R. Doherty

SOCIAL CAPITAL, SOCIAL INCLUSION AND CHANGING SCHOOL CONTEXTS: A SCOTTISH PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT: This paper synthesises a collaborative review of social capital theory, with particular regard for its relevance to the changing educational landscape within Scotland. The review considers the common and distinctive elements of social capital, developed by the founding fathers – Putnam, Bourdieu and Coleman – and explores how these might help to understand the changing contexts and pursue opportunities for growth.

Education, neoliberalism and the consumer citizen: after the golden age of egalitarian reform

In this paper I attempt to explore the implications for education policy arising from aspects of Third Way political thought and its troubled relation to neoliberalism. In particular, the implications for equality arising from Third Way reforms to secondary education are considered. The limits of contestation that mark out the centre ground of UK politics have become increasingly consolidated around neoliberal ideas and principles. I briefly outline a ‘golden age’ of egalitarian reform and its displacement by the emergence of neoliberalism. Neoliberal restructuring is implicated in the emergence of the market state, the establishment of the relation of the individual to the state as one of consumer citizen, the growth of individualism, and a likely increase in competition to fend off downward social mobility. The paper concludes that the future compass for reforms aimed at reducing educational inequality now looks increasingly restricted and narrowed.

Professionalism and partnership: panaceas for teacher education in Scotland?

A critical reading of the Donaldson Report on teacher education in Scotland reveals what might be termed a ‘panacea approach’ to addressing perceived current problems in relation to the quality of teacher education. In particular, the essence of the Donaldson Report is that teachers need to embrace ‘twenty-first century professionalism’ through a partnership approach to teacher education. However, neither ‘professionalism’, nor ‘partnership’ are defined or justified explicitly. Through critical discourse analysis, we offer possible interpretations of professionalism and partnership within the context of the Donaldson Report. These interpretations include accepting the use of such terms as simple unconscious and uncritical adherence to a dominant discourse, and the idea that the wholesale embracing of partnership is a much more insidious attempt by the state to promote network governance, thereby limiting potential dominance of any one particular stakeholder group. Through systematic consideration of the immediate textual context of phrases relating to professionalism and partnership, and through a more holistic analysis of the wider policy agenda, we offer a critical reading of the Report. We conclude with a plea that as the rush to attend to the more tangible, operational aspects of the proposed reform gather momentum, such a panacea approach to solving perceived problems needs to be critiqued openly.

Towards a Governmentality Analysis of Education Policy

This chapter attempts to draw on the idea of’ governmentality’ as developed in the latter opus of Michel Foucault in order to explore the horizon it may offer in relation to a critical policy scholarship applied to education. Critical policy analysis understands policy as an expression of political rationality, and as a constituent of the scaffolding that establishes and maintains the current political project, the project ’in motion’, that gives order and direction to the state. A characteristic of education policy under the new capitalism1 (Jessop 2000) is its unremitting disposition to fix the limits and possibilities of national projects of education at the regional, state and supranational level. Policy production now takes place in an atmosphere infused by the economic, political, social and cultural affects of globalisation. As a consequence, education policy is constructed and shaped to reflect this ’new complexity’ in the policy-making climate, a complexily comprised of the interrelation between the supranational, the nation state and the regional.