‘Hard Times for education in England’ (Educational Futures, BESA Journal)

“Unrealistic hopes have been repeatedly invested in English education. First, that selective state secondary schooling would sustain traditional industry in the 1940s and ’50s and then in the 1960s and ’70s that comprehensive school reform would overcome notorious class divisions to modernize society. Today, English education and training exemplifies the new market-state (Bobbitt 2002) introduced by the Thatcher governments in which power contracts to the centre whilst responsibility is contracted out to semi-privatised but state-subsidised ‘delivery units’, as schools, colleges and universities have become. Thus, the old compromises of a national system locally delivered have been forsaken for a national system nationally delivered to combine a strong state with a ‘free’ market in place of the consensual compromises of the welfare state and substituting governance for government.”

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