ABSTRACT
The task of the following three chapters is to explain and delineate how, just over a decade later, England and Wales witnessed not simply a ‘periodic re-ordering’ but a complete reversal of curricular fortunes, embodied in the imposition of the 1988 Education Act (and subsequent modifications). The 1988 Reform Act constitutes the start of a new morphogenetic sequence that provides the contextual backdrop to my two case-study schools. The 1988 Act endowed the Secretary of State with over three hundred new powers, prescribed what was to be taught and enjoined examinations at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16. In fact, notwithstanding its inherent contradictions, the Act was designed to subject the education system to the logic of ‘the market’; that is, through open enrolment, local management of schools (LMS) and pupil-based funding formulae. The centrally imposed National Curriculum and its associated testing requirements were thus part of the quasi-marketisation of the
education system – to provide parents with published information (league tables) on which to make ‘informed’ decisions about the ‘efficiency’ of schools.
