ABSTRACT
By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that, at almost every level, the context within which teachers worked was being transformed, although the longer-term implications of these changes were by no means immediately clear to those involved. First, across the developed world, it was possible to discern the rise of a new politics. One of the starting points for neo-Liberal thinking was Friedrich Hayek’s The road to serfdom, first published in 1944. He became a leading critic of collectivist approaches to social problems and his book The constitution of liberty was brandished in the Commons by Margaret Thatcher towards the Speaker at the time she became leader of the Conservative Party with a cry of ‘this is what we believe in’. Equally influential were Milton Friedman’s monetarist economic theories, disseminated in books such as his Essays in positive economics, and also, like Hayek, impacting on political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Keynesian demand management, which had underpinned the thinking of most post-War governments, found itself challenged by new ideas which raised fundamental questions about the effectiveness and appropriateness of state provision. These ideas came to underpin much policymaking during the 1980s and were particularly significant in respect of education, where it had become generally assumed, even by those on the right politically, that a state-provided education, through the cooperation of central and local government, was the way forward. Thus, since the late 1970s it has been possible to discern a steady drift towards that ‘neo-Liberalism’ which by the early twenty-first century has come to inform much governmental action in both the UK and America. By 1979 this process was already well under way. Ironically, in Britain in respect of education policy, the implementation of these ideas was to involve much tighter control from central government rather than its diminution.
