Policy and Power in Education

The fortunes of the education service in Britain have been intimately bound up with the vitality of the Local Education Authorities (LEAs), particularly in the decades following the 1944 Education Act. The passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act saw the LEAs in serious, perhaps terminal, decline. This book sets out to map the contours of this decline in power. It relates these changing fortunes not only to the social and political environment in Britain but also to wider developments in the industrialized world. It argues that post-colonial decline, economic retreat and insular self-satisfaction combined with basic structural flaws in the LEA system has threatened the LEA system in the last decade. The capacity of the system to reform itself into more responsive modes is left as an open question, in the face of ever tightening constraints from the Thatcherite tendency in government. The associated challenge to the curriculum is also explored, with the suggestion that an over-prescribed and specified curriculum will prove to be maladaptive against rapidly changing conditions for the 21st century.