ABSTRACT
From the heyday of educational consensus and expansion in the 1960s, when the new comprehensive schools were proclaimed as the cauldrons within which would be forged the classless workers and citizens of the ‘white-hot’ technological revolution, we had progressed to a situation where these same schools were popularly portrayed as ‘concrete jungles’, undermined by subversive teachers and progressive teaching methods, which were producing illiterate and innumerate young workers who could not get jobs. This chapter argues that the restructuring and transformation of education and training initiated by the last Labour government and largely carried through under the aegis of the Manpower Services Commission derived much of its direction from a politically specific definition of the ‘needs’ of industry.
