ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the implications of recent changes in the form and direction of education policy for the conditions, especially of professional autonomy, which progressivism needs to survive. It compares the form and direction of education policy at the time of the Plowden revolution, which may be taken as the high point of state-endorsed progressivism, with that of the present day. The chapter includes the more direct central intervention in the education system contained in the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) entry to the scene, and especially in the setting up of Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) in 1983. There is little need to do more than mention the increasingly steep economic decline Britain has undergone over the past two decades and more, or the enormous increase in unemployment, especially of young people, associated with it. It has had major consequences for the structure and ideology of the education system, both directly and indirectly.
