ABSTRACT
In the UK, the election of the New Labour government in 1997 marked a signifi cant point in the shaping of English educational policy (Bell 1999a). It must be remembered that educational policy has always differed between the nations that make up the UK, and these divergences have become more signifi cant following the introduction of devolution to Scotland and Wales. The Education Action Zone (EAZ) policy discussed in this chapter relates solely to England. However, key principles of the EAZ approach are to be found far wider than England (see Giddens 2001) with themes relating to the formation of new partnerships being evident in very diverse cultural contexts (Cheng 1999; Ng 1999; Bell 2002b). New Labour’s commitment to a ‘third way’ was intended to mark an explicit departure from free market Conservatism and traditional Labourist statism (Giddens 1998; Latham 2001). Much of the language of the preceding Conservative administration was retained as New Labour developed its discourse of standards, markets, choice and competition. However, New Labour enthusiasm for raising academic standards through the promotion of markets and choice in schools was tempered by its traditional commitment to social justice and the use of educational policy to pursue egalitarian objectives. Infl uential third way thinkers argued that mainstream social democratic policies, such as comprehensive schooling, had failed to tackle the problems of educational underachievement amongst students from disadvantaged backgrounds, hence old problems required new solutions (Barber 1993). The challenge for New Labour therefore was to harness policies traditionally associated with inequality (markets, choice and privatization) and to demonstrate that these could be used to reduce, not increase, social injustice. There was also an explicit aim to link policies designed to tackle social exclusion with economic modernization and the need to develop human capital (DfEE 1997).
