ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the important role of policy documents, which constitute a means of holding together disparately positioned people, objects and ideas across time and space. It reviews the Leadership College as emblematic of the way in which New Labour positioned e/quality, the joining of quality and equality discourses, as central to good educational governance. The chapter considers how Macpherson's pronouncement of institutional racism and the subsequent Amendment to the 1976 Race Relations Act disrupted the smooth connections between e/quality discourses in the learning and skills context. It presents the case study exploring the way in which the relational politics of policy documentation practices worked with this disruptive grain, keeping ideas of institutional racism in play as a means to hold open a space for the acknowledgement of histories of difference, struggle, antagonism and power which resist any straightforward conflation of e/quality.
