ABSTRACT

In November 1998, as the Scotland Act 1998 (re)establishing a Scottish Parliament was receiving Royal Assent, the late Donald Dewar announced that ‘Scotland leads the way with radical plan for New Community Schools … one of the most innovative and modern initiatives ever carried out in British education’ (Scottish Office 1998a: 1). It is the argument of this chapter that this coincidence was not accidental and that disaggregating the condensation of political themes in the New Community Schools initiative gives access to the heart of the ‘New Labour’ project of ‘joined-up government’, to the emergent Scottish polity and to key issues in the relationship between state and civil society.