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The identification and dissemination of 'good practice' has for years been a central part of the Government's strategy for radical change of the education system. 'Good practice', however, is no longer good enough, nor is 'best practice'. The requirement now for post-compulsory education and training (from which all our examples are taken) is nothing less than 'excellent practice for all'. This article critically examines these highly significant shifts in the rhetoric of policy, finds them wanting and argues that we need to face up to the complexities involved in deciding not only what is 'excellent practice' but also in working through all the stages which would be needed to transmit it throughout the sector. In particular, recent documents from the Quality Improvement Agency and the Learning and Skills Council on the pursuit of excellence are critically appraised. The views of those practitioners who are part of the authors' project in the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme are also explained in relation to 'good practice'. The authors attempt to explain the frenetic activity of politicians and policy makers in this sector, and end by moving from critique to construction by considering what can be rescued from the inherently contestable notion of 'good practice', and, in doing so, draw heavily on the work of Robin Alexander. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TLRP project reported on in this article attempts to understand how the Learning and Skills sector functions. It traces how education and training policy percolates down through many levels in the English system and how these levels interact, or fail to interact. The authors first focus upon how policy impacts upon the interests of three groups of learners: unemployed people in adult and community learning centres, adult employees in work-based learning and younger learners on Level 1 and Level 2 courses in further education. They focus next upon how professionals in these three settings struggle to cope with two sets of pressures upon them: those exerted by government and a broader set of professional, institutional and local factors. They describe in particular how managers and tutors mediate national policy and translate it (and sometimes mistranslate it) into local plans and practices. Finally, the authors criticise the new government model of public service reform for failing to harness the knowledge, good will and energy of staff working in the sector, and for ignoring what constitutes the main finding of the research: the central importance of the relationship between tutor and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article rejects the powerful consensus in the UK and beyond to the effect that lifelong learning is a wonder drug which, on its own, will solve a wide range of educational social and political ills. The main features of the consensus are encapsulated in a few central tenets and their influence demonstrated by a few representative quotations. Ten key problems with the consensus are listed and this analysis prompts the question, if the thesis is so poor, why is it so popular? Alternative visions of the learning society and of lifelong learning are then presented, including a sceptical version of lifelong learning as social control which treats lifelong learning not as a self-evident good but as contested terrain between employers, unions and the state. Finally, some reflections are offered on possible ways forward. Both the critique of the dominant consensus and the suggestions for policy have been shaped by the Economic and Social Research Council's Learning Society Programme and by the findings produced so far by its 14 projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]