ABSTRACT
A decade ago we published a book entitled Re-inventing Schools, Reforming Teaching. It was an aspirational title. While international in scope, its primary purpose was to explore the education reforms of the 1997–2010 Labour Governments in England. As such it still remains the sole in-depth history of those reforms. Its analysis focused on the relationship between aspirational politics and the realities of day-to-day classroom practice and asked the question, what happens when political vision travels to school and classrooms? Interviews with 37 politicians, policy makers, academics and advisers provided a comprehensive and complex view of the education nation in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first.
