ABSTRACT
In the past twenty years, policy initiatives in the United Kingdom have been introduced with the intention of redefining the individual’s relationship with the welfare state. In many areas of public policy, such as health, housing and education, the intention has been to readjust the relationship by transferring powers from ‘producers’ or providers of public services to ‘consumers’ or users of services, and establish quasi-markets in these services (Le Grand and Bartlett 1993). There have also been changes in the nature of accountability of public services, with an increasing use of performance targets or outcome measures to indicate their efficiency, effectiveness and value for money. At the same time there has been an attempt to increase the collective influence of consumers by developing structures to give them a locus in decision-making about public services. The similarity of initiatives across policy sectors, and indeed across countries, is striking. A description of the common features and an explanation of their convergence lie outside the scope of this chapter. Yet, as Raab (Chapter 1) has pointed out, it is important to note that education is one among many areas of public policy in which new approaches to governance have featured; therefore education reforms have to be seen against a backcloth of changes in social policy in general.
