ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the growing dominance of a neoliberal ideology from the late 1980s into the early twenty-first century in which teachers are increasingly restricted and controlled, so that their agency as curriculum makers is diminished. The emphasis on the teacher in curriculum making can be understood as the continuation of a tradition of teacher-led geography curriculum development. The establishment of geography as an academic subject was driven upwards, from the needs of school geography teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rather than downwards, from the university into school. The accountability of education driven by the seismic social and economic shifts of the 1970s was to become implemented by the publishing of school performance ‘league tables’ and high stakes inspections. The term ‘ideologies’ is consistently used by research into how education and curriculum can be divided and classified into distinct value/belief systems.
