Chapter 5:'Crisis' in the Classroom?

This chapter discusses the crisis in education in Great Britain. While the legislation governing education in Britain provides for children and young people to be tutored at home or in fee-paying residential schools, the majority attend compulsory day schools from the ages of 5 to 16. Late nineteenth century educational reforms were seen as progressive and enabling insofar as children, for the first time, received formal education as an integral part, if not right, of childhood. Traditional theories of education, while diverse, broadly accepted that the function of school was to prepare children and young people for life and adulthood, ensuring the acquisition of appropriate knowledge, skills, attitudes and values in a structured and disciplined environment. What was deemed appropriate, however, was determined primarily by the correspondence, in terms of curriculum relevance and appropriate skills, between schooling and work. While this broad framework has prevailed, critical approaches have challenged the consensual representation of schooling, exposing the formal processes as regulatory and determining, derived in and reflective of broader structural inequalities within the political economy. The reaffirmation of traditional principles and the attack on pluralist ideals concerning consensus became hallmarks of the New Right agenda brought to fruition by successive Thatcher administrations. The full range of recent education reform is considered and critiqued in the context of a rights approach to children and schooling.