Viewed across a longer time perspective, the major reforms of the Thatcher (and later Major) administrations, that changed the school system in England and Wales1 from 1986 onwards, can now be seen to have set the educational reform agenda for at least the next 20 years. They can no longer be treated as a temporary aberration from which normal service will be resumed once a government of different complexion is elected. Labour administrations since 1997 have followed a broadly similar educational

*Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Oxford, 32-36 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2ER, UK. Email: [email protected]

agenda; indeed one of our interviewees,2 who had been centrally involved in the 1980s reforms, commented on the ‘eerie parallels’ between the 1980s and the reforms under vigorous discussion in 2005/6. Thus Kenneth Baker’s3 ‘Blueprint for Educational Reform’ dated December 1986, which appears to be the first sketch of the 1988 reforms (this sketch was first made public in his 1993 autobiography, pp. 479-482) called for ‘the governing bodies of state maintained schools, particularly secondary ones, to become independent charitable trusts’.4 While this proposal did not make it on to the statute book in 1988-or at least not in that form-the 2005 White Paper (Higher Standards, Better Schools for All) echoed it closely, with a call for maintained schools to become independent ‘self-governing’ institutions as part of charitable trusts. It is, of course, always possible that apparently similar policy reforms can have very different underlying motives and purposes; and Paterson (2003) draws attention to a series of significant differences in the direction of Labour’s educational reforms since 1997, though some of these are more evident in Scotland than south of the border. But in this case the continuity of underlying ideas and policy direction is striking.