policy-making are often more
important in policy formulation than a rational consideration of the
results of evaluative and other forms of research. This certainly
appears to have been the case with the academic evaluation of the
pilots of records of achievement in schools, as well as evaluations of

educational vouchers, even when these were conducted in-house
(Department of Employment 1992; James 1993).
An impossible dream?
Critics of the engineering model would claim that even if all five of
the points above were somehow nullified, the engineering model
could never work. There are three main reasons for this.
It is not possible to find ‘the truth’

The engineering model assumes that it is possible for educational
research to establish ‘the truth’ and the ‘correct’ way of doing things
in schools, colleges and universities. There are a number of prob-
lems with these assumptions. First, any research study will inevitably
be selective, focusing on some issues and ignoring others. The partial
nature of research means that conclusions will also be partial: a
particular ‘take’ on reality, rather than a full depiction of it. Critics
of the ‘Three Wise Men’ Report argue that the ‘wise men’s’
selection and interpretation of the evidence was heavily conditioned
by the political climate in which they were operating. This had led
to the selection of these three researchers rather than others,
and these particular people were influenced in their selection and
interpretation of the data they examined by their own pre-existing
viewpoints. Second, social contexts which, on the face of it, appear
very similar are in fact very different from each other. Research
conclusions which may apply in one, for example in a primary
school, may be very wide of the mark in another, even another
primary school. As was noted in Chapter 5, educational settings in
particular differ in very important ways, so that any attempt to
establish a widely generalizable ‘truth’ is flawed.
Educational research and ‘interested parties’

A linked issue which affects educational research in particular is that
it, like education policy, is highly contested terrain. As with educa-
tion policy, individuals, groups and organizations with different
agendas are often keen to be involved in shaping and interpreting

research issues, approaches and outcomes.
Although we do not know for sure the grounds upon which the
‘Three Wise Men’ were selected by the Conservative government,
it is clear that they were well known as critics of ‘progressivism’.
Robin Alexander, for example, had conducted earlier research in
Leeds primary schools which was heavily critical of ‘progressive’
methods there; this received national publicity on television as well
as being published as a report and book (Alexander 1992a).
Another of the three, Chris Woodhead, later to become the head of
the HMI service and at the time Chief Executive of the National
Curriculum Council, was an outspoken critic of the teaching profes-
sion, and very unpopular among teachers for being the mouthpiece
of the government’s attack upon them. It is possible to surmise, then,
that the government knew what it wanted the report to say and
chose the authors on that basis.
There is also an increasing tendency for the terms of funded
contract research to be very tightly drawn by the commissioning
agency. The methodology and timetabling of the research may be
so closely set by the contractor that some researchers feel they are
simply ‘delivering’ goods in an unreflective (and uncritical) way
as if the sponsor was ‘contracting for ten tons of aggregate . . . or
buying a fridge’ (Pettigrew 1994, p. 44). Most worrying, however, are
attempts by sponsors to delay, suppress or change results. ‘About
three years ago you started to get comments back [on draft research
reports] from “there should be a full stop there” to “take that out,
it is contrary to government policy”’ (quoted in Pettigrew 1994,
p. 45).
Although researchers too are motivated by interests and some-
times hidden agendas, there is likely to be more diversity in values
and attitudes among educational researchers than in sponsoring
agencies. If there is creeping manipulation of educational research
by interested parties, then the engineering model’s ideal of policy-
makers using ‘objective’ results from disinterested research fades
away. This problem is compounded by the fact that the dissemi-
nation of research results through the mass media is not impartial.
The gloss placed upon the ‘Three Wise Men’ Report by the DES
press release which accompanied it was picked up by the mass media
which, on the whole, accepted the DES interpretation of the Report

as rejecting all aspects of progressivism out of hand. Alexander was
so concerned about the way the Report was publicly interpreted
that he went so far as to write a rebuttal of this interpretation
(Alexander 1992b). Like education policy, educational research
reports are not received in a vacuum but in a context highly charged
with competing interests and value systems.
Putting conclusions into practice

The engineering model assumes that research reports can be
translated unproblematically into action. But, however they are
presented to their eventual audiences, the latter will filter those
findings through their own preconceptions, values and attitudes.
In this sense, too, there is a parallel between policy research and
policy implementation. In both cases ‘text’ is ‘read’ in an active
way by highly differentiated audiences. Teachers, for example, will
not simply react to research reports in an automatic way, but
will selectively interpret them and decide to act, not to act or to
change their practice in unpredictable ways.
There is a further problem within the simplistic linkage between
research and policy set up by the engineering model. It contains
the assumption that in both teaching and educational management
it is possible to lift simple solutions from a well-researched
‘toolbox’ of techniques and answers – the notion of ‘evidence-based
practice’. This is fundamentally misguided. Good classroom
teaching involves a sense of appropriate and inappropriate teacher
behaviour which is finely attuned to subtleties of context, group
dynamics and pupil personality. Split-second decisions are made,
based on tacit knowledge in a very skilled way. In short, teachers
need to be reflective practitioners whose behaviour, while informed
by research, is also largely shaped by professional experience and
local knowledge. No matter how good the research or reliable the
findings, educational contexts are always going to differ from each
other in important ways. The good teacher or educational manager
will always need to develop a keen sense of how to deal with this
unpredictability.
The enlightenment model

The aim of this approach is to illuminate educational issues, giving
policy-makers a good grounding in the context within which they
seek to make policy, including well-formulated theories and
concepts which can make it more explicable to them. There is no
attempt to deliver ‘the truth’, because that is seen as a fundamentally
problematic concept. However, it is important that policy-makers
should be aware of the different versions of the truth that are
relevant in the policy field they are considering, because these
have important implications for policy outcomes. In this sense the
enlightenment model is closely allied to the phenomenological
perspective on the implementation of change (see Chapter 4).
As with the engineering approach, a variety of types of research
fit under this heading, including ethnographic and evaluative work.
Parlett and Hamilton, for example, wrote a famous paper in 1972
entitled ‘Evaluation as illumination’ which set out a new approach
to evaluative research, and triggered a shift away from the engineer-
ing model. Instead Parlett and Hamilton advocated adopting an
‘anthropological’ research approach, in which the programme being
evaluated, including its rationale, operation, achievements and
difficulties, is studied intensively. A fuller understanding is achieved
by studying the subject intensively and in context.
Action research involves the attempt to improve professional
practice through research. Some forms of this belong in the enlight-
enment category. The practical approach (Kemmis 1993) seeks to
enlighten teachers and others (parents, students), by giving them
responsibility for the policy outcomes which follow research, the
research being conducted jointly between them and academics.
Emancipatory action research seeks to empower teachers and others,
by giving them full responsibility for research and any changes
in practice which follow it. This is perhaps the most elaborated
example of the relationship between research and policy in
education within the enlightenment tradition.
From the point of view of critical social research (Troyna 1994),
the task should be critical theorizing rather than just problem-
solving. The problem-solving approach takes the world as given,
including the current power relationships and structured dis-
advantage. From a critical social research point of view, action
research which accepts the status quo is effectively supporting it

because it is attempting to make it work more smoothly. Critical
social research rejects this, and aims to raise awareness of the
inequalities and injustices inherent in current social arrangements
in the hope of ultimately changing them.
Critical social theorists, for example, argue that the school
improvement and school effectiveness strands of educational
research have two important limitations.
• They assume that, given the right technical fixes within any
school (changes in management styles, and in teaching and
assessment methods), then all children can succeed regardless of
their background. Such an approach makes invisible the linkages
between schooling and issues of social class, disability, gender
and ethnicity, and generally the structured nature of advantage
and disadvantage in the British education system (Ball 1990a;
Angus 1993; Whitty 1997).
• These research approaches have been captured by New Right
and New Labour discourse in that they implicitly accept the
model of schools as autonomous units which can, through
self-help, improve themselves in a competitive environment. In
reality, the ‘competition’ between schools takes place on a
playing field which is far from level, with some schools dis-
advantaged in terms of funding, the cultural capital possessed by
pupils in their catchment area, and in many other ways.
By contrast, critical social research aims:
• to situate issues in their social context

• to promote radical change through critically addressing, rather
than accepting, current policies and practices
• to take account of the political, ideological and discursive
struggles which surround education policy-making.
From this point of view, key issues for educational research in the
policy field in the twenty-first century include:
• the investigation of how educational reforms impact on class,

gender, ‘race’ and disability, both in the education professions
and among students
• the investigation of the nature and impact of equal opportunities

policies in educational institutions and more broadly
• the evaluation of the impact of changes in teacher training and
professional development for teachers and managers (e.g. on
women)
• the investigation into the consequences, intended and un-
intended, of curriculum and other ‘reforms’, particularly on the
already disadvantaged
• working for change and improvement by, for example,
challenging the discursive practices which limit our ability to
visualize and express alternatives: Ball’s (1995) ‘semiotic guerrilla
warfare’.
Case study: scheming for youth
David Lee and a team of researchers conducted a research project

lasting six years into the government-funded youth training scheme
(YTS) in a town in the south-east of England which they called
‘Southwich’. YTS was designed to help get school leavers into work
by giving them the skills needed in employment, by providing formal
education in college linked to government-funded placement with
an employer. The research funded by the Leverhulme Trust aimed
to evaluate the effectiveness of this scheme. The research methods
used included collecting background statistical data, administering
two consecutive written questionnaires to school leavers, and
conducting almost two hundred interviews with young people on
youth training schemes.
While the authors agree that ‘British schooling has for too long
been impoverished by rigid and elitist ideas of academic worth’, their
study concludes that youth training in the form it took at that time did
not solve the problem. They found that trainees complained that they
were being prepared for ‘Noddy jobs’. The trainees’ comments
illustrate this: ‘ “All I learned was how to make the tea. . . . I used to
pick up loads of potatoes and coal and load the lorry. I got all sweaty
and dirty. The reason they wanted me was as a sort of dogsbody”’
(Lee et al. 1990, p. 166). Only one trainee, in a hospital, felt that she
was receiving proper training, but she faced the hostility of NHS
auxiliaries who felt that she represented ‘cheap labour’ filling the
place of one of their number.
The researchers also found that the youth training experience was
not itself marketable to employers. In some cases it even had a stigma
attached to it, so that the trainee’s chance of getting a job was worse
after than before the ‘training’. Although a relatively high proportion
of the trainees whom they studied did get jobs after the scheme,
they were often in low-status or unskilled occupations. The main
contribution to any job-hunting success the trainees had appeared to
come from the fact that employers were using the scheme as a
probationary period for potential new staff.
More fundamentally, however, the researchers concluded that:
the emphasis of the scheme upon so-called ‘free-market

forces’ severely limits its effectiveness as a means of training
young workers and providing them with opportunities to
improve their personal circumstances through paid work.
(Lee et al. 1990, p. ix)
The neo-liberal underpinnings of the scheme were its fundamental

flaw. In these authors’ view market forces cannot compensate for
fundamental social inequalities, they only magnify their effects.
The more unregulated are market forces, the more difficult

it becomes to provide the kind of skill training that will
upgrade the long-term capabilities and living standards of
the workforce. Nor will market forces do much to eradicate
the costly social insecurities in young workers’ home lives
which decrease their ability and willingness to learn be
taught.
(Lee et al. 1990, p. 192)
Because the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), which

oversaw the scheme, lacked much power, thanks to this free market
philosophy, it could not, despite its good intentions, intervene to limit
employers’ behaviour which reinforced the gendered nature of
occupational recruitment, thus again reinforcing existing social
inequalities.
It is an irony imposed by market forces, that a scheme with
the formal goal of equal opportunities became a finely-graded
sieve for matching young people to placements with very

unequal job prospects and levels of skills training.
(Lee et al. 1990, p. 63)
Moreover it is wrong, the authors argue, to equate the interests and

behaviour of employers with the public good.
It is useless in a system whose whole rationale is based on

short-term competitive individualism to expect hard-pressed
employers to behave altruistically with an eye to the long-
term public interest . . . Individual employers will only invest
in workers they intend to use for their own production needs.
(Lee et al. 1990, pp. 192–3)
Lee et al.’s report concludes by arguing that the government

should ‘seek ways of protecting training from market forces by all
means in their power’ (p. 193). Training standards within individual
firms need to be regulated by public bodies with teeth, they argue,
and unions and young people need to be represented on those
bodies. Also important is raising the general educational standard of
young people and encouraging more young people to continue
longer in post-compulsory education. To encourage this vocational
education should offer a ladder of progression, not just short-term
schemes. Finally employers, managers and training supervisors need
to be educated about the value of scholarship and science because
they place too much emphasis on the ‘practical’, in the view of these
authors. The authors conclude with the following paragraph.
The real ‘immorality’ of YTS lies with a [Conservative] gov-

ernment so blinded by its own rhetoric of the ‘enterprise
culture’ that it is prepared to conceal the scheme’s failure
and to exclude young people from their basic rights if they
refuse to join. Until they provide adequate funds and
regulation, government ministers should stop making bogus
claims that all YTS provides quality training.
(Lee et al. 1990, p. 195)
Some problems
The link between research and policy

The nature of the link between research and policy is less clear in
enlightenment research than in the engineering model. Ethnographic
work only rarely ends with a section on the policy implications of
the research. Lee et al.’s study is an exception. It combines a critique
of neo-liberalism with an outline of an alternative. However, the
proposals are couched in the most general terms.
Generalizability
Enlightenment research has been accused of producing findings
which are non-cumulative: a series of interesting but essentially non-
comparable case studies. Some enlightenment theorists argue that
this is inevitable.
The interpretivist rejects generalisation as a goal and never

aims to draw randomly selected samples of human experience.
For the interpretivist every instance of social interaction, if
thickly described (Geertz 1973), represents a slice from the
life world that is the proper subject matter for interpretive
inquiry . . . Every topic . . . must be seen as carrying its own
logic, sense of order, structure and meaning.
(Denzin 1983, pp. 133–4)
Understandably, such a position is unlikely to give policy-makers

confidence in the research findings, since it is unclear whether or
not they apply in most, some or even any of the cases to which the
proposed policy might apply.
Qualitative research is often ignored by policy-makers

Enlightenment research appears to be largely ignored by govern-
ment, while the social engineering approach, with its quantitative
methods, has had considerable impact on education policy. There
are a number of possible explanations for this.
• Statistical data are more useful to government; they enable

the government to classify the population and institutions hier-
archically and ‘manage’ them, distinguishing, for example, the
deserving from the undeserving. The use of school league tables
is one example of this. According to many Marxist, feminist and
other conflict perspectives this is a major function of government
policy-making.
• Empiricism and positivism have traditionally higher status in
the UK than qualitative approaches, at least among the popula-
tion at large. Policy-makers and others are suspicious of research
not based on large samples and claiming to be generalizable.
Moreover, policy-makers tend to adopt an unproblematic attitude
towards ‘facts’ and feel that they are more easily able to evaluate
the quality of research in the positivist tradition.
• Educational research in general and qualitative research in
particular is seen as partisan, in particular as biased towards
the left, by policy-makers. There are suspicions about bias in the
conduct of research and the presentation of findings. Poor
sampling, unsubstantiated arguments and the selective use of
evidence and secondary sources renders much of this research
virtually valueless, according to one OFSTED-published report
(Tooley and Darby 1998). Despite robust refutations of such
views (Hammersley 2000), these suspicions tend to linger.
However, Angela McRobbie (1994) notes that the influence

of research studies on policy can be more subtle than a simple call
for or reference to research results during the policy-making
process. She argues that the expansion of higher education, and the
fact that upper-level policy-makers are nowadays very likely to have
a degree, often in the social sciences, means that a general under-
standing of theories and concepts and evidence accumulated in
social science research has already permeated the culture to such an
extent that it influences policy in an ‘invisible’ way. Perhaps it is
in this way that qualitative research is most likely to have an effect
on policy-making.
Ethical issues
Research in the enlightenment tradition tends to raise ethical
issues more frequently than engineering research does. Because it
is closer to the subjects of the research, and more revealing about
them, a tension is created between the need to disclose in order
to achieve greater illumination and the need to conceal in order to
protect the subjects of research. In such instances the researcher is
in a double bind: anonymizing the context and withholding or
changing information about it undermines external observers’
ability to check findings and raises doubts about the validity and
reliability of the research; but complete openness puts respondents
in jeopardy.
Key points
• The link between research and policy can usually be viewed
from within one of two paradigms: the engineering model or the
enlightenment model.
• The engineering model is aligned to the top-down, managerial
model of policy implementation, while the enlightenment model
is closer to the phenomenological perspective on change (see
Chapter 4) because of the insights it gives into the cultures of
actors on the ground.
• Each paradigm has a very different conception of appropriate
aims, methodologies, methods and aspirations in education
policy research and of the nature of the link between research
and policy.
• Each has its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. To date,
policy-makers have tended to give more credence to research
founded upon engineering approaches, despite their numerous
weaknesses.
• However, policy-making and the reception of research findings
are both complicated processes. The rational appraisal of
research findings and their subsequent seamless integration into
the policy-making process rarely happens. Policy-making is more
usually driven by political negotiation and compromise than
by the cool appraisal of available evidence. Similarly, research
results are received, interpreted and filtered by segmented

audiences whose perception of them is largely conditioned by
their pre-existing ideological and cultural characteristics.

For good edited volumes covering a number of key issues see:
Burgess, R. (ed.) (1993) Educational Research and Evaluation for Policy
and Practice?, London: Falmer Press.
Halpin, D. and Troyna, B. (eds) (1994) Researching Education Policy: Ethical
and Methodological Issues, London: Falmer Press.
Hammersley, M. (ed.) (1993) Educational Research: Current Issues,
Buckingham: Open University Press and Paul Chapman Publishing.
For important journal papers see:

Troyna, B. (1994) ‘Critical Social Research and Education Policy’, British
Journal of Educational Studies, 42, 1, pp. 70–84. This whole issue of British
Journal of Educational Studies carries a number of important papers,
including Stephen Ball’s guest editorial: ‘At the Crossroads: Education
Policy Studies’, as well as Fitz et al.’s ‘Implementation Research and
Education Policy: Practice and Prospects’.
For an insight see:

James, M. ‘Evaluation for Policy: Rationality and Political Reality: the
Paradigm Case of PRAISE?’, in R. Burgess (ed.) (1993) Educational
Research and Evaluation for Policy and Practice, London: Falmer Press,
pp. 119–38. This provides a brief readable account of commissioned
research into government policy on records of achievement (RoAs). In
1985 what became the Pilot Records of Achievement in Schools Evaluation
(PRAISE) team was commissioned by the Department for Education and
Science to evaluate the pilot schemes of recording achievement that had
been set up. RoAs involved pupils compiling, with their teachers, state-
ments of what they had experienced and achieved in school and outside
it, as well as identifying areas for their own personal development and
planning for the future. The £10 million PRAISE project was designed to
evaluate how far the aims of recording achievement (which included
improving the recognition of achievement, increasing pupils’ motivation
and personal development, improving curriculum and organization and

providing a document of record) were being fulfilled. The article gives an
account of the political tensions surrounding RoAs which illustrate well
some of the points made in Chapter 3 about ‘encoding policy’. It also
shows how these spilled over into the PRAISE project and evaluates how
far the data and conclusions which derived from the PRAISE were
important in the development of RoA policy. The RoA example is generally
an interesting case study of the link between policy and research,
partly because so much has been written about it, partly because it
arouses strength of feeling among critics and supporters, and partly
because of the fact that there has been a considerable amount of research
on the issue, both commissioned and independent. Some of this is
discussed in Trowler and Hinett (1994), which also contains an extensive
bibliography on the issue. This article is available in full on the Web at:
http://www.lle.mdx.ac.uk/hec/journal/1-1/2-4.htm.
Useful website
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/trowler/ressite/
designed for those involved or simply interested in educational
research.
Glossary
Action research: Small-scale involvement in the world, using

research methods to study the effects of actions and making
changes based on the results. In most cases it is practitioner
research, that is, it is done by people investigating their own
professional practices, and the methods used are often qualita-
tive in character. Elliott (1991) sums up a key feature of action
research when he says that ‘action research is about improving
practice rather than producing knowledge’.
Banding: Division of the year group into two, three or four bands,
differentiated by ability on criteria similar to those used for
streaming; each band contains a number of classes, not necessarily
of equal ability or size (Harlen and Malcolm 1997).
Black Papers: Written by members of the right who mounted a
sustained critique of the British education system between 1969
and 1977. There were three main themes:
• Academic standards, particularly numeracy and literacy, are
in decline.
• Politically motivated teachers represent a danger both in the
classroom and outside it, because they espouse progressive
teaching and assessment methods, as well as feminist and
socialist ideology, and are fundamentally opposed to indus-
trialism and vocationalism in education.
• Indiscipline is increasing in schools and threatens to disrupt
the fabric of society.
Butskellism: Combination of the names of ‘Rab’ Butler and Hugh
Gaitskell, senior Conservative and Labour figures respectively.
The word signifies the postwar settlement between the two
parties on issues such as nationalization, education and social
policy during the period roughly between 1944 and 1976.
Glossary 195
Conflict perspectives: Views which see society as divided into two

or more groups whose interests are intrinsically opposed. The
category covers a variety of Marxist perspectives, as well as a
range of feminisms. Marxism sees society as inevitably divided
into competitive classes, one of which owns the means of pro-
duction (land, factories, etc.), and the other which does not.
Human history is largely driven by the clash between the
opposing classes. Education helps maintain the dominance of
certain powerful groups in society. Feminist perspectives have
been classified into liberal, radical, socialist and black feminism,
though such a classification system has been criticized on a
number of grounds (van Zoonen 1994). Each has in common the
view that women have been systematically disadvantaged by
a patriarchal society. Feminists point to the fact that patriarchy
is reproduced in the education system in a number of ways.
Conflict perspectives call for a clear differentiation between
policy rhetoric and the reality of policy outcomes: the actual
effects of policy on disadvantaged groups or those discriminated
against, such as minority ethnic groups, women and those from
socio-economically deprived backgrounds. Understanding the
ideological provenance of policy and the operation of hegemony,
i.e. dominant ways of seeing the world and talking about it, is also
important from these perspectives. Education policy is largely
seen as encapsulating the interests and world view of privileged
groups, whether consciously or not, and it is necessary for those
committed to change to work against this.
Corporate culturalism: Approaches to the management of change

which stress the manipulation of organizational culture by senior
management for the achievement of corporate goals.
Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA): This body

regulated degrees awarded by the polytechnics. It was abolished
in 1992 with the abolition of the binary divide.
Cultural capital: Bourdieu argues that there are three forms of

cultural capital: the embodied state, the objectified state and the
institutionalized state (Bourdieu 1997, p. 47). The ‘embodied
state’ of cultural capital refers to ‘long-lasting dispositions of
196 Glossary
mind and body’. Examples might include any of the cultural

resources that are valuable in achieving educational success, such
as self-confidence, the ability to defer certain sorts of gratifica-
tion, modes of speech and thought, and so on. ‘Objectified
cultural capital’ is that which is translated into transmissible
material objects. The ‘institutionalized state’ of cultural capital
is one form of this: ‘the objectification of cultural capital in the
form of academic qualifications’ (Bourdieu 1997, p. 50). Each
of these can be transformed into the others in the same way that
other forms of capital (economic, social) can be transformed
(‘transubstantiated’) into cultural capital and vice versa. When
pupils enter school or students enter university with a con-
siderable amount of accumulated cultural capital, then the
institution’s task is easier and the chances of ‘success’ higher.
DES/DfE/DfEE/DfES: The name of the government department

responsible for education has changed over the years from the
Department of Education and Science (DES), to the Department
for Education (DfE), to the Department for Education and
Employment (DfEE) and Department for Education and Skills
(DfES) most recently.
Dirigisme: State control of economic and social matters.
Fordism: An approach to the management of production,

originally of cars, which involves the following characteristics:
• de-skilling
• the equalization of wage rates at a relatively high level
• intensification of work and the predetermination of work
output
• the automatic movement of work between workers
• the employment of those capable of doing the job, but no more
• the extension of control outside the factory (or other site of
‘production’)
• mass production of a standard product for a very large market
(Watkins 1994).
Some writers argue that aspects of the Fordist approach are
now being applied in education. Others argue that we are now
Glossary 197
seeing a ‘neo-Fordist’ or ‘post-Fordist’ phase in the organization

of education. The term ‘neo-Fordism’ suggests that delivery is
organized along managerialist lines (see Managerialism below)
and it shares with Fordism an emphasis on quick, cheap delivery
of a product which meets market demand. ‘Post-Fordism’ implies
that the organization of production is conducted in an extremely
flexible way to meet the twin challenge of limited resources
and a fast-changing market. Staff are employed on short-term and
part-time contracts in the main or as ‘consultants’. Production
rates and the products themselves are changed with great
rapidity.
Functionalism: The dominant sociological approach both in the

UK and the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. Functionalism is a
perspective which sees social organization as possessing many
similarities to the physical make-up of an animal’s body. Both
the body and society consist of distinguishable parts (legs, eyes,
etc., for the one, the church, family, etc., for the other). In both
animals and society the parts all play some clear role, i.e. they
fulfil a function (movement, sight, etc., social integration, human
reproduction, etc.). In both, too, the different parts act together
to form a system which (usually) operates smoothly to fulfil
the goals of the whole. Functionalism, as applied to the study
of education, takes the view that the contents of the school
curriculum should reflect and propagate the common culture.
The role of the teacher is to transmit this common culture; the
teacher acts as a jug from which the dominant norms and values
of society are poured into the empty vessels in the classroom.
Policy-makers often operate on an implicit functionalist model
when making policy: education is seen as being able to perform
important functions in society as a whole, particularly in fostering
greater integration and improved economic efficiency, while
reducing crime and deviance. This rather simple set of assump-
tions leads them into common errors, as the discussion in Chapter
5 indicated. At the level of the management of change in the
individual school or college, functionalist thinking has likewise
led to simplistic thinking about organizational culture which sees
it as enacted by individuals in a puppet-like way, and as being
198 Glossary
relatively easily manipulable by managers in order to effect

desired changes. A strong, unitary culture is seen as highly func-
tional for educational institutions, and managers strive to achieve
this in order to bring about change.
Grant-maintained (GM) school: School which has opted out of
local authority control by balloting parents and which receives
funding directly from a government agency. It has more
autonomy than a maintained school.
Implementation gap: The differences between the intended out-
comes of policy as originally envisaged by policy-makers, and
those which were actually realized after the policy had been
implemented.
Implementation staircase: The various levels or sites, national,
regional and local, at which education policy is received, inter-
preted and put into practice, sometimes in ways which are quite
different from those originally intended by policy-makers.
Local Education Authority (LEA): The part of local government
at the county level or equivalent responsible for aspects of
education in its area.
Local management of schools (LMS): A shorthand way of
referring to the devolution of powers to schools’ governing
bodies to look after more of their own affairs. Conversely powers
have been lost by LEAs with this development.
Maintained school: School maintained by the state, as opposed to
a private school or one maintained by, for example, the church.
Managerialism: ‘A set of beliefs and practices, at the core of which
burns the seldom tested assumption that better management will
prove an effective solvent for a wide range of economic and social
ills’ (Pollitt 1990). Its practices include the following:
• strict financial management and devolved budgetary controls
• the efficient use of resources and the emphasis on productivity
• the extensive use of quantitative performance indicators
• the development of consumerism and the discipline of the
market
Glossary 199
• the manifestation of consumer charters as mechanisms for

accountability
• the creation of a disciplined, flexible workforce, using flexible
or individualized contracts, staff appraisal systems and
performance-related pay
• the assertion of managerial control and the managers’ right to
manage (Randle and Brady 1997).
Manpower Services Commission (MSC): An arm of the Employ-
ment Department when this was separate from the Education
Department, it intervened in education policy, sometimes
in competition with the DES. It was later renamed a number of
times and eventually became TEED: the Training, Enterprise
and Education Directorate. It controls the work of local TECs
(Training and Enterprise Councils) which are concerned with
vocational education and training at the regional level.
Multiple cultural configuration in organisations (MCC): The
‘multiple cultural configuration’ (Alvesson 2002) approach to
organizations such as schools and universities, which can be
contrasted to the functionalist one. While functionalism sees their
cultures as homogeneous and coherent, shared by everyone, the
MCC approach sees every school, at least large ones, as having
numerous subcultures of different levels and kinds. People derive
attitudes, values and ways of behaving from their gender, class,
ethnicity, from their location in the school (teacher, student,
head) and from the wider society. These cultures overlap in the
school or university and are influenced by its particular character.
‘Cultural traffic’ moves around within the organization, the traffic
flow being shaped by the issues being addressed at any particular
time and the ideologies that are relevant to them. Conflict,
sometimes open and sometimes under-the-stage, is the norm. In
contrast the functionalist view sees agreement and stability as
characterizing a healthy school, university or other organization.
From the MCC perspective change is constant as the cultural
traffic shifts around new issues and as new influences flow into the
organization. From the functionalist viewpoint stability is the
norm. The two approaches have very different implications for
the understanding of policy implementation.
200 Glossary
National Commission on Education: Funded by the Paul Hamlyn

Foundation, this group of ‘the great and the good’ conducted an
extensive investigation into education in the UK. It published
Learning to Succeed (1993), Learning to Succeed After Sixteen
(1995), Learning to Succeed: The Way Ahead (1995) and Success
Against the Odds (1996). Despite their unofficial status, these
publications both reflected and influenced educational thought
in the mid-1990s.
National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ): Quango

created in 1986 and charged with establishing a common, coherent
framework for vocational qualifications. This has developed into
the system of national vocational qualifications (NVQs). NCVQ
also created general national vocational qualifications (GNVQs).
See also Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).
OFSTED: the Office for Standards in Education. This organization

was set up to improve standards of achievement in state-funded
schools in England. It uses regular school inspections and public
reporting of its findings to do this. OFSTED’s website is at
http://www.ofsted.gov.uk.
Phenomenology: Traditionally, sociology pictures individuals as

being born into a world over which they have no real control;
society is something that does things to people. The phenomen-
ological perspective, founded by Husserl (1931), replaces this
essentially passive view of humankind with a view that stresses
people’s autonomy in creating their social world, viewing reality
as at least partly socially constructed. Phenomenologists are
interested in people’s ‘taken for granted’ reality: their everyday
recurrent practices, the ways in which they define the situation
they are in and the way they understand their world in general.
However, this is a sociological perspective rather than an
individual psychological one because social processes are
important in shaping individual’s understandings. Schutz,
Husserl’s pupil, for example, stresses that subjective meanings
and motives are shared and understood by everyone in a given
society: ‘typifications’ of situations and behaviour, shared by the
actors involved, are very important mechanisms for sustaining
Glossary 201
coherence in social interaction. Phenomenology is important in

understanding policy-making and policy interpretation and the
relationship between them; it shows us that neither policy-makers
nor policy implementers should be viewed as homogenous
groups, but in a more subtle way, as people who will perceive the
meanings of policy statements differently and will have different
definitions of the situation in which policy is being made and
implemented.
Policy as discourse: Refers to the idea that the ways in which policy
is expressed and the areas it focuses on (and ignores) structure
the ways in which policy is (and is not) thought about.
Policy as text: It is necessary to distinguish between formal

statements of policy found in documents and seeing policy as
text. When seen as ‘text’, policies are viewed as statements which
can be understood and interpreted (‘read’) in different ways
depending upon the audience and the context. This idea is
elaborated more fully in Chapter 4.
Policy culture: ‘The structures and policy goals, and dominant

discourses and practices within public bureaucracies which frame
the possibilities for policy’ (Lingard and Garrick 1997, p. 2).
Policy refraction: The distortion of policy which takes place as a
result of the interaction of competing interests and sets of values.
Policy becomes disjointed and less coherent as it goes through the
‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ processes: it is refracted (Taylor et al.
1997, p. 119).
Policy trajectory (study): Policy trajectory refers to the different
phases of policy-making and implementation, from the genesis of
an idea underlying a policy development to its being put into
practice in educational institutions (for example). A policy
trajectory study is one which conducts research into each aspect
of a policy’s trajectory. Ball makes the point that the analytical
consequences of a dual understanding of policy, as both text and
as discourse, is to conduct what he calls policy trajectory studies.
By this he means studies which trace the progress of policy from
its formulation stage (where struggles, interpretations and
202 Glossary
compromises are mapped) through to the recipients of policy at

the ground level (where interpretations and implementation
strategies are similarly mapped). The policy trajectory research
strategy holds out the prospect of a much fuller, more rounded,
understanding of the processes and outcomes of education
policy-making and implementation, of the constraining effects
of the environment, as well as the power of actors.
Postmodernism and personal identity: Postmodernism is a social
theory which argues that the social world has reached a condition
of postmodernity. Here there is a free flow of information on a
global scale and people are no longer rooted to their locale. Many
contrasting sources of information are available to individuals
and they are able to pick and choose from them. In this way they
are empowered to create their own identity, which becomes
increasingly fluid, and to construct the social world in which they
live by choosing from the myriad styles and possibilities available
to them. Consumption, in this very wide sense, is an important
feature of postmodernity. Meanwhile, there is a loss of faith in the
ability of science, religion or any other ‘grand narrative’ to
achieve any meaningful truth or answers. Individuals are cast on
to their own resources; what is right for them and the
communities they choose to inhabit is right, full stop. There are,
however, constraints on individuals’ power. An important one
of these is the discursive repertoires available to them. From a
postmodernist point of view the language we use, the discourse,
both represents reality and creates it; it structures the way we
think, and can think, about the world. This has an important
significance in thinking about education policy; the discursive
devices used in framing policy may make thinking about
alternatives difficult or impossible. The policy medium thus may
be as important as its message, or even be the message.
Hargreaves and Reynolds (1989) show how the discourse of the
national curriculum has excluded other curricular possibilities
from consideration, for example. The postmodernist view of the
modern world also has more general consequences for the
consideration of education policy. From this perspective our
whole approach to education at all levels is based on outmoded
‘modernist’ thinking and needs to be completely reconsidered.
Glossary 203
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA): Quango created

in October 1997 from the merger of NCVQ (National Council for
Vocational Qualifications) and SCAA (School Curriculum and
Assessment Authority) (see next entry). QCA is the regulatory
body responsible for the national curriculum and for all academic
and vocational qualifications in England and Wales below the
level of first degrees. It has very substantial powers.
School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA): Quango

responsible for the national curriculum and for GCSEs and AS/A
levels. See also Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).
School effectiveness and school improvement research: Two linked

strands of research which attempt to identify the characteristics
of good schools and successful approaches to managing school
improvement, usually through quantitative research. They both
fall into the ‘engineering’ category of the link between research
and policy. See, for example, Reynolds and Cuttance (1992) and
Ainscow et al. (1994).
Setting: The regrouping of pupils according to their ability in the

subject concerned. This can be carried out across the whole year
group or within a band or population, provided that two or more
classes can be timetabled for the same subject at the same time.
Setting can therefore be used within any pattern or organization.
Schools frequently seek to make teaching groups smaller and
more homogeneous by providing extra sets, for example by
regrouping the ninety pupils in three classes into four or five
sets, although staffing constraints make it unlikely that this
can be done in more than a few subjects (Harlen and Malcolm
1997).
Streaming: The method of assigning pupils to classes on some
overall assessment of general ability, the most able pupils in one
stream, the next most able in the next, and so on. The classes so
streamed are used as the teaching units for the majority of
subjects (Harlen and Malcolm 1997).
Structuration theory: Structuration theory tries to find a
compromise between the theory of society which says that
204 Glossary
people’s behaviour is rigidly controlled by the social groups they

live in (the kind of structuralism seen in functionalism, for
example), and the idea that they are free to construct their own
realities (the action theory on which phenomenology is based).
For many theorists these positions are too extreme. Structuration
theory as developed by Tony Giddens says that, while structures
are important in conditioning the way people think and behave,
these structures are not external to thought and behaviour. They
can be changed and often are, sometimes as a result of conscious
decisions by people and sometimes in an unconscious way.
Structures and action are both important, each is implicit in the
other. The sophistication of Giddensian structuration theory lies
in this insight that structure and action are interdependent and
mutually causative, so that good social theory must appreciate
both. People behave in consistent ways, patterned and influenced
by the structural contexts in which they live, by ideologies,
cultures, and so on. At the same time they create their social
world and alter the very structures that condition their behaviour.
Structuration theory is, in a sense, a ‘reply’ to functionalism.
Taking its more sophisticated understanding of the social world
into account helps us to understand the ways in which top-down
policy-making and managerial approaches are over-simple and
likely to fail. From this perspective the social world is dynamic
and constantly in the process of creation. Structuration is in
action on a daily basis. Yet, in contrast to phenomenological
perspectives, structuration theory recognizes the importance of
structures in conditioning the policy-making and implementation
processes.
Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI): A scheme
funded initially by the Department of Employment by which
work-related courses are developed in schools and colleges in
the context of local TVEI projects. TVEI has now come to an
end but was a successful and well-funded project from the mid-
1980s to the mid-1990s.
Training and Enterprise Council (TEC) (Local Enterprise Council
(LEC) in Scotland): Bodies under the direction of TEED
charged with facilitating appropriate vocational education and
Glossary 205
training for their area. TECs do not provide the training directly
but fund other bodies, such as further education colleges, to
do so.
Training, Enterprise and Education Directorate (TEED):
Formerly Training Agency. Replacement for the Manpower
Services Commission (MSC) and responsible for aspects of
training both in and beyond school. It is now an integral part of
the DfEE.
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Index
action research 184, 194 cultural capital 42, 156, 185, 195,
Alexander, R. 178, 179, 182, 183 196
Alvesson, M. 127, 199 curriculum of the dead 103, 108,
Apple, M. 130, 157 151
Arnot, M. 42, 144, 169
Dale, R. 88
Baker, K. 99, 102 Davies, M. 137, 138, 139
Balfour’s Education Act 2 Dearing Reports 14, 60, 63, 76, 92,
Ball, S. 36, 82, 96, 98, 103, 104, 105, 103, 150, 151, 161
108, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, Deem, R. 41, 137, 138, 139
138, 139, 140, 146, 147, 157, 158, dirigisme 196
159, 165, 169, 172, 185, 186, 192, discourse 130, 131, 132, 133, 138,
201 140, 146, 153, 157, 159, 160, 172,
banding 194 185, 201, 202
Barrett, S. 126, 127 discourse of derision 138, 157, 159
Becher, T. 127 Dyson, A. 101
Beckhard, R. 123, 124, 147
Black Papers 101, 102, 194 Education Action Zones 20, 23,
bottom-up approaches to policy 155, 165
implementation 136 education policy – character of 95
bureau-professionalism 160, 161 educational ideologies 115, 116,
Butler Act 2, 3, 49, 194 117, 120
Butskellism 194 Educational Priority Areas 3
engineering model of research
Callaghan, J. 4, 5, 87 144, 157, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181,
Circular 10/65 4 182, 183, 184, 189, 191, 203
Circular 10/70 4 enlightenment model of research
competence 86, 87 176, 177, 184, 189, 191
conflict perspectives 195 enterprise ideology 84, 188
context and policy 35, 97, 125, 131, Eraut, M. 90
140, 146, 169, 183, 184, 185, 191, Etzioni, A. 35
201, 204 Excellence in Schools 18, 152, 153,
corporate culturalism 195 164, 166, 174
Council for National Academic
Awards 75, 195 Fairclough, N. 133
Cox, B. 101, 102 Finch, J. 176
critical social research 184 Fitz, J. 99, 168, 169, 192
Crowther Report 3 Fordism 157, 196, 197
218 Index
Forster’s Education Act 1 Lawton, C. 44, 112, 121, 174

Foucault, M. 131 Learndirect 66
Fudge, C. 126, 127 Learning and Skills Councils 69
Fullan, M. 130, 135, 136, 140 learning society 64, 152, 161, 162,
functionalism 125, 199, 204 163, 173
functionalism and organizational Lee, D. 89, 92, 186, 187, 188, 189
cultures 127 lifelong learning 119, 162, 163, 165
Lindblom, C. E. 35
Garrick, B. 129, 140, 141, 142, 143, Lingard, B. 129, 140, 141, 142, 143,
144, 201 144, 148, 201
Gewirtz, S. 40, 41, 121, 154, 160, Local Education Authority 198
169 local management of schools 34,
Gleeson, D. 89 118, 151
Goodson, I. 103
Graham, D. 101, 102, 121 McDonaldization 85
grant-maintained schools 11, 16, McPherson, A. 40, 121
34, 39, 41, 99, 118, 137, 138, 139, McRobbie, A. 190
156, 198 maintained school 198
Gurney-Dixon Report 3 Majone, G. 136, 137
managerialism 85, 142, 144, 198
Hadow Report 2 Marsh, D. 134, 148
Halpin, D. 99, 192 Mortimore, P. 165
Hargreaves, A. 132, 136, 202 muddling through 98, 105
Hartley, A. 103 multiple cultural configuration 199
Higginson Report 10
Hill, D. 147, 157 national curriculum 41, 95, 98, 100,
Hounsell, D. 180 101, 103, 118, 119, 121, 132, 143,
human capital theory 85 151, 157, 170, 172, 202
National Grid for Learning 19, 38,
identity 125, 179, 202 167, 168
ideology 103 NCVQ 51, 86, 89, 200, 203
implementation as evolution 136, neo-conservatism 104, 108, 114
137 neo-liberalism 104, 106, 113, 189
implementation gap 139, 174, 198 new managerialism 160, 161
implementation staircase 128, 129, New Right 1, 35, 43, 85, 104, 112,
198 118, 119, 121, 141, 165, 173, 185
incrementalist model of policy Newsom Report 3
making 35 Norwood Report 2
information and communication nursery vouchers 112, 150, 171
technology 162, 168
parental choice 1, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43,
Jarratt Report 50 85, 99, 169, 171
Joseph, K. 9, 122 PASCI project 40, 41
Percy Report 49
Kennedy Report 62 phenomenological approaches
Kerr, C. 166 123, 128, 129, 134, 147, 184, 191,
Kogan, M. 98, 159 200, 204
Index 219
phenomenology 200 Schultz, T. W. 85

Plowden Report 3 Secondary Regulations 1904 103
policy as discourse 130, 131, 134, selectivism 137, 151, 156
201 semiotic guerrilla warfare 186
policy as text 130, 131, 134, 139, Senge, P. 135
201 setting 203
policy culture 141, 142, 201 social democracy 109
policy encoding 98 Social Justice Strategy 140
policy paradoxes 119 social reconstructionism 105, 117
policy refraction 141, 145, 201 Spens Report 2
policy trajectory 129, 140, 141, 201, streaming 203
202 structuration theory 203, 204
Pollitt, C. 198
postmodernism 128, 164, 174, 179, Taylor Report 39
202 Technical and Vocational
post-structuralism 202 Education Initiative 7, 8, 53, 87,
Pritchard, W. 123, 124, 147 150, 204
progressivism 116, 182, 183 third way 133, 151
Three Wise Men Report 147, 178,
Qualifications and Curriculum 179, 181, 182
Authority 17, 203 Tierney, W. 127
top-down approaches to change
Raab, C. 40, 121, 167 128–30
rational-purposive model of policy traditionalism 115
35, 98, 105, 139 training 77, 87, 88, 89, 93, 158, 188,
records of achievement 150, 181, 199, 204, 205
192 Trow, M. 56, 79, 84
Rein, M. 96, 97 Trowler, P. 132
Reynolds, J. 132, 202, 203 Troyna, B. 184, 192
Rhodes, R. A. 134, 148
Robbins Report 75, 83, 84, 178 unintended consequences of policy
Robinson, P. 88, 89, 91, 166 42
Ruskin speech 4, 87
Russell Report 76 Whitty, G. 151, 185
Wildavsky, A. 136, 137
Sabatier, P. 134, 148 Willmott, H. 127
Saunders, M. 44, 128, 129 Woodhead, C. 182
School Curriculum and Woods, P. 40, 42, 147, 169
Assessment Authority 17, 203
school effectiveness 165, 185, 203 Youth Training Scheme 50, 88,
school improvement 165, 185, 203 90

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Education Policy

In this up-to-date introduction to a key policy area, Paul Trowler

• policy landmark tables

Paul Trowler is Reader in Higher Education, Lancaster University.

LC93.G7 T658 2002

ISBN 0-203-41785-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-41933-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

List of tables and figures viii

1 Policies and structures: schools 1

2 Policies and structures: post-compulsory education 47

3 Making education policy 95

Case study: policy-making on grant-maintained schools 99

4 Reception and implementation of education policy 123

5 Government intervention in education 149

6 Educational research and education policy 176

Key points 191

This book seeks to present the background to education policy for

• understand the nature of education policy

In short, having read the book, you should be able to understand,

Background to the current system

Free secondary education for all

• The 1926 Hadow Report recommended increasing the school

also made to improve school management, to abolish corporal

The move to comprehensive schools

The origin of the new vocationalism

I am concerned in my journeys to find complaints from

of our best trained students who have completed the higher

The situation in 1997

Pre-primary school education

Dale (1985b) notes the unusual features of TVEI:

■ Its genesis was unusual: there was no

1988 Education Act This reflected a fundamental animosity

It is worth noting the way in which this Act

(See the Times Educational Supplement

The ‘extended professionalization’ argument

Teaching and Higher Though primarily to do with higher

23 March 1999 Government This involved: Welcome focusing on needs of inner-city

March 1999 Excellence in ■ provide subsidised loans to teachers for

September 2001 Schools – ■ introduce a right of appeal to the Adjudicator

September 2001 Schools – ■ simplify and consolidate the Secretary of State’s

retained grammar and secondary modern schools. Some areas had

• County schools: funded wholly through the LEA. After the

Additionally at secondary level only there were city technology

Policy and policy-making 1979–97

1944–74 1974–88 1988–97 1997–2001

Source: Adapted from Dale 1989, p. 115

The situation in 2001

• choice and competition: the commodification and consumeriza-

The policy of encouraging schools to develop specialisms,

which they drew pupils. A third difference was a concern to update

Case study: extending parental choice

Why extend parental choice?

• Teachers, local authority officers and others were running the

Extending the rigours of the marketplace to the education service,

How was it done?

Acts of 1980, 1985 and 1986. Simultaneously parents gained more

• There has been a large outflow from secondary schools serving

• In an effort to achieve high standards and so become more

• These policies reward success rather than offering support for

Conclusion: policy outcomes are highly variable