ABSTRACT
Compulsory education is one of the defining characteristics of modern childhood; to a degree, therefore, any politics of schooling is also a politics of childhood, with inevitable implications for the lives that children lead and for the way that childhood itself is understood. This chapter traces the politics of British schooling, with its changing pattern of legislative intervention and implied notions of the child, since 1945. Its main focus is on the period since 1979, one of unbroken Conservative government in Britain, but it argues that some important changes in the school lives of British children were in gestation some years before the word ‘Thatcherism’ had entered the lexicon of social commentary. The chapter begins with an account of British schooling between the 1940s and the 1970s, touching on the main measures taken by government, and on the political and academic debates about British schoolchildren that took place over the period; I look then at the Education Reform Act of 1988 (the so-called ‘Baker Act’), which, for good or ill, was, as Baker himself proudly claimed on several occasions, the most significant reform of the British education system since the Second World War. Then I consider the political aftermath of the Act, during which, with the Department of Education and Science under the tenure, first of Kenneth Clarke, then of John Patten, some of its consequences for schoolchildren and those charged with their education became clearer. Next I outline the response of the left in Britain to these changes, firstly in the academic world, secondly among those left intellectuals in Britain now discerning ‘New Times’ and, thirdly, within the broad movement for children’s rights (discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this book by Annie and Bob Franklin). Finally, I
comment on the current politics of childhood-in-education in Britain in the mid-1990s, noting in particular key interventions by the Prime Minister John Major, the Leader of the Opposition Tony Blair, and their principal respective lieutenants, Gillian Shephard and David Blunkett.
