ABSTRACT
At the heart of the policy of successive governments lies the firm belief that the raising of educational standards is largely a matter of will. The often repeated mantra of ‘Targets, targets, targets’ encapsulates this belief. All the policies since the introduction of the National Curriculum have been examples of this. Whether expressed in the relatively neutral term ‘accountability’ or through ‘naming and shaming’, the policies have been dependent on the accumulation of evidence; the gathering of all kinds of data for the purposes of comparison.
