Richard Hatcher

The ‘Policy Cycle’: A Ball by Ball Account

This article originates from our reading of Stephen Balls theoretical and empirical contribution to contemporary ‘education policy sociology’. It interrogates the efficacy of his theoretical eclecticism, highlighting the incompatibility in his readings, and application, of certain social and political theorists, and reappraising some of his own research findings. It follows from Stephen Balls call for papers in Journal of Education Policy (Vol. 7, No. 5) ‘on policy and theory, and dialogue and debate’ which contribute to understandings of ‘education policy analysis’.

Privatization and sponsorship: the re‐agenting of the school system in England 1

In this article I use the concept of ‘re‐agenting’ to explore and explain the role of non‐state agencies, principally private companies and business entrepreneurs, as key instruments in the government’s transformation of the school system in England. Their role takes both for‐profit and not‐for‐profit forms. The outsourcing to private companies of the implementation of government education policies and the delivery of educational services to schools and local authorities has created a profitable market. Equally significant is the growing involvement of the private sector in schools through the sponsorship of specialist schools and Academies on a non‐profit basis.

Labour, official school improvement and equality

After the experience of a Conservative government characterized by substantial social inequalities in education, what impact will the policies of the new Labour government have? In this paper I argue that Labour governments economic and social policies will tend to sustain and recreate inequality, and that its education policies are themselves governed by the same imperatives of competitiveness in the global market, human capital theory, corporate managerialism and electoral calculation. The resulting agenda, which I have called Official School Improvement, is not orientated towards effectively tackling education inequality in terms of either its conceptual base, its aims or its policies.

RESEARCHING RESISTANCE: CAMPAIGNS AGAINST ACADEMIES IN ENGLAND

ABSTRACT:  This article uses social movement theory to analyse campaigns against a new type of government-sponsored school – the Academy – in four areas of England. It seeks to identify the social composition of anti-Academy campaigns, to track their encounters with proponents of the new schools and to describe the characteristic forms of their campaigning strategies. In doing so, the article aims to help place research into educational opposition and contestation closer to the centre of researchers’ agendas.

EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS AND ECONOMIC CHANGE: NOTES ON SOME RECENT PROPOSALS

Abstract 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.

British Schools for British Citizens

Abstract This article explores the contention that the National Curriculum (NC) for 5‐16 year olds in England and Wales provides ‘entitlement’ to all pupils. We interrogate the culturalist impulses in the NC and argue that they are anathema to the development and legitimation of anti‐racist education. After exposing the limitations of the Labour Partys alternative policy package for education we indicate how the concept of culture might be reconstructed in ways in which anti‐racist, anti‐sexist and associated social justice principles could be effectively realised.

Racist incidents in schools: a framework for analysis

In this article we want to move beyond the assembling of descriptive data on racist incidents in schools collected by researchers such as Elinor Kelly (1988) to offer a provisional theoretical model for analysing the escalation and manifestation of such events. If the efficacy of the model can be demonstrated empirically it might help us to pinpoint areas where teachers, community representatives and parents might intervene in the build‐up of racist incidents in schools.

System Change: Local Autonomy and the Evaluative State

‘Education is not for sale’ — the slogan of anti-globalisation protesters everywhere — suggests that what neo-liberalism is fundamentally ‘about’ is privatisation, and that the school is subject to an inexorable process through which it will pass from public control into the hands of private business. This is not, in fact, happening. Privatisation is certainly a powerful force, whose forms we sketch in our next chapter. It is best understood, however, not as the key that unlocks the ultimate meaning of contemporary education, but as one part of a more general process of transformation, by means of which schooling is remade so as to align it more closely to social change. The ‘truth’ of the protestors’ slogan is that this is a process that is taking place ‘under the sign of capital’, so that reforms that are motivated in terms of the need for education to respond to new complexities and social diversities, and therefore appear to have a strong element of technical rationality, turn out to be articulated with perspectives in which the relationship of schooling to the interests of business — broadly understood — is dominant.

An Emerging Order

We write in this book about the remaking of schooling in Western Europe, and the policy orthodoxy — promoted by supranational organisations, shared across frontiers — that is so powerful an influence upon it. We draw much from others who have worked in this field before us — from theorists who have analysed the scalar shift in policymaking from national to supranational level; from sociologists who have traced both the classic patterns of schooling’s regulation and their new forms; and from those who have delineated the repertoire and discursive nuances of the new world order in education.1 To this now-abundant literature, we bring something of our own. Our particular interest is in the contestation that attends supranational policy orthodoxy — how its arrival within the major countries of Western Europe has been the occasion for widespread criticism, discontent and mobilisation. This terrain, on which are fought out disputes central to the ways in which Europe’s present is understood and its future imagined, has not been so well explored by researchers, even when their sympathies have been engaged by those who challenge the new order.

Human Resources: Students

Previous chapters have dealt with the advent of neo liberal ideology in relation to other formerly hegemonic, contested and contesting discourses. They have discussed transformations in curricula and pedagogy in the macro context of wide-ranging Europeanising reforms and traced the latter’s uneven path through the erosion of collective identities and the emergence of a competitive individualism compatible with the knowledge economy. Here we attempt to sketch an outline of how all of this has impacted on contemporary student subjectivities, how they are constructed, disciplined and positioned in a context where economic discourses prevail and citizenship is weak; and how educational systems geared to the exigencies of the knowledge economy contribute to establishing the co-ordinates of a transformed and transforming symbolic framework. Of course, the extent to which any discourse is ‘heard, believed and obeyed’1 depends on a variety of factors — social, semiotic and cultural — as well as those pertaining to an economy where huge structural differences in sectoral unemployment and real expectations heavily influence credibility levels. These factors, though sufficiently common for us to speak of shared experiences across Europe, also differ according to national circumstance.