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This paper examines New Right argument on educational provision, including the establishing of a voucher scheme and the introduction of elements of a 'free market' into public sector education. The paper examines the right-wing allegation that educationalists have 'captured' the school curriculum and the argument on the need for 'consumer capture' of education. It discusses the New right tactic of privatization by stealth, and the argument that gradualism provides the most effective means of securing educational reform. The paper discusses arguments put forward by the right on the idea of a General Teaching Council (GTC) and argument on the need for the development of a teacher labour market freed from national salary scales. It goes on to examine Mary Warnock's proposals for a GTC and her views of teacher education. The paper examines the likely effects of the implementation of right-wings education policy, concluding that the 1988 Education Reform Act will prepare the ground for the privatization of education and the development of a teacher labour market of the kind proposed by the New Right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' opinion on the sociology and politics of the curriculum in Great Britain. Indeed, despite its early promise of transcending some of the conventional dichotomies between theoretical and empirical work and between educational theory and practice, British sociology of education of the 1970s was characterised by a progressive separation of theoretical and empirical analyses and by an increasing marginalisation of issues of curriculum policy and practice. American sociology of the curriculum can be seen to have been affected by three main tendencies that distinguish it from most recent British work in this field. Apple's edited collection is centrally concerned to show the potential complementarity of often disparate traditions of economic and cultural theorising. Thus, in a discussion of high school history textbooks, Anyon analyses the ideological import of their content and absences and tries to relate both the textual messages and their mode of production to the interests of capital. For the analysis of content, Wexler recommends a critical semiotics of school texts which avoids idealism by relating internal structures and content to external conditions. The neo-Marxist analysis of the hidden curriculum did, indeed, seem at one stage to have adopted a strangely monolithic view of the school as a conservative force, oddly reminiscent of the functionalist tradition that it had sought to counter.