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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 UK is typical of many industrialised countries at the present time in searching for new kinds of assessment procedure which will be appropriate on the one hand to the goals of the more vocational curricula currently being developed and, on the other, be relevant to the whole range of pupil needs and achievement. The paper explores the impetus behind such changes and argues that the policies so generated embody a number of political and educational contradictions. Using recent developments in England and Scotland as a case study, the paper argues that, despite their egalitarian potential in educational terms, the underlying political climate of cost-efficiency and laissez-faire individualism which in turn inhibits any substantial change in traditional educational values is likely to result in reinforced, rather than reduced social divisions being associated with such initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department for Education and Skills currently shows a high regard for the potential of technology transforming the British education system. Government White papers demonstrate e‐learning‐based unification strategies that reinforce the message that introducing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will raise standards in schools. This paper examines the effect of these developments on teachers and pupils, and questions the government’s motivation for change. The introduction of ICT has not been complemented by increased levels of effective professional development for teaching staff in the pedagogy of ICT across the curriculum and may have merely served to reinforce the generational digital divide. In attempting to enchant the pupils, the government may have alienated the teachers. This paper suggests that the Department for Education and Skills should place more emphasis on developing strategies and providing funding for solutions to gaps in the professional development of teachers in their pedagogical understanding of ICT across the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the Internet in the classroom has often been characterized as a practice that disconnects the teacher from traditional forms of externally imposed influence. This paper examines this assertion by mapping the emerging field of cybereducation and considering how endemic knowledge is contextualized by national curricular authorities. The field theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein are employed in order to demonstrate the relationship between expert discourse and classroom pedagogy, using the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) as a case study. This attempt to capture the dynamics of cybereducation ultimately suggests how this emergent intellectual field's fragmentation and decoupling from State education forces offers policymakers the capacity to influence use. Progress of the UK government in integrating knowledge from an emergent educational field with its incumbent priorities is gauged, demonstrating the way in which national education officials have attempted to constrain potential departures from unregulated, officially mandated curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s it has become generally accepted among British politicians that the transition of young people from school to work is a problematic process. The major response to this at the level of the school has been a proliferation of national and local vocationally oriented courses designed to ease this situation through creating a 'permanent bridge' to the labour market. This paper is an examination of a course which constitutes a central part of one of these schemes, the Schools Vocational Programme. It suggests that for from facilitating transfer from school to work, industrially oriented education may have the unintended consequence of alienating young people from sectors of waged-labour in the capitalist economy. [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.

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the arts curriculum and pedagogy in a British primary school. The policy context for the study is the school's involvement in promoting creative partnerships between teachers and artists. The pedagogies of three different artist-led projects are analysed, using a Bernsteinian framework, and are characterised in relation to notions of 'competence' and 'performance' pedagogies. These characterisations are then used to consider the impact of the artists' pedagogies on teachers in the school, and the extent to which the different pedagogies promote inclusion. Broad conclusions are drawn about the relative difficulty of adopting competence pedagogies in the current educational culture of British schools; more specific conclusions are drawn about the importance of time, text, discourse and interpretation in arts pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new system of schools' inspection, under the `Office for Standards in Education' (OFSTED), was set up in 1992. Nominally independent, it was appointed within the flame of the general restructuring of public institutions and of tile government's marketization and managerialization of the education system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the operations of OFSTED bear directly on inspectors and teachers, it provides good opportunities to study the effects on them of restructuring and how they cope with the powers of the state. The values behind the new reforms contrast sharply with the prevailing child-centred discourse preferred by primary school teachers. Inspectors, in the actual execution of inspections, represented themselves as moderating their approach in a kind of humanistic manage which apparently goes some way to meeting the teachers' position. However, this is not how the inspections were experienced by the teachers. They were conscious of a deep and damaging value clash in the areas of knowledge, pedagogy, assessment and culture. Their lives, selves and work became colonized by the OFSTED process. At the more traumatic moments, they flit deprofessionalized. Like the inspectors, however, they devised their own coping strategies, involving both distancing and engagement, staging performances and various other strategical measures. Both inspectors and teachers avail themselves of a range of discourses in negotiating personal ways through structural constraints. However, their solutions are boundaried in their own life worlds rather than meeting across them in common purpose. They are personal, rather than structural, solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]