Sally Power

Managing the State and the Market: 'New' Education Management in Five Countries

Within the field of education management studies, recent reforms promoting devolution and choice are often seen to provide exciting new opportunities. It is claimed that the ‘new’education management, with its emphasis on site-based decision-making and consumer accountability, will enable headteachers and principals to ‘take control’ of their schools and make them more productive environments in which to work and study. However, our review of research findings from five different countries that are putting in place devolution and choice policies suggests that these new opportunities are more illusory than real. Positioned between the competing demands of the state and the market, school managers are becoming increasingly isolated from colleagues and classrooms — leading to a growing divergence between the managers and the managed. The paper considers the implication of recent developments for managers in general and for women managers in particular and concludes by discussing the relationship between the ...

Moving Back from Comprehensive Secondary Education

At times during several decades of spasmodic movement towards and away from comprehensive secondary education, a change of government has brought an abrupt shift in policy. Circular 10/65, issued by the Labour Government elected in 1964, seemed an important turning point, even though a majority of Local Education Authorities (LEAs) were already planning or considering the comprehensive reorganization which all of them were now ‘requested’ to make. In 1970, a Bill to make that request into a requirement was nullified by the Conservative election victory. The response of Ted Short, Labour’s Secretary of State, to accusations of being dictatorial had been that a consistent national policy must take precedence over LEA autonomy: ‘if it is wrong to select and segregate children’, he argued, then ‘it must be wrong everywhere’ (quoted in Kerckhoff et al. 1996, p. 34). Yet his Conservative successor, Margaret Thatcher, promptly issued Circular 10/70 reaffirming LEAs’ freedom to decide whether, when and how to end academic selection, although even her own high regard for grammar schools could not slow down what she later recalled as the ‘roller coaster’ of comprehensive reform. The 1974–79 Labour administration reaffirmed central government’s commitment to a comprehensive system of state education by forcing the ‘direct-grant’ grammar schools to choose between remaining academically selective or continuing to receive public grants.