ABSTRACT
The recent narrative history of British education can be organised around two landmark pieces of legislation. The first, the 1944 Education Act has been referred to extensively in earlier chapters of this book. It is the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA, 1988) that now provides the additional lynch pin of the policy framework that governs the structure and processes of British education. The idea of framework is appropriate because the new rules and arrangements have already extended across four administrations, two Conservative and two Labour governed, as a reading of Skocpol (1992) might lead us to expect. The ERA, 1988 and associated legislation was assembled around a set of principles some of which were very different from those that underpinned the 1944 Act and, indeed, aimed to address what were thought to be some of the shortcomings of the earlier legislation and policy framework. One key theme of the legislation was to assert greater central state authority, further rewriting the balance of power and control between it and local government authorities. The 1988 framework was also distinctive because it was created by a Conservative Party sheltering a variety of interests, including industrial trainers and cultural restorationists under its strong, neo-liberal wing (Ball, 1990), already busy with the introduction of the TVEI, perceiving itself to have a clear electoral mandate to reinvent principles of public sector service provision on ‘new management’ or private sector principles, including education. That has been strongly reflected in the attempt to create markets in education and expand the right of parents to express a preference in the selection of schools for their children. In this chapter we shall consider each of these themes in turn and their implications for British education and its wider social functions.
