ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on data collected in a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council studying the government's City Technology College (CTC) initiative. It aims to provide an interpretation of the CTC initiative within the context of the overall development of government policy. The chapter argues that CTCs need to be seen as part of a broader project on the part of the Conservative government in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. The political rhetoric accompanying the educational reforms certainly seeks to suggest that education has been taken out of politics as they are normally understood. Various observers have claimed to see in CTCs and other recent education policies a shift from the "Fordist" school of the era of mass production to what Stephen Ball has termed the "post-Fordist school". CTCs themselves lie at a point of tension between competing conceptions of contemporary social policy.
