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This paper examines claims that recent reforms to UK education have led to significant organisational changes in primary school and higher education. It also examines two main theoretical explanations for these, namely post-Fordism and New Managerialism. Examples of changes in both schools and universities, including flexibility and teamwork, are explored. Up to the mid-1980s, publicly funded educational organisations did display bureaucratic features, including rules, staff hierarchies and complex procedures. However, professionals employed in these organisations retained discretion and autonomy in their work. Since then, the introduction of an audit culture and a greater emphasis on management and regulation of the work of teachers and academics has decreased discretion and autonomy. This paper suggests that theories of New Managerialism offer a more satisfactory explanation of the changes explored than post-Fordism, which has more often been used as a normative model of what contemporary organisations should look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1993 the UK Economic and Social Research Council funded the Parental and School Choice Interaction (PACSI) Study into the marketisation of education, conducted by the author along with Philip Woods and Ron Glatter of the Open University. The findings from the PACSI study highlighted the localised and complex nature of markets in education and reported the ways in which senior school managers adopted a variety of strategies to respond to the local competitive arena in which they found themselves. In more than ten years since this study the UK Government has changed from Conservative to Labour and policy discourses on choice and competition have been situated alongside those of collaboration and partnership. In this shifting policy landscape the paper utilises analytical tools and findings from the original study to revisit one of the case study areas and examines the market environment in which senior school managers find themselves today. The findings reveal a stronger ‘parent as consumer’ marketing orientation and responsiveness on behalf of schools and an environment in which competition and rivalry has intensified and continues to discursively predominate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]