The substantive contents of these analytic frames, and their linkages with each other, ought to become plain as the reader works through Chapters 4 to 6, but the essence of the argument is briefly noted here. It is argued that there are linkages between models of government, values, definitions of feelings or affect, and knowledge structures or epistemologies which may not be rigorous or predictable but which none the less emerge as important and relevant. For example, the belief in the professional control of schools carries with it assumptions, often implicit and unclarified, about the nature of democracy and participation. It entails assumptions about the purposes of education and of schooling and about the feelings, or affect, which are aroused by particular forms of power relationships between teachers, the larger political system, and client groups such as parents and pupils. The professional model of accountability rests on assumptions, too, about how knowledge is generated, how it is communicated, and the ways in which different forms of the curriculum lend themselves to external control. But these assumptions are often advanced from a particular professional or political standpoint and may not reckon with the many variations in linkages that do, in fact, exist in the actual world of work and of institutional life. Thus professionals respond to quite different notions of moral duty: their relationships might be driven by a strong sense of duty, or a strong sense of giving (altruism), or by notions of exchange in which individual advantage is derived from particular forms of reciprocal giving and taking. These relationships between individuals and the larger group, and teachers and the larger society, can be and, it is argued here, should be broken down analytically if students of educational governance are not to be faced with unrealistically large packages of received wisdom which ignore variability and complexity. The policy analyst and the student of institutional theory alike ought to attempt to disentangle different concepts if they are to make sense of complex areas of public concern.

A further preliminary point should be made. In this book, existing analysts of education accountability are criticised because they rest on diffused definitions of accountability. The diffuseness emerges from a tendency to include the consequences of a defined state within the definition itself. Of these, the most important assumption is that public control necessarily ties with notions of productivity or even the maintenance of the industrial order. This book states the claim for bounded definitions which leave room for the separate exploration of what may be a wide and differing range of consequences. In so doing, the aim is to enhance the logical quality of the analysis and not to dismiss the evaluation of consequences or, indeed, the right of colleague academics to give warnings about those consequences.

In attempting to make sense of education accountability it is necessary to identify first the dominant normative theories, that is, statements of the desirable purposes and modes of accountability. These, together with analyses of policy goals and conflicts, can be set within two contexts. The first is empirical and entails description of what now happens. The second is conceptual and should aim to be a rigorous analysis of the principal concepts and their implications.

In aiming at these objectives it is not possible or appropriate to offer tidily bounded policy options between which clear choices can be made. Superficially similar normative models may be understood and used at different times by different people to promote varied values and to engender different impacts.

What is offered here are lines of analysis through which the political, conceptual and moral choices that need to be made can be explored more thoroughly. If this ambition is achieved it will be because of the attempt to demonstrate how issues of education accountability are linked with fundamental beliefs about political institutions and moral values, about the impacts of institutions on people’s feelings about themselves and their sense of worth, and about the nature and purpose of education itself.

There is first the empirical issue: what is the problem of accountability in education?

The policy problem is that whilst education is financed and sponsored as a public activity, it is offered in institutions which are largely closed to public scrutiny and difficult to supervise from the outside. As much as they may feel underprivileged and handicapped in the fulfilment of difficult tasks, teachers have enormous power to affect the future of young people. Their rights are entrenched in employment contracts which confer tenure without specifying detailed duties. Young people must attend for 11 years institutions controlled by teachers. Teachers have authority to administer teaching and learning based on curricula and syllabuses which they devise. Although the curriculum bears the imprint of externally endorsed demands and values it is primarily a product of teacher selection of knowledge and skills. At the same time, teachers are subject to largely hierarchical systems led by elected politicians who increasingly assert the right to exercise lay surveillance of what teachers do.

Examining the relationships between individual practitioners and the publicly provided system which employs them raises the problem of conflicting desirables. If accountability can be defined as a condition in which individual role holders are liable to review and the application of sanctions if their actions fail to satisfy those with whom they are in a relationship of accountability, a whole set of dualities emerges for resolution. Teachers are publicly employed but need reasonable working privacy if they are to be creative. Their rights as professionals need to be matched with those of client groups and of the larger society which might seek explanations of, or enforce demands about, what the schools do. Teachers’ work is generated internally within schools but in important respects is externally regulated. Several tensions thus arise between the private and the public, the individual and the collective, rights and duties, discretion and prescription, and responsibility and accountability.

A second set of issues concerns the location of accountability: where is the authority to hold educators to account? Because, in effect, claims to authority are made at many levels, there is the potential for perpetual conflict between different groups all of whom have a legitimate voice in determining educational objectives and standards. There is the state which can claim to use its central and unifying authority to treat education as a national issue. There is the local authority running locally provided services and no less mandated to assert value positions. There are many different interests in conflict about a service whose purposes are not definitive. There are clients, the parents and pupils and students, who might lay claim to help determine the service which is intended to help the individual and his^* self-development. And, increasingly in recent years, there are other groups such as employers, or minority groups seeking to remove the causes of deprivation, who might wish to assert particular stand points and particular emphases in the use of power. There are, too, the teachers themselves, claiming the right to self-accountability on the basis of the expertise and moral authority of a profession.