ABSTRACT
Over the last decade and a half, national policy in education has emphasized competition between schools. The long-run consequences of encouraging the individualized development of schools as autonomous institutions with responsibility only to their governing bodies and parents are potentially far-reaching for the national education system. In particular, as each school in a locality makes individual planning decisions to maximize success, educational quality across the whole community is most likely to become unevenly spread. There can be no genuine local involvement between a community and its educational life-only individual deals for short-term, opportunistic gain. The philosophy of Education 2000 since its inception has been quite different: far from seeing the enhancement of educational quality as a responsibility of individual schools, Education 2000 has considered the regeneration of schooling and its reshaping for the demands of an increasingly competitive world a responsibility of the whole community.
