The governance, administration and control of primary education and of the school system in general is one of the policy areas that has undergone the deepest changes in recent decades. Since the rise of the Conservative government to power in the early 1980s there has been a move towards the idea of governance and more decentralised forms of decision-making and administration. Paradoxically, and while the official rhetoric tends to emphasise autonomy and par-

ticipation, the shift towards a governance model has been matched by the introduction of some measures of greater control, such as the National Curriculum and the more recent move towards a system of standards, targets and assessments. Lauder, Brown, Dillabough and Halsey (2006) have called this centralised system of ‘learning’ the ‘state theory of learning’ because it mandates for teachers modes of assessment, the curriculum and elements of pedagogy. Pedagogy is test driven where the criterion for pupil progress and school improvement turn on improvements in a battery of official tests at entry to primary school (baseline tests) and at the ages 7 and 11. The tensions emerging from the coexistence of such differing tendencies are what

characterise the governance arena in the present in what has been described as a new model of decentralised-centralism (Karlsen 2000). New roles have been devised for traditional agencies both at the central and local levels, while yet other instances have been created and new actors have become involved in policies of governance, administration and control.1