The ongoing shift towards marketised education is combined with an authoritarian and nostalgia-driven approach to curriculum
Michael Gove's education bill, published last week, offers another set of small moves and incursions that are moving English education further away from a common, comprehensive system and gradually closer to a patchwork of diverse provisions and providers. In fact, the system is beginning to look more and more like it did prior to 1870.
Two things are happening at the same time and underlie the general shift towards an education market. One is more autonomies for individual schools or groups of schools. The other is more powers accumulated by the secretary of state himself ? a fragmented centralisation. This again follows the trend of his predecessors since 1988.
One way of making sense of all of this is as a softening up of the system for further privatisations. The abolition of the General Teaching Council, the Training and Development Agency for Schools and the Support Staff Negotiating Body all contribute to making the school workforce (and we can no longer think just about teachers as delivering education) more flexible and potentially more manageable and cheaper. Salary costs are the major issue for for-profit providers.
There are also small but significant changes in the relationships between parents and schools. The schools adjudicator will no longer be able to modify school admissions arrangements in response to a complaint, neither will parents be able to complain to the local commissioner. Again, small moves, but ones which increase the possibility for schools to "manage" their recruitment and which call into question the long-term viability of the school admissions code of practice, to which the coalition is only weakly committed. Again these freedoms make the system more profit-friendly.
At the other end of all of this is the national curriculum, the "terms of trade" in the education market, and the increasing powers transferred to the secretary of state. During the last week, in a series of interviews, we have gained some insight into Gove's vision for the curriculum, based on his own school experiences, which seemed to consist of learning the capitals of obscure countries and memorising list of English kings and queens and the periodic table. Not exactly a curriculum for the 21st century or a pedagogy that recognises the recent focus in schools on student learning.
Just like under Margaret Thatcher, education is to be subject to a two-pronged process of change. On the one hand is the free market economics of choice, competition and contestability, opening up new routes of entry and exit into school provision. On the other, the authoritarian, elite, nostalgic Conservatism that is founded on a "curriculum of the dead" and the minute correctness of school uniforms. There are two political fantasies here. One is a fantasy market of perfect choice and perfect competition. The other is a fantasy curriculum based on Boy's Own comics and a vision of England rooted in the one-nation Toryism of Disraeli, Baldwin and Butler.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/31/michael-gove-education-bill
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