The Pendulum Swings: Transforming School Reform

Discontent with failed, top-down reform and the immediate prospect of political change have created a rare opportunity to reinvent education policy and to think afresh about how teachers and children should be encouraged to develop their full potential. "The Pendulum Swings" explores alternative, genuinely transformative conceptions of leadership and learning and shows how they could become the foundation for effectively improving our schools. Since 1988, education reform has been driven by what Bernard Barker shows to be a delusion. The notion that learning can be improved through market place competition, regulation and inspection, quick leadership fixes, and best practice recipes, has proved wholly untrue. New Labour's education policies have become the single biggest obstacle to school improvement. In the year of a general election, the pendulum in education is swinging away from markets and measurement towards a humane and professional approach to schools and learning. This timely book shows that policy makers must change their thinking completely, or schools will be trapped in cycles of perpetual change that lead nowhere. This book includes a preface, Getting the Boys to Sing, and the following chapters: (1) Introduction: The Dynamics of School Reform; (2) Must the Disadvantaged Fail?; (3) Markets and Competition; (4) Imagine an End to Failure; (5) Bastards and Prophets; (6) Best Practice; (7) Progressive Alternatives; and (8) Transforming School Reform.