Educational progress and economic change: Notes on some recent proposals

This article discusses some recent attempts to develop an economic case that can justify proposals for curricular and institutional reform in education of a radical kind. It investigates the claim, which underpins current debates around a Labour Party alternative to Conservative education policy, that a new phase of development, often referred to as ‘post‐Fordism’, of the dominant economies of the western world provides the basis, and the necessity, for a new system of education which would realise a programme of egalitarian and democratic reform.