A Student's Guide to Education Studies

Catherine A. Simon, Stephen Ward, Catherine A. Simon, Stephen Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000767254
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new edition of A Student's Guide to Education Studies is an essential resource for any undergraduate making their first explorations into the fascinating world of education. It explores a wide range of alternative visions of education encouraging students to challenge the perceived notions about learning and knowledge.

Offering new perspectives and powerful ideas for discussion on a variety of long-standing topics such as class, race and gender, the book is organised around five enduring themes: Policy and Politics, Global and Environmental Education, Knowledge and Learning, Childhood and Youth, Professionalism and Employment. With a distinctive international and global focus, this new edition has been extensively updated to reflect the latest research and thinking in the field and features new chapters on:

• The sociology of education and the philosophy of education
• Inclusion
• Childhood and youth
• Professionalism and work-based learning
• Populism in politics

Including summary points, questions for discussion and annotated suggestions for further reading, this book provides the theoretical background needed to carry out a critical analysis of education policy and practice and is an essential resource for all students of Education Studies.

Section 1

Policy and politics

Chapter 1

Education policy and the marketisation of education

Stephen Ward

Introduction

This chapter explains the political and economic influences on education in England. While there have been similar developments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and across many industrial nations, it is England which has experienced the extreme effects of educational politics. For over a century, education policy has swung between benign indifference, micro-management and free-market economics. The chapter introduces: trends in government policy in England since 1870, political theories and their effects on education policy, and the development of market forces in education.

The beginnings of education policy

We are now so used to government education policy dictating the nature of schooling and education that we tend to take it for granted. But political control varies in different countries and it has changed over time in England. In the 1830s and 1840s schooling for some factory and workhouse children was provided by church foundations (see Chapter 10), but education was mainly for the wealthy in independent fee-paying schools. Only in 1870, later than in other countries in Europe, did the Forster Education Act introduce compulsory state elementary schooling for all. The early influence of the church continues to the present day when there are still large numbers of Church of England (CofE) schools and academies.

In the nineteenth century the industrial revolution and its colonial powers made the British economy the envy of the world. The secret of its success was what economists call ‘liberal economics’: no state interference in production, with employers free to charge as much as possible for their products and pay as little as they need to their workers. Providers compete with each other, become more efficient, and the economy grows. However, liberal economics creates wide differentials between rich and poor and by 1870, after years of unfettered free markets, British society was close to breakdown. It was time for government to intervene, and the 1870 Education Act was one of a series of reforms to protect the welfare of the poor.

When a government provides education, it wants to make the service ‘accountable’ to ensure that the tax-payer is getting ‘value for money’. The first attempt at education policy was simple: children were taught a basic curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic and given moral and religious instruction, reflecting the beliefs and values of the day. To ensure that children were taught the curriculum Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMIs) tested them to determine the level of teachers’ pay: the so-called ‘payment-by-results scheme’.

The political consensus on education

The 1902 Balfour Education Act saw the abolition of payment-by-results, handing control of schooling and the curriculum to the teaching profession. It was an implicit statement of faith in teachers and, for the greater part of the twentieth century, left England with no national curriculum and no structure for monitoring what was going on in its schools. Midway through the century the 1944 Butler Education Act introduced compulsory secondary education, but again did not stipulate a curriculum, except for compulsory religious education and a daily act of corporate Christian worship. In setting up compulsory secondary education, a tripartite system of selective and non-selective schools was constructed: grammar schools for the ‘academically able’, technical schools for the ‘technologically able’ and secondary modern schools for those destined for a non-academic and non-technical future. The system was based upon the psychological theory that intelligence testing at age 10 – the 11 plus – could sort the child population into these categories. In reality, few technical schools were built and, in many areas of the country, children were destined for either the grammar school or secondary modern as the country turned its attention to post-war economic needs.

The two main political rivals in the UK are the Conservative and Labour parties. The right-wing Conservative Party has been committed to ‘freedom’ and the protection of property rights in the liberal economic tradition, whereas the left-wing Labour Party has been inclined to state intervention with publicly-funded services – schools, hospitals, social workers – to protect the welfare of all. Traditionally, the Labour Party would have higher taxation to fund welfare services, whereas the Conservative Party would charge lower taxes to leave people with personal wealth to spend on services as they wish. Conservatives have criticised Labour for intervening in people’s lives.

After World War II the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes became dominant. Keynes argued that the state should be an employer, and that the economy would be successful in a more equal society in which the population was supported by social services, health and education. This became the direction of social policy in Britain with the creation of the National Health Service, social services and free primary and secondary education for all. Political interest in education lay mainly in debates about types of schools, social class and access to schooling. Conservatives argued for selective grammar schools to preserve high standards for an elite, usually middle-class, group. Labour campaigned for equal access for all, regardless of social class, and from 1965 tried to introduce secondary comprehensive schools open to all pupils regardless of income or ability. However, schools were controlled by local education authorities (LEAs) and some Conservative authorities chose to retain selective grammar schools. The left wing of the Labour Party wanted to get rid of independent fee-paying schools as bastions of privilege, but of course they continued.

During this long debate about access and social class, central government took little or no interest in the curriculum, in teaching or in the running of schools. The administration and monitoring of education was left to the local authorities and a small number of HMIs. The tacit agreement not to interfere with schools Lawton (1992) calls a ‘political consensus’ on education. Economics, again, are important in understanding this ‘hands-off’ approach. During the twentieth century the British economy continued to be strong, and so, for politicians, there was no need to worry about the education system: it could be left to the local authorities and teachers.

Education and the global economy

The oil crisis of the 1970s brought indifference to an end. Conflict in the Middle East and the loss of Britain’s colonial control led to increasing oil prices which hit production in all the European economies. At the same time, there were concerns about rising crime, lower moral standards and the breakdown of traditional moral codes. Politicians looked for culprits, and in 1976 Jim Callaghan (1976), Labour Prime Minister, accused schools of failing to equip young people for industry: falling school standards were the cause of the nation’s economic and social ills.

By the 1980s the effects of the global economy were being realised with the Asian ‘tiger’ economies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan producing better industrial goods more cheaply and sucking away customers from Britain. Their education systems appeared to benefit from teaching basic skills through traditional methods. Making the curriculum suited to industrial production was seen as one of the means of enabling Britain to compete, and the government began to treat education as the principal means of training industry for competition in the world by becoming more vocationally oriented.

The New Right: neoliberal economics and the marketisation of education

The 1979 general election brought a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. She criticised Keynesian economics and social policy for creating a ‘nanny state’ in which people cease to be independent, functioning human beings. Her plan was to reduce taxation, ‘roll back the state’ and allow people greater personal control over their lives. This was the so-called ‘New Right’ politics, derived from nineteenth-century liberalism and so known as ‘neo[new]liberalism’. Its ideas are based on the social philosopher Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992) who argued in his book The Road to Serfdom (1991) that the welfare state disables creative energy and that individual freedom, while appearing self-serving and greedy, actually brings public good. For education, neoliberal economics means introducing the competition which made commerce successful. Neoliberals want a ‘free market’ in education: education becomes a commodity which is bought and sold; schools are the providers and parents and children the consumers, or ‘customers’.

It was only after Thatcher’s third election win, and twelve years after Callaghan’s warning speech, that neoliberal politics arrived with the Education ‘Reform’ Act of 1988. The act is well known for introducing a national curriculum and standardised testing, but it also introduced ‘local management of schools’ (LMS). This took financial control away from the local authorities by delegating the spending budget to schools. Schools were to use the money as they wished: to appoint teaching staff or non-teaching assistants, purchase more computers or repair the roof. Such decisions were now to be taken by the headteacher and the governing body of the school, not by local authority officials. LMS made schools into business corporations competing for pupils. The role of school governors was strengthened to get rid of ‘provider capture’: education was to be determined by the ‘customers’, not the providers, the education professionals.

The principle was consumer choice with education accountable to its ‘customers’. But schools are not open with their goods on display like shops in the high street. So the machinery of a national curriculum, testing, league tables and Ofsted inspection was needed to bring education into the market. It was intended to change education from a public ‘good’ – a service provided by professionals to everyone for the benefit of everyone – to education as a commodity which can be purchased. Sometimes referred to as ‘Thatcherism’, it is part of a broader political movement taking place in many parts of the world. (See Chapter 8.)

LMS seems contradictory. On the one hand, the government had taken central control of the curriculum and national testing, but it had de-centralised spending and management. While the 1988 Act appears to devolve power from government to schools, it actually increased the power of central government by disempowering the local authorities. Legislation in 1992 introduced the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) with powers to inspect every school in the state system every four years. The Ofsted Frameworks for Inspection give the most detailed list of every possible dimension of a school’s work and can be seen as part of a general trend in society towards increased accountability and surveillance. It is difficult to convey the magnitude and complexity of the systems which were put in place for education by the legislation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They generated prodigious amounts of consultative documents and a variety of government agencies. Another apparent contradiction is that Thatcher, a neoliberal politician who talked of ‘rolling back government’, introduced this welter of legislation which was designed to control and regulate education. Gray (1998:17) explains that free-market economics cannot happen without government intervention. The idea of neoliberals that free markets do everything and no government is needed is just too simple:

… encumbered markets are the norm in every society, whereas free markets are a product of artifice, design and political coercion. Laissez-faire must be centrally planned: regulated markets just happen. The free market is not, as New Right thinkers have imagined or claimed, a gift of social evolution. It is an end-product of social engineering and unyielding political will.

So there was no contradiction: the free market needed customers to be able to choose between schools, and gove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Section 1 Policy and politics
• Section 2 Global and environmental education
• Section 3 Knowledge and learning
• Section 4 Childhood and youth
• Section 5 Professionalism and employment
• Notes on contributors
• Index