ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have shown how the collapse of the post-war welfarist consensus presaged an attack on teacher unions as successive governments sought to diminish and marginalize their infl uence. This was most graphically illustrated by the removal of national negotiating rights in 1987 (Busher and Saran 1992), but has been buttressed by many other ways of progressively sidelining teachers and their unions. The election of New Labour in 1997 saw no obvious initial shift in this position, with teachers (explicitly), and their unions (implicitly), presented as resistant to the process of modernisation required to bring about the required transformation of the school system (DfEE 1998). The recent emergence of a national level Social Partnership in English school sector industrial relations is therefore a signifi cant departure in policy. While elements of the school workforce remodelling agenda could be viewed as continuity with previous policy, the emergence of the Social Partnership highlights the need to see policy as both process and product, refl ecting the way in which the mechanism of generating policy has become integral within the policy itself. There can be no artifi cial separation of means and ends; each is embedded in the other.
