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This paper examines the connections between the school building programme in England and the raising of the school leaving age (ROSLA) from 14 to 15 in 1947 and then to 16 in 1972. These two major developments were intended to help to ensure the realisation of ‘secondary education for all’ in the postwar period. The combination led in practice to severe strains in the education system as a whole, with lasting consequences for educational planning and central control. ROSLA was a key issue for the school building programme in terms of both finance and design. School building was also a significant constraint for ROSLA, which was marred by temporary expedients in building accommodation both in the 1940s with ‘HORSA huts’ and in the 1970s with ‘ROSLA blocks’, as well as by the cheap construction of new schools that soon became unfit for purpose. Together, school building needs and ROSLA helped to stimulate pressures towards centralisation of planning that were ultimately to undermine postwar partnerships in education, from the establishment of the Ministry of Education’s Architects and Building (A&B) Branch in 1948, through the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963, to the assertion of central state control by the 1970s. The pressures arising from such investment and growth in education again became a key issue in the early twenty-first century with the Labour Government’s support for raising the participation age to 18 combined with an ambitious ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme. The historical and contemporary significance of these developments has tended to be neglected but is pivotal to an understanding of medium-term educational change in its broader policy and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Labour and New Labour alike have been the enemies of education. Consider the brutalism of Charles Clarke--'history for display purposes only'; statistics of achievement based on the soft marking of soft subjects to achieve soviet pig-iron statistics; fat inspection and thin curriculum; compulsory lesson plans and paper plagues; foreign languages as too difficult. Before all that, remember Anthony Crosland 'destroying their schools if it's the last fucking thing I do' and the consequent rise of the public schools as bought excellence. What to do : Follow Housman's dictum, 'Knowledge is happiness'; rescue good minds in bad places with state places in boarding schools; utilise the quiz nationally the as a pop method to stimulate the study habit; get back to French and German; take the educationalism out of education especially in training colleges; thin inspection down from terror to weather-eye mentoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on research undertaken between 2009 and 2012 into the former Labour government's extremely ambitious 'Building Schools for the Future' ( BSF) Programme and its withdrawal by the Coalition government. The project, which utilises analysis of policy documents, case studies in six local authorities ( LA) and semi-structured interviews with national and local policy actors, is being funded by Roehampton's Centre for Educational Research in Equalities, Policy and Pedagogy and the British Academy ( SG100363). The focus of this article is the implications for social justice of BSF and its subsequent withdrawal. The structure of the article comprises an introduction to BSF and a summary of some of the main issues arising from it. We then move on to explore the social justice dimension of BSF as it is expressed in LA documents and in relation to the social policy aspirations of the former Labour government. In July 2010 the Coalition government discontinued the BSF programme and we track events and policy from that time, particularly focussing on the radical shift away from Labour's transformational and communitarian agenda in favour of criteria based on efficiency and value-for-money. We present data from our interviews with local actors on the equality and social justice impacts of this re-orientation of policy. We conclude by arguing against the view that Labour abandoned social justice suggesting that BSF was one of a number of policies through which equality was pursued, albeit by stealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the New Labour legacy in education, reviews the arguments of The Pendulum Swings in the light of contributions to this themed issue, examines early Coalition policymaking, and recommends four principles that should guide the search for a new approach to school improvement. Recent initiatives are found to be a parody of school reform, as previously understood, more likely to provoke a crisis than to sustain the last government's drive for improved effectiveness. The pendulum is poised to swing as current policies unravel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers possible future directions for education policy and public service governance under the Conservative-led coalition government. The article considers the extent to which Conservatives might develop a distinctive strategy for managing public services that breaks decisively with that of the New Labour era. The coalition faces a markedly different political and economic context for public service reform compared to its predecessor. This article argues that these contextual constraints make a continuation of the New Labour governing strategy less viable, but unresolved tensions in the coalition education policies enacted to date may hinder the development of a novel project for education reform. As a consequence, the New Labour education project seems likely to remain largely intact for the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author explains the need for Great Britain's Labour Party to adjust to the social changes taking place in 1960 in order to succeed in elections. While the author is supportive of the party's strong relationship with British trade unions and the working-class, he argues that changes in education and social structure, particularly an increase in professional employment and a growing middle class, require Labour to appeal to other groups.