ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a discussion of the changing worlds of work and their implications for schooling. K. Robins and F. Webster argued that the objective of the Thatcher governments was to ensure that the education system adapted to and reinforced the new mode of accumulation. The academic-vocational divide which had dogged British schooling could be dissolved, and a genuine form of participatory learning introduced. Information Technology played a central part in attempts at constructing this 'new social consensus'. In the context of public concern about unprecedented levels of unemployment and the 'North–South divide', information technology was offered as a bright new vision for the economy. Economics was the arch-modern discipline, based on the move towards mathematical modelling based on mechanical physics. Over-qualification is one of the features of the 'precariat' as defined by the British economist Guy Standing.
