Introduction

Despite the changes that have taken place in the British political context during the 1990s, a number of the issues which continue to dominate debates about education, training and the future of work have changed little over the past two decades. More than twenty years after the event, the criticisms of education and training expressed by James Callaghan in his Ruskin College speech in October 1976 still continue to resonate within official policy discourse. This is especially true of his strictures on school standards and the use of ‘progressive’ teaching methods, but it also applies to the basic premise of his argument that it is the system of education and training which holds the key to national economic improvement and prosperity. Despite a number of challenges to its validity (see Esland 1996), this view still remains the cornerstone of current policy.