ABSTRACT
Autumn 2001 was the 25th anniversary of James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College,2 designed to promote a ‘great debate’ about the vocational as well as academic purposes of education, standards of achievement, appropriate teaching methods and whether there should be a core curriculum of basic knowledge. Distinctively, however, it inaugurated an era of accountability and a restructuring of the governance of education. The curriculum would no longer be the ‘secret garden’ of an autonomous professional community detached from public scrutiny. A public service became publicly accountable. One by one professional communities have been called to account: first the teachers and more recently social workers and doctors have attracted the anxious gaze of a society increasingly driven to impose regimes of scrutiny and regulation in the face of public concern and lost trust (O’Neill 2002b).
