ABSTRACT
Education is the only area of welfare in which participation is a legal requirement. Almost everyone attends school for at least eleven years of their life. Much longer educational careers are common. In most of our minds the education system, along with the National Health Service (NHS), symbolizes state welfare provision, and, after social security, it vies with the NHS for consuming the second largest share of government spending. However, in the context of this book the education system has a very particular significance for understanding the purposes and processes of restructuring welfare. As Chapter 2 argued, the crisis of welfare and the emergence of newly structured welfare sites entailed the construction of new welfare subjects, positioned in a quite different set of relations to the welfare state from that established under the old settlements. Education is a critical site for the social construction of subjects, and subject positions. Its structural importance to the welfare state and its cultural contribution to the construction of subjects combine to make it a key institution for understanding welfare restructuring.
