Learning Policy: Towards a Certified Society?

Learning Policy Towards the Certified Society

Patrick Ainley

LEARNING POLICY

Also by Patrick Ainley DEGREES OF DIFFERENCE: Higher Education in the 1990s CLASS AND SKILL: Changing Divisions of Knowledge and Labour YOUNG PEOPLE LEAVING HOME VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING FROM SCHOOL TO YTS APPRENTICESHIP: Towards a New Paradigm for Learning (edited with Helen Rainbird) THE BUSINESS OF LEARNING: Staff and Student Experiences of Further Education in the 1990s (with Bill Bailey) TRAINING FOR THE FUTURE: The Rise and Fall of the Manpower Services Commission (with Mark Corney) BEYOND COMPETENCE: The National Council for Vocational Qualifications Framework and the Challenge to Higher Education in the New Millennium (with Moti Gokulsing and Tony Tysome)

Learning Policy Towards the Certified Society Patrick Ainley Reader in Learning Policy School of Post-Compulsory Education and Training University of Greenwich London

First published in Great Britain 1999 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–75034–9 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22230–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ainley, Patrick. Learning policy : towards the certified society / Patrick Ainley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22230–0 (cloth) 1. Education and state—Great Britain. 2. Economic development– –Effect of education on. 3. Occupational training—Government policy—Great Britain. 4. Vocational education—Great Britain. 5. Great Britain—Social policy. I. Title. LC93.G7A76 1999 379.42—dc21 99–18546 CIP © Patrick Ainley 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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The greatest thing You’ll ever learn Is just to love And be lov’d in return. Nat King Cole

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Contents Introduction:The Emergence of Learning Policy Learning or Unlearning? Living and Learning Outline of the Book

1 1 4 9

1

Tripartite Schooling, 1944–63 The Postwar Welfare State Settlement The Way We Were Peculiarities of the English

27 27 33 48

2

Comprehensive Schooling, 1963–76 Comprehensive Reform What Went Wrong Technical Training and the Tertiary Option

59 59 68 82

3

Training without Jobs, 1976–87 Introduction The ‘Vision’ of the Manpower Services Commission The Quango under Thatcher The New, Contracting, post-Welfare State

88 88 90 99 108

4

Education without Jobs, 1987–97 A New Settlement of Education Higher Education in the 1990s Trahison des Clercs? The Awful Example of Further Education

118 118 129 140 149

5

New Learning under New Labour? Extending the New Settlement ‘Full Employability’ Levels of Learning and Levels of Earning ‘Dumbing Down’

157 157 171 180 192

Conclusion: Towards a New Alternative

197

Bibliography

214

Subject Index

227

Name Index

233 vii

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Introduction: the Emergence of Learning Policy LEARNING OR UNLEARNING? Published in the last year of the twentieth century, this book shares the view of Mike Cooley, Professor of Engineering at Bremen University, that The year 2000 could and should provide a powerful stimulus to examine where we are going as a society. To do so at a macro level, we will require the perspective of a historian, the imagination of a poet, the analytic ability of a scientist, and the wisdom of a Chief Seattle . . . [For] It seems self evident that developing the skill and knowledge necessary in the 21st Century will require nothing short of a ‘cultural and industrial renaissance’ . . . [and that] Our current educational systems are fundamentally inappropriate and woefully inadequate to address this historical task. (Cooley, 1993, p. 2) While the author can hardly claim the qualities that Mike demands for such a task, the book is written as a contribution to the debate that is necessary if humanity is to survive the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand. Attention throughout is focused on England, though the trends described there are common to other developed and to some developing countries. Taking English education and training policies as a case study, the book argues that if society survives to the end of the next century, it will strike historians of the future as incredible that this country entered the second millennium with a system of schooling seemingly designed ‘to limit and stultify the educational process’. These, however, are words used by the great English historian of education, Brian Simon in 1974, to describe the Revised Code of payments by results introduced into English 1

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elementary schools during the second half of the previous century from 1863 (Simon, 1974, p. 116). Like the state school system of testing and inspection of the so-called ‘National’ Curriculum with which we are entering another new century, the Revised Code was intended not only to reduce government expenditure on education but – just like government measures today – ‘to concentrate the efforts of the teachers on the 3Rs . . . by forcing entirely mechanical drill methods of teaching on the schools’ (ibid., p. 115). As a result, ‘Between 1862 and 1890 . . . the Revised Code came near to the point of stupefying children . . . The child was literally sacrificed to the system’ (Smith, in ibid., p. 118). Now we have once again reached a point of similar absurdity on all levels of institutionalised learning from primary to postgraduate schools when, in the former, more money is spent on testing the reading of seven year olds than on providing books for them to read. In the latter, research staff similarly spend more time writing research bids – most of which, like National Lottery tickets, are bound to be unsuccessful – than actually doing research. Looking thus at the system of education and training as a whole from ‘foundation learning’ in compulsory state schooling to post-compulsory ‘lifelong learning’ in further, higher and continuing education and training thereafter, it will be argued that the system that has been imposed by the current direction of learning policy in this country is once again in danger of stupefying the students and trainees who are ‘sacrificed’ to it. As the Nexus Education and Training Group, set up to advise the New Labour government, told a Downing Street seminar: ‘the current emphases in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment may inhibit effective learning and produce systematic, trained incapacities’ because ‘the predominance of an “economic” agenda in education policymaking and the neglect of the social effects and purposes of education are producing social problems which may very well have damaging long term effects for British society.’ Particularly, ‘current external tests at 7, 11 and 14 do such damage to learning that they cannot be justified’ (reported by Ball (1998) in Education Today and Tomorrow, Vol. 50, No. 2). The effect, if not the intention of these learning policies is to produce what The Times referred to as ‘an educational underclass’, even as it

Introduction

3

endorsed the government’s approach by publishing its own league table of the ‘top one hundred’ school A-level point scores on 27 August 1998. Just like the Revised Code of a century earlier, though no longer restricted merely to elementary schooling but extended to Lifelong ‘Learning unto death’ (Rikowski, 1999), the state’s learning policy aims in essence at social control. Its intention is to make the masses tread once more what the Apostate Victorian Chief Inspector of Schools, Edmond Holmes, called ‘the Path of Mechanical Obedience’ in the report he wrote at the end of his career on ‘What Is and What Might Be’ (see Shute, 1998). Worse than this, by confusing the memorisation of information with the acquisition of knowledge and substituting narrow vocational competences for imaginative arts and skills, state learning policy contributes to the process of ‘dumbing down’ or stupefying. This has generally been attributed to the influence of the mass media, but is more accurately identified with the commodification of all aspects of social life – including particularly learning at all levels – at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than a learning society, the current direction of learning policy moves towards a certified society in which examination and other test grades as arbitrary quantitative measures are attached to individuals. Such numbering substitutes for genuine judgements of quality and worth. It is often said that a society which does not learn from its past is doomed to repeat it. And a society which fails to learn from past experience certainly fails the most basic criterion for any sort of learning society. In failing to learn, society is in fact forgetting and becoming more not less ignorant and stupid, no matter how much the mass of circulating but not necessarily related ‘bits’ of information may have increased – arguably to the point of ‘overload’. As T.S. Eliot (1963, p. 161) asked in the often quoted lines from his ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’: ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ This loss of knowledge, if not of wisdom, is a process of regression and ‘decivilisation’ (Elias, 1994). How this loss and repetition of history came about as a consequence of

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failure to learn from the past, and how such a policy for learning at all levels came to be adopted, is the subject of this book, which points in conclusion – and throughout by implication – to the necessity for a radically alternative learning policy. Before outlining the argument of the book however, some general considerations are briefly introduced. LIVING AND LEARNING Learning provides the possibility for change to prevent at all levels, from the individual to society as a whole, the perpetuation of systematically destructive cycles of behaviour. As Sir Geoffrey Vickers wrote in his marvellous and wise book The Art of Judgement, It is on the one hand a thought overwhelmingly strange that the whole expanding corpus of human knowledge must be relearnt about three times in each century; but it is an even stranger reflection that the revolution of the generations which makes this necessary also makes possible the innovations which open the door to new knowledge of all sorts and which come, generally speaking, from the new minds of each generation. (Vickers, 1965, p. 108) For what makes human beings unique amongst animals is their ability to learn from the past to alter their behaviour in the future. This is because all the other animals lack a symbolic consciousness which can be expressed in the symbols of a proper language. Instead, animal behaviour is predominantly predetermined by inherited instincts. It is, therefore, only by genetic adaptations that their behaviour can be altered, and this is an extremely lengthy process of evolution. By contrast, human learning communicated by culture and embodied in manufactured objects – those twin creations of the two tools of language and technology – relearns and re-presents to each successive generation, as Vickers said, the whole expanding body of human knowledge about the universe we inhabit and our purposes in it. Humanity can thus justifiably be described as the learning species. In this sense the English artist, craftsman and socialist William Morris was right to say that ‘We learn to live and live to learn’.

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It has probably not been possible since the Neolithic revolution introduced settled agriculture and herding, for any one individual in any society to learn and be familiar with all the culture, technology and ‘science’ of their time. Even in hunter-gatherer societies there was a division of labour based on age and gender and hence also a division of knowledge (see Bunn, 1999). It was only when technology allowed for the production beyond a sufficiency shared amongst all members of the society that there was a surplus to feed some members of society who did not have to work to produce it. Then the mental work of organising the efforts of others emerged as a specialised occupation in its own right. The first ruling classes thus possessed what Aristotle called ‘the knowledge necessary to rule’. This ‘Official Knowledge’ of society, as Apple (1995) called it, was not a knowledge of everything but of the general rules by which the totality of known facts could be acquired and ordered. It can be called generalised knowledge and was differentiated from the vocational knowledge used in the directly productive work that all the other members of society undertook for their own and the collectivity’s benefit. As societies developed, the method of induction into this ‘knowledge necessary to rule’ became an increasingly selective apprenticeship by which the mysteries of abstracted and generalised knowledge were handed down the generations of the Guardians who had to be educated to rule. This was the origin of the Platonic Academy, which has exercised such a long-lasting influence on academic ‘higher’ education in Western Europe. This academic form of ‘Official’ or generalised knowledge was shared less and less by the majority over whom the ruling classes, or those who governed on their behalf, exercised their authority. The knowledge of the labouring majority was confined to the vocational competence necessary for them to complete their productive work. Yet, because even the most abstract academic knowledge derived ultimately from practical experience, there remained the ideal, reanimated at various times – as, for example, by some artists in the European Renaissance – of combining theory and practice in the form of what became known during the nineteenth century as polytechnic education. The ideal of polytechnic education, meaning a general

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education derived from practical work rather than abstraction arrived at by speculation and then handed down by authority, influenced socialist educators in particular. Marx’s notion of polytechnicism – even if his use of the word arose from a mistranslation from German – drew on the earlier Chartist tradition of ‘really useful knowledge’ with which English workers at the beginning of the nineteenth century sought to understand for themselves the new industrial society and how to better their place in it. For the Chartists, education in really useful knowledge occurred outside formal institutions of learning and was aimed as much at adults as at younger people. It did not aim to be purely contemplative of reality regarded objectively, as was claimed by the ‘gentlemanly’, humanist or liberal tradition of academic education inherited by the English universities from the Ancient Greeks and medieval monasticism. Instead, the Chartists sought to supersede this traditional form of knowledge, which they recognised as an ideology, by solving practical problems. Teaching was therefore a collective, twoway process abolishing the distinction between teachers and taught, in which classically, as in the Academy, the Platonic sage instructs the ignorant fool. Since the point of this learning for liberation was not merely to understand but to change the world for their own benefit as a class at the expense of their masters, working people could not rely passively on the answers handed down to them by the existing academic authorities. Instead, it was necessary ‘to educate the educators’ as really useful knowledge could only be actively discovered by learners and teachers together in a process of collective self-realisation and transformation. This alternative form of learning was, therefore, essentially democratic – not merely in that it prepared people for democratic participation in society in the way that those who grudgingly granted educational reform in nineteenthcentury England saw it as necessary ‘to educate our masters’, to some of whom they had also granted the vote. Schools and colleges would in addition be, as John Dewey, the American educational philosopher, envisioned, ‘laboratories of democracy’. Indeed, Habermas (as reported by Oelkers, 1983) understands the modernity of the European Enlightenment as an ‘educational project’. While Dewey’s fellow American

Introduction

7

and historian of US education, Robert Brosio (1994), sees democracy and education as two linked promises of equal participation in society which capitalism in the age of Enlightenment held out to its citizens against the reality of the relegation of the vast majority of them to vocationally limited wage labour. It is, Brosio argues, essential more than ever today, if society is to learn from its past through education and act democratically to alter the present course of its destructive development, that the promises of both education and democracy are realised. As the French biologist, Henri Laborit, who applied information systems theory as much to social as to organic systems, wrote, ‘The desirable objective is to generalise power, for then there will no longer be any power.’ But ‘generalised power is only possible if there is also generalised knowledge’ (Laborit, 1977, pp. 103 and 155). Of course, this is exactly what the present New Labour government claims that it is doing by its emphasis on ‘education, education, education’, linked to a commitment to economic, social and cultural ‘modernisation’. And, who can deny that, as Gordon Brown, the New Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said at the Labour Party’s first conference after returning to government in 1997, ‘when in Britain only 30 per cent of young people can benefit from higher education and when at Oxford and Cambridge half the places still go to private schools, it is time to modernize’? The government has concentrated in its modernisation of education on the effort to raise ‘standards’, particularly levels of literacy. If this effort were successful it would allow access to a level of learning that is generalisable not only through the so-called ‘transferability’ of knowledge and information which written language affords (actually, through the abstraction of knowledge from one situation to its recognition in another in some way similar). The structure and form of literary texts can also allow access to the level of generalised knowledge beyond limited, vocational information (see Barton and Hamilton, 1998). For it is surely a little remarked tragedy that the majority of the population of this country are unable, as well as often unwilling, to read a broadsheet newspaper from cover to cover so as to follow a sustained written argument – let alone enjoy a classic novel. Consequently,

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most discussion is conducted above their heads by others on their behalf, a situation to which the majority have long inured themselves. The expansion of further and higher education to include for the first time more than half of the population (a goal already achieved for higher education in Scotland and long ago attained in many other developed countries) gives, this book will argue, an opportunity to transform this tragic and unremarked situation. But the form taken by post-compulsory further and higher continuing education and training, or ‘lifelong learning’ – as it is now officially called – as well as the content given it and ‘foundation learning’ in compulsory schooling, make it less rather than more likely that this goal will be achieved. The Department for Education and Employment’s strict instructions to teachers on how to implement the literacy strategy, for instance, appear to have more to do with reintroducing streaming, setting and preferred styles of whole-class teaching into ‘elementary’ primary schools than with attaining the levels of literacy that have been set. To tell this contemporary history the author draws on and develops his previous publications. They began with From School to YTS in 1988 by looking at the introduction of the Youth Training Scheme. With Mark Corney, I then went on to tell, in Training for the Future (1990), what is still the only history of the rise and fall of the Manpower Services Commission, the then seemingly all-powerful quango which introduced YTS and which, it will be seen, exercised such a pervasive influence on the subsequent form if not the direction of learning policy. As well as systematising some of the ideas first put forward in Class and Skill, Changing Divisions of Knowledge and Labour (1993) in the light of subsequent research across the former binary divide in higher education (published in 1994 as Degrees of Difference: Higher Education in the 1990s), this book also draws on the complementary examination made with Bill Bailey of The Business of Learning: Staff and Student Experiences of Further Education in the 1990s (1997). The book also includes in part but does not reproduce in full, various reviews, articles and papers – published and unpublished but most, like the books listed above, with a very limited circulation. Some were written with colleagues, to discussions and research collaborations with

Introduction

9

whom acknowledgement can now be made, especially – as well as to my co-authors above – to Becky Francis, Diana Jones, Ian McNay, Geoff Stanton, Judith Watson, Edwin Webb and other colleagues and students at the School of Post-Compulsory Education and Training at the University of Greenwich, including amongst the latter, Chris Ryan and Karen Glanville, as well as my ‘Learning Society’ extension study class of 1998; to Martin Allen of the journal Education and Social Justice; Julian Gravatt at Lewisham College; David Guile at London University’s Institute of Education; John Offord at the National Union of Students; Glenn Rikowski at Birmingham University School of Education; Peter Robinson at the Institute for Public Policy Research; Graham Sharp at Sussex University; and the indefatigable Colin Waugh, editor of NATFHE’s General Educator, plus others too numerous to mention but amongst whom I must include Beulah and Adam Ainley. OUTLINE OF THE BOOK ‘Learning Policy’ identifies a new area of social policy which is delineated and dissected for the first time in this book. Learning policy indicates the concerted approach that many governments now take to integrate the reproduction of knowledge at all levels in the education institutions under their control with skill formation in training in and out of employment. This integration is undertaken as part of economic development alongside social policies contributing to what the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank call ‘active labour market policies’. Such measures accompany reforms to ‘passive’ welfare benefits systems which these world-leading economic bodies also advocate. As the OECD saw The Future of Social Protection in 1988, Changing economic structures and the growing challenge from more open trading systems increase the likelihood that unemployment will exist more as a consequence of structural changes than as a demand deficiency or frictional phenomenon. In these circumstances, social protection systems need to do more than simply provide

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Learning Policy

income while the individual searches for employment . . . Education and training are thus likely to become one of the main pillars of social security for tomorrow’s citizens. ‘Learning Policy’ as defined in this book is, therefore, broader than but inclusive of the related term ‘knowledge policies’, which Bergendal (1984) used to describe how modern states attempt to regulate the production of scientific knowledge in his book Knowledge Policies and the Tradition of Higher Education. To begin with, learning policy brings together education and training and, therefore, also knowledge and skill formation. The division between knowledge and skill is in any case essentially artificial, since there is no purely mental knowledge without a physical component, just as there is no distinction between mind and body (see Polanyi, 1969). The two terms should really be used interchangeably, as in the portmanteau word ‘knowledgeskills’. The division between knowledge production and knowledge reproduction is also an artificial one, as all teachers know who have to relearn what they are teaching so that they can re-present it for others to learn. While, for Vickers’ ‘new minds of each generation’, all knowledge, even the most ancient and apparently unchanged, is encountered for the first time to be interpreted afresh. All new knowledge is, moreover, essentially subversive of the existing state of affairs. As Steven Boddington wrote, ‘It reveals new possibilities’ and so ‘is always liable to overstep the bounds of the society by which it is generated’ (1978, p. 84). The management of knowledge production and reproduction is, therefore, inherently unpredictable, since new ideas arise not only in reinterpretation through teaching and learning but more deliberately in scientific discovery and artistic creation, technical invention and scholarly investigation, as well as in social activity generally, particularly through the circulation of knowledge for discussion and representation in many different media. Especially with what Michael Gibbons and his co-authors (1994) called ‘The new production of knowledge’ in contemporary societies, it is impossible for the state directly to control so many areas of human agency and imagination. Previous attempts to do so through totalitarian control failed. So learning policy by, for

Introduction

11

example, officially sanctioning the knowledge and information recognised as valid and therefore worth learning, in other words what Apple (1995) called ‘Official Knowledge’, attempts to limit the information base from which new knowledgeskills may be produced and so the likely course of ideas and human actions in the future. Learning policy is thus primarily concerned with attempting to manage knowledge and skill reproduction through education and training. This at least appears predictable and therefore regulable. The book traces the emergence of an officially statesanctioned learning policy for education and training in the United Kingdom, which from a late start has been the trailblazer for the new approach. This is not to suggest that historically other societies and states have not attempted to control knowledge and skill reproduction through education and training, nor that indeed in England previously, as Simon (1991, p. 15) wrote of the nineteenth century, there was not ‘an organised educational system (or set of subsystems) designed to reflect, and perpetuate, existing social differences’. Andy Green (1990) has also shown how, in France and Prussia for example, mass schooling was introduced by states in the process of nation formation. The closure of Socrates’ Academy by the Athenian democracy could be instanced as an even earlier example of a deliberate state learning policy. However, it will be argued that learning policy is much broader than even totalitarian control over education. Importantly, it includes training, which is nowadays conventionally bracketed together with education to form the new term ‘learning’. This learning is no longer just what occurs in schools, colleges or universities before individuals enter the labour market for which their education and training prepared them in one way or another. Learning is now lifelong and – in some of the more fantastic versions of this ‘Learning Society’ ideal – pervasive of the whole of society, linking learning not only to earning, but to leisure also, so that consumption is seen as a form of work and learning. (See the discussion in Ranson, 1994 and 1998.) The definitive change indicating the emergence of learning policy is that both education and training are linked to the economy in a systematic way which goes beyond anything that has been attempted previously. Although – again

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– it was often recognised in the past that, as Sidney Webb put it after the Boer War, ‘It is in the classrooms . . . that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost’ (quoted in Semmel, 1960, p. 73). ‘A public training policy’, wrote John Field in his 1992 history of Learning Through Labour, is essentially a modern phenomenon. In pre-modern societies, the acquisition and transfer of skill was essentially a private matter between master and apprentice, coming under state regulation mainly in so far as customary systems were seen to cause other problems for the polity (such as vagrancy). States intervene to secure and steer the supply of vocational skills only when a sufficient number of citizens, representing sufficient influence, come to the view that the knowledge and know-how available in the labour force fall seriously short of that required in order to sustain a good and secure life for ‘the nation’. Particularly is this true of Britain, where public training policies emerged in the late 19th century in response to bourgeois qualms about the efficiency of the German worker . . . (Field, 1992, p. 1) A new, much more inclusive and systematic linking of education and training was redefined as learning and connected to economic development to permeate all aspects of social life and was, it will be shown, pioneered in England during the 1970s and 1980s. This was what Field calls ‘a characteristically modern attempt to “learn our way out of crisis”’ (ibid., p. 2). It is also an example of what Keep and Mayhew (1998) called a ‘magic bullet’ solution, offering apparently simple and limited intervention by the state in one of the few remaining areas under its direct influence supposedly to bring about much wider changes. Henrietta Dombey (1998) asking ‘So why are we being force-marched along this route?’, provided an example of such a ‘quick-fix solution’ in the National Literacy Strategy: ‘Our New Labour Government needs a quick fix for economic problems, and can tolerate neither the number of children who fail to learn to read and write effectively at primary school, nor the political consequences of recognising the part played by social deprivation in this state of affairs.’ Yet, as Hirsch (1988) pointed out,

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summarising the results of US research, reading with comprehension is not an isolated competence, but a skill intimately related to and affected by the culture that the reader brings to the text. ‘There is thus’, as Paul Auerbach commented, ‘an interactive relationship between the skill of reading and the building up of a stock of knowledge . . . [so that] reading cannot be developed in a population independently of the construction of a cultural context for that reading’ (1992, p. 29). This is just what the literacy strategy attempts to do and why it will fail. The fact is that the complex economic and social problems to which learning policy promises simple solutions require much more concerted and extensive structural reform. Since this is beyond the state’s control, or the wishes and abilities of government intervention, learning policies confined to education and training can necessarily only be limited in their effects. For, to anticipate the argument of this book, the subordination of education and training to economic demand merely compounds the social and economic problems learning policy proposes to solve. Nevertheless, the English example has been widely imitated. There is now such a wide consensus on Learning Policy internationally that, for instance, the 1995 European Union White Paper on education and training, ‘Towards the Learning Society’, could declare ‘The end of debate on educational principles’ (p. 22). While in the UK, education and training (conceptually united as learning) are so closely integrated with economic policy that Gordon Brown could declare in his first Budget speech on 2 July 1997 that even ‘childcare is now an integral part of economic development’. Although Brown was referring here primarily to parents, the justification for the new and widespread consensus on integrating the economy with learning at all levels from primary to postgraduate schools is the incrementally rapid pace of technological change. ‘The role of government in this world of change’, as Tony Blair explained, ‘is . . . to educate and retrain for the next technologies, to prepare our country for new global competition, and to make our country a competitive base from which to produce the goods and services people want to buy’ (in The New Statesman, 29 September 1995).

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The United Kingdom is taken as the prime case for the development of such a Learning Policy despite the fact that throughout the period of renewed ideological and political emphasis on education from the 1970s on, education suffered a long-run decline in share of GDP. In terms of knowledge production too, OECD figures show that the UK is the only large industrialised country where R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen over the past 15 years. The percentage that employers invest in vocational training has also fallen since large-scale state intervention in this area (see chapter 3). Despite these deficiencies, the evolution of a concerted learning policy by successive UK governments has been markedly rapid. This is in contrast with the previous lack of any very strong political direction for either education or training in the former corporate – and at least partly planned – welfare state established by the postwar political settlement described in chapter 1. After the war, in what the book argues was the first phase of learning policy embodied in the 1944 Education Act, the administration of education was notoriously devolved into ‘a national system’ of schooling that was ‘locally administered’. So, despite the contemporary emphasis on planning in the corporate state, the content of schooling was virtually unprescribed. Although the Conservative Party Political Centre pamphlet One Nation argued in 1950 that ‘So long as the “cold war” against communism continues, education is more than a social service; it is part of defence’ (quoted in CCCS, 1981, p. 62), education remained only indirectly ideological. Similarly, many years later, Keith Joseph suggested in a speech to the Institute of Directors (reported in The Times Education Supplement, 26 March 1982) that they go into schools and ‘preach the moral virtue of free enterprise and the pursuit of profit’, this was but one of his several aberrations as Secretary of State for Education. Subsequently, debate centred on the extent to which the National Curriculum, which was later introduced into all state schools, should emphasise the ‘Pride in British culture and past national achievement’ that Joseph was also keen to see fostered in schools, particularly by history teaching (ibid., 15 April 1983). This was still very different from the role of teaching in the direct educational propaganda of totalitarian states.

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However, the content of the academic curriculum for the small minority of state pupils in grammar schools who were regarded in the 1950s as examinable was actually determined by the elite universities which dominated the examination boards in collusion with the leading private schools. For the remaining elementary, or primary and secondary schools, as they became – including the few technical secondary schools – it was notorious that the only compulsory element of the curriculum, regular religious instruction and a daily act of religious worship, was often ignored. Like the private schools, the ‘donnish democracies’ of the ancient universities and the departmental fiefdoms of the Victorian civic ones also ran their own affairs almost entirely unhindered by government. Meanwhile, wartime controls over training were abandoned so that apprenticeship was once again left to employers and the trades unions to sort out between themselves, also without government interference. Technical training in what became colleges of further education was also left in the hands of local authorities whose priorities for it varied considerably, as they did for the adult education and youth and community work for which they were also made responsible. In this first phase of what can now be seen as a learning policy, though it was not devised as such at the time, expert knowledge was centralised. Like power, and in so far as knowledge is power (as Francis Bacon said it was, but which it is not, incidentally), knowledge was shared between what are still known in Germany today as ‘the social partners’. These ‘two sides of industry’, as trades unions and employers used also to be known here, were brought together by government as the third party in the form of corporatism in a ‘mixed economy’ of private and state sectors. This represented also a settlement or compromise between private and state monopoly capital and was but one of many compromises necessary to sustain the overall postwar welfare settlement. The social compromise between classes and the political one between their political representatives was the most fundamental of these various settlements. The conventional social pyramid was thus preserved, the chief distinguishing feature of which was that the ‘middle’ class, intermediate between the ruling class of large employers above and the manually working

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class beneath, was rigidly segregated from the rest of the employed population. The division between mental and manual labour, between conception and execution, office and plant, was therefore the basic division of knowledge and labour in the employed or working population. Rigid Taylorism thus supplemented Fordism on the shop floor and bureaucracy within the office. As a consequence, knowledge was conceptually separated from skill with resulting theoretical confusion. This was the historical moment when, for example, behaviourism on the one hand, and IQ testing on the other, established themselves in industrial and educational psychology. An important part of this rigid division of knowledge and labour was the development of the ‘middleclass’ professions and their ideology of professionalism. These professions were augmented and sustained by the growth of welfare bureaucracies during the nearly 30 years of sustained economic growth after 1945. The second phase of the emerging learning policy, which is examined in chapter 2 began earlier but was officially signalled by the 1965 Department of Education and Science circular 10/65, which directed but still did not legally compel local education authorities to begin moves toward comprehensive reorganisation of secondary schooling. This was partly a response to demands for a greater popular share in the official, academic knowledge imparted by educational institutions and the economic benefits which its possession could bring. In addition, the scientific discrediting of IQ testing in the previous decade had undermined the justification for trisecting (male) school pupils into three types of intelligence at 11+ for entry to academic grammar, technical and secondary modern schooling. These ancient divisions between the men of gold, bronze and iron were supposed to correspond to the needs of traditional heavy industry for non-manual, skilled manual and unskilled manual labour in an approximate ratio of 20:40:40. Not only had ‘wastage of talent’ been revealed by the 1959 Crowther and 1963 Robbins Reports, but now a modernising economy was presented as offering new opportunities for individual advancement to more young men and women. This justified an expansion of higher education as well as new ideas of individual interests needing development by progressive

Introduction

17

primary schooling. The new comprehensive secondary schools also afforded a means of reducing class antagonism and increasing social cohesion. Yet, the announcement in 1965 of the binary policy in higher education by Labour Education Minister, Anthony Crosland, had the opposite effect. It shifted selection up into tertiary education just as it was beginning to be phased out of secondary schooling. The creation of the polytechnics also protected the ancient, civic and new universities from any change for nearly 30 years, perpetuating their grip on the selective examination system and thus preserving the mainstream academic curriculum in the comprehensive schools. At the same time however, further education began its unnoticed and steady expansion by offering second chances to those failed by academic schooling, as well as growing in the new areas of office and other employment beginning to be demanded by a changing economy. FE and the polytechnics also provided technical education in place of the technical secondary schools which only ever catered for 4 per cent of the secondary school population. These schools failed to establish themselves owing to the persistent English tendency towards ‘academic drift’, first identified by Burgess and Pratt in 1974. Much of FE and all of the polytechnics were later to succumb in their turn to this imitation of the elite and academic. Meanwhile in traditional industry, numbers of apprenticeships peaked in 1966, though the proportion of young workers apprenticed did not decline until its highest 25 per cent in 1969 – most of them young men. (Hairdressing was then and still is today the largest single apprenticeship, predominantly for young women.) The third phase of learning policy described in chapter 3 followed the end of the 30 year long economic boom in the oil crisis of 1973. The Industrial Training Boards were the first to fall foul of recession. They had been set up by the 1964 Industrial Training Act – almost the first statutory attempt in peacetime at reforming the training system since the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers in 1583. The ITBs were succeeded by the Manpower Services Commission as an agency of the Employment Department established by the 1973 Employment and Training Act. Although inaugurated by Ted Heath’s Conservative government as a ‘Next Steps’

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agency of the type advocated by his ‘Businessman Team’, the MSC was a classically corporatist body involving ‘social partnership’ between government, employers and the unions and dedicated to Manpower Planning – as its name implied. Under Labour government during the 1970s, the MSC aspired to quality training on the model of the German ‘dual system’, but became, as was said at the time, ‘blown off course’ into ‘fire-fighting’ rising youth unemployment with a succession of schemes culminating in the Youth Training Scheme introduced in 1983. YTS was intended for the majority of young people who at that time still left school at the minimum age of 16 (raised from 15 in 1972). This attempt at training reform thus left untouched the academic top c.20 per cent still proceeding to traditional higher education via A-levels in sixth form. This third phase of learning policy can, therefore, be called (as by Finn in 1987) one of ‘Training without Jobs’. It reached its apogee under the period of MSC dominance when the Department of Employment, through its creature quango, almost succeeded in taking over its Ministerial rival Department of Education and Science. The MSC launched repeated vocational initiatives in schools, colleges and even universities. Indeed, it can be argued that the Department of Employment’s ambitions were prompted by the loss of its previous empire as the attempt to sustain Keynesian demand management of the economy was abandoned by Mrs Thatcher’s governments in favour of regulation by the market. However, the new vocational education policy, enthusiastically adopted by the Conservatives soon after 1979, had been announced earlier by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in his Ruskin College speech in 1976 – the same year that his Chancellor, Denis Healey, embarked on the same monetarist economic policy as the Conservatives of de- (or rather, re-)regulation in exchange for IMF loans. The fourth and final – because still ongoing – phase of learning policy detailed in chapter 4 was marked by the 1988 Education Act and the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. These two Acts frame a new settlement of education and training comparable to that introduced by the 1944 Education Act as part of the postwar welfare settlement. In its turn, the new settlement of learning policy can be seen

Introduction

19

as part of a new and post-welfare state fashioned by Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997 and consolidated and further developed by New Labour, who inherited it. The new settlement, like the new state and the contracting nature of its administration, is not as stable as the old one, and the decade following the 1988 Act saw successive adjustments to it, especially in the area of learning policy by Sir Ron (later Lord) Dearing in a series of three reports in 1993, 1996 and 1997. This latest period is characterised by the regaining of ascendency by the Department for Education, which finally absorbed Employment (though, significantly, it has lost responsibility to the Department of Trade and Industry for science policy and for the funding of the various research councils, including a new one for the arts and humanities, i.e. for the production of knowledge as opposed to its reproduction by teaching and training). Rather than a German model, learning policy now aims at a North American model to reverse the proportions in and out of institutionalised learning towards a goal of 80:20, continuing education:drop-out to residual training. Instead of ‘Training without Jobs’ this phase of policy, therefore, presents ‘Education without Jobs’ as the solution to permanent, structural unemployment. The official goal of policy is, however, presented as aiming at ‘full employability’, which has replaced the government’s pledge to maintain ‘full employment’, which was an essential condition of the postwar welfare settlement. In this connection, as part of the ongoing adjustments to the new settlement, there has been a partial resuscitation of vocational training for a minority (for example, with the introduction of Modern Apprenticeships in 1994). This recognises the failure of the attempt to provide academic general education for all through the compulsory and highly prescriptive National Curriculum for state schools. This shift was signalled by Sir Ron Dearing’s first review in 1993 in which he loosened up the National Curriculum in schools to make room for a workbased route at 14+ and then by his second review of qualifications for 16–19 year olds in 1996 in which he sought to establish sixth forms as the royal road to ‘quality’, academic higher education, thus associating further education with school failure and linkage to the former polytechnics.

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These suggestions were confirmed in Dearing’s third review of higher education in 1997. The main effort of this review, after the ‘Go–Stop’ policy of the Tory years, was to try to reconcile restarting expansion by widening participation in higher education with the introduction of fees on top of loans for students. As well as being contradictory, the details of Sir Ron’s last review were unusually vague. They therefore needed clarification in a consultation on ‘Lifelong Learning’ and a repeatedly postponed White Paper. Originally promised for autumn 1997, this document was reported to have been finally cancelled at the last moment in March 1998 on the highest authority. In its place a further series of Green Papers and more consultations ensued in what was coming to be a familiar pattern. This pattern, and the extension and consolidation of the 1988 and 1992 Conservative, postwelfare settlement of education and training by a New Labour government, are examined in chapter 5. Learning under Labour can now be expected to rely on FE in association with HE for the majority of local, mature and working-class students fed to former polytechnics via access courses in colleges. As indicated by the 1997 Kennedy Report to the FEFC, which can be read as an attempt to refocus FE on adult students, this may replace the traditional rationale for FE of provision of a non-academic route into skilled jobs, the number of which have been reduced by the partial deindustrialisation of the UK economy. It also recognises the collapse into FE of most local authority adult education and that the moment of tertiarisation as a way forward from school to tertiary college, which was briefly presented as a possibility during the 1970s, has been lost by the colleges in the competition for 16–19 year olds retained in the burgeoning school sixth forms. The ‘better’ state and private sixth forms now provide ‘oven-ready’ students, who can afford to pay to the top of the reanimated hierarchy of HE institutions from which they graduate – if they are lucky enough to find jobs – to a national or international graduate labour market. While presenting opportunities for many young people and others to progress to some form of further and higher continuing education, so that approximately two thirds of 16–18 year olds now remain in school or FE while

Introduction

21

approximately one third enter HE thereafter, this latest phase of learning policy has accelerated chronic qualification inflation/diploma devaluation. Despite the reality of knowledge and skill polarisation in employment, an officially sanctioned qualifications framework now ‘benchmarks’ competence from Foundation Learning level 2 at the completion of compulsory schooling up to postgraduate or equivalent professional level 5. National Targets, first announced and then almost immediately revised in 1994 and again in 1998, aim to have the majority of the workforce (not the population, it should be noted) qualified to level 3 by the year 2000 – a target which it can safely be said will not be met. It is, therefore, salutary to recall that only since 1959 have the majority of English and Welsh school leavers come to possess any educational certification at all, as compared with only one in twelve without any certification today. In this sense, the subtitle to this book suggests that the successive phases of learning policy have brought us in many ways closer to a certified than to a learning society. This possibility is discussed in the Conclusion, which puts this recent and contemporary history in a longer historical perspective, pointing out that, since its inception in the European Enlightenment, mass education has always played an important role in legitimating the social order of capitalist states. It has achieved this both directly through the social control and regimentation that schooling in institutions separated from the rest of society represented and also indirectly through ideological inculcation. The role of the state is thus seen as one which the German sociologist, Claus Offe, called ‘selectivity’ in education as in other areas of social policy. Through these selection mechanisms, ‘the state’, as Stewart Ranson put it, is now ‘developing modes of control in education which permit closer scrutiny and direction of the social order’ (1984, p. 241). With the decline of full-time employment, the extension of education and training in the form of ‘lifelong learning’ is becoming a replacement for the social control formerly exercised in the workplace. In particular, education and training at all levels are today heavily implicated in the social exclusion of a marginalised, and racially and regionally stigmatised, so-called ‘underclass’ through credentialism – or, rather, through the lack of any

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worthwhile credentials. This is more than ever the case as the form of the state itself has changed in recent years from a welfare to a workfare state. For, accompanying these shifting learning policies since the end of the long boom, there has been a move away from the social insurance principle of ‘dependency’ on the old Welfare State towards an encouragement of individual selfreliance and ‘enterprise’ in what is becoming a new post-welfare or Workfare State run on the contracting principle of devolved agencies or ‘quangos’. Just as youth unemployment was officially abolished by the ‘guarantee’ of Youth Training for all 16–18 year olds in 1987, the new learning policy of the new Contracting State moves towards constituting all adults as either employed and supposedly learning on the job, or – alternatively – learning off the job to become ‘employable’, rather than actually unemployed or ‘Jobseeking’. Like actors who are ‘resting’, ‘Jobseekers’ – as the 1996 Jobseekers’ Act redesignated the unemployed – would then never actually be unemployed. They might however be ‘unemployable’, but this would merely reflect the fact that they had not invested in sufficient education and training to make themselves ‘employable’. The goal of ‘full employability’, unlike that of full employment, might thus prove to be illusory. Certainly, the new learning policy poses a new relation of institutionalised learning to both employment and unemployment. In addition, in the new mixed economy of provision of education as of other social services, a semi-privatised state sector is increasingly indistinguishable from a state-subsidised private sector. This new post-welfare state settlement, like the former ‘classic welfare state’ settlement, embodies a number of necessary compromises. Important amongst them is a new relation of dominance of private- over statemonopoly capital to replace the former partnership between the public and private sectors of the economy, as in that between trades unions and employers as ‘social partners’. As a result, private capital has extended its reach, not only to transform the former public sector by replacing its values of service to citizens with those of quality for customers but also into new areas of the lives of all individuals. Indeed, in the case of schooling, Mrs Thatcher aspired to reverse the old

Introduction

23

Labour Party’s rhetorical intention for the state to take over the private schools by attempting to privatise the state schools. In this she was only partly successful, although the New Labour government may complete the job for her – by inviting private companies to run ‘failing’ state schools, or parts of or even whole education authorities through the latest Educational Action Zones, for instance. Mrs Thatcher’s reversal of Labour’s old slogan of ‘equal opportunities’ into one of ‘opportunities to be unequal’ has been embraced by the New Labour government. So has the new type of state which the Conservative Party introduced, but was too internally divided to maintain. Despite an attempted consolidation under John Major, which exactly paralleled George Bush’s succession to Ronald Reagan in the USA, followed by a Democratic Party restoration under Bill Clinton, New Labour was able to reassert its claim to be the natural party of government by pledging to maintain the new Contracting State introduced by the Conservatives. There is an historical precedent for this in the way that Old Labour introduced the welfare state after the war only to lose power to the Tories, who then ran the new type of state for the next 13 years. Noting this irony brings the history of the rise and rise of learning policy presented in this book to a close with the speculation as to how long New Labour can sustain the new post-welfare state and the new mixed economy which it has inherited. Both are inherently unstable, not only due to their form of contractual administration, but also because of their dependence on the global financial forces to which the economy has been opened and to which the state has accommodated itself. In fact, the new state could be said to be the form of adjustment adopted by British capitalism to integrate its economy with the new global market over which international finance capital now exercises unparalleled and almost unopposed influence. Following all these changes, it is asserted in conclusion that education and training have been elevated to a position at the top of the political agenda out of all proportion to institutionalised learning’s real importance in relation to other areas of social policy. For example, Tony Blair has substituted education for social justice by his proclamation that ‘Education is social justice’. Although this echoes earlier

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pronouncements by previous Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and Harold Wilson, the unprecedented importance given to education by all main parliamentary parties is largely attributable to the fact that government can no longer even pretend to do anything about many other areas of policy, particularly the economy, over which effective control has been deregulated away. In fact, the new learning policy at all levels from nurseries to postgraduate schools has little to do with the economy which is its rationale. Rather, it represents a social policy of selectivity that has more to do with social control than education. It seeks both to return to the old social and cultural divisions between traditional ‘middle’ and ‘working’ classes that were entrenched by the original postwar settlement and simultaneously to reinforce new divisions between an uncertificated so-called ‘underclass’ of the resurrected ‘rough’ and a new ‘respectable’, ‘middleworking’ class. These new divisions of labour and knowledge are a consequence of the class recomposition that occurred along with the deindustrialisation and reregulation of the economy encouraged by Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. There are dangerous implications for the future of democracy in a sustainable economy and cohesive society in these developments. The heightening of selectivity at all levels of the new learning system, together with the facility of new communications and information technologies to render qualitative differences between individuals and their ‘levels’ of learning in illusory quantitative terms, demand a legitimation. Following a speculation by Brian Simon, it is suggested that this legitimation may soon be found in the apparent advances of socio-genetics. Genetic determinism offers an ideological and pseudo-scientific explanation for the increasingly evident failure of supposedly meritocratic selection in a supposedly egalitarian society. It can therefore be used to justify more psychometric and ‘intelligence’ testing for selection and the extension of control to the diversity of schools that now exist as well as to the various training and education tracks thereafter. Social control is thus extended beyond employment where it was previously mainly exercised and supported directly and indirectly by the state through the wages system. In the new contracting state education and training for ‘full employability’ has

Introduction

25

replaced the guarantee of lifelong (15–65 male) full employment. Instead, intermittent ‘lifelong learning’ is provided by the new mixed economy of semi-privatised state and state-subsidised private sectors. This is the new state formation’s answer to the crisis of control and legitimacy posed for it by permanent and structural insecurity of employment. The acceptance of such a previously discredited ideology as socio-genetics to justify the new learning polity is rendered more likely by cultural changes that have blunted collective critical intelligence. This ‘dumbing down’ has occurred not least through the demise and depoliticisation of traditional popular cultures by commodified entertainment industries, including the ‘infotainment’ proffered by monopolised mass media. Despite (or perhaps partly because of) the emphasis on literacy in official learning policy, many young people live primarily in an aural and visual culture rather than a literary one. The growing tenuousness of connections between the generations is another consequence of accelerating social change disintegrating the old patterns of human social relationships, and with them, as Eric Hobsbawm warned in his epic history of The Short Twentieth Century, ‘the snapping of the links between generations, that is to say, between past and present’. So that, ‘For the first time . . . the young live in societies sundered from their past’ (1995, pp. 15 and 328). Rather than ‘relearning the whole expanding corpus of human knowledge’, as Vickers said, our society may be in danger of forgetting important parts of it, becoming the opposite of a learning society by actually being more ignorant than before. This makes it more difficult for society to learn to live within the constraints that ensure its continued survival. If we are not, as has been said, to be condemned to relive our history because we have forgotten it, another of the many responsibilities the formal learning system assumes more than ever before is that of communicating the past to the future. Or rather, affording ‘the new minds of each generation’ opportunities to appropriate the cultures and technologies of the past on their own terms for their own common purposes. Certainly, having so many people, old as well as young, in some form or other of continuing formal learning represents a major cultural change for society. If

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they can be helped to think creatively, logically and independently by their extended educational experiences, this would constitute a fundamental challenge to the present destructive course of social development. An alternative learning paradigm is therefore presented in the conclusion to this book. It is based on new conceptions of mind associated with the new cognitive psychology and opposed to the reduction of human to machine intelligence. This is in place of the dominant information-processing model of the brain and information-transmission model of learning and teaching that informs policies to ‘raise standards’ and bring IQ and psychometric testing with its spurious genetic justifications back into education and training at all levels, combined with a reborn behaviouristic benchmarking of narrowly conceived competence. By contrast, an alternative learning paradigm elevates human creativity and imagination developed through independent study and manifested in useful project learning informed by generalised knowledge and skill. It connects learning policy to popular culture, sport, the arts and science and advances the contribution that institutions of learning at all levels can make to the preservation and extension of democracy and the entitlement to full citizenship rights for all, offering an open and hopeful perspective for the future.

1 Tripartite Schooling, 1944–63 THE POSTWAR WELFARE STATE SETTLEMENT ‘As a result of the 1944 Education Act the tripartite system of education became established in England and Wales’ (Carter, 1966, p. 13). Education was an important component of the postwar welfare state and the settlement, or compromise, between different interest groups in education was a specific instance of the larger, overall settlement which the creation of the welfare state involved. This was a welfare state of the classic type, which has been defined as ‘a society in which government is expected to provide, and does provide, for all its citizens, not only social security but also a range of other services, at a standard well above the barest minimum’ (Lowe, 1993, p. 14). To this implicit social contract between state and citizen was linked the commitment by government, made for the first time in the 1944 White Paper ‘Employment Policy’, ‘as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment’. This was the economic bottom line on which the various compromises, or deals, between the different social actors involved was founded. As has been pointed out, ‘The post-war welfare state was legitimated and sustained by a range of settlements’, defined as ‘limited and conditional reconciliations of different interests’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997, pp. 1 and 8). The most obvious of these reconciliations was party political. The Education Act was an instance of such a party political compromise. It preceded many of the other measures introducing the new welfare state, being drawn up and agreed during the war so that the proposed bill was first published in 1943 and enacted in 1944. Like the Beveridge Report covering the whole field of social security, the Education Act was thus a product of cross-party consensus in the wartime coalition government. It is a prime example of what, when 27

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the consensus was maintained by the postwar Labour government, was called ‘Butskellism’ by its critics on the Left, who derisively combined the name of the Conservative Minister of Education, R.A.B. Butler, with that of the Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell. This party political consensus both contained and reflected a popular, democratic consensus for radical change which emerged during the war. This was the popular foundation for the classic welfare state, which remains, as Blackwell and Seabrook recorded, ‘the most enduring creation of British Labourism’ and ‘the English working class’s great existential protest against the way they were told life had to be’ (1985, p. 37). Even though Winston Churchill’s Conservatives were – to their own and nearly everyone else’s surprise – heavily defeated in the immediate postwar general election of 1945, they came to accept the new type of welfare state, which was inaugurated by the Labour government of 1945–50. Consequently, when the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, they did not substantially alter the status quo as they found it. Indeed, they went on to run the new type of classic welfare state which their opposition had introduced for the next 13 years. Political consensus extended beyond party political compromise. The classic welfare state settlement was political in the deeper, politico-economic sense that it involved an agreement between the two main forms of ownership and control that had come to dominate modern capitalist society – private and state monopoly capital – or rather between the political representatives of these two forms of ownership of capital. Privately owned monopoly capital thus acceded to the state much of the regulation that had already been put in place during the war. The 1945 Labour government then moved rapidly to nationalise ‘the commanding heights of the economy’, including the Bank of England, coal, gas, electricity, transport and, in addition, iron and steel. As a result, another part of the classic welfare state settlement or compromise was a ‘mixed economy’ with, on the one hand, the private sector and, on the other, the clearly separate state sector. These two distinct sectors of the economy were brought together by the state in the shape of government. Such was the form that ‘corporatism’, or the corporate state,

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took in the UK. Limited though this was as compared to prewar fascist forms of corporatism (where the corporate concept originated), or to postwar corporatism in France for example, it still made it possible for even Conservative governments to talk in terms of the ‘planning’ that was later to become anathema to them. (Of course, looked at from the point of view of private monopoly capital, the state had taken over the least profitable sectors to insure continued infrastructural support for the remaining private sector. This included, the health, education and training of the workforce as well as infrastructural transport, power, etc.) Corporatism took on another sense of the ‘two sides of industry’, as trades unions and employers used to be known, who were brought together by government as the third party in the form of ‘tripartism’ in a ‘mixed economy’ of private and state sectors. This managed model of development for society in its predominant postwar form common to other developed Western countries presented a package with welfarist social policy, Keynesian economics and representative (social) democratic politics. What Lipietz (1992) called ‘the fordist compromise’ is widely accepted by others as ‘the social democratic compromise’ or postwar ‘welfare settlement’. In terms of an information theory that maps the flows of information and its ordering as knowledge in society, this arrangement corresponds to a learning policy in which knowledge, like power over the economy, could also be said to have been centralised. At these ‘commanding heights of the economy’, power and expert technocratic knowledge alike were shared between what are still known in Germany today as ‘the social partners’ – employers and trades unions, whose cooperation was mediated and facilitated by the state as directed by its government. The management of policy was left to professional and bureaucratic experts in the growing welfare services from which clients were the passive beneficiaries. For, as Clarke and Newman recalled, after the war professionals and bureaucrats were seen as ‘indispensable partners in the great national task of social reconstruction’ (1997, p. 7). Universal provision was to be assured nationally by professional experts and an efficient bureaucratic administration. This was widely welcomed as not only ‘fair’ but as a ‘modern’,

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‘scientific’ and ‘technocratic’ progressive alternative to the arbitrary patronage, nepotism and corruption of welfare provision before the war, administered through Poor Law Boards of Guardians or the Charity Organisation Society. ‘As late as 1939,’ as John Field reminded us, ‘almost 100,000 Britons lived in what were known as “Poor Law Institutions”. Work camps, in which the long-term unemployed were segregated into enclosed and isolated institutions . . . in many respects a logical extension of the workhouse system’ (1992, p. 18). As Clarke and Newman pointed out, ‘The post-war state promised to replace’ the administration of such antediluvian measures by ‘old elites, patronage, partiality and the mixture of laissez-faire, charity and means-testing that had dominated earlier conceptions of social welfare in Britain’ (ibid., p. 4). Now complex tasks of assessment and calculation in health, education and other public services would be routinised to treat each individual case according to common rules equitably and fairly. Professionals and bureaucrats were socially, politically and personally neutral, separating the person from the position, as in the administration of justice, for instance. This reflected the Fabian ideology of the Labour Party founders of the socially and politically neutral welfare state and also the public service ideal that they drew upon, involving the application of valued knowledge in the service of the people. The sociological justification for such a machinery of welfare was found throughout the whole Western, or ‘free’, world, as it called itself, in the work of Max Weber, as conflated with Freud and Durkheim by the American functionalism of Talcott Parsons. The new ‘science of society’, as the postwar official academic sociological orthodoxy of structural-functionalism began to present itself in opposition to unofficial Marxism, saw the state as one interest group among many, able to arbitrate between the competing claims of other interest groups. As orthodox academic sociology and social policy perceived it, the formulation of policy by civil servants was also increasingly a matter for impersonal technocrats weighing rival considerations in an impartial manner. Meritocratic selection – also undertaken technically and scientifically through IQ testing – could thus be justified for entry to this technocratic,

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professional ‘service’ class who were entrusted with administering the new welfare state efficiently and impartially. Pedagogically, the professional–client relation presented an unequal information exchange in which the privileged technical knowledge of the professional expert was validated by academic higher education in association with professional bodies. This accorded well with the traditional humanism of the Ancient Universities. They endorsed this Official Knowledge (Apple, 1995) either indirectly, through the examinations that they validated for sixth-formers in private ‘public’ schools and in the state grammar schools, or directly, through their degree courses for professional employment. Classically, as has been said, on undergraduate courses at Oxbridge the ignorant student was tutored by the wise sage. Science at the Victorian Civic Universities was also upheld as an initiation into the mysteries of a craft. In the skilled manual trades that had not over the years made it into the Universities, a similar apprenticeship – controlled by the craft trades unions in a similar guild-like manner – exercised an identical exclusionary power over entry to and practice in the non-professional trades. The control over access to the privileged or Official Knowledge of the skilled trades exercised by the craft unions formed a barrier to the further Taylorisation of heavy industry run on Fordist lines. Behaviourism in psychology, which was the manual counterpart to the mentalism of IQ testing and a transmission model of information exchange in pedagogy, was thus only applied through Taylorist work study to unskilled manual work and the ‘competency movement’ remained in check at this stage (see Wolf, 1994). This ‘progressive’, ‘scientific’, ‘technical’ and ‘meritocratic’ model of development for society was advanced as an international model for economic and social modernisation. And it worked, at least in the West, where by 1959 the British Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was able to confirm with the electorate that they had ‘never had it so good’. As a result, ‘The period from 1945 to the mid-1970s can be characterized as an era of social consensus,’ recorded Guy Standing of the International Labour Organisation (1997, p. 8). Known variously as ‘Welfare Capitalism’, ‘Fordism’ or what the French called ‘the thirty glorious

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years’, the new settlement and the economic goods which it delivered to the mass of the population rested not merely on internal agreements within nation-states, but globally on what Amin (1997, p. 47) called ‘three pillars’. These were partly in conflict and partly complementary: (i) in the West social-democracy and Fordist accumulation regulated by Keynesian national policies . . . with a coherence between accumulation and the historic capital/labour compromise; (ii) modernization and industrialization in the newlyindependent peripheries, managed by . . . the Bandung Project, a national bourgeois project of catching up [with the West] in a context of circumscribed independence; (iii) the Soviet project, catching up with the West by means of an accumulation strategy much like that of historical capitalism . . . managed on the level of the national or multinational state by means of state ownership and the centralization of political and economic power . . . The military power of the United States and the sustained postwar economic recovery in Japan and Europe were underwritten by the Bretton Woods Agreements over fixed exchange rates with the US dollar. The Soviet Union and its allies, including China, which as ‘the socialist camp’ covered nearly half the world’s land mass and a third of its people, were excluded from this (yet another but, in this case, international) compromise between the USA and its subaltern allies and were largely delinked from the rest of the global economy. Capitalism was thus not the global system it had become before 1914 and became again in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the previous opening up of China at the end of what Hobsbawm called The Short Twentieth Century. Rather, the world was divided between East and West led by the Soviet Union and the United States. Between these two superpowers, the Third World of nonaligned, underdeveloped and newly independent countries – later joined by China – attempted to manoeuvre, but often became the battleground for proxy wars between the US and the USSR. In between these First and Third Worlds was the Second World of second-rank military powers, either former-imperial superpowers, like Britain and France, or defeated would-be ones, like Germany and Japan, together

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with other at least partially industrialised countries, like Russia’s East European subordinates. Nevertheless, such Second World countries as Britain shared in the long economic boom sustained by the permanent arms economy throughout the Cold War; although in Britain’s case, relative growth lagged behind its ‘economic competitors’ in the other developed economies. All this seems a long way from consideration of the learning policy of the UK as embodied in its tripartite school system established after the war. However, it relates to later discussion of globalisation and de-, or rather, re-regulation of the economy and the effects which this had on education, training and the state and so the evolution of its learning policy. For the time being, what can be noted of the postwar welfare settlement was its genuine popularity. ‘That is,’ as Clarke and Newman said (1997, p. 8), a settlement ‘in which “the people” were represented’ through an ‘identification of people and state . . . a unifying imagery of “the people” which aligned them with the state in mutual defence against disruptions to their individual and collective stability.’ The welfare state settlement thus built on the strongly established work ethic to naturalise ‘a set of social arrangements based on gender, age, able-bodiedness and race’, leading to ‘the subsequent growth of the citizenship test for eligibility for welfare’ (ibid., p. 3). This leads us to the most fundamental of all the various internal compromises involved in the UK welfare state settlement, that between social classes. THE WAY WE WERE Thanks largely to the limitations of the reforms implemented by the 1945–50 Labour government, England escaped the social upheaval of total war with its class system virtually intact. This is nowhere clearer than in the area of education. Labour’s leaders did not even attempt to establish a universal system of equal education with open access to all. Rather, by accepting Butler’s 1944 Act, ‘Even under a Labour government, elected with a massive majority,’ as Simon (1991, p. 115) said, ‘the mediation of existing class relations was still seen as the major function of the education system’. So, far

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from being a progressive Act, as Michael Barber saw it (1997), the 1944 Education Act is more readily perceived as ‘a cautious, typically conservative measure’, or ‘Tory project’ (Addison, 1975), embodying ‘Labour’s instinctive faith in the grammar schools’ (Morgan, 1984, p. 174). As Kopsch wrote, ‘the 1944 Education Act . . . incorporated many key Conservative beliefs, notably the belief in the relevance of traditional religious values, the belief in variety and quality rather than “gross volume”, the belief in the desirability of preserving educational privileges and the belief in hierarchy’ (1970, pp. 385–6). The reverence for traditional hierarchy and the dominance of established academic conceptions of Official Knowledge is revealed in the way that the postwar Labour government faithfully implemented the recommendations of the 1943 Norwood Report in introducing what became known as the tripartite system of secondary modern, technical and grammar schools at the secondary level. These three types of school corresponded to the three types of mind into which Cyril Norwood, ex-Head of Harrow, had divided the male school population for whom three different types of education were deemed appropriate. First, there were the men of gold, those ‘interested in learning for its own sake’. The innate qualities of their ‘first class minds’ could be refined out from the dross of baser metals by meritocratic and scientific IQ selection for grammar schooling to higher education and go on to become the management and professional Guardians of postwar society. Then there were the men of bronze, those who, while not so able intellectually, were capable of applying knowledge practically: ‘He often has an uncanny insight into the intricacies of mechanism whereas the subtleties of language construction are too delicate for him.’ This did not mean that these boys could not talk, but they were presumed by Norwood to be the future skilled workers for the reconstructed economy. Last, were the men of iron, who were below average and therefore ‘incapable of a long series of connected steps’. This did not mean that they could not walk, but Norwood assumed they would be the unskilled workers of the future. For these children ‘whose future employment will not demand any measure of technical skill or knowledge’, explained Ministry

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of Education circular number 73 in 1945, the new ‘modern’ schools were intended. ‘Whether such groupings are distinct on strictly psychological grounds, whether they represent kinds of minds, whether the differences are differences in kind or in degree, these are questions which it is not necessary to pursue . . .’(HMSO, 1943, p. 201). Nevertheless, it did not escape notice at the time that this convenient trisection of male children into three levels of intelligence, the academic, the technical and the practical (or the men of gold, bronze and iron of Plato’s Republic), corresponded to the traditional divisions of industrial labour into workers by brain and by hand, the latter being subdivided again into the skilled and the unskilled. Such a division was ridiculed at the time for presuming ‘that the Almighty has benevolently created three types of child in just those proportions which would gratify educational administrators’ (Curtis, 1952, pp. 144–5). However, it was the traditional division of labour that had served British industry so well in the past and upon which it was assumed that postwar industry would be rebuilt to secure continuing prosperity in the future. Similarly women, it was supposed, would return from the factories and fields to resume their peacetime role as wives and mothers to replenish the nation’s stock. As the Beveridge Report had said: ‘housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British Race and British ideals in the world’ (1942, p. 52). (It is the habitual reference to eugenics, despite the example of the German enemy at the time, that is often noted by commentators here, but the emphasis on the family as an instrument of learning ‘British ideals’ is equally remarkable. The classic welfare state aimed to support the nuclear family so that its normal functioning would ensure correct ideas were perpetuated. As nuclear families came under increasing pressure, later learning policies saw the state intervening much more directly – through ‘parenting’ classes, for example.) In any case, ‘women’s work’ was considered separately from the real, breadwinning labour on which family wages depended. As above, this naturalised also a view of the family and women’s situation in which, to quote Clarke and Newman again, ‘married women and other dependants

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would gain benefits in times of need via the male head of household . . . [Thus] the state would only be a support for welfare needs where “the family failed”’ (1997, p. 3). ‘The tripartite system of education’ that emerged from this vision of the future society and its workforce was never realised, however, due to underfunding and undervaluation of the technical schools designed to produce the skilled (male) workers of the future. As late as 1958 secondary technical schools still contained only 4 per cent of the secondary school population and did not exist in more than 40 per cent of local education authorities (Schilling, 1989, p. 49). Simon said 3.6 per cent (1991, p. 142) – ‘mainly boys’ (p. 135) – adding: ‘From this it is clear that, in spite of a good deal of pressure and talk about the need to develop secondary technical education, very little was achieved’ (ibid.). Nor was the proposal in the 1944 Act implemented for compulsory parttime attendance to 18 at continuation colleges. So the ‘tripartite system of education’ that actually emerged was not between grammar, technical and secondary modern state schools, but was in fact between the private (public), grammar and secondary modern schools, many of the last renamed comprehensives after 1965. Although excoriated before the war by Labour’s most persuasive advocate of ‘Equality’ as ‘The hereditary curse upon English education’ and a ‘barbarity’ (Tawney, 1931, pp. 142 and 145), the independence of the public schools was preserved by the 1944 Act, subject only to their periodic inspection. In fact, the architect of the Act, Lord Butler, congratulated himself in his autobiography on how cleverly he had managed to ‘shunt . . . the first class carriage . . . onto an immense siding’ (1971, p. 120). For the postwar Labour government, the intention of their education policy lay in the state providing educational opportunities of such wide variety, encouraging experiments so comprehensive in character, and planning and staffing its schools to provide such high standards of teaching and amenities that no parent, however rich or however snobbish, could gain any advantage either in prestige or social opportunity by paying £315 a year to maintain his son at Eton. (quoted in Green, 1948, p. 161)

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Or, as ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson, Labour’s first Minister of Education after the war, put it to the 1946 Party conference: ‘Free milk will be provided in Hoxton and Shoreditch, Eton and Harrow. What more social equality could you have than that?’ Yet, as the inherited and financial advantages of the private schools continued to exert such an unfair influence in the competition with the state sector, they, and the academic establishments of the ancient universities which sustained them through their examination and entrance procedures, came to be the prime target – at least in rhetoric – of further promised reform. However, it was the state school system over which they could have some influence via the Labour Party and the National Union of Teachers that continued to be the main practical preoccupation of education reformers. It was assumed that with an increase in ‘access’ and ‘opportunities’ – the terms in which the problem of opening education to more manually working-class children were conceived – society would gradually become more egalitarian, dissolving antiquated class divisions in a rising sea of affluence so that the manual working class could actually be educated out of existence. From its inception, therefore the new sociology of education developing in the expanded teacher training colleges and departments was peculiarly concerned with analysis in terms of ‘class chances’ in the reformed education system. This was long before Marxism was accepted on equal terms as a competing school of thought in what became a plural society of academic Official Knowledge, but when ‘The word “class”’, as Tawney put it, was still ‘fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit’ (quoted in Marwick, 1980, p. 7). The most famous of these descriptions of educational access in class terms was Jackson and Marsden’s 1962 classic Education and the Working Class, an account of the struggles of 88 workingclass children in the grammar schools of a Northern industrial town. Their conclusion was that ‘The children who lasted the full grammar school course came from the upper strata of the working class’ (p. 152) and, although ‘most of the 88 completed their education happily and successfully . . . They are now middle-class citizens’ (p. 153), who had bidden

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‘Farewell to the Working Class’ (Greenslade, 1976). The system was thus self-perpetuating. In fact, in his 1964 follow-up study Streaming, Jackson considered that the tripartite separation between private, grammar and secondary modern schools reflected and perpetuated traditional divisions in English society: ‘an older generation usually accepted that our grandparents’ society (like its railway carriages) had its 1st, 2nd and 3rd class: upper, middle and lower. Our world combines this ironic echo. In school uniform the child learns of the teacher–prefect–pupil triad. In army uniform he meets the firmness of the officer–NCO–men structure. The BBC “naturally” postulates three audiences, Third–Home–Light’ (p. 135). The anthropologist Gregory Bateson also considered what he called ‘ternary systems’, such as parents–nurse–child, king–ministers–people or monitors–leaders–fags (at private schools) to typify the English national character as he wrote to explain it to our wartime allies (in 1978, p. 69). For Jackson, similarly (pp. 135 and 141), The values that associate early selection with defeat on the playing fields are real enough: many teachers and parents share them – and in the world between 1850 and 1950 they were extraordinarily effective. There was no economic point in raising large hopes through education, for society had not the resources to satisfy them. Early selection of the few allowed the governing elites to recruit a new stream of talent from lower middle class homes. Eleven plus and streaming clarified the problem. It was as objective as any such procedures. It worked. This was the ordered and cautiously but increasingly prosperous world to which so many grammar school celebrants of educational ‘excellence’ sought to cling on to for so long and to which they still aspire to return. The vision of a simply stratified world has the additional attraction to many of those who supported and continue to advocate it that in it they see themselves occupying the comfortable position in the middle between two extremes. Or, even more gratifying to their selfesteem, like Mr Bounderby, the self-made man in Dickens’ Hard Times, who never tires of telling anyone who will listen to him how he was born in a ditch, they feel that they have

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risen by dint of their own efforts and talents. Educational selection confirmed their elevation into the ranks of the nonmanual middle class, distinguished, as Hobsbawm said, from ‘the working class as traditionally understood’ by the fact that the latter ‘got their hands dirty at work, mainly in the mines, factories, or working with, or around some kind of engines’ (1969, p. 285). This picture of how it used to be has such persistence, not only because of its clarity and simplicity but also because for such a long time that was precisely how it was. Further, traditional class divisions continued to impress themselves with such salience because, as Roberts et al. pointed out (1977, p. 24), urbanised England did not leave room for the differences between town and country that persisted elsewhere, for example between Highlanders and Lowlanders in Scotland. Also, ethnic, national and religious differences in England were relatively insignificant, at least after the partial assimilation of the Irish influx during the nineteenth century and of the East European Jews who arrived before the First World War and until more large-scale and visible black and Asian immigration from 1948 to 1962. In addition, the media and particularly the televisual image of working-class life in the cities of the English North was assiduously cultivated by ‘a generation of programme makers whose idea of the English working class stood still when they left it two and more decades ago; then, as they remember it, the population everywhere was predominantly white and lived in terraced housing’ (Ainley, 1991, p. 58). Even to those at the bottom, the memory of a simple stratified world in which each knew their place has its attractions, especially as recalled through the romanticised imagery of advertising, or the timeless and fictitious community of soap operas like ‘Coronation Street’. (See also, ‘Nostalgia Rules – Hokey Cokey?’, in Hobbs, 1990, for a sentimental Cockney recreation of what one of his informants called ‘the way things used to be before the niggers moved in’.) So celebrated, nostalgia for a lost and more simple past corresponds to the reality of the pattern of manual working-class life that Hobsbawm recorded was established between 1870 and 1900, and

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which the writers, dramatists and TV producers of the 1950s thought of as ‘traditional’ . . . It was not ‘traditional’ then, but new. It came to be thought of as age-old and unchanging, because it ceased in fact to change very much until the major transformation of British life in the affluent 1950s . . . It was neither a very good nor a very rich life, but it was probably the first kind of life since the Industrial Revolution which provided a firm lodging for the British working class within industrial society. (1969, p. 164) The classic factory proletariat of manual labourers divided into skilled and unskilled, respectable and rough, was thus created earlier in England and lasted longer than in any other country. There was not even a peasantry in England to pose the problems of relations between the two great manually labouring classes which dogged communist parties and governments in other countries. Work-based organisation amongst this factory proletariat distinguished revolutionary socialist parties and groups from the electorally oriented ward organisation of the reformist Labour Party. That the soviet power of the future would be based on the factory floor was unproblematically accepted by classic Marxism. The communists particularly sought to combine the industrial muscle of the manual workers with mental analysis by ‘progressive intellectuals’ through their organisation as ‘vanguard parties’. The Communist Party was thus a mechanism for the ideologically desired unity of manual and mental labour and a precursor of the future socialist society. Communism therefore presented an alternative paradigm to the division between hand and brain, body and mind, skills and knowledge which the predominant division between manual and mental labour accepted and celebrated in Taylorist and Fordist work organisation and was reflected in the learning policy embodied in the 1944 Act. Not that the English proletariat was particularly pervious to accepting the heroic and historic role in which it had been cast by those who desired a revolutionary alternative for it. Typically, the majority of the population shared the suspicion of ‘theory’ cultivated as the academic Official Knowledge of traditionally English empiricism and pragmatism that was practised in the politics of social-democratic reform. The

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parochialism and defensiveness of the traditional English working class has been remarked by many writers, who often forget how much of such a defensive culture and its practices were elaborated over a long period of time to make bearable a position in society that would otherwise be unsupportable. By those sociologists who were sympathetic to it, for example Richard Hoggart decrying the effects of a mass, Americanised culture upon the indigenous Uses of Literacy, or Wilmott and Young (1957) discovering an urban village in Bethnal Green, this working-class community was described and so preserved in academic aspic just at the moment of its dissolution. The definition of class predominantly adopted as the Official Knowledge of English academic sociology as it gradually established itself in higher education after the war was either the Registrar General’s five class schema, originally elaborated by civil servants in 1911 for a comparative study of infant mortality, or the more recent refinement of it by Moser and Hall in 1954. This graded hierarchy ranked the skill levels of different occupations according to the estimation of those drawing it up, their own function thereby figuring at a higher level than it might otherwise have done. In addition, there was a tendency for the upper or ruling classes to disappear from the taxonomy – perhaps because they tend not to have any very precisely defined occupation! They were ‘shunted . . . onto an immense siding’, just as their schools had been by Butler. As a result, attendance at grammar or secondary modern state schools came to mean the same as definitions of ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class while, along with the schools they had attended, ‘upper’ or ‘ruling’ was conveniently forgotten (although implied by the term ‘middle’). Official academic sociology, therefore, followed popular usage of these commonly understood terms without defining them, save through the proxies of educational qualifications. As a consequence, in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms ‘school leaver’ and ‘working class’ became synonymous, while only ‘middle class’ school students stayed on. Sociology’s measures of statistical estimations of the social status of various occupations were also assumed to be static and unchanging indicators of a settled social situation, rather than subject

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to the economic and technological transformation that was later to become increasingly rapid. In the 1950s, however, the social situation was ‘settled’ for a long time. To Brian Simon, who lived through it, ‘stagnation was the order of the day’ (1991, p. 271). What C.P. Snow called ‘the rigid and crystallised pattern’ of education was maintained by the separation between ‘The Two Cultures’ of art and science which his famous 1959 lecture bewailed. Society was experienced as, above all, secure and predictable. A 14- or 15-year-old leaver completing compulsory schooling in the classic Welfare State as late as the 1960s, as Anderson wrote, ‘could, with a reasonable probability of being right, have predicted within a very few years the timing of his or her future life course – leaving school, entering employment, leaving home, marrying and setting up home, early patterns of child-bearing and rearing’ (1983, p. 13). For the majority of people (including ‘dependent’ women) their future prospects were predicated upon guaranteed full-time male employment from 15 to 65. The education and training which prepared male labour market entrants for this lifetime of full employment (lifelong earning rather than today’s ‘Lifelong Learning’) was ‘front-loaded’ as elementary schooling to 14 or 15, through time-served apprenticeship which issued into skilled status demarcated from other grades and trades, or, for the academic minority, to a ‘final degree’ at 21. Most people, of course, had no formal educational qualifications at all and, until the 1960s, the majority of school leavers had none either. Following the tradition established in Victorian times of early leaving to work, most pupils in England and Wales quit school as soon as they could (at 14 until 1947, 15 until the school-leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972) and not until the 1980s did this begin to change. Indeed, it was only with the introduction of CSEs, recommended in 1959 for the next third of school students after the top 20 per cent then attempting O-levels who were regarded as examinable by the Crowther Committee, that the majority of English and Welsh school leavers came to possess any educational certification at all (as compared with only one in twelve without any certification today). This did not stop them – without any of the formal ‘vocational preparation’ now deemed necessary to ‘bridge the gap between

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school and work’ – walking straight into a full-time job on quitting their school yard for the last time and then walking out of that job and into another in the pattern of ‘aimless’ job changing much decried by employers and in official comment at the time (for example, as recorded in Carter, 1966). The demographic baby boom working its way through the age ranges reached its all-time peak of nearly a million school leavers in 1962 without any noticeable effects on this deplored situation, though subsequent fluctuations – to nearly 800,000 in 1972 to a second peak over 900,000 by 1983 were to have effects in a changed youth labour market (see Deakin 1996 for details). Michael Carter’s (1962) Home, School and Work remains the classic account of the outcomes of education for the majority of children who did not go on to experience the difficulties of further advance in the education system described by Jackson and Marsden in the same year. Carter shows aspirations shaped by the local ‘climate of opinion’ in the then still booming ‘Steel City’ of Sheffield. Indirect influence – whom you knew, rather than what you knew – was what was important to gain employment, especially for the most sought after, skilled manual jobs into which sons might follow their father’s footsteps and which constituted the ideal of a ‘good job’ for boys. The equivalent for girls was a job in an office where appearance could be more important than qualifications or any possible parental influence. In any case, ‘The particular occupations were not a vital matter,’ recorded Carter. ‘What was important was the status which being a worker conferred’ (1962, pp. 150 and 212). This was hardly the ideal of progress through a career entertained for the minority to be selected for meritocratic advancement by the schools. The gap between school and work, which only a very few leavers found difficult to bridge at this stage, was therefore also a gap between home and school. To many children, the values of school had always appeared irrelevant to life as it is actually lived, but the values of work fitted with those of the home and in the neighbourhood. Effort, enthusiasm and loyalty were advocated at school, but laughed at, or frowned upon at work. The beautiful and spiritual were insisted upon at school,

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while at work ugliness and materialism prevailed. In addition, many children had got into the habit at school of only doing what they were told – no more – and were in no way shocked to find that this standard was common at work. In general, furthermore, children entered jobs in which the norms and values of the home were approximated to . . . The ‘gap’ [between school and work] was to them no more than a moderate change of routine. (ibid., pp. 210–11) ‘The school-to-work transition processes were informal and largely family related, but were perpetuated through the formal learning system’ (Marshall, 1994, p. 4). As also in the USA, summarised by Wilson (1996, p. 2): The skill requirements of the mass production system were reflected in the system of learning. Public schools in the United States were principally designed to provide lowincome native and immigrant students with the basic numeracy and literacy skills required for routine work in the mass production factories, service industries, or farms. On the other hand, families with professional, technical, and managerial backgrounds had access to elite learning processes in public and private schools and were able to utilize family connections and experiences to prepare their children for higher paying occupation. Even as late as 1984, the management guru and Methodist minister, Charles Handy, was quoting the personnel manager of a large US automobile plant who used to boast that they could take anyone off the street and train them to do a job on the assembly line in one-and-a-half hours, while an article in American Machinist recommended employing ‘retarded people with a mental age of 12’ to operate the latest numerically controlled machine tools (quoted in Ainley, 1990, p. 8). The classic critique of this ‘correspondence’ between Fordist, factory production and schooling which ‘reproduced’ labour for it was made in the USA from a Marxist point of view by Bowles and Gintis in 1976. This was the ‘low skill, low trust’ ‘equilibrium’ into which British industry and society comfortably settled down and which was later held responsible for the country’s unchecked

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slide into relative economic decline, and at reversing which so much subsequent reforming effort was subsequently to be aimed. In the decades after the war however, education and training did not appear to have a very high priority in the minds of policy-makers. Beyond maintaining the system, Simon records that the 1951 Conservative government ‘did not appear to have had any plans for education apart from keeping things going at a minimal level’ (1991, p. 164). The Minister of Education was not considered important enough to sit in the regular Cabinet (only in the full one) and the whole business of educational administration was devolved in the classic formulation of ‘a national system locally administered’. The government did not play any part in the prescription of a ‘National Curriculum’ for the schools or elsewhere beyond, as has been pointed out, the stipulation in the 1944 Act of the necessity for ‘a daily act of religious observance’ – a stipulation more often breached than observed in many state schools. This meant, as mentioned in the Introduction, that there was very little direct control of the content of education by central government. This was left, instead, in the hands of headteachers in schools, who in turn tended to leave what went on behind the doors of the classroom to the individual class teacher. This independent control over their classroom situation became an important part of the developing notion of teachers’ professional autonomy as it was fostered in the mushrooming teacher training colleges after the war. Beyond the elementary acquisition of literacy and numeracy by more or less rote learning in most primary schools, the academic content of secondary school education for those preparing for further selective examinations was dictated by the private schools in conclave with admissions tutors for university courses. Through the examination boards they decided the contents of higher school certificates and subsequently of A-levels (introduced in 1951), which paved the way for undergraduate study of academic subjects. Examination boards were private organisations over which the Education Ministry exercised no control, whilst the universities enjoyed not only academic but financial freedom from ministerial control, being funded separately by the Treasury through the University Grants Committee.

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Meanwhile, wartime regulation of training by the state which had drafted half a million people, the majority of them women, into Ministry of Labour and National Service training courses to streamline industry for all-out war production, was abandoned. Despite the recommendation of the 1945 Ince Report for a national apprenticeship scheme and the treatment of all beginning workers as trainees, this wartime experience was forgotten as industrial training reverted to type. The content of training was once again negotiated between employers and trades unionists in apprenticeships and agreed between employers and heads of departments of colleges to whom apprentices might be day-released. The technical, or Further Education, colleges – as they became known – struggled on the fringes of public perception between the higher priority that was placed upon schools by most of the minority of parents who at that time bothered to vote in local elections to influence the policies of their Local Education Authorities and the inviolate prestige accorded to academically elite higher education. Why the ‘crystallised structure’ of education imposed by the 1944 Act persisted for so long with so little criticism can be explained by what Hobsbawm called ‘the secret weapon of a society of popular affluence, namely full employment’ (1995, p. 259). In retrospect, it becomes clear that the period of full employment after the war until the 1973 oil crisis was an anomaly which had been mistaken at the time for permanent reality. Even the government which committed itself to ‘a high and stable level of employment’ in the White Paper ‘Employment Policy’, referred to above, anticipated that a prolonged depression, like that into which the economy had plunged shortly after the First World War, would recur soon after the ending of the Second. The postwar recovery proved not merely temporary as that of 1918 had been, however, but persisted, though in the UK’s case with much faltering, into the long boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Overall unemployment averaged little more than 1.5 per cent until the end of the 1960s, exceeding the apparently wildly optimistic expectations of Beveridge during the war when he said that if unemployment could be kept down to 3 per cent, the country would be doing very well. The regional unemployment that had characterised the

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1930s persisted in rates of 2 and 3 per cent only in the North and in Scotland, while in Northern Ireland unemployment has never been less than 7 per cent until recently. With this general material improvement, British society emerged slowly from wartime rationing and the deadening conformity encouraged by the subsequent Cold War. As a consequence, as Coates and Silburn recalled, During the fifties the myth that widespread material poverty had been finally and triumphantly overcome was so universally current, so widely accepted by politicians, social commentators and the general public alike, that for a decade and more, public controversy and political discussion were engrossed by the new (and fundamentally more encouraging) problems of what people are still pleased to call the ‘Affluent Society’. (1970, p. 13) ‘Affluent Workers’ who had ‘never had it so good’ were supposed responsible for Labour’s third successive general election defeat in 1959, even though the research on car workers in Luton by Goldthorpe and Lockwood (1969) found that more of them voted Labour than other manual workers. To those who did not live through it but were born after it, or to those whose memories extended beyond it to the poverty and depression before the war, it is obvious in retrospect that the long boom, which for nearly 30 years sustained more or less full-time, full employment for men aged 15–65, was unique. It was the mistake of those who lived through it and were born into it to assume that living standards for all would continue to rise forever and that the Keynesian mechanisms of economic control had been discovered which could avert any return to the periodic booms and slumps of the past. Yet also, a ‘settlement’ of society, such as that represented by the postwar welfare settlement, to be successful not only needs to be sustained materially. It has, as Lipietz suggested, also its counterpart in a new psychology at the level of the individuals who acquiesce in it or, rather, who adjust themselves to it to the extent of seeing a viable future for themselves within it. At this level of ‘psychic economy’, the postwar settlement and its associated ‘learning policy’ corresponded with deeply established features of the predominant

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English mentality or ‘national character’ that, like so much else in the country’s condition, have their roots deep in the past. This explains the tenacity with which the settlement was maintained for so long in education and the tendency to return towards it even when it had been finally superseded. PECULIARITIES OF THE ENGLISH Every country and people are unique of course. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of modern Britain lies in the fact of its double primacy, being the first country to pioneer industrial revolution upon which basis the first empire of a modern type was established. The industrial revolution had happened in England without the benefits of universal education and systematic training. In part this was because, as Hobsbawm pointed out, ‘The early industrial revolution was technically rather primitive’ (1969, p. 60). It was not until what Landes (1972, p. 151) described as ‘the exhaustion of the technological possibilities of the industrial revolution’ by the end of the nineteenth century that scientific research began to contribute directly to production processes. It was only then that abstract and generalised knowledge became important for more than an elite minority, as opposed to the ‘tacit knowledge’ shared by skilled workers and many of the Masters who rose from their ranks. Scientific method within academic specialisms could then be formally extended to a minority of production workers, together with some more generalised knowledge for administrators, alongside functional literacy and numeracy for the majority. Despite these ‘demands of industry’, as Green demonstrated in his 1990 comparison between The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA, England lagged far behind other Western countries in the development of scientific and technical education, training and research; demonstrably it still does. Countries like Prussia and France introduced compulsory universal elementary education at the end of the eighteenth century – literally a century before England. However, as Green has shown, the establishment of education systems in these countries had less to do with preparation for the universal literacy supposedly necessary

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for industrial success and more to do with insuring the adherence of citizens to a national state which in England was already secure. When education reform did come to England it was piecemeal and diverse, and continues to be so. This weakness underlines the irony with which Green closed his still unfinished history, so that, as he said, ‘the European country which was last to create a national education system, and which never quite completed the job’ could also be ‘the first to dismantle it’ (ibid., p. 316). From a politically conservative and traditionalist point of view, this national predilection for ‘muddling through’, combined with English empiricism’s pragmatic distrust of Continental rationalisations and sweeping, philosophical totalisations, corresponding to root and branch political reforms, are sources of abiding strength. These deep-seated cultural characteristics were only confirmed and in part created by the unique historical experience of pioneering industrial revolution. The result was that, unlike other industrialising countries – with the significant exception of the USA – industrialisation in Britain was not a top-down affair directed by the state. In the rest of Europe (including Russia), as well as in Japan, Kumar (1978, p. 128) records that ‘It was the state that encouraged the immigration of foreign – mainly British – workers and technicians, that mobilized capital for investment, that underwrote loans, that set up industrial enterprises, that established (well before Britain) schools and institutes of scientific and technical training.’ By contrast in Britain, what Rosenbrock (1977, p. 391) called ‘the marriage of intellectual inquiry and practical skill, which resulted in the industrial revolution’ was gloriously consummated without any such management by the state. The happy union just seemed to happen in the cataclysmic confusions of the time. The state thus came to be distrusted by ‘the freeborn Englishman’ who, while he might celebrate the unity and continuity symbolised by its monarchical head, resented pettifogging interference by its bureaucratic officialdom. This reaction was characteristic also of other Anglo-Saxon dominated countries, particularly the US and the similarly confederated Australians and Canadians. However apparently miraculous the wealth generated by

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the country’s lead as the first industrial superpower, the marriage between intellect and handicraft soon ended in divorce. Ever since, commentators have bemoaned the subsequent separation between theoretical education and practical training. The accepted version of this sad story is that the children of those practical men of affairs, the factory owners, abandoned trade to ape the foppish ways of a parasitic and landed gentry. Unlike the founding ironmasters, who could turn their hands to any of the crafts performed by any of their operatives, their sons turned their backs on manufacture and declined ever again to soil their hands with practical affairs. With their fathers’ fortunes they bought their way into the aristocracy and thus saved that social anachronism from extinction. Instead, its persistent dominance over the nation’s affairs was preserved through the hereditary principle. Hence the subsequent debilitating and persistent weakness for valuing the practice of effete arts above the creation of wealth necessary to sustain them. The result in education was that, instead of practical skills and useful knowledge, schools and universities put a premium on the academic Official Knowledge derived from the Ancient Romans and Greeks who despised the labour of their slaves. According to Corelli Barnett’s influential diagnosis, this situation would have to be reversed to ‘keep Britain an advanced technological society and save her from being a Portugal, perhaps even an Egypt of tomorrow’ (1979, p. 172). Sclerotic class divisions ossified any attempt at modernisation and reform, and in the nineteenth century British education became dominated by the classics to an extent that the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (1973) found ‘extraordinary’; ‘For surely it must strike any historian as odd that an industrial revolution, having triumphed at home, was carried over the whole world by the elite of a society bred up on the literature of a city state and an empire whose slaveowning ruling class regarded industry and commerce as essentially vulgar . . .’ Yet this classical humanist education was what Friedrich Ebert called ‘the vocational education of the ruling class’ (quoted by the Institute for Public Policy Research, 1990, p. 1). This tradition of academic Official Knowledge stems essentially from the curriculum of the nineteenth-century public schools designed to perpetuate an

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elite and based upon the classics. It aimed to foster what would nowadays be called the ‘personal and transferable skills’ of gentlemanly behaviour in all circumstances. These codes of behaviour were distantly descended from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, leavened with Christian and courtly asceticism, combined with monastic contemplation and polished off with the leisured amateurism of the Victorian gentleman. They were not ‘transferable’ from one different situation to another but, in reality, the behaviour required of such a cultured individual was essentially the same, whether he was ruling India or directing the board of a bank, commanding a military detachment or judging in a court of law. This was what Aristotle had called ‘the knowledge necessary to rule’. In contrast, elementary education for the mass of the working population was intended to control rather than emancipate. As Ashton and Green summarised it (1997, pp. 14–16), Britain became a mature industrial society without a national education system. Industry developed using poorly educated labour. As the national education system became established, the forces that shaped it came from the upper and professional classes, who required education to provide a preparation for entry to the civil service and the administration of the empire. When a national system of elementary education was established, the concern among the ruling elite was to establish moral control over the new industrial classes, not to prepare them for work; that was always left to employers. Thus, the system that took root was geared toward providing a mass of disciplined children, with a respect for authority, and an elite socialized in the requirements of the professionals and colonial administration. Employers, geared to the production of low value-added goods and services, were left to provide whatever additional training was required. Once established, this basic institutional framework then shaped the future development of the system. Especially because, as the authors add, ‘Britain was the first to industrialize and because for many decades it had captive markets in the Empire, the low skills route remained a viable route to capital accumulation.’

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These are what Whitty (1983, p. 105) called ‘the two traditions’, one generalised but classically academic, the other limited to the elementary and narrowly vocational. In his formulation of the liberal humanist idea of a university, Cardinal Newman declared that ‘not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves and children’ (quoted in Ainley, 1994, p. 72), and, he could have added, of the majority of the working class of his day. For even once they overcame their initial hostility to publicly provided education and Britain’s rulers began belatedly in the nineteenth century to provide through the state elementary schooling for the majority of the population, the patrician and paternalistic attitude remained that this state education for the masses was an elementary and second-best preparation for labouring life. It did not provide generalised knowledge of ‘the relative disposition of things’, but only the basic literacy and numeracy that most work and social life was coming to require and on which foundation any additional technical skills could be acquired as necessary. The grammar schools and Victorian civic universities were also seen as vocationally preparing the growing middle class through specialised courses of induction into various academicised subjects for non-manual, professional occupations. The antique universities of Oxford and Cambridge at the apex of this ‘higher’ – as opposed to ‘elementary’ – education not only endorsed professional status, including that of the academic profession which policed and defined the system of ‘Official Knowledge’, but also formed an essential part of the status symbolism of all English elites. The ancient colleges were originally founded to train the medieval professions of the clergy, medicine and law. In the nineteenth century, with the availability of cheap, mass-produced paper, the examinations for the First Division of the Civil Service were closely modelled on the Oxbridge honours papers, even though at that time the majority of Oxbridge students habitually left without bothering to take any examinations at all. They had derived sufficient gentlemanly ‘personal and transferable skills’ simply by being in residence at college for a period. A bachelor’s (sic) degree was therefore little more than a certificate of good behaviour for three years and collecting it was only important for those who wanted to become bishops

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or masters of a college. Yet by 1900, as the examination system spread, it had become virtually impossible for nonOxbridge graduates to reach senior positions in Church or State, in law or in the private schools feeding pupils to individual Oxbridge colleges. Harold Perkin’s history The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 thus describes the two antique universities as ‘the main articulator of the social ideal of the professional class’ (1989, p. 57). In industry and commerce the rise of ‘the professional class’ was also linked to the growth of paperwork. The application of Taylorism to automate and deskill industrial processes translated the knowledge of craftworkers from the shopfloor onto flowcharts and schedules on paper in the office. Here middle managers did not, unlike the original Ironmasters of the industrial revolution, any longer own the enterprise. Ownership had passed to shareholders and banks. Instead, they could claim authority based on specialised knowledge. This came to be validated by higher education qualifications, but it was not until after the Second World War that it was common for English engineers and business managers to possess formal graduate-level qualifications. With the growth of higher education, degrees have become necessary for the parallel growth of a range of occupations which have closed themselves off from non-graduate applicants. Degrees were also increasingly required for administrators and other, ‘service class’ professionals in the growing organisations of the welfare state founded after the war. So, alongside ‘the working class’, a whole ‘thinking class’, or ‘intelligentsia’, dealing in more or less abstract knowledge grew up, especially in the increasingly influential and manipulative media and advertising but also in teaching and research. The training for employment of this ‘thinking class’ includes the higher education that develops their high levels of literacy, together with their generalised, abstract reasoning abilities in the Official Knowledge of subdivided academic specialisms. Ostensibly meritocratic, the traditional academic English system of educational selection is still one in which failure is the norm. For the majority, education is an effort in which at each hurdle only a minority continue to the next stage. The systemic assumption, which constitutes an implicit and

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explicit ‘common sense’ at all levels from primary to postgraduate schools, is that the prime purpose of education is the ranking of pupils/students to recognise inherent quality which can then be developed appropriately. Despite the widespread challenges which this ideology received from the 1960s onwards, ‘in the minds of school policy makers and the professional and public community at large,’ as Bob Moon put it (1996, p. 72), ‘the idea of fixed aptitudes, potential and abilities still runs very deep. More significantly, this perception of ability is highly constrained focusing on apparent capacity in relation to a limited number of traditional knowledge domains. The idea that ability is measurable, observable and finite feeds the belief that education should somehow respond to a deterministic vision of learning.’ Educational qualification of this type could be justified by economic theory as signalling potential efficiency, the assumption being that innate natural abilities measured as ‘general intelligence’ in one area will be evident in another (see Spencer, 1973). After the war, selection started at 11+ when a minority were picked through the supposedly scientific and therefore ‘objective’ testing of the general ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) for grammar schooling. In comprehensive schools the age of selection was then raised progressively to 14, where the few sheep who would attempt O-level were segregated from the remainder of goats bound to take the second-rate CSE examinations which were later introduced. With the introduction of the unitary GCSE examination in 1986, the age of selection was further raised to 16 – though it has tended to drop again since with the introduction of tiered papers and the internally differentiated system of selection discussed in chapter 5. Again today, only a minority pass at the A–C levels required for the next stage. A third of those attempting A-level entrance exams for higher education then fall at the fence, and for the rest, the grades they obtain determine their level of entry to an elaborate hierarchy of colleges and universities. Only those graduates attaining the highest class marks are deemed worthy of pursuing further academic study, while at postgraduate level, the majority of candidates fail to complete their doctoral theses. Thus, as Tim Brighouse has it in a characteristic witticism, ‘No matter

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how far you go in English education, they’ll fail you in the end.’ Only to the elite upper stratum that can afford to have its offspring educated privately and intensively from an early age, through a succession of nurses, nannies, preparatory and boarding schools to an extended childhood at sheltered colleges, finishing schools and military academies, does achievement in this system remain effortless. Although, as Simmel – and later Bourdieu – noted, for those who do succeed in the uphill struggle, ‘the accumulation of intellectual achievements . . . gives a rapidly growing and disproportionate advantage to those who are favoured by it . . . [so that] The highest stages of education require less effort for every step further than the lower stages, and yet at the same time produce greater results’ (Simmel, 1978, p. 442). Thus for Simmel no less than for Bourdieu, The apparent equality with which educational materials are available to everyone interested in them is, in reality, a sheer mockery. The same is true of the other freedoms accorded by liberal doctrines which, though they certainly do not hamper the individual from gaining goods of whatever kind, do however disregard the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them. For just as the substance of education – in spite of, or because of its general availability – can ultimately be acquired only through individual activity, so it gives rise to the most intangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinction between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socioeconomic differences) by a decree or revolution, nor by the will of those concerned. Thus it was appropriate for Jesus to say to the rich youth: ‘Give away your goods to the poor’, but not for him to say ‘Give your education to the underprivileged’. (ibid., pp. 339–40) The result is, as Simmel added, ‘There is no advantage that appears to those in inferior positions to be so despised, and before which they feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education’ (ibid.). This is the deepest wound among many of what Sennet and Cobb called The Hidden Injuries of Class (1973), inflicted upon the majority of the

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population by an apparently meritocratic education system, selecting, as Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) showed in their book on French students, only those who already possess the cultural capital necessary to succeed. The awareness of this trick being played upon them, however, is never totally lost to the majority, even if they lack the means and the words to express it fully in abstract and propositional form. Thus, Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’ could scrawl in workman’s chalk on the walls of ‘Bibliol College’ angry words from the book of Job: ‘I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you, yea, who knoweth not such things as these?’ For working-class, or any, individuals can acquire the same generalised knowledge and analytic abilities of rational or scientific thinking by their own efforts without attending higher (or any) education, though it may be hard for them to do so. But in the absence of any alternative, counter-culture to that of Official, academic, generalised knowledge, such ways of thinking and speaking are likely to be recognised by others as typical of the ‘middle’ rather than ‘working’ class and can therefore be deployed, along with the badges of qualification attesting to their formal certification, as what Bourdieu (1982) called marks of ‘Distinction’ to gain entry to typically ‘middle-class’ professions. The system is thus selfperpetuating and enclosed, enmeshed tightly with the traditional hierarchy and snobbery of a semi-feudal cultural and academic inheritance. There are, of course, compensations for the majority who are failed by this relentlessly selective system. Widespread contempt for theory and culture, indeed for generalised thinking that goes far beyond the commonly accepted and easily understood, is another of the crippling debilities of the English cultural inheritance. Many people settle, not only through exhaustion or because of lack of resources, for what they acknowledge is too often trashy and second-rate. Thus the terrible admissions, which can be heard so often from ordinary people and even from their children at a very early age, ‘I’m not brainy’, ‘I’m thick’, as if this were an innate and unchangeable quality in themselves. Yet this view of knowledge is shared by the academic Guardians of the system who select the gold of a ‘first class mind’ from the dross of second and third rate students. For them, following an economic

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analogy, the more valuable knowledge is the more rare and inaccessible it is thought to be, hard to find and refine – like gold. This involves a contradiction, however, as knowledge (as distinct from the mystically inspired revelations with which it is sometimes confused) by definition only exists so long as it is shared. This accounts for what the anthropologist Frederick Bailey (1977, p. 57), investigating the strange tribes inhabiting the universities of North America, described as academics’ ‘fragile sense of superiority . . . that curiously nervous elitism, which combines a firm sense of one’s own superiority with a conviction that there is no way in which outsiders can be made to acknowledge it.’ This traditional conception of knowledge and the separation of superior mental from inferior manual labour upon which it was based, elevated the mind over the body in a philosophically idealist manner derived from Descartes. ‘The presumption of a free, spirit-like existence of the mind’, what Maritain (1928, p. 54) called ‘the sin of angelism’, ‘has been the central characteristic of Western thought for the past four centuries’, according to May (1976, p. 49). Yet, it began to break down, along with so much else in the apparently firmly fixed settlement of English state and society, as the long boom finally petered out towards the end of the 1960s. During that decade so much that was holy was profaned and so much that had appeared so solid seemed to melt into the air. 1960s progressivism and the counter-culture developed not only through the media by popular culture and new social movements, but also within expanded higher education, where alternative ideas were elaborated in opposition to academic Official Knowledge. ‘The silly sixties’ are now widely condemned not only by the older generations but by influential sections of the generations who have grown up since, who now see them as the decade when the rot set in. There is thus a still continuing contemporary attempt to reverse what are now widely seen as the educational follies of the period. These were identified as progressive primary schooling, comprehensive secondary education and expanded higher education. All came to be seen subsequently as unrealistically related to any application of training for employment and thus to the real business of ‘wealth creation’

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of the profits vital for continued prosperity in a capitalist economy. In the following chapter, a more balanced and optimistic assessment of the 1960s will be made, particularly of the main emphasis of education or learning policy upon comprehensive secondary schooling from 1963 to 1976.

2 Comprehensive Schooling, 1963–76 COMPREHENSIVE REFORM ‘Although’, as Caroline Benn and Clyde Chitty (1996, p. 88) said, ‘1965 was the year when reorganisation of secondary education became national policy, comprehensive education reform itself began many years earlier.’ Section 13 of the 1944 Act allowed local education authorities to submit for approval proposals for schools organisation other than along the officially sanctioned tripartite lines. In consequence, immediately after the war, with the establishment of universal secondary – as opposed to elementary – education, such plans were approved in a number of areas. Anglesey, for example, which opened its first comprehensive school in 1949, was fully comprehensive by 1952 and spearheaded what Simon (1991, p. 205) described as the ‘Welsh resistance to tripartism’. Coventry’s bombed-out schools were rebuilt along comprehensive lines, as were a proportion of secondary schools in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The 1947 London School Plan designated eight schools as ‘interim’ comprehensives and this led to the opening of the London County Council’s first ‘purpose-built’ comprehensive at Kidbrooke in 1954. In addition, despite the predominance of separate tripartite schools, there were multipartite or bipartite arrangements combining grammar, technical and secondary modern streams under one roof. In country areas this was often the only practical means of schooling a sparse population so that some comprehensive developments were pioneered in Conservative-controlled shire counties but also, for example, in Southend. As a result of these ‘experiments’, as Benn and Chitty (1996) recorded, the numbers of students in comprehensive schools grew from 7,988 (equals 0.4 per cent of all pupils) in ten schools (equals 0.2 per cent of all state schools) in 1954 to 239,619 (equals 8.5 per cent) in 262 schools (equals 4.5 per cent) ten years later. 59

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All this was before the issue of Circular 10/65 by the Department of Education and Science, as the Ministry became in 1964, which requested local education authorities to follow the government’s new policy for comprehensive reorganisation of secondary schooling. The phase of learning policy officially favouring comprehensive schooling can thus be said to have lasted from the issue of the Circular in 1965 until another Labour government repudiated this approach by espousing a new policy of vocational relevance to the needs of industry with Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin speech in 1976. However, unlike the phase of policy marked by this speech, as well as by the phases initiated by the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts, comprehensivisation was not in origin a top-down direction of policy but was stimulated from the bottom up. As a genuinely popular movement, it also gained a momentum that was maintained throughout the intervening period of Conservative government from 1970 to 1974. In fact, as is often pointed out, Heath’s Secretary of State for Education, Margaret Thatcher, designated more schools officially comprehensive than any other minister before or since. She later described the unstoppable, comprehensive bandwagon as a ‘roller coaster’ (quoted in Simon, 1991, p. 412). Supported by many Labour councils and some Conservative ones – especially, as noted above, in rural areas – by trades councils, progressive political parties and the labour movement generally, the campaign for comprehensivisation was already by the early 1960s, as Simon wrote, ‘a social movement of some significance’. It led, he said, to ‘a veritable explosion of grass-roots activity’ (1991, pp. 271 and 272), or what The Times Educational Supplement (28 May 1965) called ‘grass roots democracy’. So much was this the case that by 1962 it had become clear to the Conservative Education Minister, Sir Edward Boyle, that ‘support for the development of secondary education along comprehensive lines was gaining considerable momentum’ (1972, p. 31). At this time, comprehensive reform was also supported by a number of figures who would subsequently change their minds and oppose it, for example, the then Stepney headteacher and later Conservative Education Minister, Rhodes Boyson. Much of this history has since been conveniently forgotten.

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To Brian Simon, whose account is followed here, looking back on the events in which he participated, 1963 marked ‘the crucial moment of change’ (ibid., p. 271). It is, therefore, taken as the date indicating the inception of this phase of learning policy because it was then that the still nationally significant Northern cities of Manchester and Liverpool under Labour local government declared in favour of comprehensive change. It was also the year that Boyle announced to the annual conference of the Association of Education Committees that he thought the time had come ‘to abandon the idea of the “bi-partite” system . . . as the “norm”, compared with which all other forms of organisation were to be thought of as “experimental”’, and that in future any proposals for secondary school reorganisations would be decided ‘strictly on educational grounds’ (Boyle, 1972, p. 34). It was also the year the Robbins Report on higher education (see below) and the Newsom Report on the (other) ‘Half’ of ‘Our Future’ were published. This last, on the education of pupils aged between 13 and 16 of ‘average and less than average ability’, already sounded dated by the time it appeared and was associated with a last-ditch and soon abandoned attempt by a Conservative government to legitimate the secondary moderns. Robin Pedley’s influential book The Comprehensive School was also published in 1963 to keep parents and the general public abreast of the latest developments. The fact that not only Boyle but also the new leader of the Conservatives, Edward Heath, made it clear ‘we accept the trend of educational opinion against selection at 11-plus’ (in The Sunday Times, 18 June 1967) shows how the new consensus had now consolidated on this latest phase of learning policy centring on comprehensive secondary reform. So Michael Stewart, the 1964 Labour government’s first Minister of Education, in announcing that ‘reorganisation of secondary education on comprehensive lines should be national policy’, could claim that he was only anticipating what Boyle would have done anyway. Meanwhile, the fear that secondary school reorganisation would lead to a decline in standards was proved illusory (see Reynolds and Sullivan, 1987). ‘Indeed,’ as Simon concluded, ‘in the mid1960s, so complete was the hegemony of those supporting

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comprehensive education, that there was little . . . debate’ about it (1991, p. 292). The National Union of Teachers first endorsed reorganisation at its conference in Easter 1965. Indeed, it was the enthusiasm and commitment amongst teachers in the early comprehensives that partly accounted for their success. ‘It is difficult’, as Simon said, ‘to recapture the mood and feel of the 1960s’ (1991, p. 352) but this was indeed ‘the heroic period in English (and Welsh) secondary education’ (ibid., p. 319) when there was an ‘effervescence . . . an explosion in the schools’ (ibid., p. 317). Partly, this is accounted for by the youth of a teaching force rejuvenated by the influx of postwar baby-boomers from the expanded teacher training colleges. Through their enhanced place in higher education, these colleges – many of which were now incorporated as schools of education into universities – gave their students a new sense of professional expertise and knowledge which was sustained by new developments in pedagogical theory, especially in psychology but also in the new ‘sociology of education’. So supported, teaching as an occupation now moved within sight of its goal of becoming an all-graduate profession. In the classrooms meanwhile, Nuffield science curriculum reform centring upon discovery learning and independent study was complemented by the pioneering Humanities Curriculum Project whose director, Lawrence Stenhouse, posited its objective ‘to transform our adolescent pupils into students’ (quoted in Plaskow, 1985, p. 5). The ‘new maths’ also began to filter through to the secondaries from the primaries where it was encouraged by Her Majesty’s Inspectors against the computational drilling and chanting previously predominant in elementary schools. These curricular reforms were supported by teams of teachers, backed up by local authority advisers and teachers’ centres specialising in various subjects. They relied on draft guides and materials to trial and develop a shared, professional approach, rather than textbooks handed down from on high for all to follow uniformly. This was also the approach to curriculum reform adopted by the Schools Council, set up with a teacher majority in 1964 to develop it further in concert with the state. ‘In this matter,’ as Bell and Prescott (1975, p. 2) wrote

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of the Council, ‘the state’s first duty is to maximise teacher autonomy and freedom.’ As reiterated by the report of the Lockwood Committee on schools curricula and examinations (HMSO, 1964), and affirmed by the Ministry official responsible, ‘the schools should have the fullest measure of responsibility for their own work, including responsibility for their own curricula and teaching methods, which should be evolved by their own staff to meet the needs of their own pupils’ (Morrell, in Jennings, 1985, p. 20). As the Labour Secretary of Education, Anthony Crosland stated, ‘The only influence’ which a Secretary of State can have on the curriculum and the internal organisation of schools ‘is the indirect one that is exercised through HMIs’ (in Kogan, 1978, p. 172). As well as the ‘soft progressivism’, as Martin Allen calls it (personal communication), of the Schools Council and Nuffield Science, this period also saw the start of more radical practices, around the teaching of English, for example. These contested academic definitions of the inappropriate grammar school curriculum with which comprehensives were foisted, so as to, as Ken Jones put it, ‘reshape curricula in ways that were both critical of received definitions of culture and responsive to pressures arising from important cultural changes in the post war period’ (1983, p. 157). Antiracist and anti-sexist initiatives also began to be integrated with learning in areas like humanities, as well as different versions of ‘social studies’ which integrated teaching across previously separate subject disciplines. The more explicitly socialist versions of this harder progressivism found expression in the establishment of journals like Teaching London Kids, in the work of classroom teachers like Chris Searle, whose pupils struck in his support when he was dismissed for publishing their poetry, and in movements for multicultural and anti-racist education. There was also a radical groundswell within the main teachers’ union, the NUT, and even in the nascent school students’ unions formed in 1972 – the National Union of School Students (an adjunct of the National Union of Students) and the Maoist-influenced Schools Action Union. The latter induced apoplexy in the popular press by leading as many as 10,000 pupils waving ‘the little red school-book’ on strike in one day in London for

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an end to canings, uniforms and detentions (Hansen and Jensen, 1971). All this contributed to the ferment and debate. The shared project of reform from below is emphasised here because it contrasts so strongly with later approaches in which the state repeatedly attempted to dictate terms from above to school teachers. Not that the new approach was introduced without argument. The Conservative former Minister of Education, David Eccles, first used the phrase ‘the secret garden of the curriculum’ in a Commons debate on the Crowther Report in 1960 to criticise the tendency for some teachers to attempt to abrogate to themselves all control over what went on in the schools; while for left-wing commentators the Schools Council could be seen as either ‘a clear and deliberate step aimed at enhancing both the selfimage and the public image of the teachers’, as by Simon (1991, p. 314), or, as by Michael Young nearer the time, ‘a step towards the incorporation of teachers into governing processes’ (in Bell and Prescott, 1975, pp. 31–5). The reorganisation of secondary schooling – and indeed of education at all levels – received academic endorsement from human capital theory in economics, which saw ‘brainpower and skill’, as a Labour Party sponsored study group first argued in its ‘Taylor Report’, as ‘a nation’s primary asset’ (Labour Party, 1963, pp. 7–9). At this stage, human capital theory coexisted with the dominant Keynesian orthodoxy in economics. When this orthodoxy changed to mainstream monetarism, as summarised by Aldrich et al., Human capital theory internalized skills and education into classical economic theory. In doing so it both shifted the meaning of equality from egalitarianism to individual equal opportunity, and it justified investment in education on economic grounds. The movement of these two cultural strands was to converge on education and the reform of existing institutions as causally linked to economic performance. (1998, p. 3) Following human capital theory, educational expenditure, which by the end of the decade had risen to nearly 5 per cent of GDP, surpassing that on defence for the first time in 1969–70, was seen as an investment (though not yet as an investment equal or superior to investment in physical and

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financial capital – materials, machinery and money-capital – as it was later to be presented). As in the US, it was the launching of the sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1958 that stimulated this interest and investment, particularly in technical and higher education, including the commissioning of the Robbins Report in 1961. This Conservative-appointed, university-dominated committee advocated an expansion of higher education along the self-governing university model that was then synonymous with HE in the UK. Like the Plowden Report on primary schooling (below), Robbins rejected the now discredited notions of IQ – which evidence submitted to it saw as irrelevant a criterion for university admission as height. Robbins, therefore, abandoned the notion of a limited, genetically determined ‘pool of ability’ and declared that, in principle, higher education could be universally available. Expenditure on higher education had already doubled in the decade preceding the publication of the Robbins Report in 1963 as a result of both the higher costs of equipment and the introduction of student grants. Later, numbers grew to exceed even Robbins’ estimates, which were regarded at the time by the Treasury as extravagant. From its origins in an elite system of medieval Oxbridge colleges and Victorian Civic universities attended before the Second World War by only 3 per cent of the age range, mainly young men, higher education had grown to 7.2 per cent by 1962–3. Including the polytechnics (see below) and the Open University (founded in 1969), the percentage of full- and part-time students rose to 12.7 per cent of 18–21-year-olds by the end of the 1970s after which a short period of cutbacks followed. New universities were founded alongside the promotion of some technical colleges to independent university status. This was the most rapid phase of expansion that the HE sector was to enjoy until the very different circumstances of the late 1980s. Even so, demand exceeded supply, with further education ‘mopping up’ the overflow, according to Layard et al. (1969, p. 65). The belief in individual potential and a new emphasis on educability permeated the Plowden Report on ‘Children and Their Primary Schools’ (HMSO, 1967) as much as the Robbins Report on higher education. The new Piagetian

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orthodoxy in child psychology, which emphasised individual development, reinforced what Boyle in his foreword to the Newsom Report said was, ‘The essential point . . . that all children should have an equal opportunity of acquiring intelligence, and of developing their talents and abilities to the full.’ Indeed, the common optimism suffusing all these reports informed the consensus on education expansion which was now seen as affordable thanks to continuing economic expansion, which in turn required increased investment in education to sustain it. As Plowden said, ‘Unemployment has been almost non-existent since the war . . . incomes have risen, nutrition has improved, housing is better, the health service and the rest of the social services have brought help where it is needed’ (Vol. 2, p. 69). The questioning of the general category of ability allowed experiments in ‘mixed ability’ teaching, both in the primaries, where streamed preparation for the 11+ was no longer required as grammar schools were phased out in many areas, and in the secondaries. So a new pedagogy, based on independent learning and complementary to the ‘progressive’ primary schooling advocated in the Plowden Report, began to be created within the new movement towards comprehensive schools for all. The changes in state education at all levels were part of the liberation in British social attitudes ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP’, as Larkin wrote in June 1967, this liberation was undoubtedly superficial in many respects for many people. However, ‘The sixties’ – when they are not seen as ‘silly’ – are celebrated for at last sweeping away the fuddy-duddy old world of what suddenly came to be seen as petty, hierarchical class distinction. Preserved in the aspic of austerity and rationing after the war, the orderly ideal of the tripartite social system collapsed in the scandals and incompetence of the Tory old boys running a government that had become a satirical joke. Everywhere events appeared to move beyond the control of England’s natural rulers. Abroad the pretence to a new Elizabethan age of empire had been exposed by the humiliation of Suez. The economy juddered and faltered from one balance of payments crisis to another but the ‘thirty glorious years’ did not finally end until the oil crisis of 1973. So,

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even while falling behind relative to other industrialised economies, Britons had indeed ‘never had it so good’, as Macmillan had told them. Fuelled by the permanent arms economy of superpower competition which brought the world to the brink of destruction at least once in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the three pillars referred to in the previous chapter as underpinning welfare capitalism (and what could be called welfare communism in Eastern Europe) continued to sustain the Fordist industrial development paradigm of mass production. This was a model for society’s future development that was shared widely enough for most members of society, as has been said, to envision a place for themselves within it. In fact, it can be argued – as by Lipietz – that the paradigm first broke down at the level of the psychic economy which sustained it in the collective mind-set shared by the individuals who participated in it. In the events of May 1968 in France he saw ‘the first mass revolt against the Fordist paradigm’ (Lipietz, 1992, p. 13). These demonstrated therefore, as Nairn and Quattrocchi said 30 years later, ‘The Beginning of the End’. In the UK meanwhile, the old world of cosy working-class terraces was literally demolished and redeveloped. Anarchy seemed loosed upon the world as popular culture appropriated trends in fashion and music that had first appeared in the still mainly manually working class. Young people were now a larger proportion of the population than they had been since the beginning of the century. With some modest affluence, youth became for the first time a state to be celebrated and prolonged, instead of a transient phase to be endured and got through as quickly as possible. The emergence of a shared commercial youth culture obscured real differences between blue- and white-collar workers. These labels were lost as manual workers could no longer be identified outwith their workplaces now they drove to work like everybody else, no longer walking cap on head, lunchbox in hand. New appetites were excited by mass marketing which put on every high street what had previously been exclusive first to the wealthy and then to some of the old middle class – televisions, fashion, holidays abroad. With the mass marketing also of the contraceptive pill, all this appealed particularly to the young, so that, together with parental

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controls over future generations, traditional class affiliations were further weakened. The Labour governments of 1964 and 1966 claimed to advance the new classlessness, redefining socialism as egalitarianism, or ‘opportunities to be equal’. They embraced also an alliance with science, as former double-barrelled hereditary peer, now plain Mr Tony Benn, forged at MinTech a bright future in the white heat of new technology. Instead of returning to the glories of the past, the industrial modernisation that was attempted would, it was claimed, demand higher skills from more workers as drudgery and hard labour were replaced by automation. Blue collars would give way to white-coated technicians as the traditional manually working class would be literally educated away. Science and art might then be united in the laboratories and offices of the gleaming factories of the future. As much education as possible for as many people as possible was to be supplied by progressive primary and comprehensive secondary schooling, as well as by new, ‘plate glass’ universities, some specialising in science and technology, and by polytechnics which echoed a Soviet ideal of combining practical and theoretical study, which might then become ‘The People’s Universities’ (Robinson, 1968). WHAT WENT WRONG For a start, Circular 10/65 did not ‘require’ but only ‘requested’ local education authorities to ‘submit plans . . . for the reorganisation of their secondary schools on comprehensive lines’. These were defined according to the ‘Statistics of Education’ for 1979 as schools having ‘admission arrangements without reference to ability and aptitude’. Kogan (1978) revealed that much argument went on in the DES as to whether the Circular should ‘request’ or ‘require’, officials wanting the former and the Minister (Reg Prentice) the latter. Requesting rather than requiring led, as has often been pointed out, to a gradual, piecemeal approach with no overall planning of the transition to non-selective state secondary schooling in England and Wales. There were consequently delays in implementation with not only

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Conservative but Labour local council objections to comprehensivisation in their education authorities, for example in Labour-controlled Birmingham which retains selection through 11+ to this day. As a result, by the time that Labour left office in 1970, as Rubinstein and Simon (1973, p. 110) indicated, only 12 per cent of secondary pupils attended ‘genuinely’ comprehensive schools, most of the changes having been in name only, redesignating secondary moderns as comprehensives. The waters were also muddied at the source by the Labour Party’s 1964 Manifesto promise of ‘Grammar school education for all’. This confusion was amplified by the Party’s leader, Harold Wilson, characteristically facing in two directions at once during the election. He appealed to voters on all sides by advocating comprehensives while simultaneously declaring that grammar schools would be abolished over his dead body. Labour’s first Secretary of State for Education, Michael Stewart, tried to reconcile the contradiction by explaining that comprehensive schools would preserve ‘what we value in grammar school education’ but ‘make it available to more children’ (The Times Educational Supplement, 20 November 1964). While Tony Crosland, Labour’s leading ideologue, had argued in The Future of Socialism (1956, p. 147) that ‘We cannot be content with correctly distributing all the (as it were) alpha material, but must make best use of our beta resources also.’ Thus ‘division into streams of ability’ remained essential, as Roy Jenkins also made clear in putting ‘The Labour Case’ when he stressed that although a comprehensive school would ‘include within its intake children now classified into the different types of grammar, technical and secondary modern. It does not imply that these children will be taught in the same classes and all do the same work. They must be divided according to intelligence and aptitude . . . but the divisions will be less sharp and less final’ (1959, p. 96). Despite Wilson’s depreciations of the ‘educational apartheid’ of the 11+, it was therefore a softening rather than an abolition of selection that was intended by the Labour government. The necessary reform was conceived in terms of the wastage of national talent revealed not only by the Robbins Report on higher education but by Crowther’s 1959 report

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on 15 to 18 year olds. It was also seen, as has been said, as a means of lessening class antagonism and increasing social cohesion. Circular 10/65 referred to comprehensives as schools aiming ‘to establish a school community in which pupils cover the whole ability range and with different interests and backgrounds can be encouraged to mix with each other, gaining stimulus from the contacts and learning tolerance and understanding in the process’ (para. 36). This was ‘the social case’ for comprehensive schools, which Shirley Williams still considered ‘unanswerable’ in the 1980s when she argued for ‘educating children of different backgrounds and of different abilities together . . . to break down class barriers and the mutual ignorance of different social groups, and create the context for a more democratic, open and unprejudiced society’ (1981, p. 156). So, as Ruth Levitas put it, ‘The actual possibility of social mobility for the exception . . .’ became ‘the primary illusion of an entire class’ (1974, p. 53). From this perspective, ‘We can now see social mobility as an ideology’ (Sarup, 1978, p. 185). This impossible project of social democratic reform – ‘No less than to “break down”, in a capitalist order which builds them up and is based upon them, the divisions of society of class, sex and race’ (Selbourne, 1981, p. 115) – became a constant refrain of both the old and new Labour Party. It was repeated, for instance, by Niel Kinnock, referring to schools as ‘the solvent of class division and personal advantage’ (New Socialist, March–April 1986). The emphasis on education as the ‘main instrument’ in ‘equalizing . . . the social distribution of life chances’, as the Labour Party’s 1982 Programme put it, was echoed again by Tony Blair’s 1997 declaration that ‘education is social justice’. Plainly it is not the whole of social justice, although equitable educational provision is equally plainly a part of social justice. Such a narrowed elision of the part with the whole puts all the weight on education as a means of effecting social change, a weight which it is unable to carry alone. To succeed, the project of changing society through education would have needed to act in tandem with a wider movement for progressive change in other areas of society, particularly the economy. Too often these connections were not made by the minority of progressive teachers. Their initiatives remained the property of professionals in

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the classroom, rather than linking up with the larger labour movement. Also, even if formal equality of provision were superimposed on all state schools, the fact that schools exist in neighbourhoods differentiated on the basis of class residence would offer no more real equality now than it did in the 1960s, or than did the provision of free school milk ‘from Hoxton to Harrow’ in the 1940s. Indeed, it has been argued that, despite the popular groundswell behind the pressure for comprehensive reform in the 1960s, by ‘marginally widening the opportunities for upward social mobility’, which was also achieved through the expansion of higher education, Labour ‘appealed to a social class group who form part of the natural constituency of the Tory Party’ (Harris, 1983, p. 50). The growing non-manual group of employees who defined themselves as ‘middle class’ found that they could forget the trauma of the 11+, which was unpredictable in its rejection of more children than it selected, and that self-selection by residential neighbourhood was a far more congenial arrangement. In addition, division ‘according to intelligence and aptitude’, even if it was ‘less sharp and less final’ had the consequence of ensuring the persisting dominance of academic Official Knowledge enshrined in the grammar school curriculum over the new comprehensives. Comprehensive reorganisation focused on structural change, neglecting necessary curricular changes as well as concomitant pedagogical issues. Simon succinctly encapsulated the resulting contradiction: ‘Concentration on the more academic students at the expense of the majority involved importing within the secondary school values and practices characteristic of the divided system that comprehensive education was intended to overcome’ (1991, p. 303). To prove their worth, the new comprehensives had to show that they were as academically successful as the grammar and private schools by building up sixth forms and achieving examination success for entry to elite universities. To do so they resorted to internal selection by streaming and banding. The effects of the former were revealed by a 1997 study of the ‘Social Relations in a Secondary School’ by David Hargreaves, who showed how streaming within schools reinforced the peer group

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values of those relegated to the bottom forms. Banding was a more common arrangement, but often amounted to the same thing. Benn and Simon, who reckoned they were ‘Half Way There’ to comprehensive reform in 1970, showed only 4 per cent of all the secondary schools they surveyed continued mixed-ability teaching through all years in a complete system of non-streamed classes. But, as they wrote, ‘The practice of streaming . . . is . . . clearly incompatible with genuine comprehensive reorganisation in the long run’ (1970, p. 360). In terms of gender, although less than one third of all state schools were now single sex, half of Benn and Simon’s secondary schools restricted some subjects to boys or girls only, while nearly all mixed secondaries (98 per cent) separated the sexes at some point before 16. As to race, the children of postwar immigration who now began their progress through the state school system, like a chemical added to clear liquid to show the flow of current, punctured the pretensions to fair and equal provision that a ‘colour-blind’ approach presented. From bussing black students away from schools in which they were becoming majorities, the official response moved from such attempts to ensure their effective assimilation, through the compromise of multiculturalism, towards the anti-racism that a racist state, defining the problem through immigration controls in terms of numbers, could hardly be expected to endorse. This progression of policy, now turned full-circle back to a colour-blind assimilationism, has often been rehearsed, most recently by Grosvenor (1997). Irritated by the threat to ‘traditional values’ and ‘national identity’ posed by black and Asian immigration, but stimulated initially in 1969 by the student revolt before finally settling upon defence of grammar school ‘excellence’, the reactionary writers of the Black Papers on education began the totally unsubstantiated complaint that ‘standards’ were falling as a result of comprehensive reorganisation. As Halsey et al. commented, ‘To claim that standards have declined may be a plea that certain kinds of traditional knowledge ought to be valued’ (1980, p. 111). The Black Papers’ widely publicised defence of academic ‘quality’ drew in debased form on the tradition of conservative cultural criticism running from Arnold to Leavis. The Black Paperites

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also used the discredited psychology of Sir Cyril Burt, who contributed to the second paper in the series to treat social inequalities as natural differences. Another Professor of Psychology, Richard Lynn, claimed in the same collection that teachers in comprehensives were wasting their efforts because ‘They do not realise that slum dwellers are caused principally by low innate intelligence’ (1969, p. 29). The main contention of progressives favouring education reform that there were no such innate differences and that anyone could in principle be educated to do practically anything could logically refute such claims, drawing on the evidence of human science. In fact, the Black Paper writers were further discredited when Burt’s fraudulent uses of his data were later exposed, as well as by the racist associations of another psychometric advocate of IQ testing, Hans Eysenck, who contributed to the Black Papers. However, the grounds upon which progressives attempted to prove the reactionaries wrong in pedagogical practice by raising standards in the comprehensives were not their own. They were those defined by the academic Official Knowledge of the grammar and private schools in which students raised in a narrowly literary elite culture already excelled through traditional written examinations. Only in exceptional cases could individuals not endowed through their upbringing and education with this cultural capital hope to compete. That so many succeeded in doing so in comprehensive schools was a tribute to them and their teachers. Moreover, the mentalist model of learning contained within the academic conception of abstract, generalised, Official Knowledge precluded the mutual pedagogic relations between teachers and taught that many idealistic young teachers sought to develop. The academic assumption was that teacher knew best and Marx’s prescription that ‘The educators also need to be educated’ was forgotten. The growing strength of teacher professionalism also became assimilated to the Taylorist division between mental and manual labour that was a part of the still predominant Fordist social development paradigm. The majority of state secondary pupils were relegated to the latter (manual) category. In the primary schools, for instance, the Piagetian orthodoxy now taught in the teacher training colleges

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allowed a new categorising and typification of children in terms of a theory of developmental stages through which each child could be regarded as progressing, though at different rates. As a consequence, Reay (1980, pp. 47–9) found ‘that within unstreamed primary school classes there is a pervasive non-overt streaming according to ability and that the resultant hierarchy is perceived in essentially the same form by both teachers and children.’ Despite attempts to overcome such ‘labelling’, ‘middleclass teachers’ – most of whom still voted Conservative until 1987 when the majority switched to Alliance (according to an opinion poll commissioned by The Times Education Supplement on 29 May 1987) – also often set themselves against ‘workingclass parents’. Academic education was seen by many parents and pupils as irrelevant to real life and so teachers ran up against the ‘parental attitude and maternal care’ that the Plowden Report had seen as ‘more important than the level of material needs’ in preventing all children from taking advantage of the educational opportunities presented to them (1967, p. 369). Young and Whitty (1977, pp. 3–4), therefore, remarked on the ‘obsession’ of ‘policy makers – particularly those in Labour administrations – and their academic advisors . . . with the problem of working-class failure at school’. They showed that ‘the problem’ then became ‘to identify correlations between cultural features of working-class life and failure at school – facts which then became “deficiencies” for which educational policy makers attempted to devise effective programmes of compensation’. ‘This approach was based on several unquestioned assumptions: that schooling as currently practised was good, that selection was a prime function of education, that talent and merit could be identified objectively as traits of individuals, so that individual mobility in education demonstrated that greater equality of opportunity was being achieved’ (Meighan, 1981, p. 327). The attempt to break the ‘cycle of poverty’ seen as holding back working-class educational advance was to begin in the Education Priority Areas. These were intended, in an echo of Ellen Wilkinson, to make schools in deprived areas as good as the best in the country by targeting £20 million at them. This measure was described even by the Labour government’s

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chief education adviser, A.H. Halsey, as ‘yet another example of ideas drifting casually across the Atlantic, soggy on arrival and of dubious utility’ (1977, p. 38). The central assumption of both EPAs and their accompanying Community Development Programmes was that there existed only small pockets of poverty needing to be cleared up. This assumption was immediately called into question when, following the criteria for inclusion, Birmingham Local Education Authority put forward a quarter of its schools as eligible for educational prioritisation. EPAs were more than just an educational policy, however; they aimed to head off the urban rioting that had occurred in the USA. As suggested by Midwinter’s advocacy of community schooling: ‘if they are disadvantaged and unhappy the hope is that they may be on the way to rationalizing their dissatisfaction creatively rather than expressing it incoherently and perhaps violently’ (1972, p. 240). Urban riots were to come later to the UK and it is doubtful that community schools or EPAs played any part in postponing their arrival. Certainly, the EPAs did not substantially alter the educational and life chances of their impoverished residents. Halsey himself acknowledged their limited contribution to reform at a DES-sponsored conference on ‘Educational Disadvantage’ in 1975. So Caroline Benn, once again reviewing the progress of comprehensive reform, this time throughout the 1970s, reported that ‘Selection Still Blocks the Growth of Comprehensives’ (1980, pp. 8–11). This was irrespective of the internal organisation of the schools, but because, nationally, non-selective schools were in competition with selective ones, both grammar and private. Because of the overall effect of such selection, ‘If we want to be purists, we can say that probably only one third of the country’s secondary population goes to a comprehensive school where there is no selection at all.’ ‘The DES’, she noted, ‘has never been anxious to acknowledge that there is an inherent conflict in running a comprehensive system alongside a grammar one’. And, ‘At no stage has there been a planned, specially-funded, evolutionary programme of change from a selective to a comprehensive system. Instead, there has been an encouragement – or lack of it – for a series of local thrusts to establish comprehensive beach-heads inside what was, and still is, a selective education system.’

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The failure of comprehensive reform was acknowledged in the claim that the process was complete. This was made in the contributions of Callaghan and other Labour leaders to ‘The Great Debate’, which they staged to signal that the attempt at educational reform the Labour government had endorsed in the 1960s was over. Ironically, the ‘Debate’ had followed the publication in 1975 of the Bullock Report, which was the last major government effort to assert the reforming ideal of education in leading social reform, in this case – drawing upon the work of Bernstein – by an emphasis on language at all levels of learning. Set up under a Conservative government as the result of a ‘reading scare’, Bullock reported to a Labour one, which announced it had no extra funds to implement his recommendations. It then shelved the report without even parliamentary debate, so that Bullock himself said that the government was not interested in the report and never had been. He was right, for the government had abandoned the ideal of reforming society through education and now sought to reshape education to fit the changing needs of the economy as defined by industry, thus initiating a new phase of learning policy. The dominance over the majority of school students of selective academicism which regulated university entrance for an elite was thus preserved throughout the period of comprehensive reform. So too was higher education’s connection to the ‘high culture’ of the ruling-class private schools. In fact, the much celebrated ‘Robbins principle’ that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so’ did not establish – as it is often presented as doing – the universal right to attend higher education. Because entry to HE was still through ‘qualification by ability and attainment’, Robbins can be seen as moving selection up the age range, just as it was being phased out of state schools by the piecemeal introduction of comprehensives from 1965 on. The age of selection for the top 20 per cent officially qualified to progress to higher education thus rose from 11+ to 14+ and later, with the introduction of a common GCSE examination, to 16+. This had first been suggested by the Schools Council in 1970 and by the NUT before that, but was preceded in 1965 by the Certificate of

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Secondary Education examination proposed by Crowther for the next third of school students then regarded as examinable, below the top 20 per cent already taking O-levels, which had been introduced in 1951. The relegation of the majority of pupils to the second-best CSE or no exam at all reinforced their feelings of worthlessness compared with those taking the higher exams. The division of labour between manual and mental, ‘thick’ and ‘brainy’, was thus perpetuated. Crowther did not think that the majority of children should be ‘subjected to external examination’ at all; they were better taught ‘a sensible practicality’, ‘moral standards’ and ‘a wise use of leisure time’. These nearly half of all pupils were the ‘average and less than average . . . Browns and Robinsons’ of Newsom’s concern. Thus, the familiar pattern of 20:40:40 – 20 per cent O-level: 40 per cent CSE: 40 per cent low-grade CSE/fail/non-exam – began to establish itself in the reformed comprehensive system which, therefore, could still be seen and, more importantly, experienced as failing more than half its students. And, To ‘fail’ within the post-war education system with its underlying meritocratic ideology, where all had ‘equal’ chances to succeed, was a radically different experience to failing in the more openly class-based system of the prewar years. In the former case, onus for failure rested on the individual’s ‘merit’ or ‘ability’; in the latter on one’s social position: a position that has made ‘educational failure’ much harder to bear in the post-war period – and the more galling if one’s parents, too believed the myth. (Clarke and Jefferson, 1975, p. 14) Arguably, the switch to rejection via comprehensives added to this ascription of self-blame, as compared with rejection from grammar schooling at 11+ which could be correctly rationalised in terms of reflecting social position. For those who succeeded in this unequal competition, the acceptance of Robbins’ recommendations by the 1964 Labour government led to a pattern of transition for growing numbers of middle-class youth, female as well as male, moving from school to work and from home to living away via three or four years residential HE. Many of them

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preferred arts, especially the growing proportion of young women entering university, rather than science courses – so perpetuating the two cultures Snow had complained about in what became the mainly arts foundations of the new universities. The expansion of higher education offered a route to preferred non-manual employment in the growing service and state sectors. So much was this the case that it became a staple contention of seminar discussion on the burgeoning social science courses at the new universities and elsewhere that entering higher education made you ‘middle-class’ even if you were not so before. As the Robbins Report recorded, the percentage of students from working-class homes had actually decreased from 27 in 1928 to 26 in 1961. Matters have not improved substantially since, as Dearing noted in his Report on higher education in 1997, although class recomposition accompanying the absolute and relative decline of the manual working class and the expansion of nonmanual office and service working makes strict comparison impossible. The growth of the universities was supplemented after 1965 when Anthony Crosland suddenly announced an expansion of the colleges and polytechnics under the control of local education authorities. This ‘binary policy’ was urged upon him by DES officials alarmed at the cost of university expansion and also seeking to protect the academic universities from the pressure to change exerted by increasing student numbers. ‘Binarism’ was supposed to benefit local students following more vocational and less academic courses related to their local labour markets. Even though Crosland said that he ‘did not want any rigid dividing line between the different sectors – quite the contrary’, the ‘binary line’ he now created between the new polytechnics and the already existing and new universities institutionally polarised higher education. It generated and sustained – in this sector of education as elsewhere – a simplified opposition of academicism against vocationalism, education against training, generalised knowledge against limited information and behavioural competence. Despite this, many of those involved in setting up the new polytechnics advocated ‘higher education for all’. This would for the first time give opportunities for ‘careers for all’,

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instead of interesting, varied and progressive careers for a few and dull, repetitive and dead-end ‘jobs’ for the many. Seen as ‘the people’s universities’ (in Sidney Webb’s phrase) by some of their idealistic founders, the polytechnics aimed to pioneer what they called a liberal vocationalism which paralleled contemporary developments in the comprehensive and community schools that were not wholly given over to pursuit of the academic ideal. Like the comprehensive schools, the polytechnics aimed to make available for students studying locally ‘equal opportunities’ to qualify for occupations on equal terms with those educated selectively. Thus, one of their founders, Eric Robinson, saw the new institutions creating ‘a bridgehead’ for a ‘comprehensive system of education for adults’, replacing ‘the concept of the boarding school university by that of the urban community university’. Nevertheless, he admitted, ‘The British image of a polytechnic remains that of an educational soup kitchen for the poor’ (1968, p. 34). This also remained the relation of the state schools to the private schools attended by a fee-paying minority of around 7 per cent of the population. The 1966 Labour Manifesto promised to ensure the integration of these private ‘public’ schools into the national system. Indeed, a commission to make recommendations on this issue had already been set up in 1965 as promised in the 1964 Manifesto. It reported in 1968 with a second report on the direct grant grammar schools in 1970. The Public School Commission rejected abolition of the public schools in favour of their assimilation through a system of ‘assisted places’. This half-hearted recommendation was rejected at the 1968 Labour Party conference. As a result, as summarised by Simon (1991, p. 328), ‘those within the party who wanted change were back to square one’. The opportunity for fundamental reform had been missed again, just as it had been in 1945, even though, as Simon commented, ‘history seldom offers second chances’ (ibid.). Only the direct grant grammars were partially absorbed into the state system, so that what Crosland had considered in 1956 would be ‘absurd from a socialist point of view’ actually occurred: ‘to close down the grammar schools while leaving the public schools still holding their present commanding position’ (1956, p. 275).

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Following the Victorian Apprentice Boy model, most pupils in England and Wales quit school at 15 (16 after 1972); not until the 1980s did this begin to change. Indeed, as already indicated, the terms ‘school leaver’ and ‘working class’ were virtual synonyms. Yet as unemployment and deskilling began to lay waste Britain’s industrial heartlands from the 1970s onwards, the old division within the working class between skilled and unskilled/respectable and rough was eroded. However, this did not affect the deeper divide within the employed population between manual and mental labour for which the schools, grammar or secondary modern/comprehensive, continued to sort pupils at 14+. With gathering momentum, changes in the whole way of life of the manual working class sapped the traditional, informal, cultural apprenticeship by which not only habitual skills and attitudes but popular culture and trades union consciousness had been previously acquired. Moreover, the alternative to corporatist mass production usually presented by the traditional labour movement looked increasingly like merely a left-wing version of the same thing, run wholly – instead of only partly – by state bureaucrats. Certainly, the actually existing alternative in the Soviet Union no longer offered a radically different direction for the future development of society. As a consequence, opposition at all levels became increasingly defensive. With the important exception of the women’s movement, the ferment of the 1960s had failed to coalesce into a new paradigm or model for social development which could secure the permanent allegiance of a majority of the population. ‘The alternative politics of the 1970s’, as Roger Coleman commented (1988, p. 132): was never more than a very loose alliance of individuals and groups who either felt specifically oppressed by society or found it repressive in a general sense and wanted to change it. It was the diversity of this youth culture that gave it such enormous creative energy, but the irreconcilability of all its sub-groupings left it with no unifying objectives other than a nebulous and undefined glorifying of ‘revolution’ as an end in itself. For progressive and radical teachers, the equivalent goal of

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creating cultural revolution in the classroom, as urged in schools by Channan and Gilchrist’s 1974 What School is For, became increasingly divorced from life beyond the class or lecture room walls. The Gramscian ideal advanced from within the new left of state school teachers functioning as ‘organic intellectuals’ to create an alternative, socialist ‘hegemony’ for the working class dissolved in face of the increasingly defensive and fragmenting traditional industrial proletariat. This isolation led to extremes of practice, as in the case of the William Tyndale School teachers who attempted to run a non-authoritarian primary school without the support of the parents. After Tyndale, progressivism became an easy target for the increasingly vehement right wing and their supporters in the mass media, and – a decade later – by new Labour educational ideologue, Michael Barber (see chapter 7 of his The Learning Game (1997) but for a more considered critique see Jones’ 1983 Beyond Progressivism). In higher education, the ‘theoretical practice’ of academic radicalism (if that is not a contradiction in terms) – similarly immured within the campus – became increasingly abstruse, like Milton’s devils ‘in wandring mazes lost’. Thus, the ideals animating the student movement, from which many progressive teachers had graduated and which was a product of unparalleled expansion of higher education worldwide, were dissipated despite the achievements of the movement. But the student movement, in the UK at least, was as much as anything else a product of the frustrated expectations of a generation of students, the majority of whose parents had not attended higher education, and for whom promises of access to new and more demanding job opportunities were unlikely to be met. The progressive critique which they joined in making of academic Official Knowledge in terms of its ‘irrelevance’ to the real life of labour was soon appropriated by the state. It was turned around to support a new learning policy of relevance to the needs of industry with which, first Labour, and then Conservative, governments were to meet the perceived failures of secondary comprehensivisation, primary progressivism and expanded higher education. The lack of a coherent alternative vision, then, can be seen to be the fundamental explanation for what went wrong in this phase of learning policy.

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TECHNICAL TRAINING AND THE TERTIARY OPTION However, the reform of education had by no means been exhausted and still offered a way forward within the predominant, corporatist paradigm of the mixed economy. Indeed, further progressive evolution appeared to possess an historical inevitability to Halsey, Heath and Ridge, who in their magisterial account summarised The development of education in Western industrialized countries . . . as having characteristically three stages. In the first stage primary education is universalized and is terminal for the majority with a minority going on to secondary and tertiary education. In the second stage secondary education is universalized, the primary schools are transitional to the secondary schools and a minority go on to tertiary institutions. In the third stage the secondary schools become transitional to a system of mass higher education . . . (1980, p. 24) That this tertiary option was not yet taken as the next stage of comprehensive reform was further witness to the strength of selective academicism over the system of education at all levels. The collapse of the tripartite system of grammar, secondary modern and technical schools into comprehensives had resulted in the loss of technical education, seen by Halsey et al. (ibid., p. 214), as by many others, as ‘one of the tragedies of British education after the second world war’. But it has already been noted that the technical secondary schools did not expand as intended under the 1944 settlement. The general demand for skilled labour did not occur as anticipated and so such specialised technical training as was required was provided by the further education colleges. In the comprehensive schools, technical departments were subordinated to the more academic education to which the new schools aspired. The skills of manual workers were thus acquired in what remained of technical education in formal institutions, through largely part-time FE by day-release from apprenticeships and in night schools. In the 1960s, 40 per cent of boy school leavers gained apprenticeships. This proportion was halved by 1981 as the number of school

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leavers entering manufacturing apprenticeships fell from a peak of 236,000 in 1968 to under 100,000 in 1982. The number of other trainees in manufacturing fell from 210,000 in 1968 to 90,000 in 1980 (Manpower Services Commission, 1982, para 2.2). When this decline in training first began, it was often blamed on young workers themselves. They were seen as unprepared any longer to put in the time to gain the old apprenticeship skills, whilst their unions were castigated for demanding too high wages for them and for unskilled workers generally, against whom there was no longer sufficient ‘differential’ to make the effort of training worth while. The 1964 Industrial Training Act was partly a response to this perception of the situation. It was recognised – as by an inquiry set up by the Ministry of Labour in 1961 – that ‘the Government may need in future to play a larger role in industrial training’ (quoted in Sheldrake and Vickerstaff, 1987, p. 33). The role that government was to play accorded with the tripartite ‘social partnership’ model of industrial development which was still predominant in Britain, as elsewhere in Western developed economies. Under the Act, government would bring together employers and trades unions in a Central Training Council with six representatives from each side of industry. This national Council advised and consulted with similarly tripartite Industrial Training Boards overseeing their various sectors. Although set up by a Conservative government, the ITBs were intended by Labour to play a part in their national planning processes. By May 1966 there were 13 of them covering 7.5 million employees. Numbers training in manufacturing industry increased by 15 per cent in the five years following the Act and faster in those sectors covered by ITBs. There was also increased day-release to expanded further education. The effect of the Industrial Training Act was therefore to halt temporarily the long-term, secular decline in training, but its measures were to be abandoned during the next phase of learning policy largely at the instigation of the employers whom it was supposed to benefit. Employers’ organisations, such as the Confederation of British Industry, only set up with government support in 1965, complained ceaselessly about the exactions of the grant/levy system which financed the training that the ITBs

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organised. Smaller firms particularly lost out because, although they paid the levy, they did not benefit from the grants which went disproportionately to the larger companies. This conflict between larger and smaller capitals was the main reason why the 1964 Act broke down. The inability to respond to the gathering crisis of a faltering economy by extending secondary reorganisation to a tertiary level and integrate general education with skills training on the model of the polytechnic ideal reflected an historical lack of planning for post-compulsory education and training. Even though what was to become the Board of Trade first began funding technical education in Schools of Design as long ago as 1836, there has never been any effort to identify and provide a national minimum of courses for young workers and adults. Or, more accurately, as Bill Bailey points out (personal communication), there was no implementation of legislation for such a national system. The Education Acts of 1918 and 1944, for instance, included sections requiring all school-leavers to continue in part-time education and training up to the age of 18, but in neither case were these proposals implemented. This was part of a larger apparent indifference towards generations of young people, the majority of whom had no further formal education after leaving school. This neglect of most young workers is related to another aspect of the failure to replace traditional apprenticeships with a modern system of technical and vocational training before or during employment. Throughout the twentieth century, an increase in official interest in the debilitating effects of industrialism upon young people centred on the social, physical and moral effects upon young men particularly of what used to be called ‘blind-alley’ or ‘dead-end’ jobs and, increasingly, of prolonged periods of unemployment. From the Boer War onwards, recurrent moral panics surrounded these workingclass youngsters as future citizens, soldiers, parents and workers who might lose their ‘work ethic’ as the devil found work for their idle hands. Any remaining national interest in the systematic vocational training of young people was thus replaced by a moral crusade to rescue, civilise and school youth for its future place in society. From representing the nation’s hopes for the future, the young came to be seen as a

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threat to the established order. The intention was to draw working-class youngsters in particular into a unified national experience. In so far as this persistent cultural concern found any effective expression in schools and elsewhere, it hampered the development of an integrated education system bringing together the academic and vocational to contribute to technical and political modernisation (Jones, 1989). Characteristic of a system separating education from training was a division of responsibility for ‘schemes’ and ‘initiatives’ to deal with the young and adult unemployed under the former Ministry of Labour/Department of Employment from the Department of Education’s main responsibility for schools. With each economic recession these rivalries resurfaced, so that in the 1930s, for instance, the Labour Ministry ran Government Training Centres in the Special Areas while Local Education Authorities were given money to establish Juvenile Instruction Centres for unemployed youth. In the recessions after 1973, conflict between these two Ministries of State was a consistent theme of the troubled contemporary history of education and training. This meant that in England and Wales – unlike in many other developed countries – there was no national pattern in the provision of post-compulsory education and training. Further education colleges, for instance, were not until recently recognised as part of the mainstream education system. FE is still described negatively as neither schooling on the one hand, nor higher education on the other. Or – still more dismissively and inaccurately – as ‘non-academic’, being supposedly concerned solely with vocational training rather than general education. FE remained a local affair at most until very recently. Its achievements went unsung and were disconnected from developments in the national system of schools and higher education. As with so much else in England, this lack of status has much to do with social class; through its origins and associations further education was almost by definition for working-class students. Their education was vocational with the application of learning for practical paid employment plainly in view. Compared with sixth-form study, which offered possibilities of progression to higher education,

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training for a skilled job at the local ‘tech’ has always been seen as a second-best, inferior option. This has been reflected in the perspectives and priorities of politicians, national and local, throughout the twentieth century. Given the weakness of pressure from groups within further education, or the industries for which colleges trained skilled workers, the focus of public policy has been mainly on the extension and the organisation of compulsory and academic schooling. From the 1970s onwards governments of both parties attempted to control and reduce public expenditure so that local authorities came under pressure to reduce their costs. In some places this led to the establishment of tertiary colleges which normally would be the sole provider of courses of all kinds to all those over the age of 16 living in a particular area. Sometimes this rationalisation of provision was adopted as part of a move to extend comprehensive provision to a tertiary level. The incoming Conservative government in 1979 began an inquiry into this aspect of 16–19 provision which resulted in the Macfarlane Report of 1981. The conclusion in the first draft of this report recommended that, for educational and costs reasons, tertiary colleges should be adopted as official policy. This recommendation was deleted at the highest level and this represents a lost moment for further education which from then on was left in competition for younger students with school sixth forms. The process of going tertiary had begun with Exeter in 1970. As Caroline Benn and Clyde Chitty (1996) pointed out, these tertiary colleges were created specifically to promote the development of comprehensive education rather than merely to rationalise A-level (like the sixth-form colleges) or offer a limited range of work-related qualifications (like many FE colleges at the time). As with the move to comprehensive schools, Conservative-controlled authorities sometimes led the way, as many were in mainly rural areas with small sixth forms and under-used colleges. By 1992 there were 57 tertiary colleges with 90,000 full-time 16–19 year old students. There was, however, less possibility of such tertiary reorganisation in the large Labour-controlled cities, partly because some parents and most school teachers fought to preserve their sixth forms and partly because many Labour councillors, who were committed to comprehensives, thought of

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these – as has been seen – as 11–18 schools with sixth forms, like grammar schools. Even in those places, like Sheffield and Manchester, where Labour Councils reorganised provision at 16+, the move to a tertiary system was incomplete as some schools were able to retain their sixth forms, later threatening to opt out if they were not allowed to keep them. The opportunity was thus lost to bring further education colleges into the mainstream state education system by carrying forward the comprehensive reform of secondary schooling to a tertiary level, normalising the transition from school at 16 to full- or part-time attendance by all school-leavers along with many adults in their local FE/tertiary college. It was an opportunity that was not to be represented again until the end of the century, by which time schools and colleges had changed in response to a learning policy that had transformed the very conditions of their existence.

3 Training without Jobs, 1976–87 INTRODUCTION During the 1970s corporate tripartism in the UK ran into a dead end. The political consensus for a mixed economy of private and state monopoly capital sustained by successive governments collapsed as the long, faltering postwar boom finally fell into recession following the 1973 oil crisis. ‘A major crash began in the summer of 1974. Advanced Capitalist Countries’ industrial production fell by ten per cent between July 1974 and April 1975. In the first half of 1975, ACC output was three and a half per cent down on the level of a year earlier, and international trade was 13 per cent lower . . . The crash of 1974 was far and away the biggest since 1929’ (Armstrong et al., 1991, p. 225). ‘The party’, as Anthony Crosland had said, ‘was over’. The days of full employment could then be recognised, as by Andrew Sinfield (1981, p. 1), as ‘a part of social history, which we may regard with nostalgia or contempt according to taste, as hoolahoops or spats.’ Normal capitalist service was now resumed in a return to the uncontrolled cycles of boom and bust. The long boom had ended. The policies of planned growth under Keynesian demand management with which Labour advanced its claim to become the natural party of government in the 1960s and again when it returned to power in the 1970s had failed to modernise the economy and reverse Britain’s steady industrial decline. Among mainstream political parties only the Liberals manifestly advanced an alternative policy of national wage bargaining. Labour, despite (or because of) its organic relation with the trades unions, failed in its repeated attempts to incorporate the organised workforce into the setting of wage norms. Only the Labour Left advocated a programme of wholesale nationalisation for domination of the economy by state capital. Unaccompanied by any radical 88

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conception of further democratisation, it has been suggested that this alternative did not offer a development paradigm which could find a popular base for widespread adherence, especially as the actually existing models for such a form of socialism were by then ossifying in Eastern Europe. In this sense, Mrs Thatcher was correct that there was no actually existing alternative to the policies she advanced in favour of private monopoly capital. To make them triumphant, she would have to reform not only society – the existence of which she professed not to believe in – but the state as well. A new state form would have to be created. This new state would also be the form of the accommodation that British capital would make during the 1980s with a new and globalised capitalism. The crisis of the postwar development model of social partnership between ‘the two sides of industry’ and between state and private monopoly capital was thus to be resolved in the favour of the latter. The Conservatives had been seeking a new way forward for private monopoly capital against any reliance on state capital and its at least nominal public ownership and control through representative local and national democracy. They had learnt the lessons of the 1972 rebuff by the trades unions of Heath’s brief Selsdon man, free-market phase. Under a new leader, they prepared to implement what their chief strategist, (then) Keith Joseph, called ‘a law-abiding free enterprise reconstruction of Britain’s social relations of production’ (quoted in Coates and Hilliard, 1986, p. 354). After 1979 Conservative governments openly repudiated the commitment to full employment shared by all parties since the war and which was the economic underpinning of the classic welfare state settlement. It had in any case already been abandoned surreptitiously by Labour under Healey’s Chancellorship as a condition of loans from the International Monetary Fund. As a result of the conditions that the IMF imposed, unemployment rose from the level of half a million which had panicked Heath’s government to over a million, as reflected in the Tories’ 1979 general election winning slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’. The object of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘British experiment . . . the demonstration that Trade Union power can be curbed within a free society, and that inflation can be eradicated within a democracy’, as her Chancellor

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Nigel Lawson described it (quoted in Ainley and Corney, 1990, p. 53), was to restore the economic primacy of private monopoly capital. It was ironic that the Manpower Services Commission, a nominally tripartite organisation associated with the corporatist policies of the previous period, was to play such a large part in this process of ensuring the new dominance of private monopoly capital and in pioneering the introduction of the new state form which was to make this possible. This chapter examines the role of the MSC during the phase of learning policy in which it was the deciding influence over education and training at nearly all levels. This can be called, as by Finn in 1987, the phase of ‘Training Without Jobs’ as this was the answer then presented by government to the mounting crisis of permanent mass unemployment, particularly youth unemployment. THE ‘VISION’ OF THE MANPOWER SERVICES COMMISSION The Training Services Agency, which became the MSC in 1974, was established by the Conservatives in the 1973 Employment and Training Act. This executive agency was hived off from the Department of Employment in the manner recommended by the 1968 Fulton Committee on Civil Service reorganisation as revived by Prime Minister Heath’s ‘Businessman Team’ of advisers. The TSA was later split into two operating arms, one administering the newly revamped benefit offices while the other ran special employment and training programmes. Initially only 40 civil servants strong, this was ‘the tiny spore’ from which what Low (1988, p. 215) called ‘a great fungus’ was to grow. The original intention, as Maurice Macmillan, Heath’s Employment Minister, told Parliament, was ‘to set up a Manpower Services Commission representative of employers, trades unions and other interests which would have direct responsibility to me for employment and training services’ (House of Commons Debates 1972, vol. 846, c. 1293). This was not strictly a quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) since the elected minister

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held a crucial directive role over the Commissioners he appointed. It was instead a quago (quasi-autonomous governmental organisation). Labour and the TUC, who had long been proposing something similar along the lines of the Swedish Labour Market Board, though without its wagefixing powers, welcomed the proposal. Partly it was intended as a sweetener to the trade unions for post-Selsdon Heath’s own attempt at incomes policy. The previous system of Industrial Training Boards were also set up by the Conservatives, as has been seen, in 1964. They thus followed the longstanding principle that, while Tory rhetoric opposed any state interference in employers’ training arrangements, the proposals for legislation initiated by the unions could never be agreed by them with Labour governments and training legislation therefore came from Conservative ones. (Now that New Labour has severed the old party’s links with the trade unions – also much weakened by deindustrialisation and unrepealed Conservative legislation – this rule no longer holds, of course.) Old Labour had incorporated the ITBs into its national planning processes but, despite initial expansion, numbers of apprenticeships were falling rapidly with the decline of traditional manufacturing. Following a review in 1969, the new 1973 Act redressed the balance in employers’ favour with respect to the unions, but nevertheless was largely welcomed by them as above. Characteristically, the trade unions were divided between urging greater state planning of training to benefit all workers while hanging on to the relatively advantageous conditions they had secured for their craft members. Beyond the TUC leadership, however, shopfloor activists were coming to see that the crisis of industrial restructuring highlighted by dramatically rising unemployment could only be met by a programme of work-sharing and an extension of radical democracy including redefined comprehensive education and training for all. Thus, new technology could be used to overcome traditional divisions between hand and brain (e.g. the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Corporate Plan, in Cooley, 1987, and TURC, 1987). This critique shared an adherence to the ‘really useful knowledge’ that the progressive critique of ‘irrelevant’ academic Official Knowledge had developed amongst comprehensive school teachers and in

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the student movement. It thus afforded a continuity with older forms of socialism but updated for the modern age – William Morris with computers, as it might be called – and is well represented by the life and work of Mike Cooley. This vision was also partly shared by many who contributed to the growing debate on education and training in Britain, not least by the economists and planners who became the driving force behind the MSC. They too recognised that new technology was undermining the immemorial divisions between mental and manual labour and could contribute to a new industrial revolution. In this modernisation of the British economy a new training culture of lifelong learning would overcome the demarcations associated with Fordist heavy industry between managers and managed, office and plant, skilled and unskilled, manual and non-manual, blueand white-collar. In their place a new, flexible and multiskilled, post-Fordist workforce would combine the mental skills of diagnosis and programming with the manual abilities to effect repairs and maintain production. ‘The New Training Initiative’, for example, as Ainley and Corney recorded, ‘presented a solution to the crisis of education by building a bridge between school and work. More than that, it offered a chance to break down the traditional divisions between mental and manual work, between academic education and practical training. Now every school leaver would be offered a foundation that combined both areas. No longer would irrelevant study in arcane subject specialisms for test by written examinations be separated from practical applications tried and tested in the workplace. The least qualified could also be given an equal chance in the new apprenticeship system which they had been denied by the old’ (1990, p. 56). Yet, this radical vision was characteristically posed as a technical solution in socially neutral terms, as in Hayes’s influential and typically titled Training for Skill Ownership (1982). It was to be implemented by individual skill acquisition and ownership that took no account of the class cultures by which tacit knowledge and the theoretical abstractions based upon it are developed as they are handed down the generations. Behaviourist definitions of ‘skill’, derived from work-study in employment, were so limited as to confuse

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holistic and integrated repertories with their component competences. They did not recognise the local, regional and class cultural and gendered skills and competences that people acquire as part of growing up in the cultures and subcultures into which they are born, especially those of women, young people and ethnic minorities. In the case of women, for instance, such recognition would involve the acknowledgement of the skills and competences that women conventionally acquire in domestic labour and child-rearing, but which are rendered invisible to human capital theory because they are not used in paid employment. One example of this decontextualised, technicist and behaviourist vision of skill as competence, as well as of the ambition of the MSC, was the Occupational Skills Inventory which the quango began to draw up in 1977. This claimed nothing less than to record all possible tasks required in every occupation in the economy. Under the tutelage of Gilbert Jessup, this narrowly behaviouristic classification developed to form the basis for the National Council for Vocational Qualification’s matrix or ‘framework’ of vocational qualifications. As summarised in a 1985 critique by Moore: The skills inventory purports to represent skills actually required in industry and necessary to the performance of specific jobs. These skills are represented in the form of atomised ‘items’ of behaviour which can be referred back to underlying ‘generic skills’ and grouped together into Occupational Training Families of associated skills and job clusters. Possession of these skills (referred to as ‘skill ownership’) is seen as facilitating labour mobility by virtue of their ‘transferability’ and so overcome ‘labour market rigidity’ (ie: trade-union ‘restrictive practices’). A crucial aspect of the skills inventory is that it is immediately translatable into a curriculum because it specifies in a very precise way what people are meant to be able to do (not know) in order to perform particular jobs. Also, because these skills are supposedly drawn directly from industry itself they are seen as representing what employers actually require, hence promoting employability. The standards for these National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) were derived from their use in employment based on

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the assumption that there existed a single agreed description of what competent performance entailed in each case in each industry. The quest for clarity quickly generated an ever more complex ‘methodology’ for deriving the standardised descriptions of tasks so that the format and even the language of standards came to involve such unfamiliar terminology only a limited number of people were able to draft them. As a result, one lead body organising NVQs in its industry even had to employ another set of consultants to translate this rigorously defined code into language that assessors, assessees and trainers could understand! To descriptions of performance criteria associated with the various ‘elements of competence’ comprising the NVQs were added ‘range statements’ of the exact circumstances in which competence could be demonstrated, then of additional ‘underpinning knowledge’ and finally detailed sets of ‘assessment requirements’. All these were centrally specified as part of the standard. In the FE colleges where most NVQs were awarded to Youth Trainees by lecturers who spent more of their time assessing than teaching, it was not surprising therefore that FEFC inspectors found ‘considerable variation in the interpretation of what is meant by competence’ (quoted in Ainley 1994). Despite this, the framework formed the basis for an unprecedented national experiment, as Britain became, as Alison Wolf says, ‘the first country to introduce competence-based assessment as the sole and mandatory approach for a large section of its education and training system’ (1994, p. 3). After the decline of the MSC and the political alliances that sustained it, learning policy was to return to favour academic over competence-based qualifications. Then, the fact that academic examinations are equally if not more unpredictive of actual abilities and, moreover, do not necessarily assess abilities in the subjects they claim to assess – as advocates of competence-based assessment like Jessup had pointed out – was forgotten. NVQs then became restricted mainly to the assessment of low-status, work-based courses. Still, the emphasis on outcomes, which MSC/NCVQ had envisioned extending to all qualifications, was not dropped completely, as can be seen in the criterion-referencing of ‘bench-marked’ attainment targets at different levels of the

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National Curriculum. A similar attempt to produce equally unambiguous ‘grade criteria’ for GCSE was also made, while so-called ‘personal and transferable’, ‘key’ or ‘core skills’ in A-levels and for higher education were to be subjected to the same approach. NVQs were also extended to levels 4 and 5, graduate and postgraduate equivalent professional qualifications. In what was a major ideological concession for the NCVQ, the matrix of occupational competences was also later qualified by the addition of General National Vocational Qualifications to assess in schools and colleges ‘underpinning knowledge’ as well as practical competences in work. The juxtaposition of ‘general’ with ‘vocational’ accounts for contradictions in this new qualification, as well as their progressive potential in relation to academic A-levels. They were fitted into what was part of an ongoing attempt to introduce coherence and progression into the maze of vocational qualifications and to make them continuous with academic and professional qualifications. For Jessup (1991), these ‘Outcomes based qualifications’ and their assessment as competences were nothing less than a revolutionary new form of practical learning. In this radical sort of deschooling, without curriculum content but only with specified outcomes to be attained, teaching was turned into facilitating the learner and learning into a lifelong process continuously matching technological development. (See also Burke, 1990, but Wolf, 1994, for a critique.) Similarly, the pseudo-problem of ‘skill shortage’, which was exacerbated by rapid technological change and which yet came to coexist with mass unemployment aggravated by the application of that same new technology, was conceived by MSC officials as a purely technical and not a social problem. Nevertheless, as expressed in the MSC’s espousal of A Comprehensive Manpower Policy (1976), the importance of the labour force was elevated to an unprecedented level as the Commission assumed for itself a strategic role over the labour market, extending from schooling through to facilitating labour mobility via housing policy (see Ainley and Corney, 1990, p. 36). For the task which the MSC was set of linking job creation with training for employment was unparalleled in peacetime. Yet Labour, which returned to

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power in 1974, could not accept that the recession, with unemployment rising beyond one million by 1975, was not cyclical and temporary but permanent and structural. Consequently, under Michael Foot at Employment, the MSC embarked on a series of job creation and make-work schemes. These soon created at ever-mounting cost what became widely known as an alphabet soup of rapidly changing acronyms aimed at counter-cyclical training. They were intended to placate the trade unions, as Labour in its turn attempted its own social contract on wage restraint with the TUC. This was the source of the much repeated criticism, made for instance by Benn and Fairley in 1986, that the MSC was ‘blown off course’ from its intended purpose into ‘fire fighting’ unemployment, particularly that it abandoned adult retraining in favour of youth unemployment. First, however, the MSC as the Mother of all Quangos, or Ministry of Social Control as it was becoming known amongst the unemployed, had to win the right to administer these successive programmes from its parent Department of Employment’s long-time rival, the Department of Education and Science. The DES was moving towards asserting more systematic control over the schools, colleges and polytechnics it loosely administered through the LEAs, with a central Assessment of Performance Unit for instance, as well as suggestions for a ‘core curriculum’ and other centralising measures in the notorious ‘Yellow Book’ (see Chitty, 1989, especially chapter 3). This expressed the culture of elitist academicism for a selected minority subscribed to by classically humanist DES mandarins who felt themselves superior to the vulgar concerns of business and trade. They looked down on the Department of Employment, which had always felt itself closer to what it regarded as the real world of industry, the employers and the unions. The DES attitude was well expressed in the much quoted words of one hapless and anonymous mandarin elicited by Stewart Ranson (1984, p. 241) that ‘People must be educated to know their place’. Such a shameless assertion of the elitism inherent in the academic approach to the Official Knowledge imparted by education was out of tune with the current populist emphasis on economic relevance. Moreover, DES officials had been heavily criticised by a 1975 OECD international comparison

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of England’s dismal performance in vocational education and training. On the strength of this influential and damning critique, the MSC’s ‘Vocational Preparation for Young People’ (MSC, 1975) initiated the so-called ‘Great Debate on Education’. In his Ruskin College speech the new Prime Minister, Callaghan, signalled his party’s abandonment of the policy of ‘equal opportunities’ through comprehensive schooling which it had pursued since 1965. In its place, as Ken Jones stated (1983, p. 4), ‘the relation of education to vocational training, and to ideological preparation for work . . . replaced equal opportunity as the central motif of state strategy.’ The exercises in public participation presided over by the Secretary of State for Education, Shirley Williams, following the lead given by Callaghan’s speech, were not just ‘a smokescreen to hide the cuts’ in funding for state schooling, as alleged at the time by most of the government’s leftist critics. Rather, this tedious peripatetic precursor of the SDP’s founding conference was an effort to gain public endorsement for a fundamental change in direction for Learning Policy, and with it, for the whole social democratic project of class equalisation and amelioration through education. ‘In this process, its relentless repetitiveness must be understood as a political tactic’ (Donald, 1979, p. 33). The Green Paper summarising the Debate defined the new orthodoxy: ‘In addition to their responsibility for the academic curriculum, schools must prepare their pupils for the transition to adult and working life. Young people need to be equipped with a basic understanding of the functioning of our democratic political system, of the mixed economy and the industrial activities, especially manufacturing, which create our national wealth.’ The schools were seen to have failed in this responsibility and, therefore, ‘industry, the trades unions and commerce should now be involved in curriculum planning processes’(HMSO, 1977, pp. 44 and 22). Beyond some modest projects of the Schools Council, the machinery whereby ‘industry and commerce’ were to be involved in reshaping education was not suggested by the Great Debate. ‘The trade unions’ were included as a ritual genuflection to ensure their continued participation, but it was employers’ complaints that labour market entrants were

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leaving the schools ‘unprepared for the world of work’ that were given the greatest prominence in the debate, such as it was. These were heralded in the first of many such press articles by prominent ‘captains of industry’ led by Sir Arnold Weinstock, then managing director of one of the country’s largest companies, GEC (later criticised for its financial and general mismanagement). Typically, he declared, ‘I Blame the Teachers’ in The Times Education Supplement (23 January 1976) for their inadequate preparation of their pupils for employment. The ‘relentless repetition’ of this allegation deflected attention from employers’ own responsibility to provide school leavers with jobs to be prepared for. Employers had also, as seen, ceased paying training levies for the vocational preparation provided by the Industrial Training Boards, causing their collapse and thus the disappearance of many apprenticeship places for school leavers. This attack on the ‘irrelevance’ of academic education to the real ‘world of work’ bolstered the position of the Department of Employment in relation to its rival DES. For instance, Albert Booth, who had replaced Michael Foot as Employment Minister in the reshuffle following Harold Wilson’s resignation (see Wright, 1987), won the agreement of Shirley Williams at Education to a pilot programme of Unified Vocational Preparation to be run jointly by both ministries. However, the idea of a vocational preparation scheme for all young people – first suggested by the MSC in 1974 – was temporarily shelved. MSC officials meanwhile had been dispatched to Canada to study the means by which the central government there bypassed the federal authorities to channel funds straight into the hands of local agents managing a Youth Opportunities Programme for the unemployed. The MSC’s Annual Report for 1974–5 noted the immediacy and flexibility of this approach which ‘can be introduced and terminated speedily’ as required. Following this model, Booth announced a British YOP as ‘a new deal for the nation’s unemployed’. (On such ‘New Deals’ generally, see Finn, 1987.) YOP began by offering work preparation and pre-vocational training to one in eight of all 16-year-old school leavers, 80 per cent of whom graduated to employment or further full-time training. As numbers on the scheme rose to half a million by 1982, when

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half of all 16-year-old school leavers joined, the pattern that was to be repeated by the subsequent Youth Training Scheme was established as training quality and placement rates fell. THE QUANGO UNDER THATCHER Despite its success in delivering a programme of the size of YOP, plus its own phenomenal growth from 40 to 26,450 staff in regional centres, area boards and a new headquarters in Sheffield, the seemingly irresistible rise of the MSC was threatened by Mrs Thatcher’s unexpected 1979 election victory. The tripartite, corporatist Commission suddenly seemed a relic of the eccentricity of beer and sandwiches at Number 10 so that rumours spread that the new government would abolish it along with other quangos which Mrs Thatcher had denounced during the election campaign. There could be little room for a Department of Employment, let alone its creature quango, in a government that eschewed employment policy. Cuts of £186 million were ordered in special employment programmes, including YOP, following Sir Geoffrey Howe’s first budget. The new government’s economic policies of raising interest rates while attempting to limit the money supply quickly resulted in the loss of an estimated 20 per cent of the country’s manufacturing base. Meanwhile, the monetarist solution of allowing unemployment to find its ‘natural’ level meant that the dole queue rocketed towards 3 million. Even Frederick Hayek, the monetarist inspiration of Sir Keith Joseph’s Institute for Economic Affairs, doubted ‘that any government could persist for two or three years in a policy that meant 10 per cent unemployment for most of that period’ (1984). In fact, by the time Hayek published this opinion, this had already been the case in the UK for the past three years, MSC schemes having played a large part in containing the situation. So, although the MSC was censured by the Pliatsky Report on Non-Departmental Public Bodies, its abolition was postponed. Instead the government took a grip on the Commission by sacking its Chairman, Sir Richard O’Brien, associated by them with Labour’s consensual

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approach and later to Chair the Church of England’s highly critical ‘Faith in the Cities’ enquiry. He was replaced by Mrs Thatcher’s own man, David (soon to be Lord) Young, a former property developer returned from the USA to head the Conservative Party’s research unit and to advise Sir Keith Joseph. They had met through their mutual interest in the narrowly utilitarian Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training which ran trade schools in France and elsewhere. The MSC was also given back £183 million in 1980 with which to add 40,000 places to the YOP. This was not enough to avoid the widely predicted outbreak of rioting or ‘uprising’ by inner city youth during the spring of 1981, following which Mrs Thatcher announced a £500 million expansion of the programme. In addition, the Central Policy Review Staff published a report recommending a ‘modernised apprenticeship for all’ (CPRS, 1980). It saw ‘the concept of skill and in particular apprenticeship’ as having ‘more to do with trade-union restrictive practices than with the needs of modern industry’ (quoted by Fairley, 1982). The report, therefore, recommended reclassifying all occupational tasks to facilitate the flexible transfer of labour and replace trade union control. This was sufficiently similar to the vision held by leading members of the MSC for its Director, Sir John Cassels, to reveal in an interview that the most important factor in his decision to think again about the country’s training institutions was what was happening in the industrial relations arena (Ainley and Corney, 1990, p. 50). Significantly, he soon moved to the Cabinet Office to be succeeded as Director of the MSC by Sir Geoffrey Holland, author of Young People and Work (MSC, 1977), which had prepared the ground for the YOP. In the run-up to the 1983 election, Norman Tebbit announced a Task Force to implement a £1 billion Youth Training Scheme of training and vocational preparation leading to ‘recognised qualifications’ for 16–18 year olds. This was but a part of the MSC’s New Training Initiative which was to replace the statutory structure of the ITBs and the levy/grant system that had characterised the previous attempt at training reform. Instead of the £40 initially paid on YOP, Tebbit offered youngsters £15 a week (later raised

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to £25 after protest) for the ‘high quality training’ that it was promised YTS would provide to distinguish it from ‘Son of YOP’, as critics soon called it. Given such concessions, the TUC’s representative on the MSC told the Congress’s Youth Conference that ‘The new scheme is fully consistent with TUC policy on training for all’ (reported in The Times Educational Supplement, 25 February 1983). However, the threat of compulsion by withdrawal of benefits for those under 18 (previously suggested by Labour’s Albert Booth) was only narrowly averted. In 1985 250,000 school students walked out of classrooms all over the country to protest against compulsory YTS in the largest school strike in Britain’s history. Compulsion was only finally introduced after the 1987 election. After the Malvinas adventure in 1982 won the Thatcher government a renewed term in office in 1983, attention was directed from enemies without to ‘enemies within’. These ranged from the National Union of Mineworkers to DES officials supposedly tainted with 1960s egalitarianism. The latter had so frustrated Mrs Thatcher during her office under Edward Heath that, as noted, she actually sanctioned the replacement of more grammar schools by comprehensives than any other Minister of Education. A process of ‘ideological cleansing’ was, therefore, now initiated at the DES. As Norman Tebbit at Employment gleefully told The Financial Times (15 October 1992), with ‘Keith Joseph at the DES and David Young at the MSC I think you will soon find the Vandals stabling their horses in the temples’. Indeed, Young was ‘the only man’, Mrs Thatcher declared, ‘to bring me solutions not problems’, while Joseph was widely recognised as her eminence grise. So for the next six years, until the departure of Sir Keith and the subsequent feuding between Tebbit and Young, this Gang of Four really made policy in the crucial area of education and training. They represented an alliance of modernising tendencies in the Conservative Party with the free market faction inspired by Joseph. They thus elbowed aside the Tory old guard of ‘wets’ and grandees, like Thatcher’s first Minister of Education, Lord Carlisle, who had been sidelined in the 1981 Cabinet reshuffle which radicalised the government by ensuring the dominance of the free market and modernising factions.

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Under the aegis of the Gang of Four the MSC rose to the height of its power and influence, playing a large part in the permanent transformation of the economy, society and the state which is Mrs Thatcher’s legacy to the nation. Lord Young as Chairman of the MSC made no secret of his intention to take over the DES and merge it with the MSC/DE to create a new superministry with himself as ‘Overlord of Education and Training’. The methods which had launched first YOP and then YTS (extended in 1985 from a one-year to a two-year scheme) were now applied to schools and colleges. The Technical and Vocational Education Initiative – a scheme to develop a new technical training school curriculum financed directly by the MSC – was announced to Parliament in 1982. Leaving the top 20 per cent to continue on an academic sixth-form route to higher education and the professions, TVEI aimed to equip ‘the next quartile’, as Joseph called them, with technically relevant vocational competences. It demonstrated the characteristically precipitate action of the Gang of Four, typically by-passing conventional channels of procedure and funding. Lord Young even threatened the local education authorities that if they did not volunteer to run TVEI, then the MSC would set up its own schools to do so, which he proposed calling Young Schools! As well as sidelining local democracy, TVEI also demonstrated the way policy was now made on the hoof – what Low called ‘government by press release’ (personal communication). This resulted in contradictory statements of the Initiative’s intentions by Thatcher, Tebbit and Young, who had not even consulted Joseph about TVEI (although he quickly came on board), let alone Sir Geoffrey Holland – or so Holland claimed. Typically again, money saved from cuts elsewhere and creaming off the government’s taxation of the North Sea oil windfall was thrown at the problem. A ‘pilot’ phase was quickly declared a success and extended further (eventually, though spread much more thinly, to all secondary schools). Sir Keith Joseph was proved right that given cash incentives most local authorities would soon cooperate. Nevertheless, like the later City Technology Colleges and TVEI’s succeeding HE equivalent Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative, as well as the YTS that went before it,

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central funding was intended as ‘pump priming’ and employers were supposed to pick up the tab for the programme later and finance it fully when they saw its benefits to them. This, of course, they never did. When the money ran out the purpose of TVEI, which received only a two-line mention in the 1988 Education Reform Act, was redefined into one of supporting the ‘National’ Curriculum imposed on local authority schools by the Tories’ new education policies, while EHEI sank without trace (see further). Two-year YTS too was wound up as a coherent national programme, only five years after Holland had declared that ‘if it fails then we are at the end of the road. There is nowhere else to go’ (The Times Educational Supplement, 2 December 1985). By that time another consequence of the MSC’s method of operation was that teachers and lecturers had taken the TVEI money and spent it to bring new technology into schools and colleges, updating and integrating their teaching for their students’ benefit. They had thus subverted what their initial suspicions saw as TVEI’s original intention to recreate tripartite divisions in the form of a technical stream within comprehensive schools. These suspicions were apparently confirmed when the Initiative was complemented by a Lower Attaining Pupils Project, run on much less money from within the DES, for what Joseph called ‘the bottom quartile’. Joseph had conceded during a television interview that he accepted comprehensive schools were now a permanent feature of the educational landscape and therefore ‘selection between schools is largely out’, but he added that there must be instead ‘differentiation within schools’ (reported in The Times Education Supplement, 17 February 1984). If it was his intention for TVEI that it reintroduce such internal selection, it was not the result, largely due to subversion by teachers and lecturers. The same unintended consequences were also to result from the reception by academics of the EHEI. Typically, EHEI was introduced without any reference to the previous experience of TVEI, nor was any systematic comparison made between the two initiatives, one in schools and FE colleges and the other in the universities, polytechnics and other higher education institutions. As recorded in the author’s Degrees of Difference,

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The Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative introduced student centredness and employer participation simultaneously, on the assumption that both aims were necessarily complementary. However . . . the connection between innovation in teaching and learning within the institution and mechanisms for employer/education liaison . . . [were not] successfully established. These latter were in any case rendered difficult due to recession . . . More fundamentally though, the failure demonstrated that ‘student centredness’ as conceived by the . . . staff who entertained the notion, did not necessarily correspond, save in a minority of cases, with those same staff’s notion of participation by employers with whom they often failed to make effective contact and use. This was due to misconceptions on both sides but was . . . fundamentally because ‘student centredness’ was given primacy over vocational relevance by the academic staff involved in Enterprise-funded projects. (Ainley, 1994, pp. 119–20) Despite this, by 1986 the quango was at the height of its power. With £3 billion forecast for its 1987/8 budget, a million unemployed 16–18 year olds were anticipated on YTS and on the Community Programme to which they graduated at 18+. Employed workers were also subsidised by the MSC through the New Workers’ Scheme, as was NonAdvanced Further Education in colleges and TVEI in schools, for which the MSC also supplied special teacher training. The youth service and voluntary sector working with the unemployed also largely depended on MSC funding, as did even a hundred-odd TUC-sponsored Centres for the Unemployed. Adult Training, Information Technology Centres and training for small business were also part of its empire. In many places the MSC was the biggest local employer, taking over the function of previous regional aid. In others, more and more statutory local authority services were coming to depend on its support and it was also linked to Inner City Task Forces. In 1986–7 the quango spent £16.5 million on advertising alone – half the government total, which that year surpassed for the first time the amount spent by any individual private company. The MSC’s final fling was the £100 million EHEI. Through

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all this, it continued to enjoy all-party, CBI and TUC support. However, the MSC’s rapid series of initiatives were running out of steam as government interest turned again. Even the quango could not run fast enough to keep up with its critics, and Young left it for the Department of Trade and Industry, faced with opposition from even the ten-man Commission over a plan to transfer £220 million for NonAdvanced Further Education from the local authorities to the MSC’s budget. The measure was only forced through by Young’s casting vote as Director backed up by a directive from the Employment Minister. Young’s replacement, Sir Bryan Nicholson, quickly compromised with the LEAs and even prepared for an accommodation with a possible Labour government, writing in The New Statesman (13 May 1985) and the NUT’s journal The Teacher (30 April 1986). Meanwhile, Sir Keith Joseph had virtually surrendered the independence of the DES to the strategic domination of Young, Tebbit and the Department of Employment while he agonised over how to introduce educational vouchers as a way of privatising state education without having to spend public money subsidising private schools. (He admitted this circle could not be squared after a paper exercise in Kent showed how much money would be lost to the Treasury.) Joseph also ran into a similar impasse as Young had over NAFE in his long-running dispute with the teachers’ unions which brought his eventual resignation. He had been ‘more than anyone else’, as Mrs Thatcher acknowledged in her letter answering his resignation, ‘the architect who shaped the policies that led to victory in two elections’. Yet he left, as Paul Johnson wrote in The Times Education Supplement at the time (11 April 1986), ‘a tragic, bewildered figure . . . overwhelmed by the magnitude of his problems and his own evident incapacity to surmount them . . . like a general after a catastrophic defeat.’ So in the run-up to the 1987 election, with Tebbit too carpeted for a lacklustre campaign, there was no one left to press on Mrs Thatcher the virtues of a combined system of education and training for economic modernisation. As the election progressed her ear was left open to new appeals from educational traditionalists who played on her prejudices

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by urging, instead of modernisation through training, a return to grammar school excellence as a way of preparing the nation to enter the next millennium. Conservative education policy thus shifted from one of ‘Training Without Jobs’ based on a German model of academic grammar schooling for a minority combined with training for the rest, towards one of ‘Education Without Jobs’ (Ainley, 1992). This was based on a North American model of keeping as many young people as possible in some form of further and higher education for as long as possible. The new policy was supported by a new alliance of factions within the Tory Party as the free marketeers left their alliance with the modernisers to team up with the new right. The widely recognised ‘deal’ cementing this new coalition of forces was that the free market in education would deliver grammar schools and preserve ‘quality’ higher education. Thus buttressed with support for its centralising academic agenda, the DES took the initiative from the MSC for the first time with the announcement in 1986 of its own City Technology Colleges as a solution to the nation’s training crisis. It was hardly likely that the planned ‘twenty beacons of excellence’, ‘halfway houses between the independent and state sectors’, announced by new Education Minister, Kenneth Baker, to a standing ovation from that year’s Conservative Party Conference, could actually do much to bridge Britain’s skill training gap. This was not the point, however. What the CTC proposal actually represented was a bridge between the 1976–87 vocational phase of learning policy and the new education reforms now being drawn up. Concentrating all resources in a few technical schools was an admission that the effort to bring vocational education to all schools through TVEI was too expensive to continue without the private employer funding, which had not been forthcoming. At the same time, CTCs presented an exemplar for the way to run schools which opted out from local authority control. Eventually all schools could follow under their own financial management to unleash competition, increase diversity and create ‘opportunities to be unequal’, as Mrs Thatcher translated Labour’s old slogan. Once this had happened, CTCs would be irrelevant and so, like TVEI, they only received a one-line mention in the 1988 Education

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Reform Act. It was only as a prototype for formula funding that they were important and that prototype was in turn taken from the method used by the MSC for per capita funding to the private training agencies which provided its youth and other training programmes and which it had borrowed from the Canadians. (It should also be noted that, like other transfers from local authority to central state control, CTCs were typically undemocratic. They were set up, like the Urban Development Corporations and their Enterprise Zones, outwith any local council control under self-appointed boards of governors – just as incorporated FE colleges were to be, also subject to their central funding council or quango, the FEFC.) With the CTCs, the DES appropriated the MSC’s style as well as its substance, issuing a glossy brochure with accompanying video to launch the initiative. It was not the only Department of State at which profound changes in policy were being put into effect. A review of social security spending had been going on for some time at the Department for Health and Social Security under Norman Fowler. The aim was to retarget benefits at ‘those most in need’, distinguishing in a typically Victorian manner between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The latter were to be set to work to earn their maintenance by the state until they developed the qualities of enterprise enabling them to break free from dependence on benefits. The reforms thus ran contrary to the spirit of the MSC’s efforts which had begun as a process of job creation, though they had gone on through a series of schemes to subsidise existing low-paid jobs. It was always intended that employers would come to appreciate the value for them of a training revolution. The voluntary principle was thus of cardinal importance in this process, not only to sustain its credibility and trade union support, but also because forced training was clearly impossible (though forced labour was not). Now the MSC was criticised, in its turn, by the Auditor General in 1985 for its poor accounting and wastefulness. His report even suggested that YTS had contributed to the unemployment it was supposed to alleviate (as it undoubtedly had) by substituting permanent adult employees with temporary trainees. The ground was then cut further from

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under the Commission’s feet by a temporary recovery in the economy in the ephemeral ‘Lawson boom’ of the late 1980s. Together with the demographic fall in the proportion of young people entering the labour market, the government now actually began to believe its own rhetoric that a training revolution in British industry and commerce had been achieved. The rapid boost to MSC programmes to reduce further the unemployment total prior to the 1987 election was thus the quango’s last gasp. Like its many schemes, the MSC had outlived its usefulness to government and could be disbanded. The planned changes followed swiftly after the election victory. The first reductions in MSC grant-in-aid since 1981 were made while the Job Centres and Enterprise Allowance Scheme were returned to the DE. The 1987 Employment Act proposed the establishment of a new employer-dominated Training Commission. Employers were also given predominance over the nominally tripartite local Area Manpower Boards, renamed Labour Advisory Boards to reflect the more marginal training role of the new Commission. The government then introduced a £10-plus-benefit Employment Training scheme, which they knew the unions, committed to the principle of the rate for the job, could not accept. The government used the refusal of the 1988 Trades Union Congress to cooperate with ET to wind up the Commission after only ten days in existence. In its place the once mighty quango was relegated to the ignominious position of a Training Agency (TA, later Training, Enterprise and Education Division, or TEED) within the Department of Employment. THE NEW, CONTRACTING, POST-WELFARE STATE ‘The story of the MSC is important because it amounts to the major attempt at large-scale social engineering in Britain since the post-war wave of measures’ (Roberts, 1990). Yet what can be made of the Conservative claim that the quango had achieved the long-sought training revolution to create an enterprise culture when Mrs Thatcher could declare to her last party conference that the battle for the economic

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future would be won, not by relating education to employment and training, but ‘in Britain’s classrooms’ by teaching the future generations of workers to spell properly? Official acknowledgement that ‘The Skills Revolution’, which the CBI had called for, had not taken place came later in Heseltine’s 1995 third ‘Competitiveness’ White Paper. Little changed in the party’s education policy after Mrs Thatcher left. State-subsidised training was returned to employers, whose failure to train had previously led to the creation of the Industrial Training Boards, the last of which was abolished in 1991. Yet, as Frank Coffield (1990, pp. 59–78) pointed out, it was still the case, as the MSC had stated in 1981, that ‘Training is perceived by many employers as a disposable overhead dropped at the first sign of lowering profit margins.’ Employers do not see themselves as responsible for either education or for retraining the unemployed, which they regard as social problems not of their concern. As a Financial Times editorial put it, ‘Successful businessmen are not educators. Businessmen are necessarily driven by shorttermism’ (5 December 1990). Despite this, these were the people now charged with spending the MSC’s nearly £3 billion training budget to solve long-term skill problems through the local Training and Enterprise Councils which replaced the national structures of the former quango in England and Wales. Notwithstanding the obsession with identifying so-called ‘skill shortages’ and attempting to eradicate them, there was still a ‘skills crisis’ in the British economy. As soon as the economy recovered somewhat, ‘skills mismatch’ was again held to account for the bottleneck that stifled industrial advance and the full use of new technology. This, in turn, contributed to the weakness of the recovery and its vulnerability to the next world slump. As that recession deepened, training was once again the first casualty as redundancies suddenly succeeded ‘skill shortages’ and employers were laying workers off even as they were supposed to be ‘Investing in People’. Once more, the OECD ‘Economic Outlook’ reported ‘chronic skill shortages and inadequate training of the labour force’ in Britain (July 1991). The report echoed an earlier World Competitiveness survey, which ranked the UK bottom among OECD countries for

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standards of compulsory education, availability of skilled labour and qualified engineers. The country was also ranked last for in-company training (reported in ‘Working Brief’, August/September 1991). Employer investment in training of £14.4 billion in 1987 had fallen to £10.6 billion in 1993 or by a quarter since the TECs were set up (Jones, 1997). To put employers in charge of the situation for which they were responsible may not merely have been, as Coffield (1990) suggested, a ‘triumph of political preference over experience’. The enterprise solution was seen by the combined free market and modernising factions within the Conservative Party who advanced it as a form of modernisation and a way out of the intractable crisis of Keynesian welfare capitalism. So, ‘State induced enterprise’, as Wallace and Chandler (1989) called it, was coming to ‘permeate the franchise sections of the welfare state’, from Youth Training managing agents, to schools, colleges, the health and social services, along with whatever other public services could be put out to contract. As an organisational principle, Wallace and Chandler pointed out that it meant ‘problems can be privatised too’ and ‘whilst responsibility is de-centralised, power is further centralised’. This mirrored ‘the model of the state as a holding-company which sub-contracts parts of itself at different levels’. Independently, Randall (1992, p. 4) came to the same conclusion when he wrote that TEC managing boards ‘have the sort of freedom which business people gain through franchising from a Pizza Hut multinational’. ‘A clear advantage of this government by quango,’ as Ainley and Corney called it, is that the government can retain firm control of policy development but distance itself from the detailed day to day management of programmes. Additionally, civil service bureaucracies can be expanded and disbanded ‘to task’, according to the exigencies that arise. This new flexibility of response had allowed government to by-pass and eradicate the remnants of Britain’s corporatist and tripartite past. (1990, p. 128) In this new ‘mixed economy’ of private and state capital, no longer clearly separated from each other as in the old, postwar mixed economy but indiscriminately mixed

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together, not only former services provided by the local or national state are taken over and sold off to private companies, other public services are retained by the state as semi-independent agencies to be run at a profit. Citizens are then redefined as consumers with individual rights enshrined in the contractual relations of ‘Charters’. John Major’s ‘Charters’ did not anticipate that citizens would participate collectively as informed individuals in democratic decisions about which goods and services should be provided by society at what cost to its members. Instead, as consumers, they merely chose passively between the different commodities that the market offered them so that their ‘equality’ depended on the buying power they brought to the marketplace, the Charter giving the right to complain when services were not delivered satisfactorily. In the market the only common value of commodities is their relative price. As the tool of all tools in which all qualities are represented as quantities, money appears as a universal medium, a measure which is not itself measured (see Simmel, 1978). Public issues of health, education and welfare that should be the subject of informed debate and democratic decision are then disguised by the mechanical routines of cost accounting, reducing them to simple certainties that can easily be measured. Once established, monetary measures of ‘value added’ form a closed, apparently concrete and completely self-sufficient system of reference, exclusive of all external considerations. The end result is a new Benthamism in which profit is the only measure of utility so that, as was said of a previous indictment of such ‘Hard Times’, ‘As the issues are reduced to algebraic formulation they are patently emptied of all real meaning’(Leavis, 1972, p. 265). This, and not any illusory ‘training revolution’, is the real cultural revolution to which the Manpower Services Commission contributed. The MSC has been presented ‘as a paradigm of new state agencies’ (Baron, 1989, p. 119). It may have been unique but in a wider perspective, Paolo Garonna and Paul Ryan (1991) note that such training proposals as the MSC initiated can be seen as part of the revision of the postwar regulatory system, or ‘labour accord’, in a number of advanced economies, but particularly in the US and UK. The 82 local Training and Enterprise Councils in England and Wales and the 22 Local

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Enterprise Companies in Scotland, which by 1991 had taken over the national administration of training from the Department of Employment, were widely seen as modelled on the US Private Industry Councils. As Evans (1992, p. 127) noted, ‘This reflected ideological bonds between the Thatcher and Reagan administrations’, a world-view that saw the US as, in Mrs Thatcher’s phrase, ‘the flagship of enterprise’. Moreover, Lord Young had returned from numerous visits to the land of the free to express an interest in the PICs and, when Norman Fowler succeeded him as Secretary of State for Employment, he too visited the Boston PIC which ran the Compact scheme there. As a consequence, Kay Stratton, a member of Governor Dukakis’s gubernatorial office responsible for the so-called Massachusetts miracle, advised the DE on formulating the 1988 White Paper ‘Employment for the 1990s’ which announced the new TEC policy. She subsequently performed the same role for the National Training Task Force, given a four-year lifespan to advise Fowler on the transfer of the former MSC’s functions to the self-appointed groups of local businessmen hastily cobbled together to form the TECs and LECs out of Local Employer Networks or, where they did not exist, local Chambers of Commerce. As Evans records, ‘It became clear by the beginning of 1990 that the NTTF was falling apart as many of its members . . . appeared to lose interest in its work’, so that ‘In reality it was departmental and TA officials who approved the applications for TEC status’ (1992, p. 139). Meanwhile, the government cut the training budget, earmarked for specific purposes, which was to be handed over to the TECs from £2.9 billion to £2.4 billion in 1991, with a further £110 million reduction proposed for 1992/3. The TEC boards were thus involved in a three-way struggle to get more money out of government while the TEED (as the MSC, then the TA, had become) tried to prove its enduring usefulness by setting the standards to monitor this spending. This struggle was intensified by the rise in unemployment after its temporary alleviation during the Lawson boom. There followed the longest slump since the 1930s when, with 75 per cent of funding still tied to YT and ET, employers on the TECs found themselves responsible for lower-level skill

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training and unemployment programmes rather than able to train for their own firms’ higher skill requirements as they might have preferred. Several TECs refused to agree contracts with the DE and some ran into deficit, with one or two becoming insolvent. Indeed, according to an internal Department of Employment report, ‘relations between the government and the TECs are unsustainable without a fundamental review’ (reported in The Financial Times, 9 July 1991). Nevertheless, TECs were to be saved from abolition in yet another Tory ‘training revolution’ by New Labour’s 1997 election victory. In 1998 the new government guaranteed them another three years’ life, or until the next election (see further). This was the longest period of security the TECs had yet enjoyed. While nominally private companies, the TECs remained dependent on state funding and, while less centralised, they were no more independent than the old MSC. In fact, given the other commitments of the businesspeople (mostly men) who had volunteered, been cajoled or merely appointed their (originally excluded) personnel managers into serving on the TEC and LEC boards, TECs and LECs were also staffed and run by civil servants who had been drafted in from the old regional and area structures of the MSC. Yet the TECs were set up on voluntarist principles to return training to the laissez-faire situation that existed before 1964, only now in an environment in which the unions had been considerably weakened. They were much criticised because that approach of relying on persuasion alone had not worked in the past for there are in the UK no compulsory financial levies on employers, as in France and Sweden, nor legal compulsion to train, as in Germany. TECs were not accountable to the local communities they were supposed to serve and made no claim to represent the ‘social partners’ incorporated, for instance, in the German Chambers of Commerce. They were not even representative of local employers, for large manufacturers (where they exist) tend to predominate overall. The local focus of the TECs did not necessarily correspond with local labour markets and made national coordination of education and training impossible. Yet with the atrophy of LEA powers, the TECs were fast becoming the only major planning body for

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training and education at local level. As schools, sixth form and FE colleges, polytechnics and finally the Careers Service were also cut loose into the marketplace, all of these became enmeshed in bidding for short-term contracts from the TECs and LECs. In this ‘contract culture’, according to one FE college principal quoted in The Times Education Supplement (21 February 1992), ‘Nothing is shared since everything has its price’. Indeed, the paper added that a highly critical report by the Bridge Group of 15 large voluntary organisations had identified the potential for widespread financial abuse of this bidding system. For as Tony Christopher of NACRO recorded in 1992, ‘the monitoring of actual delivery on the ground by the Employment Department is limited and remote’. As a result, ‘TECs are diverging further and further from each other and from any concerted approach to raising the skills of those with fewest qualifications’. Under control of the TECs, YTS (imaginatively renamed YT in April 1990 and later redesignated again as ‘Network Training’) no longer even pretended to present itself as a coherent national programme, and several large employers withdrew from it altogether, unwilling to make 104 separate agreements with individual TECs and LECs. Since 1991 the TECs were unable to meet the guarantee of a YT place for every school leaver by Christmas and the Unemployment Unit and Youthaid’s ‘Working Brief’ detailed the rising numbers of young people left without any income as a result. Despite this, TECs piloted training credits for YT, planned to go national after only a four-month trial period. Credits have been seen as another attempt to introduce vouchers that subsidise private schooling, but their more likely extension is to further and higher education as Individual Learning Accounts (see further). Meanwhile, with the 1991 White Paper ‘Employment and Training for the Twenty-first Century’ focused almost exclusively on young people, the 70 per cent of the workforce with no recent education or training and the 3.4 million adults enrolled in further and adult education were abandoned. The Conservatives’ 1992 election manifesto promised to look further at the machinery of government, heralding the final dismemberment of the Department of Employment. Nevertheless, as Crook and Aldrich (1997) recorded, when

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employees of the Education and Employment Departments received news of the merger on 5 July 1995, delivered to them in the form of an e-mail message, it came as a surprise. Already the substantial Business Enterprise Programme and the Small Firms Service had gone to the Department of Trade and Industry and the TEED (or parts of it) followed Sir Geoffrey Holland’s transfer to the Department of Education and Science. Through ‘workfare’, under whatever guise, it could be anticipated that what was left of the MSC’s training and employment efforts would be tied still more closely to social security and unemployment relief. They were finally taken over by the new Department for Education and Employment. Announced by Holland as the final triumph of Employment over Education, in fact the much smaller DfE, although it lost Science, gained hegemony over its old adversary the DE, now renamed the Employment Services Division of the new merged Ministry. The takeover of Employment by Education represented the domination of academic ‘standards’ over vocational relevance in the new learning policy. The new settlement of education remained unstable however, partly because training could not be squeezed out altogether and had to find a new if subordinate place in the new order. Mainly, of course, stability was lacking because the last Conservative government remained so deeply divided over fundamental issues. It was no longer able to contain the competing and contradictory tendencies between enterprise and authority, tradition and the free market, that were reconciled for a time by what was called ‘Thatcherism’. The four main factions (economic modernisers, traditional paternalists, free market radicals and the culturally nationalist New Right) were all riven by the deep divisions over Europe that finally rendered the Tories incapable of governing. This was what undermined Major’s attempt to bed down by a process of attrition the new state which Mrs Thatcher had introduced in education and training, as elsewhere. This may seem a negative summary of the results of nearly 30 years of training reform, let alone for the billions of pounds that were spent by the MSC and its successors. Perhaps the best that can be said is that the training system – if anything so organised as a ‘system’ could be said to exist

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– had been driven into such incredible confusion that it at least offered the opportunity for a thorough reorganisation. In place of the moribund market modernisation attempted by the Conservatives there was the potential for an alliance between what was left of British industrial capital and a government that would attempt a real modernisation of the economy and society. As a first step in this direction, the full employment goal of economic policy would have to be reasserted, the right to work reaffirmed, as well as the ‘right to training’ which has been substituted for it. But, with the relative decline of British industry and the growth of multinational companies decreasing the influence that any government could exercise over its national economy, education and training policy had come to substitute for discussion of more fundamental problems facing society. Nevertheless, due to all the talk about training since the Great Debate in 1976, there was at least now an awareness of the problem, though still no consensus on how to deal with it. Although the situation was better in Scotland (see Raffe, 1991), the vocational education debate in Britain remained polarised. On the one hand, the German model of a dual system which separates vocational youth training from traditional academic schooling had been attempted by the MSC. In the British cultural context, where the two routes do not enjoy parity of esteem, this separation could only deepen the division in the workforce between an academic minority and the majority who are failed by the schools system. In its place, a North American model of general education to 18 with transition via local community colleges to a mass system of higher education thereafter was now advanced under the aegis of the unified DfEE. The details of this phase of learning policy, marked by the 1988 Education Act and the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, will be explored in the next chapter. In higher education the Conservative government set admirable targets for raising the numbers of students, but contradicted them by introducing loans to pay for courses that in a market-driven system would be raised to their full cost. The expansion of HE could then only accommodate those who could afford it, while the widely predicted

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separation of research from teaching, together with the introduction of two-year degree courses, would predictably recreate a new binary divide between the more or less privatised antique universities and the rest of the HE institutions striving to emulate them. In this competition the distinctive contributions of the former polytechnics would be lost, just as the ideals of the comprehensive schools were being submerged in the academic competition engendered by the 1988 Act. Here it can be noted that the marketing of education and training was in contradiction with technological development and the demands placed on society by continuing international economic crisis, the social and environmental consequences of which impose physical limits on further growth. The resolution of this crisis can no longer be limited by national boundaries. A new economic order has been repeatedly called for. To comprehend and deal with the accelerating pace of historical and even climatic change new skills and new ideas developed from existing knowledge are required to cooperate in using the latest technology for collective ends. Such a necessity has yet to be forced onto the agenda of current policy-making. In its absence, it has been seen that the Conservatives embarked on a policy of ‘Education Without Jobs’ (Ainley, 1992) by expanding further and higher education. This was the new solution to the crisis of permanent, structural unand under-employment, combined with growing insecurity for those in work. This new learning policy was to be implemented through the new Contracting State Form of intervention in the new mixed economy of semi-privatised state and state-subsidised private sectors which the MSC had been so instrumental in pioneering in education and training. As elsewhere in the new Contracting, Franchise, Enterprise or Quango State (as it was variously called), and which had been introduced by the Conservatives to replace the corporate structures of the classic welfare state, this represented an extension of the dominance of private over state monopoly capital in an accommodation of the new state form with a re-regulated global capitalist market. The details of this phase of learning policy will now be developed.

4 Education without Jobs, 1987–97 A NEW SETTLEMENT OF EDUCATION ‘The Great Education Reform Bill’, as its architect – Kenneth Baker – proudly presented it, with the 238 clauses and 13 schedules that it accreted in its juggernaut passage through the Houses of Parliament, was intended as a successor to the 1944 Education Act and thus to usher in a new settlement of education. Indeed, prior to the 1987 election with its manifesto embodiment of Mrs Thatcher’s stated intention in a much-quoted interview to ‘go much further’ in education than ‘we had previously thought possible’, Baker had derided the old settlement of a ‘national system, locally administered’ as ‘maverick, eccentric and muddled’ in a speech to the North of England education conference in January. In its place he proposed the centralised system contained in the 1988 Act with the 200 new powers that Simon (1988) calculated the legislation gave to the Secretary of State for Education. The Act also introduced for the first time a National Curriculum for all state schools in England, conceding only some variation to the Scots and the Welsh in their versions of the same. This academic curriculum, based on the 1902 grammar school regulations substituting only design and technology for Latin, was to be tested at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16. Another main measure of the Act devolved, or financially delegated, funding for schools, colleges and polytechnics from local authorities through a centrally designated national formula linked to student numbers. Thus, despite the National Curriculum, education was to be ‘denationalised’, as the Tories announced it, and the rigours of the market introduced to the new and semiprivatised economy of competing schools and colleges. Here, though, a spanner was thrown in the intended workings of the free market in schools driven by parental choice and formula funding per head on the YTS model 118

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originally trail-blazed by the MSC and piloted for itself by the DES in its City Technology Colleges. For the prime minister insisted on the right of schools to ‘opt out’ of local authority control into grant maintained status centrally funded by a new Funding Agency for Schools. She plainly saw this as a way to bring back grammar schools, as she told The Independent (14 September 1987): ‘You are going to have three systems. First there will be those who wish to stay with the local authority . . . [then] you are going to have direct grant schools and then you are going to have a private sector with assisted places.’ This vision of a return to the golden days of hierarchically ordered tripartite schooling sat oddly with the free market mayhem which was seen as the route to its restoration. Because, of course, any school that was threatened with closure by the pressure of market forces could threaten to opt out, as happened in a number of cases. So too, the imposition of a state directed ‘National’ Curriculum was anathema to the apostles of free market choice, such as Keith Joseph’s eccentric adviser Stuart Sexton, who tells anyone who listens to him that he was at one time a ‘fourth education minister’. When he was overruled over the issue of the National Curriculum, he resigned and went off to set up his own school so strongly did he feel about it! (Lord Joseph from his elevation in the House of Lords, also opposed the introduction of the National Curriculum but for different reasons – see below.) These contradictions and the differences between the prime minister and her Education Secretary before and after the election illustrate the fundamental conflict between the two now dominant factions of free-marketeers allied with the New Right supporting the new settlement in education within the increasingly divided Conservative Party. All this is now fairly widely accepted amongst contemporary historians and other commentators. What is not so widely recognised, however, is that the new settlement covers not only what came to be called the ‘Foundation Learning’ of compulsory schooling but extended to the ‘Lifelong Learning’, as it came to be known, of post-compulsory further and higher education and training. The subsequent 1992 Further and Higher Education Act must, therefore, be taken as complementary to the 1988 Act.

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The two Acts together indicate a shift in learning policy and a new settlement of education. As a solution to the now permanent problem of structural youth unemployment and endemic general under- and unemployment, this represented a change over to a policy of ‘Education without Jobs’ (Ainley, 1992) and an imitation of the American model of extended education in place of the German model followed from 1976 to 1987. As has been seen, during this period of Manpower Services Commission dominance of the field, Germany’s ‘dual system’ of education and training had been the model for learning policy. To recapitulate, under this policy, first the Youth Opportunities Programme in 1978 and then the Youth Training Scheme in 1983 were introduced to replace the apprenticeships which had virtually disappeared with the collapse of manufacturing industry after the end of the long boom in 1973. Yet Youth Training always was more of a make-work scheme than the Germantype apprenticeship it aspired to become. And the ‘new vocationalism’ in schools and further education left untouched the top 20 per cent who stayed on in sixth forms for higher education and the non-manual professions. As Jones and Wallace (1992, p. 149) said, with ‘Employment, training and education policies, backed by social security policies, moving towards constructing just two groups of young people: trainees or students’, the new phase of policy attempted to reverse the proportions of these two groups from a majority of trainees and a minority of students in the 1980s towards a majority of students (at least to age 18) and a minority of trainees in the 1990s. Moreover, in contrast to the succession of youth training schemes in the 1970s and 1980s, young people (and adults) did not have to be dragooned into further and higher education, but in many cases were prepared to enrol enthusiastically, despite the personal indebtedness this entailed for them in the case of HE. The model was no longer Germany’s ‘dual system’ of apprenticeship but the North American model of keeping as many young people as possible in some sort of continuing further and higher education for as long as possible. As in the US, those who did not participate and ‘dropped out’ were to become the subject of intermittent and recurrent concern.

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Far from professionalising the proletariat, as the expansion of further and higher education pretended, this latest learning policy actually proletarianised the professions. This included those, like teachers and lecturers, whose professional positions in the old welfare state were being steadily undermined (see especially Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994). For the change in learning policy accompanied a shift from the old, corporate, welfare state, premised on demand management of full employment (Ainley and Vickerstaff, 1993). With the acceptance of permanent, structural unemployment, the welfare state was to be dismantled in favour of what has aptly been called ‘The Contracting State’ (Harden, 1992). This transition from welfare to workfare – if not ‘learningfare’ – was predicted by Peck in 1991. He and Jones (1996) echoed those economists who talked in terms of a new ‘Schumpeterian workfare state’ (Jessop, 1993). This new state, it has been argued, has a corresponding new mixed economy. Private and public sectors were no longer separate, as they had been when government brought them together as ‘social partners’ under corporate tripartism. Instead, a semi-privatised state sector was becoming indistinguishable from a state-subsidised private sector. This new mixed economy was particularly obvious in schools where the competition for pupils under Local Management semi-privatised state schools, while private schools were state-subsidised through Assisted Places and tax relief on their charitable status. State-subsidisation of the private sector did not end with the termination of the Assisted Places Scheme by the New Labour government but took new forms of ‘partnership’ between state and private schools, as well as through the Private Finance Initiative which New Labour inherited from their Conservative predecessors and attempted to expand upon. Even without this, the hidden state subsidy to private schools and colleges was estimated by Caroline Benn in 1996 at £1.3 billion annually. With the change in learning policy, the rush to expand educational opportunities at all levels was universally applauded. Educational providers were naturally especially enthusiastic, though their approbation may not have been totally disinterested. Yet education and training are heavily implicated not only in maintaining old social divisions but in

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creating new ones, particularly through the certification – or rather the lack of it – of a so-called ‘underclass’. This new ‘rough’ is divided from the new ‘respectable’ working-middle of society by housing, immigration, social security and policing policies (Ainley, 1993). The Training and Enterprise Councils Chief Executives Network estimated more than 100,000 ‘disaffected’ 18–20 year olds not in education, training or employment in 1996. Everybody who works in education knows that motivation is the key to successful learning and that failure in routine tests designed to allow the reintroduction of selective schooling is profoundly demotivating. At the bottom of this certified – not ‘learning’ – society, many of those without worthwhile certification drift into a black economy of irregular employment, if not criminality and drug dependence. This social fragmentation in turn effects those above making it increasingly difficult ever to meet the National Targets that have been set, especially as revised in 1995 (Ainley and Green, 1996). Learning policy thus contributed to and built on the process of class reformation which it has been suggested was taking place as a result of the dissolution of the industrial proletariat or traditional manually working class. In its place a new ‘rough’ is divided from the ‘respectable’ workingmiddle of society by, among other things, the lack of worthwhile qualifications. This is a fluid situation, however, in which what Zuboff (1988, p. 233) called the ‘sedimented beliefs’ left by previous periods still play a part and in which ‘the magnetism of the past and the forces of inertia on which it thrives’ as well as ‘contemporary events’ can ‘reanimate meanings normally associated with an earlier historical epoch’. So at the same time, attempts like reintroducing grammar schools under the guise of Grant Maintained status, aimed at shoring up traditional class distinctions between manual and non-manual workers – eroded by the decline of heavy industry, growth of services and use of new technology. Such policies of reversing into the future were thus muddled with the more or less deliberate reinforcement of new divisions within the labour force – particularly the creation of a so-called ‘underclass’ – and the modernising agenda of creating a flexible workforce able to retrain for lifelong learning and earning by combining manual and

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mental capabilities in the manner demanded by the CBI and originally envisioned by the MSC. Unhampered by any such confusions, the National Advisory Council for Education and Training Targets proposed raising its targets aimed to ensure education and skills matched the highest international standards (NACETT, 1994). These were set by yet another quango, borrowing its idea of ‘targets’ for the whole country to achieve in the manner of ‘management by objectives’ from current commercial management theory. The new standards which were being aimed at were absolute ones, derived from industry in the case of NVQs. In the ‘National’ Curriculum too, as has been indicated, different ‘levels’ are ‘bench-marked’ against Attainment Targets. These National Education and Training Targets, later randomly mutated to NTETs, Reeves (1995, p. 24) pointed out, are expressed in terms of the proportion of young people and employees/the workforce, not of the population as a whole. They thus ‘sidestep’, as the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (1994) put it, 2–3 million functionally illiterate adults. The revision of the Targets included raising Foundation Target 3 for the proportion of young people who attain level three qualifications by the age of 21 in the year 2000 from 50 per cent to 60 per cent – though the economic justifications for this were far from clear (see Robinson, 1995). Research by the author and a colleague for the National Advisory Council for the Education and Training Targets and published as Green and Ainley in 1995 was undertaken in representative colleges and schools in all regions of England and Wales in autumn 1994. The investigation suggested that reaching the new targets would demand substantial improvements in the rates of increase in participation amongst 16–19 year olds in full- and part-time education. It would also require improvements in the current rates of successful programme completion and progression to higher-level courses, particularly as regards the transition from level two to level three. In fact, it could safely be predicted that the Targets would not be met. They were, therefore, later revised downwards. For the new learning policy did not succeed in reversing the proportions staying on and leaving education from 20:80 to 80:20, although there was a shift to

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what Ken Spours (1995) called a ‘medium participation’ postcompulsory education and training system. Much of the increase in staying on beyond the school leaving age has been attributed to the introduction of unified GCSE examinations. These were finally and reluctantly announced by Keith Joseph in 1984, having first been proposed by the Schools Council in 1970 and by the NUT before that. Logically associated with the comprehensive phase of learning policy, the introduction of GCSE is an example of a time-lag effect, whereby a feature of one phase of learning policy rumbles on through into the next phase. (In a similar way, the momentum built up by comprehensive reform carried over into Mrs Thatcher’s tenure as Education Minister.) Despite the differentiation between various grades which Joseph insisted on adding to GCSEs – differences which have been entrenched more deeply since with further limitations upon course work and the introduction of tiers of exams for various streams within schools – the new exams, initially at least, gave more young people more opportunities to demonstrate what they were worth. This was generally associated with the availability of assessment via course work rather than terminal exams, since the former was considered to be a factor in motivating students and encouraging participation post-16. From 1995, however, the Heads of Careers Services destination statistics for the United Kingdom showed a slowdown in the previous dramatic increases in staying-on rates (reported in Working Brief 66, 7–8/95). Regional and local trends in participation rates also varied considerably, the greatest gap in England being between the North and the South. Since 1988/9 LEAs in the North of England generally displayed below-average increases in rates of full-time participation whilst LEAs in the South showed increases above the national average. Within those regions some LEAs, like Newcastle upon Tyne, increased faster than their regional average. The labour market is generally judged to exercise the greatest influence on young people’s choices, but in this case appears to have been overlaid by changing cultural attitudes. These went furthest in normalising remaining in education beyond the compulsory age in the South despite the greater availability of jobs there (but also because many

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of these jobs demanded higher entry qualifications). In the North the traditional tendency for early entry into work for many young people persisted despite the lack of employment opportunities (but in some cases, e.g. in Sheffield, due to extensive local authority and MSC-run YT Schemes which replaced many jobs for young people during the 1980s). These regional variations, it will be suggested, are an important feature of the new patterns of learning in the last phase of learning policy reviewed in this book. In place of – or rather in addition to – what Green (1986), following Ranson (1984), had called ‘tertiary modern FE’, new divisions within and between schools and FE were foreshadowed in the 1993 Dearing Review of the National Curriculum and were confirmed – if softened with provision for ‘progression’ and ‘transfer’ – in the subsequent rewriting of the Review. Splits can occur between an academic and a non-academic sixth form, or between school sixth forms and FE, or within different FE courses. The distinctions between A-levels, general NVQs (once called vocational ‘A’-levels) and NVQs, is mirrored in training by divisions between professional education and one of the last inventions of the Employment Department – ‘Modern Apprenticeships’ to NVQ level 3, alongside Youth Training or Network Training to NVQ level 2, or no qualification at all, which is the outcome for half of courses at this level. Sir Ron Dearing’s three successive reviews in 1993, 1996 and 1997 cannot be understood save in the context of factional struggles within the Tory Party over learning policy. They attempted to patch up, or adjust, the hastily imposed new settlement of education and training marked by the 1988 and 1992 Acts. The deal between the free market ideologues and the New Right had marginalised the modernising faction with whom the marketeers had previously been in alliance during the period of the Gang of Four/Department of Employment/MSC dominance of learning policy, which we have called, following Finn, the phase of ‘Training without Jobs’ from 1976 to 1987. In the new phase of ‘Education without Jobs’, instead of vocational relevance, academic ‘standards’ were now to be raised through testing the subject-based National Curriculum. Yet, as the late Lord Joseph warned from the House of Lords, a grammar school

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curriculum designed for the academic selection of a top 20 per cent would not suit the whole school population. Hence Dearing’s first review of under-16 provision to prune an overloaded, academic National Curriculum and its associated tests. Sir Ron’s second review of ‘Review of Qualifications for 16–19 Year Olds’, published in March 1996, partly resuscitated vocationalism. This was seen, for instance, in his support for ‘Modern Apprenticeships’. The Employment Department reintroduced these with its last grasp – after trying to get rid of ‘inflexible’ and ‘time-served’ apprenticeship throughout the 1980s. Dearing even renamed the ED’s discredited Youth Training as ‘Youth Traineeship’ to make it sound more like apprenticeship. He also proposed rebuilding a ‘work-based’ route for non-academic 14 year olds. Those who ‘failed’ the academic National Curriculum in schools would, from now on, have an alternative linked to Further Education. Associating FE with school failure enhanced the status and esteem of school sixth forms. Funding for students also remained weighted in schools’ favour and against FE and training in the competition between the schools and the colleges for dwindling numbers of 16+ year olds. The DfEE had been working for some time on their equalisation, as proposed in the DTI’s 1996 Competitiveness Mark 3 White Paper. This consultation process was complicated not only by the different rates involved, but the different methods of payment – full-time equivalents for sixth-form students, units for FE and the TECs own output-related funding of training and apprenticeship. Dearing also attempted to tidy up one legacy of the Departmental battle between Education and Employment by merging the former’s School Curriculum and Assessment Authority with the latter’s National Council for Vocational Qualifications. They formed a National Qualifications Authority (later Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, or QCA) to administer both academic and ‘applied’ examinations, another renaming turning level 3 General National Vocational Qualifications into ‘applied A-levels’ (though the name did not stick due to government fears that it would ‘debase’ A-levels by association). Academic and applied were assured the same ‘parity of esteem’ by Dearing that was

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supposed to hold between the grammar, technical and secondary modern schools under the 1944 tripartite system. In the new tertiary tripartism of A-levels, GNVQs and work-based NVQs, all qualifications now fell under one unified framework. Yet the numbers of different qualifications have multiplied to more than 6,000 since Keith Joseph set up the NCVQ to rationalise them into five levels from Foundation to Professional. Dearing recommended more rationalisation but complicated the levels further by adding an ‘Entry’ level. Confusion was worse confounded with redundant National Certificates and National Diplomas to recognise additional breadth and depth of achievement respectively, all recorded in a revamped (again) National Record of Achievement. The new SCAA–NCVQ merger left uncertain the status of NVQs, which, as seen, NCVQ designed to be acquired at work (unlike the school- or college-based GNVQs). Dearing proposed leaving NVQs with the awarding bodies. However, under the employer-led Training and Enterprise Councils which took over the MSC’s training empire and linked with the Industrial Lead Bodies awarding NVQs, training was considerably run down. NVQs also ran into the sand despite an extensive review (Beaumont, 1996). The extension of NCVQ’s framework to higher and postgraduate education was considerably modified, while Dearing endorsed reforms of GNVQs previously suggested by the 1996 Capey Review of them to extend written testing of these ‘applied A-levels’ as Dearing would have liked to have called them. Written tests would now apply particularly to the ‘core skills’ of literacy, numeracy and IT familiarity, which with another change of names Dearing now called ‘key skills’. The radicality of GNVQs as an attempt to acquire ‘general’ knowledge through vocational areas rather than through traditional academic subjects was thus considerably undermined. In any case, it is possible that the introduction of GNVQs has actually hindered attainment of the National Targets for Education and Training since even more students drop out of them than fail the A-levels and BTECs that GNVQs have to some extent replaced in FE and sixth forms (as alleged by Robinson, 1996). Also, many 16–19 year olds who did not get the GCSE grades qualifying them for

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A-level are taking GNVQs as an alternative route to HE. Yet the capping of HE student numbers by the Conservatives meant there were not enough places in HE for all those qualified for them. Learning policy at all levels, therefore, followed contradictory social goals. It sought to return to the secure certainties of academic/vocational divisions between traditional ‘middle’ and ‘working’ classes. At the same time the modernising agenda, still advanced for example by the CBI, continued to call for a new ‘flexible’ workforce. Constantly updating their portfolios of so-called ‘personal and transferable skills’, these classless individuals would move from contract to contract in a work environment transformed by new technology to combine the academic with the vocational. Rather than either goal being attained, chronic qualification inflation/diploma devaluation has resulted. Ironically, it can be asserted that in this sense more students are now learning less at all levels. Dearing’s Second Review did not confront these fundamental issues, merely patching up a tripartite framework of supposedly equivalent academic and vocational qualifications alongside a work-based route. He reinforced the hegemony of A-levels by levelling up rather than down in a futile bid for grade comparability, while at the same time introducing reformed A-level special papers ‘for young people of exceptional ability’ and A/S-levels (equivalent to half an A-level) ‘for students who do not proceed to the full A-level’. Progression between one route and the other was limited by Dearing’s restriction of modular A-levels and refusal to credit modules for transfer. It would be extended elsewhere by his advocacy of beginning modular degrees at school – leaving the door open to the ‘Scottish solution’ of reducing academic specialisation by integrating modularised A-levels with GNVQs, as advanced in 1990 by the New Labour think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. Sir Ron Dearing’s first review had also allowed for the introduction of General National Vocational Qualifications into schools at 14. This was confirmed by the suggestion in his second review of a ‘work-based’ route for ‘non-academic’ 14 year olds. However, the ‘parity of esteem’ that Dearing hoped for between pathways, and between institutions and courses within institutions providing for different pathways,

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is impossible whilst academic A-levels remain the ‘gold standard’ against which all other qualifications are judged inferior. Nor can the reality of differentiated outcomes to different employment opportunities and earnings from different pathways be ignored (see Robinson 1997). The unholy alliance since 1987 between the free market and New Right factions of the Conservative Party was based, as argued, on the ‘promise’ that the market would deliver grammar schools and save A-levels as the guarantee of ‘quality HE’. This ‘deal’ in a few short years produced unprecedented chaos through unregulated competition between and within HE, FE, tertiary and sixth-form colleges, schools and schemes. Everybody involved knew that the impossible was being demanded – more for less. A learning society would not be produced by sacking teachers and lecturers, increasing class sizes and closing colleges. In conditions of pre-existing monopolies – in education as in other areas of the semi-privatised public services, such as health – market competition clears the way for new monopolies and two-tier service. Yet the Conservative government continued to argue that – in education and training, as elsewhere – free-market competition is more efficient and responsive to individual demand than democratic accountability. The consequences for schools are well known, but those for higher and further education are less appreciated. They will be briefly examined in turn as a part of the new settlement of education in the latest phase of learning policy under the new Contracting State that has replaced the classic Welfare State. HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE 1990s In the 1992 general election the government’s target for a growth in higher education to cater for one third of 18–21 year olds by the year 2000 was accepted by all parties. In Scotland, indeed, this target had already been met, so that country aimed for half of all its 17–20 year olds in HE by that date. Attempts by the colleges and universities during the election campaign to lobby for extra funds to finance this expansion without loss of quality were largely ignored. As a

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result, higher education (at 18+) and indeed further education (at 16+) were no more an election issue than adult education, although schools (but not nursery) education was. By the 1997 general election, HE had a higher profile. Blair’s declaration that his first priorities were ‘education, education and education’ and Major’s that his were the same ‘but in a different order’ were interpreted – by those working and studying in further education at least – as meaning ‘primary, secondary and higher’, or vice versa. So, whilst FE was relegated from any public attention as usual, party policy on HE had become bipartisan as the third Dearing review (of higher education) had been scheduled to report after the 1997 election. It was accepted by both main parties (though not by the Social Democrats) that its anticipated recommendation for the introduction of student fees would be accepted by whichever party was in power. By 1990 the age participation ratio of home HE students under 21 compared to the total population of that age topped 20 per cent for the first time in the UK as a whole. By the end of the decade there were 1.5 million full- and part-time, home and overseas HE students, with the female majority in school sixth forms and FE working its way through to HE. Half a million more HE students have been promised by the New Labour government by the year 2002. They will have to come from mature, local students fed on to HE through FE, if not through franchising arrangements for those in employment. Already, half of the new student body are outside the stereotypical 18–21 age range and many live at home rather than move away to study. The numbers of postgraduates increased by 65 per cent throughout the 1980s and are projected to rise further. The increase in total numbers has been achieved despite an increase in fees (previously recoverable by the universities and colleges from public funds) and the introduction of loans to pay for student grants. Flat-rate fees were differentiated by subject area in an unsuccessful effort by the government to go against the operation of the free market it favoured and to direct more students into science and technology and away from the cheaper but more popular arts and social sciences. This makes some subjects more expensive to study than others and invites institutions to charge ‘top-up’ fees for their popular courses.

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In addition, the contradictory recommendation of Dearing’s Report on higher education to recommence expansion by charging fees further undermined the Robbins’ principle of state support for all qualifying students and predictably discouraged would-be students from applying. This was seen in the immediate fall in applications from mature students in 1998 and a later fall in under-21 year olds (confirmed by The Times Higher, 3 July 1998). The removal of grants, which the New Labour government unexpectedly added to Dearing’s expected recommendation to introduce fees, now saddled students with total debts/loans estimated by the Campaign for Free Education to vary by course and institution from between £10,000 and £20,000. That these debts would be repaid by those earning more than the national average wage was argued by both Tories and New Labour as ‘only fair’, since – in another of the changes to the old welfare state accomplished by Mrs Thatcher and sustained by New Labour – a progressive tax regime had been abandoned in favour of (an overall increase in) taxes levied at the point of sale (a measure which further shifted the burden of taxation from rich to poor). The argument that HE students should, therefore, pay for qualifications which would secure them greater income could also be applied to A-levels of course. The universities were no longer able to respond to cuts in funding, as they had done previously, by ‘raising the grades they required for entry rather than squeezing in all those who meet previously acceptable standards’ (Fulton, 1991). This response in the 1980s had raised the cultural profile and the numbers attending polytechnics and other nonuniversity higher education institutions. When government policy changed at the end of the 1980s towards the introduction of a market-driven expansion of higher education on the US model, this elitist option was no longer available. The universities’ reliance on state funding meant the loss of their much cherished but largely illusory independence (see Fraser, 1983). Despite ‘the concept of autonomy’ being, as Tapper and Salter (1992, p. 228) put it, ‘central to . . . the traditional idea of the university, only the most perverse re-reading of history could claim that British universities remained autonomous institutions by the final days of the Universities Grants Council’. Instead, the university

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authorities accepted that the expansion on a reduced unit of resource to include one third of the age range in some sort of higher education by the end of the millennium would alter what they taught. So that, as one of the advocates of such an approach recommended: ‘More’ would ‘mean different’ (Ball, 1990). The new system of funding, through Councils for further and higher education introduced by the 1992 Higher and Further Education Act, links central state support of universities and colleges to student numbers and this has encouraged the dramatic rise in student intake, but this only explains the supply side of the equation. On the demand side, numbers enroling for higher education have until recently consistently outstripped targets set by government. And a demographic drop in the actual numbers of young people has increased the proportion of mature students. The source of this ‘demand for HE remains a mystery’, even according to Professor Peter Scott, former long-time editor of the sector’s house journal, The Times Higher Education Supplement in September 1992. The social engine of the expansion is, however, plainly to be found in the new middle of society where the previously clear-cut distinction between the non-manual middle class and the manually working class has been eroded by the decline of heavy industry and the growth of services, especially in offices and marketing. The latest applications of new technology have also replaced many of the hard labouring jobs of the past. This reflects the wider economic and social ‘restructuring’ popularly identified with the period of successive Thatcher governments, though the social changes they encouraged were the outcome of long-term trends that have yet to take final form. In this process of class recomposition it has been argued that the traditional, tripartite social pyramid with distinct divisions between upper, middle and working classes has pulled apart. This is confirmed by the latest revisions to the official classification of socio-economic groups for the 2001 population census (Rose and O’Reilly, 1997). This ‘attempts to avoid all reference to “skill”, “manual” and “non-manual” as these are not meaningful terms in relation to the underlying concept of the revised SEC’ (p. 11), which is ‘to devise an algorithm that will construct classes so as to minimise

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within-class and maximise between class variation so far as relevant aspects of employment relations are concerned’ (p. 48). For this purpose, ‘neither the degree of “manuality” of the work involved nor its skill level are in fact considerations that should determine the allocation of occupationby-employment status units to classes’ (ibid.). The new social class reformation gives education a heightened significance for many people in the new middle of society. Now that degree-level higher education is required for entry to more and more professional/managerial occupations, there is greater dependence on academic achievement as the means of reproducing superior status, with greater resort by those who can afford it to private schooling. Especially for those who continue to think of themselves and would like to think of their children as traditionally ‘middle’rather than ‘working’-class, educational credentials have a new significance. Meanwhile, the lack of any certification is a virtual condemnation to the dependency of the ‘underclass’ and exclusion from the new, respectable working–middle of society. Further, educational credentials assume a new importance in achieving or sustaining cultural distinctions in the absence of clear-cut divisions between the formerly manually working class and the traditionally non-manual middle class. This is the origin of the latest and rampant ‘credential inflation’ or ‘diploma devaluation’, as it has been called. Broadfoot (1996) presents the growth of a ‘credentialised society’ at all levels as an answer by the state to a crisis of legitimation. The expansion of higher education thus also relates to Bourdieu’s (1982) insight that it is cultural capital rather than occupational information that is increasingly being transmitted in the new (higher) education system. Bourdieu long ago pointed out how in France culturally arbitrary qualifications can change their worth as badges of distinction acquired by different social groups, and how new signs of exclusion can be elaborated by elites to preserve privileged access to powerful positions. His ‘general anthropology of power and legitimacy’ (see Robbins, 1991, p. 165) helps to explain the system of cultural differences between groups and individuals developed from the past by modern consumerism. This process is accelerating today. In this situation, as Bourdieu (1992) wrote about French schools:

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the official diversification (in grading) or the officious diversification (in institutions) also has the effect of helping to create a principle of differentiation which has been meticulously concealed: the well-born pupils who have received from their families a well-honed sense of their position and, additionally, examples of advice capable of sustaining them in the event of uncertainty, are in the process of placing their (cultural) investments at the right moment and in the right place, that is to say, in the right career stream, the right establishments, and the right departments. In contrast, those from the most disadvantaged families are forced to be reconciled to the school’s injunctions or to chance to find their way through a more and more complex universe and are, therefore, bound to invest at the wrong time and in the wrong way a cultural capital which is, in any case, extremely limited . . . This is one of the mechanisms which, added to the logic of the transmission of cultural capital, ensures that the highest educational institutions, especially those leading to positions of economic and political power, remain as exclusive as in the past. This is the way that this system of education, which is widely available to all and yet plainly reserved for the few, pulls off the tour de force of bringing together the appearance of ‘democratisation’ and the reality of reproduction accomplished with a greater degree of deception and, therefore, with an increased effect of social legitimisation. Such cultural knowledge is distinct from but common to the various cultures of different courses that are a product of admissions procedures, staff attitudes and, crucially, the intrinsic, cognitive status of curriculum content, by which the dispositions of individual applicants, curriculum content and institutional ethos are moulded together to constitute a marketable commodity. These differences relate not only to variations between students of different subjects, especially arts and science students, but also to those between institutions. Similarly, Bourdieu described the French grandes écoles ‘objectively located in a structural map on the basis of the self-constructions which they had effected in their selection procedures’ (Robbins, 1991, p. 166). Thus, while students produce and reproduce the cultural market in education in

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their everyday life – particularly at college and campus universities in their extra-curricular activities – they do not do this, as Marx said of the way humanity makes history, in circumstances of their own choosing but on a ground that has been chosen for them, in this case, by the selective processes of the institutions which they attend. So, as Robbins (ibid., p. 6) also observed, ‘in so far as these profiles [of students at similar institutions] are homogeneous, it is because the students have become self-selectively homogenised by becoming members of the student population of the University of East London (for instance) rather than because they have become initiated into any common intellectual discourse’. For, as Robbins continues, with ‘Higher education institutions decreasingly imposing a neutral academic ethos’, owing to the heightened differentiation between competing universities in the widening hierarchy, increasingly the social ethos of students and institutions is mutually reinforcing. So that the result may be that ‘a common intellectual discourse’ may soon no longer be communicated to all higher education students. The maintaining of a common quality is thus vital to the future of higher education, as are the preservation and extension of access to and transference between institutions. Otherwise, old cultural distinctions rendered increasingly arbitrary by their lack of correspondence with rapidly changing material circumstances will only be preserved by the selection of a minority through an antique and academic curriculum. In this case, instead of integrating and communicating information, the facility of new technology for reducing cultural qualities to arbitrary qualities can be used to produce elaborate and supposedly objective rank orderings of individuals in a reanimated hierarchy. Then, as Laborit (1977, p. 153) observed, ‘the more the hierarchical system is staggered and individualised, the greater the sovereignty of the commodity’. The introduction of the market in higher education, which may soon be further augmented by the mechanism of a more or less disguised voucher entitlement (in the form of Individual Learning Accounts administered for FE, HE and training through the University for Industry), provides a model for the type of differentiated market that Conservative governments intended to replicate in independently

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competing schools and colleges of further education. Only minor changes were necessary to produce such a result in the higher education sector as an elaborate hierarchy of universities already existed in which independent, self-governing institutions competed with their various specialised course offerings in an academic marketplace for state-subsidised students. The removal of the binary division between universities and polytechnics in 1992 completed this differentiated hierarchy at the same time as it removed the last vestiges of local accountability and democratic control over higher education. By taking the former polytechnics and colleges, together with further education and sixth-form colleges, away from administration by the local state, the hierarchy of higher education institutions competing in the academic marketplace also provides an example of the new organisation of state agencies in what has been called ‘The Contracting State’ run on the franchise or contract principle which complements the state subsidisation of the private sector in the new mixed economy of state-subsidised private and semi-privatised state sectors. It is predictable that, with research increasingly concentrated in specialist centres, as government clearly signalled even before Dearing by hiving off responsibility for science policy to the Department of Trade and Industry (via a staging-post in the Cabinet Office), there will be a new binary divide as the new (and some not so new) universities at the bottom of the pile become teaching-only institutions. This can only be confirmed by Dearing’s recommendation for research to be concentrated in ‘centres of excellence’ – predictably in the elite, Ivy League. For, as Scott (1997) wrote, ‘Since the onset of “consolidation” many universities have concentrated instead on improving their research performance. Dearing attempts to reverse that, although the committee has perhaps not been sufficiently bold in recognising that renewed expansion may have to lead to a clearer division between research-oriented and access-oriented universities.’ In the latter, access-oriented universities, ‘skills’ courses related to employment will be concentrated, along with two (as opposed to the normal three and four) year (sub-)degree programmes delivered in their associated FE colleges. At the

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other pole of the widening spectrum, in research-oriented universities, courses unrelated to any specific employment but serving as a cultural apprenticeship to core management positions in business and finance also pander to the academic consumerism of overseas students and those who can afford to take courses for their intrinsic interest. Fees raised to full cost for such prestigious courses can be anticipated as colleges in the old universities and elsewhere may be tempted to privatise themselves out of the state system. Then they would be able again to raise their entry requirements to preserve their elite status rather than admit more students who meet their old standards. The effect of releasing five times as many graduates into the labour market as the 1960s and twenty times as many as the 1930s has been an inevitable lowering of expectations. This may be an element in what Smithers and Robinson (1995) call the ‘discouragement effect’, putting people off from applying to enter HE but evidenced also amongst FE students interviewed in Ainley and Bailey (1997). According to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), many sixth formers too are beginning to question the value of a university degree. This can only be confirmed by Dearing’s recommendation for student fees and the New Labour government’s further removal of maintenance grants, as well as the threatened introduction of top-up fees by certain universities and colleges within them for particular courses. This will only entrench what is already plainly observable that the more culturally prestigious the institution and the course, the more white, male and conventionally middle-class the students are. Older universities as a general rule also have younger students (with some exceptions such as Warwick University, for instance). Partly as a consequence of the lengthening of education and the large numbers involved, higher education is attempting to meet a change in employer demands upon graduate labour. It is at the middle management level that the same demands are made as of the workforce lower down, less for the specific skills acquired within particular companies and other organisations and more for general abilities and knowledge taught in schools and colleges. This change in employer demand is, of course, also in part conditioned by

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the larger pool from which graduate recruits are now drawn, as well by the correspondingly increased numbers of posts for which graduate qualifications are now required. It is a demand not necessarily for ‘higher’ skills in specialised areas of expertise but more for multi-skills, including so-called ‘personal and transferable skills’. These are – as has been intimated – neither ‘personal’ nor ‘transferable’ nor ‘skills’ but actually generic and universal competences increasingly required of more and more formerly discrete occupations that are becoming integrated and simplified by the latest applications of new technology as well as by similar methods of work organisation at all levels of (remaining) employment. As a result, the Association of Graduate Careers and Advisory Services now reports 40 per cent of all graduate jobs advertised in the UK as being open to graduates from any discipline. These are not the minority of elite recruitments to, for example, the First Division of the Civil Service, for which this type of cultural selection was traditionally the case, but for a mass of lower management and service jobs which previously recruited internally but which are increasingly becoming closed to non-graduates, for example, in retail management. Most employers though, save for the few degrees that specifically match their special technical requirements, have always looked more favourably on Oxbridge degrees, especially for management posts, and rank HE institutions thereafter. So no matter how vocationally relevant the course that applicants may have followed in a former polytechnic, they are therefore unlikely to be considered for many highstatus jobs. Thus, although within academia all degrees are officially held to be equal, outside of it some degrees are demonstrably more equal than others. So, the formal equality previously existing between degrees now seems set to disappear. With the abolition in 1993 of the Council for National Academic Awards, which oversaw the degrees awarded by the polytechnics and colleges, all the universities in the new system could award their own degrees and there have been repeated accusations that standards were slipping. It may, therefore, be necessary to reinvent a CNAA for all degree-awarding HEIs. The Times Higher (19 June 1998) has already reported the QCA working with the Universities’

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own Quality Assessment Agency on ‘benchmarking standards in vocational degrees and industry-related postgraduate programmes’. This may accompany the introduction of ‘core curricula’ for basic, two-year degree programmes in many subjects. Indeed, the NVQ key skills of numeracy, literacy, familiarity with information technology, working with others, ‘learning to learn’ and ‘problem-solving’ already constitute such a common core for all subjects to levels 4 and 5 of the National Qualifications framework (equals degree and Masters level). The most prestigious universities will predictably assert their distinctive claims to ‘quality’ by opting out of such ‘national’ curricula and continuing with traditional three-year degrees, just as the universities in the past made much of their Royal Charters of independence from regulation by the former CNAA. Common standards are the more necessary as, with more courses broken down into modular components that carry equivalent credits, students can more easily transfer from course to course and from institution to institution. Semesters of the same length at all colleges will also facilitate this transfer. Despite the loyalty that students usually show to their college, individual students may be tempted to ‘trade up’ the system from less to more prestigious courses and colleges. As in the US, only an Ivy League of the top colleges will then be regarded as ‘real education’, even though what they teach may well be increasingly academic and remote from reality. Mass universities for the many will then be combined with elite universities for the few. In this worst of both worlds, competition all down the line shadows the medieval flummery and academic obscurantism of Oxford and Cambridge. Meanwhile, in the forgotten college sector of HE, colleges that do not attain university status are merging or closing. This may also be the fate of those new universities that lose out in the competition for students and research funds. Mergers in their cases may be accompanied by collapse into regional learning centres ranged around the surviving management core of the old institutions.

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TRAHISON DES CLERCS? The reaction by academics to this incorporation not only by the state and its learning policies but also as adjuncts to the production requirements of international capital (see Gibbons et al., 1994) has been equivocal. This is in contradistinction with the much-cherished independence of the Western European universities which has been central to their ideal image of themselves as developed since the Renaissance. Their autonomous self-government supposedly safeguarded the freedom of inquiry of members of the academic community. However, in Britain since the Second World War, the increasing reliance of the universities on state funding undermined these pretensions to independence. As seen, University Vice Chancellors had little option but to succumb to the Conservative government’s demand at the end of the 1980s that a market-driven expansion of higher education should take place in the 1990s. Such compliance was nothing new. Despite the cultivated eccentricities of the odd professor or two and the individual conditions of much academic work, academic life at universities is in general marked by the respectable conventionality and social conformity of its staff. For in the academic world individuals’ professional positions are based on their reputation amongst the ‘invisible college’ of their peers. This ‘peer review’ system, despite its ethos of supposed dedication to pure research and scholarship, in practice often stifles originality, preserves outdated subject subdivisions and only serves to encourage academic careerism fostered by professorial paternalism. (See Ainley, 1994, pp. 93–4.) Reputation amongst their peers, which the individual academic pursues supposedly for its own sake, is after all linked to financial reward, not only in terms of salaries, which are low relative to other professional occupations, but also to sometimes lucrative private consultancies. There are also the perks of a previously secure and comfortable existence – if not company cars, then trips abroad to conferences, sabbaticals and exchange visits, etc. Meanwhile, much of the day-to-day work of teaching and research in universities is sustained by postgraduate students and a growing army of insecurely employed contract staff who now make up to a third of all academic employees.

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The threat to their previously relatively privileged way of life prompted the majority of dons’ growing hostility to Conservative government. This was symbolised by Oxford University’s refusal to grant Mrs Thatcher the honorary degree it usually confers on prime ministers. One national survey (quoted in Ainley, 1994, p. 32) showed support for the Conservative Party amongst academics dropping from 48 per cent in 1963 to under 20 per cent in 1992 (15 per cent at Oxbridge). Mrs Thatcher’s policies were seen as undermining the professional ideal not only of academics themselves, but also of the professions for which they prepare their students. Central to this conception of a profession is the expert and specialised knowledge which higher education imparts. Self-regulation by its own members is a stronger definition for a profession than the mere possession of specialist knowledge – a criterion for exclusivity also shared by skilled craftworkers. As policed by the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nurses, or the Law Society, doctors, nurses and lawyers exert greater control over their situation than either university teachers or journalists, for example. In the older universities, and the newer ones modelled on them, anarchic and archaic forms of collegial self-government by the academic community of fellows also still performed this function for academics. In the Civic universities erected from Victorian times on a German model of subject specialisation and in the former technical universities, departmental rule by the professoriate is bolstered by ‘peer review’ systems of maintaining their professional integrity. The two forms of management – collegial and departmental – are both opposed to the top-down corporate management structures imposed on academics in the former polytechnics and increasingly elsewhere, whose staff see themselves as being reduced to teaching functionaries. In higher education new forms of work organisation involve all academics in the administration and accounting of their own labour. Access to privileged knowledge is an aspect of professionalism likely to be stressed by higher education teachers defining their teaching in compliance with the requirements of professional bodies and, increasingly, defining their own work according to externally specified measures of ‘quality’. In addition, previously discrete subject disciplines

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are being interrelated by the latest scientific discoveries as well as by new information and communications technology. As formerly specialised databases become accessible to information about other aspects of reality, academic experts, who had previously carved out a specialised niche for themselves in the intricate division of knowledge that used to obtain, find themselves suddenly exposed. The academic specialisms that are now breaking down were originally a by-product of the increasing availability of free time in a society that was becoming more and more productive. The Victorian gentleman amateur, who pursued his own research interest irrespective of where it led, eventually gave way to the professional scientist and scholar. Industry and the state needed to organise research and inquiry, but usually could not do so directly since research is by its nature unpredictable. On the other hand, the public funding of research, as well as education at all levels and indeed health and other social services, means that those who work in these areas have some public accountability for what they do and cannot be left to follow their own bent. They can, however, if they can make their voices heard, justify their actions in a way that is not open to employees of private companies who are directly accountable only to their shareholders. Private sector workers are, therefore, much more immediately constrained by short-term demands for their product in the commercial marketplace. This was an additional reason for privatising the public sector as far as Conservative governments were concerned. If, as part of their accompanying market modernisation of the economy, market mechanisms could be made to determine demand for public sector products and services, this would remove them from the arena of public debate and democratic determination. There would then be no further discussion of their purposes, which would become, like everything else, merely to maximise the return they could earn in the market. This dedication that successive Conservative governments showed to the principles of early nineteenth-century, neoliberal economics, in which social problems and priorities were supposed to be resolved by the hidden hand of market forces, was difficult to apply to the field of ideas, particularly the generation of new ideas. The dynamic of the world of

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ideas is irrepressible. As argued in the introduction to this book, new knowledge reveals new possibilities and is always liable to overstep the bounds of the society that created and now seeks to contain it in order to preserve the conditions of its own social existence. Original acts of creation and discovery – and learning about or rediscovering them – are not only enjoyable because they engage people’s natural curiosity and imagination, but are also always implicitly critical of the world as it is because they have created something new and potentially upsetting for the existing state of affairs. This poses acute problems for those who wish to maintain things as they are and to use the latest scientific discoveries, artistic creations and theoretical notions in order to do so. There are different options available to a capitalist society to resolve this difficult relationship. The need to settle it is the more pressing as industry becomes ever more science-based. Scientific research is not only becoming more expensive, but is increasingly integrated with production. Private corporations can, therefore, set up their own research institutes, either singly or collectively, as in the US where companies also sponsor charitable foundations dedicated to medical and other research. Or the state can subsidise research centres to support the needs of national industry, as in Japan. Another possibility is for companies to apply the rhetoric of themselves becoming educational institutions, constantly learning to develop new products and teaching their employees in order to do so. In-house training would then develop beyond awarding its own certification of mechanical competence to giving the company’s own degrees for higher level technical and also management staff. British Telecom was granted the authority to do this by the former CNAA, while British Leyland at Coventry has moved in the same direction. BL is supported by local universities even though they may thus end up doing themselves out of business, at least as far as some of their engineering students are concerned. More recently, British Aerospace announced plans to establish its own university on the grounds that it could not recruit graduates with the required skills from existing institutions (The Times, 12 March 1997). In the past when two universities supplied virtually all the scientists and intellectuals who were required in England

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and Wales, these ancient institutions could be allowed to get along with little supervision by the state. Even as the universities grew in number they were given room to pursue relatively pure research in the different areas in which they specialised. But with much more money being required from the public purse for increasingly expensive research projects, there was a growing demand for accountability over how it was being spent, especially as there was also greater competition for dwindling public funds. This is another reason for the pressure on higher education to conform to the demands of the market modernisation of the economy, as well as for academics to become part of it themselves by self-financing and selling their services at a profit in the market. In the area of arms production there has always been a close and mutually beneficial link between universities, the military and the arms industry. The Ministry of Defence particularly has long been a notorious tap for research funds, especially as their mismanagement is legendary. So much so that geographers have attributed a large part of the growth of defence-related precision electronics in the formerly prosperous South East of England to adjacent university research departments (e.g. Morgan and Sayer, 1988). With the end of the Cold War some winding down in this area should have occurred, but much of Britain’s ‘export success’ continues to depend on arms sales (estimated by CAFOD, the Catholic Relief Agency, at 20 per cent of the country’s export earnings). In a world economy dominated by transnational corporations based in the most developed economies – the US, Japan and the heartland of Europe – industrial research no less than production is internationalised. So the universities in the industrially developed countries are shifting, as Harvey (1986) said, from being guardians of national knowledge to ancillaries in the production of knowledge for global corporations. This, as well as their financial dependence on the state, is making it difficult for many of them to sustain their previous commitment to independent research, vital though it is to the self-concept of the academics who work in them and to their traditional ideal of a university. In the traditional ideal of a university – derived ultimately from the Ancient Greeks – students are supposed to benefit from a withdrawal from the world to be taught by experts at

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the leading edge of scientific experiment, scholarly investigation and theoretical formulation. The wisdom of the sage is presumed, in some undefined way, to transmit itself to the initiates gathered around him, just as it did to Socrates’ acolytes all those years ago. Seminars and tutorials too are traditionally modelled on the Socratic dialogues of question and answer in Plato’s symposium. But students universally complain that their teachers are less interested in teaching them than in the research on which their academic reputation depends. Indeed, pedagogy (the science – or is it an art? – of teaching and learning) has been neglected in the old universities. This is because there is little career potential in being recognised as a good teacher and because the way learning is organised in the old universities and those modelled on them, responsibility for failure rests with the individual student not with their teachers. This is regarded as a virtue not a failing for, in order to gain acceptance in academia, a subject has to be shown to be ‘hard’, like the ‘hard sciences’. This means it is not only ‘hard’ for students to learn, but also for their teachers to be qualified to teach it. In this traditional view, university education is seen as a conversation restricted to academic peers into which students are initiated and by which general and analytic knowledge is handed down, essentially unchanged, from don to potential don. This task of academic vocational education is regarded by its proponents as a vital task, literally, to the preservation of civilisation as they know it and one that in the present economic and political climate is increasingly beleaguered on all sides. From this point of view, higher education is seen as building on students’ previous schooling, or – exceptionally – college education, or even training in work, but is considered to differ fundamentally from them. Other university students (than potential dons) may incidentally benefit from a higher education so conceived, but the university is not essentially concerned with them. Selection for the academic vocation is seen as through a series of examination hurdles at which the majority fail at every stage. The function of academic education is thus not so much to teach as to establish the conditions in which the majority of students can fail and the minority sort themselves out eventually to succeed their examiners as the gatekeepers of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’. According to

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this view, the process of education is not lifelong but culminates in the ‘final examination’ in which the class of degree is used as an indication of the academic quality of the individual. This individual mental quality is viewed as innate, for students are seen as having distinct levels of ability indicated by the class of final degree they obtain – a mind is either an ordinary mind or ‘a first class’ mind. This label of a fixed state of grace is considered more important than the subject studied to obtain it. Even 20 or 30 years after graduation, a first class degree can be cited as indicating suitability for academic employment, although demonstrably the level of qualification for such employment is a function of the academic labour market at different times. In this sense, the degree is as final for the minority who continue their study after it as it is for the majority of graduates for whom it is the last exam they ever take. It is ironic that the unprecedented expansion of higher education with which so many professions sought to guarantee or to gain previously secure exclusive status can be seen to have resulted in an actual proletarianisation of the professions. For this expansion is not only, or even mainly, a rearguard action by education professionals to preserve their depreciated status – depreciated along with the value of their educational credentials. As has been argued, even as their devalued currency inflates, educational credentials become increasingly important, especially to parents seeking secure, ‘middle-class’ status for their children, but also for anybody trying to cling on to remaining secure employment in the shrinking core of both semi-privatised public and statesubsidised private sectors. Hence the phenomenal growth in part-time adult courses of continuing professional development, often run off-site and out of hours using distance and open learning. Meanwhile, the actual conditions of work in these ‘professional’ occupations become increasingly onerous and insecure. However, as Aronowitz and DiFazio (1994, p. 225) remark, ‘the relative proletarianisation of the technical intelligentsia does not signify that they have become a new working class so long as they retain the ideology and culture of professionalism, one of whose characteristic features is to foster self-blame for failure.’ Yet, ‘The pervasiveness of self-blame

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reveals the degree to which the self-perpetuating features of the academic system are introjected by one group of its victims’ (ibid., p. 256). Academics are defensive at the best of times, as Bailey showed in his investigation into The Folklore of Academic Politics (1977). Nowadays, they feel beset from all sides and have tended not only towards sheltering behind professionalism but in buttressing this claim to professional status with a technicisation of the academic form of generalised, or what Apple called Official Knowledge. This is particularly the case in the arts and social sciences, which are the most open to challenge from the uninitiated who may have their own opinions without necessarily having undertaken any formal study at all, especially when they can access formerly specialised information so easily via the internet. As Ernst Gellner (1992, pp. 46 and 48) explained it, In the world’s most developed countries, something around 50 per cent of the population receives higher education. The colleges and universities which provide it are staffed by people who are assessed in terms not merely of teaching performance but also of intellectual creativity and originality . . . There simply must be the appearance of both profundity and originality. It is all intended to resemble scientific growth. This results, wrote Gellner, in ‘a setting up of artificial obsolescence and rotation of fashion, characteristic of the consumer industry’ in higher education of which the current craze for ‘postmodernism’ is symptomatic – ‘a highly ephemeral phenomenon, destined for oblivion when the next fad arrives’. Postmodernism, as the latest avatar of what Gellner called ‘relativism in its modern guise’, denies students the possibility of making sense of their experiences by denying the possibility of academic generalised knowledge. At the same time, as an obscure academic discourse, it elevates the position of the few who can claim to understand it. The thousand and one varieties of postmodernism have thus come to replace the former orthodoxy of functionalism in social science, just as monetarism has come to replace Keynesianism as the former paradigm in economics (Harley and Lee, 1997). Postmodernism and its associated

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post-structuralism and deconstructionism developed from an academic Marxism, which it has been argued became increasingly abstruse as it attempted to accommodate itself to the demands of academic ‘rigour’. In addition, as Gramsci (1977, p. 246) noted, ‘The death of old ideologies takes the form of scepticism with regards to all theories and general formulae . . . and to a form of politics which is not simply realistic in fact . . . but which is cynical in its immediate manifestation.’ The central dogma of all these post-isms is that, as summarised by Robertson (1994, p. 332), ‘individuals are passive recipients of whatever fragmented set of messages are propelled in their direction, unable to make connections between them for themselves because they can never be aware of the global totality of things . . . The effect is to increase the power of information owners and decrease the power of information receivers.’ Postmodernism, says David Harvey in his 1986 enquiry into The Condition of Postmodernity, thus takes matters ‘beyond the point where any coherent politics are left, while that wing of it that seeks a shameless accommodation with the market puts it firmly in the tracks of an entrepreneurial culture that is the hallmark of reactionary neoconservatism’ (ibid., p. 116). The new postmodern orthodoxy is, however, but one variety of academicism. It allowed academics a retreat from their disciplinary subdivisions as these broke down. Instead of the older forms of academic obscurantism, they resorted to a new ‘discourse’ of fragmented incomprehensibility. This precluded all but a few of them from making any protest against the marketisation of higher education and the commodification of academic knowledge and technical skill with its increasing restriction of the mass of students to the level of vocational information and competence. The new postmodern ideological orthodoxy and its associated academic manifestations denied the possibility of any holistic way in which to make sense of the new situation. Its students, as well as its teachers, were thus thoroughly confused and ideologically defenceless. Yet if only staff in higher education had looked beyond the boundaries of their sector to the related and indeed logically indistinguishable further education sector, they would have seen all too clearly the consequences of the processes that are only now beginning to impact upon HE.

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THE AWFUL EXAMPLE OF FURTHER EDUCATION On 1 April 1993, the further education and sixth form colleges were ‘incorporated’. Under the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 – the first major legislative recasting of FE since 1944 – they ceased to be part of Local Education Authorities’ responsibilities. Instead, newly constituted governing bodies, or ‘corporations’, became responsible for the assets, staff and management of their colleges. Appointed initially by ‘search committees’ led by Principals, these selfperpetuating college corporations have charitable status. They are, however, empowered not only to provide education and training, but to supply goods and services, acquire and dispose of land and property, enter into commercial contracts and to borrow and invest, as long as this is ‘incidental’ to the provision of further education. The corporations may also include a student representative, but at present most do not. Although college corporations are not covered by the Companies Act, they have the same right to commercial confidentiality as private companies and appoint their own staff, setting the framework for their pay and conditions without necessary reference to national norms. Their Principals became Chief Executives working to the new governing bodies, which following the 1992 Act, had few if any local authority representatives including instead one nominee from the new employer-run Training and Enterprise Councils. Colleges receive state money from Funding Councils – one for England and another for Wales, which also covers higher education there. Like the Funding Councils for Higher Education, the FEFCs are representative of what the Chair of the 1994 Nolan Committee on standards in public life called ‘the big quangos’, which he numbered at 3,000, with 42,000 appointments to their boards (Radio Four, 16 May 1996). Instead of representatives from local authorities and the other stakeholders previously involved, the Secretary of State for Education appointed 13 large private company representatives, like the first Chair of the FEFC who was a former Chief Executive of Boots the Chemist. As well as appointing its board members, the DfEE also has powers of ‘guidance’ and other reserve powers over the FEFC under the 1992 F&HE Act.

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College corporations are amongst what Lord Nolan called the ‘little quangos’, which he next went on to investigate. As independent individual agencies, college corporations enter into contracts with the FEFC and other funding bodies to deliver services agreed in advance. Delivery is guaranteed by the achievement of various specified performance indicators. As in the other areas of the new Contracting State which these institutions exemplify, responsibility for delivery is devolved to the periphery whilst power contracts to the centre. The piecemeal process by which these new contracting arrangements were introduced is well illustrated by the government’s decision to incorporate the colleges. This was clearly connected with the Treasury’s need to make up quickly the £2 billion lost through the Poll Tax revolt, which helped to bring down Mrs Thatcher. This left her chosen successor, John Major, with the immediate task of finding another way to reduce local government expenditure. There was a precedent in the incorporation of the polytechnics and other colleges of higher education after the 1988 Education Act. Under their own Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (the PCFC), these higher education institutions increased the overall funding they received by raising their numbers of students by more than a half (from 250,000 to 382,000 in the polytechnics alone), while their unit costs went down by a quarter between 1989 and 1992 (Pratt, 1998). This impressive efficiency gain undoubtedly influenced the government as an example of what could be done with further education. In addition, an elaborate system of funding polytechnic courses at differential but nationally standard rates per student had been developed if not invented by the chief accountant to the PCFC, Roger McClure. He subsequently transferred to the FEFC. FE incorporation represented another inroad by the new Contracting State into the LEA’s involvement in postcompulsory education. It can thus be seen as the continuation of a long-term strategy to remove state education and training, along with other public services, from local council control. It may also be seen as a further attack on largely Labour-controlled local democracy, regarded by many of the ruling Conservatives as inefficient if not corrupt (a view perpetuated under New Labour government which sees local

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councils as epitomising old Labour). This was not the only justification for the government’s policy. An early FEFC circular showed that costs varied considerably between colleges, ranging from £1,486 to £5,579 per student. There were also variations in class sizes and in the number of hours students were taught on the same courses in different colleges. These in turn bore little relation to student achievements in terms of the qualifications they obtained. The FEFC aimed to meet the criticisms of the previous provision of further education with a new form of funding which tore up the former secure existence of the colleges. The 1992 F&HE Act established the Funding Council to introduce, for the first time, a national system and common level of funding for all colleges. Now the only programmes of study to be funded would be those listed as approved by the Secretary of State under Schedule Two of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. The payment for these programmes was to be numbers driven. The colleges would gain the extra funding promised by the FEFC in 1992, only if they could attract and retain 25 per cent more students over the next three years. The new funding method – soon dignified with an ‘-ology’ into ‘methodology’ – presented a contrast to the often opaque manner local decisions had previously sometimes been brokered between elected councillors, council officers and college Principals. Instead, for the first time, the funding of colleges would follow a national formula that would be applied to all. It was also intended to be easy to understand, ‘transparent’ to all colleges and ‘fair’ to all students. These were the terms with which the FEFC’s preferred method of ‘Funding Learning’ was sold to the colleges. Units of funding are the currency of the new methodology. They are earned by colleges as students enrol on programmes of study, remain on them and successfully complete them by achieving their ‘learning goal’ or qualification. The system requires that colleges make five annual ‘returns’ to the Funding Council to claim funding for the enrolment and then retention of students at three ‘census’ points in the year and, finally, for student achievement of qualifications at the conclusion of programmes. There are also extra units to be earned by students with learning

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difficulties or needing additional support in the ‘key skills’ of literacy, numeracy and computeracy, as well as for English language learning, for childcare and for fee remission. Variations in the costs of the many courses offered by colleges are reflected in differential levels of funding. Classroom taught subjects, for example, are worth fewer units than laboratory or workshop-based subjects which use expensive equipment and materials. The FEFC’s Tariff Committee has worked on this issue since 1993 to list all 20,000 qualifications recognised for funding with a unit value, regardless of mode of delivery. Each year the FEFC makes a funding agreement or contract with each individual college. The funding agreement consists, first of all, of a main allocation which is a sum paid by the FEFC in return for the college meeting the targets it sets itself for enroling students and keeping them on course to complete their learning programmes. This main allocation is made up of 90 per cent of the previous year’s allocation (the ‘core funding’ guaranteed to all colleges). To get more than 90 per cent, a college has to bid for additional units. So colleges can maintain or increase their funding from the FEFC only by increasing the number of units that they deliver. As the main allocation reduced year on year – colleges receiving 90 per cent of 90 per cent, and so on, over five years – the result was that the amount paid per student dropped by an average of 3.5 per cent per annum. The system meant that a college could not stand still, and failure to grow would set a college budget on a downward spiral. If an individual college failed to achieve agreed targets – through under-recruitment or higher than anticipated dropout, for instance – the Council could ‘claw back’ the money overpaid in the next financial year. Like the polytechnics and other HE colleges before them, and the universities which joined them in the competition to recruit more undergraduates and other students, FE colleges had to do more for more students on less money in order to increase their overall income. The fall in college incomes due to convergence on a lower average level of funding was accelerated by further cuts which followed the 1995 budget. These marked the end of the brief phase of growth for the FE sector from 1993–6 and also cut capital funding from £159 million to £59

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million per annum. Things became increasingly difficult for all colleges, as new students were mopped up in competition with schools, Modern Apprenticeships and other training schemes, as well as the surviving Adult Education Institutions, universities and other HE institutions. Potential students still remaining outside the system were the hardest to attract and recruitment to the FE sector thus flattened out in 1995–6. Effort increasingly went instead into keeping those who were in college on course for completion (e.g. Martinez, 1997). Some colleges managed to grow by franchising courses to students in employment, in schools and in community organisations, often certifying competences that such ‘students’ already possessed by agreement with their employers or the schools and organisations ‘teaching’ them. Very quickly franchising grew to exceed 10 per cent of all the units in England, though it represented well over 50 per cent of units in some colleges, until the FEFC clamped down on it. Such franchising was often only a short-term measure, since employees of a company, for instance, could not as ‘students’ be certified again and again for the same competences – though the ingenuity of colleges in devising new ‘courses’ for accreditation can never be underestimated. It has been suggested that the only way HE can meet the target set by the New Labour government to recruit more students is by similar franchising arrangements with industry. To meet their announced targets for student enrolments, retention and attainment, and to avoid the ‘clawback’ of having to repay the Funding Council some of the money allocated to them, colleges worked to meet the demands of the new regime. This operated for the first time during 1994–5 and has continued since with only minor modifications. The FEFC made it clear from the beginning that the colleges could expect no special treatment if they got into financial difficulties; the rules of the new system would be applied without mercy. As the FEFC’s chief accountant, Roger McClure, stated, ‘No college is sacred’ in a market in which there would inevitably be winners and losers and the ‘least fit’ would go to the wall (Ainley and Bailey, 1997, p. 22). The colleges thus waited anxiously to see which would be the first to go into receivership.

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By August 1996, two-thirds of the colleges owed debts totalling £82 million, according to the FEFC, and around 70 colleges were reported to be technically insolvent. In February 1997, the National Audit Office reported 83 colleges unable to cover their financial liabilities for 1995–6, 280 colleges in deficit during 1995–6 (as compared with 214 in 1993–4) and four out of ten colleges unable to guarantee to the FEFC that they could control their own finances. Later that year the FEFC itself was reporting to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education that more than half of all colleges were either ‘financially vulnerable’ or ‘financially weak’ – the number in the latter category having increased from 6 to 27 per cent of all colleges since incorporation (Further Education Funding Council, 1997). ‘Delayering’ accompanied ‘downsizing’ – or, even more euphemistically, ‘right-sizing’ – with ‘alternative career enhancement counselling’ for those involved. FE Now (December 1996) estimated a staff loss of 13,000 via the FEFC’s Restructuring Fund since 1993. As a consequence, according to the Central Statistical Office, in 1995 alone more days were lost through industrial action in FE colleges than in any other sector of the economy. Despite these predictable results and the ensuing mergers and closures of colleges that began to occur, the funding mechanism continued remorselessly. It has been reviewed five times since it was established, three times by the FEFC itself, by the 1997 Kennedy Committee on ‘Widening Participation in Further Education’ as well as by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, which reported in June 1998. None of these proposed any substantial change to the system. Palliative measures taken by the New Labour government following the Parliamentary Select Committee’s report and its own Comprehensive Spending Review, ‘can be no more than a holding operation whilst convergence continues’, despite ‘the considerable sums’ involved (Ainley and Bailey, 1999, forthcoming). For it can no longer be assumed, as College Principal Vince Hall did in his 1990 survey of ‘Maintained Further Education in the United Kingdom’, that FE has a natural place in the order of things. What is new is that the partial deindustrialisation of the UK economy has excluded broad

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sections of traditionally working-class young people from the labour market and has thus undermined the traditional rationale for FE, namely provision of a non-academic route into skilled jobs, the number of which in industry has also reduced. Traditional technical further education thus appears more than ever a relic of the country’s ancient industrial past. At the same time, successive governments weakened the power of the trade unions, replacing the social partnership of the Industrial Training Boards with employer-dominated Industry Lead Bodies and TECs. Above all, control over funding was taken from LEAs and given to the FEFC. As a result, the local administration of colleges has been replaced by a nationally funded ‘market’ or ‘quasimarket’ system of competition for students. The colleges are thus no longer protected from national government learning policies, in so far as these are implemented, for instance, via funding to meet National Targets, or as reflected in Dearing’s reviews. The colleges are subject too to government priorities for social security and dealing with the unemployed, as well as being drawn into the incessant battle over pseudo-educational issues conducted in the national media. So, although the FE colleges’ growth has been unprecedented, their present position is more than usually ambiguous and their future even more uncertain than it has ever been. The lessons to be learnt from FE can be taken two ways. Either they are an awful warning to avoid the predictable outcome of contract funding on a reducing unit of resource leading to closures and mergers. Or a new government may be tempted to apply a similar funding method regardless to all schools (or at least all school sixth-forms), further and higher education and training under a unified and possibly voucherised system disguised as a form of ‘learning credit’ perhaps linked to an Individual Learning Account. This would have the apparent virtues of ‘fairness’ and toughness with which the FEFC funding regime was announced. This was the real choice facing the New Labour government – whether to sustain and extend the Contracting State and new mixed economy in education as elsewhere, or to turn towards a real alternative to it. As will be argued in conclusion, it has chosen the former course. This leads

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inexorably towards the eventual privatisation of publicly funded learning at all levels.

5 New Learning under New Labour? EXTENDING THE NEW SETTLEMENT The variety of competing schools, colleges and universities created in the semi-privatised state sector has been preserved by the New Labour government. The final abandonment of the repeatedly postponed White Paper on Lifelong Learning in February 1998 indicated that post-compulsory education would remain in the state bequeathed by the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. Similarly, the structures of compulsory schooling are fixed by the 1988 Education Act. The new settlement thus remained firmly fixed in place. As Kenneth Baker said on the tenth anniversary of his ‘Great Education Reform Act’, ‘David Blunkett has in effect accepted the changes of ten years ago. The core curriculum, tests, league tables, grant-maintained schools, CTCs – they are all there and being built upon’ (The Times Education Supplement, 23 January 1998). More than that, the new settlement is being deepened and extended by the new administration. Echoing Mrs Thatcher in 1987, one of its education advisers, Michael Barber, told The Times Education Supplement (26 June 1998), ‘The Government . . . is explicitly going much further than any previous government in encouraging diversity . . . to provide a wide range of opportunities to meet the diverse aspirations of individuals and communities.’ While then-Standards Minister, Stephen Byers, declared the new Education Action Zones, intended to involve private sector partners for the first time in mainstream public education, ‘The test bed for the education system of the twenty-first century’. This echoed Barber’s description of them in the Daily Mail (7 January 1998) as ‘test-beds for innovation in a postmodern world’. The May 1998 announcement effectively to opt out all LEA schools from direct control by their authorities put all state schools in the same semi-privatised position 157

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as the former-grant maintained schools and as incorporated FE colleges, though not (yet?) under their own funding agency, like the FEFC. It backs up Byers’ warning to the North of England Conference that ‘LEAs have no God-given right to run schools’. Democratically elected local councils are, as has been said, associated as much by New Labour as by the previous Conservative governments with the old corruption of Old Labour. The new, centrally administered system of schools seeks to replace the local variety that there once was under the former system locally administered through the LEAs. Yet, despite tight central control, the new settlement also seeks local variety in an explicitly differentiated and selective system. This replaces the aspiration to basic universal provision that there was in the classic welfare state settlement of the 1944 Education Act. As described, this elementary provision for all with selection for a minority thereafter was ‘front-loaded’ with tripartite and later comprehensive schools to a school leaving age for the majority rising from 14, then 15, then 16 to full-time, lifelong, male, full employment. Now, instead, the education system of the new settlement aims to be individually differentiated and flexibly available throughout lifelong learning, not merely a final, ‘front-loaded’ foundation. Universal entitlement within rigid structures is replaced by provision ‘targeted’ at particular localities and their specific economic needs, also at individuals and problem groups within them, each with their own set of demands to be flexibly responded to. As Rustin and Rex commented, ‘One can view this change more generally as the obsolescence of a “Fordist” concept of “mass welfare”, committed to basic but uniform standards, and its intended replacement by a “Post-Fordist” system, adapted to consumer choice, mobility and the management of “risk”’ (Rustin and Rex, 1997, p. 21). As a result, distinct regional patterns of clearly structured routes or pathways are emerging both within and between institutions in the new system to which social groups defined by background, gender, ethnicity and ability are relegated or promoted. This is but one instance of the ‘new regionalism’ emerging in response to re-regulation of the economy through globalisation, leading to what is referred to as

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‘glocalisation’ (see Green, 1997, for a discussion of related issues). These divisions both between and within regions have not yet become so entrenched that they are plainly apparent to all who are involved or to outside observers. Moreover, they are obfuscated by opportunities for transfer between routes and by extension beyond previously sharp cut-off points into ‘Lifelong Learning’ with recurrent returns to learning and new combinations of learning with (often part-time) employment. The new system thus appears fluid and changing, with successive new initiatives for particular groups and individuals at different times and in different places. It is also, like the new Contracting State of which it is a part, inherently unstable and internally competitive despite the New Labour emphasis upon ‘partnership’. In addition, various individuals, bureaucracies and different interest groups are jockeying for power in battles for influence and control that have yet to be resolved – for instance, between QCA and OfSTED for control over the curriculum in schools, or between the Universities’ Quality Assurance Agency and the QCA for control over what is taught in higher education, while the future of the FEFC (more than once proposed for amalgamation with the HEFCE but lumped in with training in the latest Learning and Skills review) is also uncertain, as is that of the TECs. This is merely within the Education and Employment arena. Beyond it, interdepartmental conflicts and rivalries dispute the boundaries of social security (likely to be amalgamated with Employment Services, as in New Zealand), the relations of the Department of Trade and Industry to research and enterprise support (knowledge production as opposed to its reproduction by education and training) and both the DTI and DfEE’s relations with the new ‘super-ministry’ of the Regions and Transport. While amalgamations into such super-ministries – like the DfEE itself – appears to be the order of the day, there is also the overarching question of the contractual relations of the various government departments to the Treasury, which – as pointed out – becomes even more powerful in this new Contracting State (see below). Meanwhile, for structural if not personal reasons, the prime minister becomes more presidential (lately taking to using the monarch’s Royal Flight as well as her train!). And this is

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not taking account of the internal differences between personalities and their camp followers with which the government and ruling party are riven (Hennessey, 1997). Nor does it allow for the pressure that will be put upon these fissures in the government’s façade by inevitable economic recession. To mistranslate Saint-Just: ‘The new order of today is the disorder’ not ‘of tomorrow’ but of today! This instability is presented as dynamic, however, while competition is supposed to drive up standards. The intention is for provision of education and training, as of other services, to be responsive both to the changing demands of the economy and to individual demand. The latter may be ‘empowered’, as has been suggested, by a basic voucher entitlement through Individual Learning Accounts administered by the University for Industry and topped up with financial investment or loans. Thus, individual responsiveness to consumer demand replaces the rigidities of universal provision as an entitlement of citizenship. For universal principles are dismissed by the new government, as by postmodernists, as ‘totalising’ and therefore totalitarian. In their place, New Labour proposes to ‘modernise’ such classic welfare state measures into the individually and locally customised services of a ‘postmodern’ society. Significantly, the government proposes to begin with changing the national and uniform terms and conditions of school teachers – a feature of the bids accepted for Educational Action Zones, which, in this respect as in others, differ profoundly from the EPAs and CDPs of the Wilson era. As in FE, where a prolonged dispute saw the eventual removal of the former ‘Silver Book’ agreement in favour of local negotiation of pay and hours by individual college corporations, this is the most expensive area of expenditure where the most savings can be made. The removal of security of tenure for academics in HE had the same effect. Supported by an ideology of ‘the politics of difference’, ‘individualisation theory’, ‘reflexivity’ and ‘risk’, such oldfashioned universalist aspirations to single scales of pay and conditions for teachers and to similar standards of provision for their students are derided as ‘sameness’ rather than equality. Yet what Avis et al. (1996) call the ‘new consensus’ on these postmodern policies includes also a new neoliberal

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orthodoxy on economic policy. This has been described by the magazine Working Brief (August–September 1997) as having ‘three principal tenets’. These are: 1) inflation should be controlled by interest rates, preferably by an independent central bank. 2) budgets should be balanced and not used to influence demand – or at any rate not to stimulate it. 3) unemployment is solely a problem of the labour market. These are also the principles underlying the Maastricht Treaty and the convergence criteria for EU member states to enter the common currency. They ‘boil down’, as ‘Working Brief’ says, ‘to the use of strict demand policies to keep unemployment at a level high enough to restrain inflation’ so that ‘when unemployment falls to six per cent, financial policy is tightened for fear of “overheating”’. Government economic policy thus sustains a reserve army of the permanently unemployed ‘underclass’ and/or perpetual insecurity amongst a periphery of part-time and short-term contract employees, as admitted by the Governor of the Bank of England (quoted by William Keegan in The Observer, 25 October 1998). The new consensus on economic – together with learning – policy embraces also a major ideological shift amongst mainstream politicians and policy-makers on social security policy in favour of measures to ‘reform the welfare state’ and end ‘welfare dependency’. Thus, former Conservative government Employment Secretary, Peter Lilley, introducing the Jobseekers Act could define ‘the real issue . . . [as] how to reduce benefit dependency’ (HMSO, 1995, para 40). While Frank Field, who was Chair of the House of Commons Social Security Select Committee during the same period and then became briefly a Minister of State for Social Security, describes the ‘passive benefit system’ introduced in the 1940s as ‘broken-backed’. He resigned when his proposals to ‘transform’ the social security system were rejected (allegedly because of their initially high cost – a dispute over means, not ends). The necessity for an active benefit system is accepted on all sides, social security spending being described by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, for example, as ‘the price of

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economic failure’. Like the new consensus on learning and economic policy, this agreement on the future for welfare is endorsed by the G8 group of leading capitalist governments and by the OECD. These advocates and beneficiaries of the newly reglobalised capitalist economy all now accept that on their own the ‘natural’ forces of economic recovery will not remove long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. Whether advanced by the previous Conservative government and the CBI backed up by the G8 and OECD, or by New Labour and the TUC, the new consensual solution to Britain’s social and economic progress through a learning policy of ‘Foundation’ and ‘Lifelong Learning’, linked to an active benefits system, can be seen as signifying a shift in the balance of forces embodied in the postwar (classic) welfare settlement between capital and labour. This shift in (private monopoly) capital’s favour has gone furthest within AngloSaxon dominated countries. It was pioneered particularly by New Zealand – the first country to introduce a welfare state at the beginning of the century and the first to dismantle it in the 1980s under a structural adjustment programme imposed by a Labour government (see Kelsey, 1996). Former British Labour MP and now Vice Chancellor of the University of Waikato, Bryan Gould (1997), writing in The New Zealand Political Review as quoted in The Jobs Letter (25 August 1997), claimed that the first act of the new Chancellor, Gordon Brown, in contracting out monetary policy to the Governor of the Bank of England was modelled specifically on New Zealand. Australia is, however, preferred by New Labour ideologues as an alternative, third or middle way between the extremes of the US model and the European, the latter excoriated as incorrigibly corporatist by Blair. This relates to what Will Hutton in The Guardian has called the European as opposed to the US approaches to the economy, which, as he says, are but ‘two sides of the same coin’, whereby ‘In Europe there is a reserve army of the jobless, in the US a reserve army of working poor’ (18 April 1994). As Ashton and Green (1997) suggest, ‘The use of low cost, unskilled labour can still be just as viable a route to capital accumulation as the high value-added, high skilled, high wage route, especially within protectionist markets . . .’ (see also Keep and

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Mayhew, 1998). Or rather, the two can be combined with a high value-added core contracting to a periphery of lowcost, unskilled labour. There is thus no ‘third way’ between the European and American models of capitalism, and New Labour is committed to the latter. In the new Americanised mixed economy of semi-privatised state and state-subsidised private sectors, New Labour ‘stakeholdings’ by private capital investment in public services represent a dominance of private over state monopoly capital. Previous privatisations under the Conservatives have not been reversed but rather taken further, for example, in ‘Brown’s £12bn sale’ reported in a Guardian (12 June 1998) headline, where ‘Everything must go’, according to The Times on the same day. All this has extended the reach of private monopoly capital into new areas of public and private life, marking an increased commodification of society and limiting still further the space available for public or civil society and representative democracy. The new state form of administration of this new mixed economy through contracting to quangos was also extended by the New Labour government. Contracting was institutionalised by the Comprehensive Public Service Agreements or ‘Contracts’ between individual government departments and the Treasury introduced by the July 1998 Comprehensive Public Spending Review. Meanwhile, more than 100 ‘taskforces’ (variously labelled ‘ministerial’, ‘advisory’, ‘regional’, etc.), ‘stakeholder panels’, ‘advisory bodies’, ‘reviews’ (‘strategic’, ‘comprehensive’, etc.), and other ‘working parties’, ‘forums’, ‘commissions’, ‘audits’, ‘groups’ (‘working’, ‘action’, ‘advisory’, etc.) were set up within a year of the new government taking office, according to a written answer in the Lords’ Hansard for 12 February 1998 (cc. 231–44). At least half of these quangos are manned (mostly) by businessmen (ditto), usually from the top FTSE-100 companies, according to Tony Barker’s wittily entitled record of the ‘Never Ending Review at New Labour’s Whitehall Farce’ in The Parliamentary Monitor (May 1998, p. 27). Predictably, the result of including so many private sector ‘partners’ in Blair’s presidential style of government was the same leaky sleaze that mired the Conservative governments which pioneered the same approach.

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Existing quangos have also been preserved, merely some regional coordination of their activities being allowed in order to take advantage of European regional funding. The Training and Enterprise Councils were, it was related, given what was for them a long lease of life of three years from 1998, after which Regional Development Agencies were planned to take over their functions. A ‘pinking of the quangos’ also took place, as Conservative placepersons were replaced by retired headteachers and sympathetic academics, similar to those drawn into advisory roles to central government in order to co-opt potential critics. There have likewise been some concessions to national and regional feelings through devolution and promised regional assemblies – the London mayor, for instance. The changes to and prunings of the local state made by Mrs Thatcher remain firmly in place, however. Arguably they will be taken further under the ‘new regionalism’, which echoes the ‘new federalism’ of Reagan and Bush and shadows that of the EU and existing Government Offices. For the surviving democratically elected councils have already had their role recast by central government legislation from being responsible to their local electorates towards becoming boards of managing directors seeking tenders, issuing contracts and monitoring the performance of separate subcontractors (see Cochrane, 1993). Such so-called ‘enabling’ local authorities, endorsed by all three main electoral parties, mirror the ‘contracting’ or ‘franchising’ that has occurred in the central state, again with a parallel loss of accountability and democratic control. Financially, the only way out offered by the central government to hard-pressed public services, like education and health, is through partnerships with the private sector. Like the continuing state-subsidised privatisations of nationalised industries, investment of business interests (and money) in the running of formerly (and formally) public sector services is taken much further by the Private Finance Initiative by which private capital is supposed to be invested in public services. This was limited under the Conservatives who launched it, but New Labour is determinedly committed to it despite the reluctance of private companies to invest their capital on the terms they were initially offered. These have, therefore, been improved in many cases, especially in the Health Service.

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How far the processes of state-subsidised privatisation could go is shown by an article in The Economist (25 January 1997), which described ‘A revolution in the administration of American poverty programmes’, reporting that ‘Anderson Consulting, the world’s biggest consultancy, is bidding against Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, for a five-year contract to run the entire Texas state welfare system’ (p. 83). As a result, ‘Almost every aspect of welfare, from determining whether a claimant is eligible for help to preventing fraud and making payments, will eventually be in private hands’, including job training, drug rehabilitation and pregnancy prevention programmes, 30 social programmes in all, ‘whose administration currently costs the state $550m a year’. Even though this proposal was subsequently defeated in Texas, the article added that ‘Oregon, Maryland, and Wisconsin are already working along similar lines.’ It should not be thought, though, that such privatisations occur only under doctrinaire, Republican administrations. The welfare reform law, signed by President Clinton, ‘ending welfare as we know it’, in August 1996 allows states far more flexibility in the use of private contractors. This consumerisation of public life with the handing over of public services to be run for private profit is also a form of modernisation (if not ‘modernism’ since it is confusingly presented as ‘postmodernism’). It is the form of modernisation which was chosen, or rather, was fortuitously stumbled upon, by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s following the lead of Reagonomics in the US. Perhaps what Rustin (1998) calls this ‘Perverse Modernisation’ is better described, as he says, as no more than ‘marketisation’. While it led to the temporary and relative economic recovery from which the New Labour government benefited in its initial years, this new market modernisation has not afforded a way out of the intractable social and cultural malaise that is the legacy of Britain’s long decline from industrial primacy and imperial past. Instead, this moribund market modernisation has aggravated the increasing fragmentation between individual consumers which builds upon and heightens existing cultural differences between social groups. In conditions of pre-existing monopolies, the outcome of competition for what were previously universal services available to all

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citizens is a two-tier health, education, transport, housing, whatever, system. This may not be immediately apparent as public services are differentiated into their diverse parts, much as the public utilities like gas and water have been split up to compete against one and another. Two tiers of provision become obvious once the initial competition shakes down into new cartels and monopolies with large companies holding multiple outlets. This reconstructs the state along the lines of a holding company which produces an inherently unstable system. Holding companies suffer particular organisational dysfunctions, managing at arm’s length a complex range of diverse organisations to which self-management has been devolved. Subcontracting can be a way of reducing the price of a product or service by squeezing the contract, but it typically involves loss of detailed control, although financial control is increased. The relationship between contractor and subcontractor is one of mutual dependency, yet another effect is fragmentation, for it is difficult to maintain and enforce national standards or public goods without considerable interference in the activities of the subcontractor. (BS750 – imaginatively renamed BS EN ISO 9000 – and other such ‘kitemarks’ may be means of ensuring consistency if not quality.) The ‘new public management’, borrowing from the ‘new managerialism’ pioneered in the private sector, is also potentiated by new technology (‘management by e-mail’) using indirect quality indicators as performance targets of outputs (‘management by objectives’). A contracting core of management no longer in direct contact with the work being undertaken comes to rely on such indirect indicators of performance. This leads to the well-known ‘All Pigs Flying’ scenario (Ainley, 1997). As well as new divisions between core management and a periphery of contract workers, this makes it difficult to determine which are real indicators and which are virtual ones. The Contracting, post-welfare or workfare state may therefore also become the Virtual State. Beyond its virtuality, the new settlement implies a new ‘correspondence’ with the economy which is its explicit rationale. In place of the old ‘reproduction’ of labour for either manual or non-manual employment in mass production factories and

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offices, ‘Today’s close interaction between technology and international competition has eroded the basic institutions of the mass production system’ (Wilson, 1996, p. 2). In their place, the new hierarchy of employment opportunities is supposed to be much less rigid and more dynamic, even ‘chaotic’. It is a rapidly changing system, amenable to consumer demand and responsive to contributions by individuals, who – in the latest management-speak – can ‘make a difference’. In this new ‘postmodern’/‘post-Fordist’ society, human capital is supposed to be decisive over investment of money capital in machinery and materials. Michael Barber could thus even assert in one of his many explanations and justifications of government policy in The Times Educational Supplement (3 April 1998) that ‘in the future learning society the imagination will be king’. This echoed the National Commission on Education’s 1994 ‘After “Learning to Succeed”’ by Lord Walton: ‘We, along with many other countries round the world, are in the throes of a “knowledge revolution” which has already created a society in which the basic economic resource – as Drucker has pointed out – is no longer capital or natural resources but knowledge.’ The reference is to Drucker’s 1993 Post-Capitalist Society (sic). This claim that in the new postmodern/anti-modernist world of New Labour ideologues, capitalism and the power of capital has been superseded by that of individuality and imagination is extraordinarily unreal given a de-/re-regulated global economy dominated as never before by the power of unprecedented agglomerations of international capital. It is, in fact, the fickle ebbs and flows of unrestrained speculative investment in global financial markets that generates the insecurity reflected in the feverish competition between rival companies. Together with the incrementally rapid pace of technological transformation, this results in an unstable employment situation to which it is difficult for the new education settlement to find a secure correspondence. Individual differentiation and variety of outcomes are but one part of the attempt to do so. The new learning system is also differentiated institutionally with 320 specialist schools with selection procedures for ‘gifted pupils’ announced by the Education Secretary in February 1998 and more selection in inner city schools in

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March. The variety of competing colleges already existing in the hierarchy of further and higher education provides a model for schools. Thus it is the government’s intention for one in seven of all state schools to be selective and specialised by the next election, with selection by aptitude for 10 per cent of admissions to all state schools already proposed in the Schools Standards and Framework Bill. The introduction of selection into state schools by the New Labour government, of course, goes against the plainest (‘read my lips’) of preelection commitments not to do this by Blunkett. Apart from the promise to remain for its first two years within the spending limits imposed by the previous Conservative government, one of the few pre-election pledges which the New Labour government did keep was the abolition of the Assisted Places Scheme subsidising private schools. However, private schools not only retain their right to charitable status (what Caroline Benn called the ‘charity scam’) but are to be given public money to help build ‘partnerships’ with the state sector. This is far from the nationalisation of the private sector that the old Labour Party repeatedly proposed but never implemented. Neither is the new settlement a fullscale privatisation of state education – yet, some might add. It is rather a continuation of the new mixed economy of education introduced by Conservative governments in which semi-privatised state schools are mixed with state-subsidised private ones. This – and especially the Private Finance Initiative to encourage private capital investment in public services – is presented as New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ by Margaret Hodge, former Chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, ‘between state socialism and free market . . . both of which have failed’. For this reason, she explained in The Times Education Supplement (12 June 1998), ‘This government has chosen not to prioritise structures’, for example ‘not forcing abolition of grammar schools’, but puts the emphasis instead upon ‘standards’. As under preceding Conservative administrations, the new settlement of semiprivatised competing schools, colleges and universities is seen as a means of increasing motivation to raise standards. At the same time, efforts have gone into preventing exclusion from this selective and exclusionary system of education and from the labour market.

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The attempts to prevent exclusion are contradicted by the dominance over the new settlement of narrow academic conceptions of Official Knowledge. These are imposed through the centralising control of the DfEE, following its habitual academic inclinations and using the powerful new Office for Standards in Education as its curricular police. The academic ‘standards’ so relentlessly pursued are embodied, not only in the virtually unreformed A-levels, but in the notion of maintaining and improving traditional literacy and numeracy. Yet the dedication to academic performance in written tests and examinations only ensures that the new competitive system excludes more and more individuals and groups at every stage because academic Official Knowledge is by definition elite and, therefore, selective and exclusionary. As the Nexus advisory group told the government: the educational reforms set in train by the previous government have resulted in the exclusion of large numbers of young people from participation in mainstream education. A legacy of these reforms is a distorted economy of student worth which encourages schools and colleges to compete for students who are easy to teach and good for league tables, and avoid those who are troublesome, demanding and expensive to teach. (Ball, 1998) Consequently, despite efforts and exhortations for all schools to be as good as the best, it is apparent that schools are building upon and heightening through selection the cultural capital of their pupils to increase the differences between them. This was confirmed by OfSTED’s 1998 ‘Review of Secondary Schools in England’, along with the fact that class sizes, pupil:teacher ratios and teacher contact times are all increasing. Some schools have also accumulated surpluses of material as well as cultural capital through the workings of Local Management while others are in debt. Such heightened differentials often have little to do with any value-added by the schools, being affected by factors such as the average age of the teaching staff. The balance of ability has also shifted to grant maintained/Foundation schools, increasing problems of disaffection as well as resource in LEA/Community schools. Following the movement of pupils, inner city schools have become more impoverished as

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suburban schools gain pupils/funds. In the diverse ethnic communities of most inner cities, this amounts to bussing in reverse and contributes to ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Even within secondary schools and authorities still calling themselves comprehensive – sometimes ‘community’ (though both names are increasingly avoided), ‘The initial objectives of comprehensive education seem to be receding out of reach; distanced by distortions inflicted on the inner organisation of the schools by external forces, too powerful to resist’ (Simon, 1991, p. 496). This seems a more realistic assessment of comprehensive schools ‘struggling to survive’ than the overly optimistic picture of them ‘alive and well’ presented by Benn and Chitty in 1996. The same disparities between institutions have grown in FE colleges during the five years since their incorporation in relation to FEFC funding, though here, owing to the nature of the convergence criteria for funding, there have been many more losers than winners (see Ainley and Bailey, 1997). FE has also failed to attract the most academically able 16–18 year olds in the competition with sixth forms. It, therefore, continues to be seen as an inferior option and faces problems of retaining disengaged students (Martinez, 1997). FE and sixth-form colleges in competition with school sixth-forms, both private and public, are related in turn to the hierarchy of universities and other HE institutions divided as by the recommendations of Dearing’s third report on higher education into an elite Ivy League of researchbased HE, followed by mainly teaching universities and former polytechnics. Existing hierarchies are thus reanimated and differentiation within and between institutions at every level of learning is reinforced, ‘precisely reflecting existing social gradations and patterned to ensure their reproduction and so perpetuation’, (Simon, 1991, p. 554). The continuity in policy between New Labour and the previous Conservative governments was surprising to no one save ‘left-wing’ Labour supporters. It was obvious, for example, before the election to former Tory minister, John Biffen, writing in Tribune (6 February 1997) under the headline ‘We Are All Conservatives Now’, that ‘The Tony Blair/Gordon Brown axis is not even a pink edition of High Toryism with a paternalist view of welfare and an acceptance

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of high social spending. It is neo-Thatcherite.’ He added, ‘It remains a curiosity why Labour should so determinedly follow Tory policies when the latter have been ill-starred in their economic consequences and disastrous in their political reckoning’, leading to the ‘firm defeat’ which he predicted in the general election. Similarly, the last edition of the US magazine Newsweek before the election (28 April 1997) printed a cover picture of Baroness Thatcher with the title ‘The Real Winner’. While the Adam Smith Institute held an election night ‘Victory for the Free Market’ party without TV sets or other news reports because the result was ‘irrelevant’; ‘Whoever wins the poll, the free market has triumphed,’ as a spokesperson said. ‘FULL EMPLOYABILITY’ It has been argued that a wider class recomposition in society has accompanied the changes in the form of administration of the state and the balance of forces within it. It is the latter which has led to the new welfare settlement of which the new learning policy is a part. In turn, the new settlement acts on and conditions the new class alignment. It does this particularly through the goal of ‘full employability’ as the aim and intention of learning policy. As noted by many commentators during the 1980s, while the restructuring of class and gender relations increased material inequalities, it also reduced the level of subjective awareness of them. This was partly because, as has been suggested, the manual–mental division of labour between traditional ‘working’ and ‘middle’ classes was eroded by the use of new technology and the growth of services, as well as by the extension of post-compulsory education. It was also because the widening of differentials along a spectrum, the poles of which are growing further apart, offered the illusion of equality, or at least of only minor quantitative variations, to those between the two extremes. These illusions were sustained by the more or less deliberate political and ideological construction by Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997 of a new division within the working population. This stigmatised a new so-called ‘underclass’ with the poverty that

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disenfranchises its members from equal participation in society (Jordan, 1985, p. 8). Building on already existing divisions, this resurrection of the rough has separated a regionally and racially stereotyped so-called ‘underclass’ from the new ‘respectable’ working–middle of society. In this sense, the dismantling of the welfare state and the construction of a penal state in the unprecedented growth of the prison population under the Conservatives were two sides of the same coin. (With a prison population of 72,000 incarcerating one in 250 adult males, the UK rate is one of the highest in Europe. This is still a long way behind the US, following a similar rise under the Republicans, where there is now a gulag of some 2 million prisoners with many millions more on various forms of restrictive parole – making up as many as 5 per cent of the workforce, according to some estimates and with prison industries that contribute substantially to the economy.) As argued, education and training at all levels in the UK are heavily implicated in the social exclusion and more or less deliberate creation of a marginalised so-called ‘underclass’. Only peripherally participating in the formal economy and stigmatised by region, residence and ethnicity, the new ‘rough’ is ‘disadvantaged’, i.e. discriminated against, not only by the lack of worthwhile qualifications, but by housing, immigration, social security and policing policies with the results so graphically described by Davies (1997). Most significantly, given the importance of qualifications to gain access to any sort of long-term, secure employment, this ‘disadvantage’ includes the lack of any worthwhile educational certification through relegation to inferior vocational options, or no options at all. For instance, it has been widely alleged – though not definitely proven – that the effects of league tables, which rank schools by raw GCSE scores, has been to increase exclusions from schools. Nationally, these have risen by 450 per cent over 1990–5, while temporary suspensions were running at 137,000 in 1995/6 (as reported by Smith 1998). Over 80 per cent of permanent exclusions are from secondary schools, boys being nearly five times as likely to be excluded as girls (Parsons et al., 1995) and African-Caribbean boys six times as likely to be excluded as whites (Smith, 1998). Unpublished

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DfEE figures reportedly show children in care make up a third of all secondary school exclusions and two-thirds of primary school ones (The Guardian, 24 March 1998). A recent building programme of Pupil Referral Units has been announced by government for the estimated 30,000 permanently excluded school students. Exclusion is linked to crime, especially youth crime. The Audit Commission recorded in 1996 that 26 per cent of known offenders were under 18. And, ‘it is clear from the London TEC Council’s research with young people that some young people do see a fifth option’ (to the four offered by the New Deal Gateway) ‘– and that is crime’ (London TEC Council, 1997, p. 23). The end of full employment and the dismantling of the welfare state had by the late 1990s reduced nearly 14 million men, women and children, not merely to relative but to breadline poverty (Davies, 1997). Many in this ‘country of the poor’ are malnourished and destitute. As in the US, this was something new: What most characterizes the ‘new poverty’ is that it affects the life chances of the poor more acutely than in the recent past. It has involved qualitative changes in the status, social relations and expectations of the poor and does not just represent new forms of material inequality and deprivation. These problems derive in part from the declining labour market opportunities for those of limited education. (Lawson and Wilson, 1995, p. 179) This absolute poverty is, however, relative to a carnival of conspicuous consumption in the rest of British as of American society, which has grown richer during the same period. This is, as Davies says, ‘poverty on a scale . . . and of a kind that has never been seen before’ in which ‘A mainstream society that is losing its humanity is willing to create a poor country . . . as deliberately as the great penal colony of Australia was planned and created by politicians in London nearly two centuries ago . . . but the destruction which sweeps through this undiscovered country then causes a new cycle of damage to the affluent’ (quoted in Ainley, 1999). The new respectable working-middle class lives in disdain and fear of the new poor ‘underclass’ into which accident or illness, redundancy or the lack of sufficient qualifications and

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connections can so easily pitch them. Thus, common human values are replaced by economic ones, commercialising human relations and reducing individuals to objectified commodities. This reality is overtly endorsed by theories that are now politically mainstream and which blame the poor for their own poverty. In particular, as Davies writes, ‘New Labour thinking takes no account of the damage which has been inflicted on the poor in the past twenty years’ (Ainley, 1999). Indeed, the government explicitly endorses Mrs Thatcher’s achievements and shares the same ignorance of their consequences, not realising for instance that ‘To cut the benefits of young people is like running a recruitment campaign for the nation’s drug networks’ (ibid.). Consequently, as Davies concludes, There is no crusade against poverty in Britain. No leading politician demands full employment . . . or insists that the wealth which was taken from the poor should now be returned. There is only the immense jabber of the powerful who are surrounded by the victims of their affluence and who yet continue to know nothing of the undiscovered country of the poor. (1997, p. 305) Indeed, it is part of the new consensus and the unreal and virtual world inhabited by the respectable mainstream working-middle of society to ignore the realities surrounding them, both in this country and abroad. To disregard also the impossibilities of sustaining the present competitive global economy and the immiseration it has inflicted on the majority of the world’s population as well as the ecological disasters it visits upon the environment and stores up for the future by attempting to persist in the self-destructive course of the new paradigm for social progress and ‘modernisation’. Yet the development model presented by the new consensus in favour of the unchecked global predominance of private monopoly capital has to an extent succeeded in presenting also a model of social development. This is shared, as was said by Lipietz of the old Fordist development model, widely enough for the majority of people to see individual places for themselves in its likely future development. This collective mindset was expressed both by the overwhelming electoral victory of New Labour in 1997 and by the long honeymoon

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which that government then enjoyed, partly through its populist depoliticisation of politics. This latter has been achieved through the presidential style of government assumed by New Labour, building upon Mrs Thatcher’s precedent and encouraged by the changes in the administration of the state that this book has argued have taken place; aided also by technological transformations in the (predominantly) private monopoly owned media. As has been said, a permanently unemployed reserve army of the old, traditional working class represents the collapse of the full-employment ideal underpinning the postwar consensus. The classic welfare state has been effectively undermined by the removal of the fundamental guarantee of unemployment benefit as social insurance. Entitlements to benefits for many claimants and for many items for which they were previously entitled to claim were replaced following the 1988 Social Security Review by discretion and are no longer grants but loans. In place of entitlement, alongside a heightened role for institutionalised charities and the voluntary sector, an ‘active benefits regime’ of workfare has replaced welfare. In fact, from October 1996 with the introduction of the Job Seeker’s Allowance, the unemployed officially ceased to exist, redefined as ‘Job Seekers’. And, under the 1995 Job Seeker’s Act, the powers of compulsion given to Employment Service Agency staff, who now manage the Jobcentres, make most government training schemes compulsory. This amounts to a US-style work for benefits system and ends any notion of entitlement to benefits as social insurance. As powers of direction now include education courses, this could be said to constitute also a ‘learningfare’ regime. As proposed in the introduction to this book, one can even imagine a ‘learning society’ in which the unemployed are redefined out of existence. Their numbers have already been obscured by the 33 changes made to the way unemployment figures have been calculated since 1979 but at any one time average around 2 million, though some definitions of those ‘wanting work’ range as high as 5 million – depending on whether part-time workers and those on schemes and in education are included. (‘Working Brief’ 93 estimated the total ‘slack’ in the workforce at 4.9 million in May 1998.) In

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a similar way to which the unemployed are consigned to a virtual and invisible existence, compulsory Youth Training for 16–18 year olds ended youth unemployment at a stroke of the pen in 1986 (Ainley and Corney, 1990). In such a learning society, like actors ‘resting’, no one would ever be unemployed, but only ‘learning’. To such a bizarre prospect, the New Labour notion of ‘full employability’ gives a further twist, for if anyone was unemployed in a ‘Learning Society’ they would only have themselves to blame through not having made themselves ‘employable’ enough to be employed! The persistence of ‘skill shortages’ alongside longterm unemployment is then attributable to individual deficiency to be addressed by individual effort and tailor-made new government initiative. At the same time as it has been argued that the selective learning system the new government has endorsed and extended necessarily produces further exclusion, New Labour’s other social and learning policies contradictorily aim to overcome the ‘social exclusion’ that the system creates. In this contradictory effort, the ‘Underclass Task Force’ (later redubbed Social Exclusion Unit), announced in 1997 and modelled on Mrs Thatcher’s 1987 ‘Action for the Cities Programme’ plays a large part. Similarly, the New Start initiative, announced in September 1997, also builds on a previous Conservative ‘Relaunch’ of Youth Training as ‘Network’. ‘New Start’ is sometimes referred to as ‘NewStart’ or ‘Newstart’ but is not to be confused with ‘Fresh Start’, a scheme for closing failing state schools and reopening them under new headteachers. It is intended to bring back disaffected 14–17 year olds into school, FE or training. It is thus continuous with the New Deal for unemployed 18–24 year olds, subsequently extended to 25+, likewise aiming to bring the long-term unemployed or those in danger of becoming so, back into the wages system. New Deal, though, is designed to increase the supply of labour, whereas, as the magazine Working Brief (8–9 1997) points out, ‘It is only in the context of a stronger overall demand for labour that measures to help particular categories of unemployed people (i.e. the young and long-term unemployed or lone mothers) are likely to have any significant effect on total unemployment.’ That sustained demand for labour can be

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maintained is described by apostate Thatcherite, John Gray (1998), as one of the ‘Delusions of Global Capitalism’. Without it, the predictable result is the ‘churning’ of the unemployed that Finn (1997) warned of, based on Australian experience. In addition, the emphasis on compulsion expressed by ministers at the launch of the New Deal which offers a choice of four options (subsidised employment, fulltime education or training, work in the voluntary sector or the Environmental Taskforce) to take some 100,000 young people off benefits, is likely to prove counter-productive (Bender, 1997). The new policy of ‘learning for full employability’ is not only one of ‘Education without Jobs’ (Ainley, 1992), replacing what Finn (1987) called ‘Training without Jobs’ in the 1980s, but also one of ‘Education with McJobs’, as students and trainees work their way through college and on schemes while employed part-time in a pattern that is extending up the age range (Ainley and Bailey, 1997). For students – like social security claimants – the former classic welfare entitlement to free higher education has been replaced by loans. As has been argued, for the mass of five million-plus full- and part-time Further and Higher Education (F&HE) students and trainees, this new ‘learning policy’ represents a proletarianisation of the professions for which HE particularly previously prepared its students, rather than the professionalisation of the proletariat that is officially presented by the expansion of F&HE. As mentioned, included in this proletarianisation, as part of the accompanying dismantling of welfare bureaucracies, are professional teachers at all levels. School teachers are a very obvious case in point, not only prescribed the ends or ‘outcomes’ of their teaching by the National Curriculum but also now increasingly dictated the means to achieve them in a merely instrumental or technically ‘effective’ manner. For graduates the CBI produced a document in 1994 called ‘Thinking Ahead’. In it they celebrate occupational fluidity alongside the recommendation that graduates ought no longer expect to have secure, life-time employment. Rather, they will build up a portfolio of occupational competences moving from project to project on a contract basis. Projects require the application of a set of competences

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against a set of tasks that have a definite life-cycle. When the set of tasks has been completed the ‘project’ is over. Uncertainty and moving around will thus become routine. Individuals will then be expected to manage their own careers by profiling inventories of their competences, retuning them with retraining on a regular basis. Learning to learn then, the CBI argues, becomes paramount, as this is the only constant in a constantly changing world. As the CBI says, ‘individuals cannot rely on political and economic authorities to provide continuous employment and career opportunities’. They will have to pay for these investments in their own human capital from commercial provider agencies. They will also take out personal insurance schemes against prolonged unemployment – when the insurance will cover any lapse in their pension contributions and mortgage payments – as well as to cover sickness and other accidents. This vision of individuals competing to raise the overall standards of competence (if not skill) is shared and propagated by most of the management literature. For instance, Management Today ran a cover story in February 1995 under the headline: ‘No Stability, No Security, No Careers. Welcome to the New Deal’, which was adulatory in tone. Similarly, Fortune magazine in May 1993 explained ‘How we will work in the year 2000’, declaring that by then, ‘employees will package themselves as a marketable portfolio of skills’. In ‘the virtual corporation’ – a networked organisation connecting customers and suppliers via electronic channels – vertical divisions of labour will be replaced by horizontal ones, ‘not “Where do you stand on the corporate ladder?” but “What do you know how to do?”’ – and, they could have added because it is now more important than ever, ‘Who do you know?’ Charles Heckscher asks in the subtitle to his book White Collar Blues (1996), what will happen to Management Loyalties in an Age of Corporate Restructuring and answers that loyalty to the company should be replaced by loyalty to the project and to the team engaged in it, as recommended by US business guru Ed Lawlor for ‘Competence-Based Organisations’ as opposed to ‘JobBased’ ones. Yet it has been seen that the rapid succession of policy changes under the Conservatives in the vocational education

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and training area did not lead to the vaunted ‘Skills Revolution’ in training which the CBI had called for ten years earlier, let alone create a ‘Learning Society’ by the year 2000. Nor is the continuation of similar policies likely to do so under New Labour. The objective is to increase ‘employability’, often defined as ‘flexibility’ or ‘adaptability’. The workforce must be ‘adaptable’ and labour markets capable of reacting ‘flexibly’ to economic change, leaving employers free to offer insecure and ill-paid jobs instead of good ones. As Gordon Brown told the annual G8 world leaders’ summit (on 15–17 May 1998) in Birmingham, ‘A new employment agenda is vital given the background of intensified global competition and technological advances we all face as the 21st century approaches.’ The Education and Employment Secretary, David Blunkett, noted that this was the first time an international summit had endorsed the principle of ‘lifelong learning’. ‘G8 members’, he said, ‘share the priorities we have set for our domestic employment policy – promoting employability and adaptability and tackling skill shortages. We all face the challenge of change. We need to improve the skills of everyone in the labour market and to bring those excluded from employment into the world of work.’ ‘We are placing work and the reintroduction of a work culture at the core of welfare reform,’ stated yet another New Labour government adviser, Geoff Mulgan of the think-tank Demos, at a seminar on ‘Welfare Reform’ at the London School of Economics (7 July 1998). This explained, he said, the insistence that there would be ‘no fifth option’ of remaining on benefit for 18–25 New Dealers. This represents a major change in the safety-net provision of the classic welfare state. It confirms the ‘fundamental change in the responsibilities and rights of the unemployed’, which Dan Finn saw in the Job Seeker’s Allowance introduced by the Conservative government in 1996 and ‘designed to make it clear to unemployed people that there is a link between receiving benefit and looking for work’. The connection between the rights and responsibilities of the unemployed was also made by Tony Blair, who with a characteristic soundbite declared his policy was to provide ‘work for those who can and security for those who can’t’ – once again discriminating between

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the deserving and undeserving poor. New Labour’s approach is thus consistent with the Conservatives’ Victorian emphasis on the work ethic and fears for its loss amongst wayward youth and long-term unemployed alike. This learning policy for ‘full employability’ is thus more like one of ‘work, work, work’ rather than ‘education, education, education’. The paradox of work’s reappearance as the central concern of vocationalised education even as it has been displaced from its centrality in real life was noted by Field: As the work-ethic’s place at the basis of western identities has been challenged, the pedagogy of labour has grown in scope and sophistication. Identity might be moulded with work as both pedagogic basis and as a positive goal. In our own time, positive attempts to shape identity through the pedagogy of labour have been imported into the process of initial schooling, characteristically by bussing pupils out for planned experiences of labour in other people’s places of work . . . [So that] Work is still seen as a central pedagogic process; but, as ‘work experience’, it is subjected increasingly to organization, supervision, classification and assessment. (Field, 1992, pp. 4–5) This reversion to type in the Victorian work ethic sits oddly with New Labour’s ‘postmodern’ disparagement of ‘modernist’ promises of universal provision premised on full employment. LEVELS OF LEARNING AND LEVELS OF EARNING It has been noted how calls for ‘full employability’ rest on the related assumption of the need for a general ‘upskilling’ in the labour force. Yet, it has been questioned whether the UK workforce as a whole is becoming more skilled and knowledgeable. Academic investigations have come up with contrary findings, sometimes by the same author! (White, 1993; and White and Gallie, 1993). More recently, Green et al. (1998) from the London School of Economics answered their own question ‘Are British workers getting more skilled?’ in the affirmative, while in the same year Keep and Mayhew from Warwick and Oxford Universities argued the opposite.

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Conservative governments were often accused of deliberately heightening skill and knowledge polarities. In seeking to attract multinational capital looking to invest in assembling and servicing in Britain as a bridgehead to the European heartland they emphasised the virtues of a low-wage, deregulated workforce. Consequently, Britain now has the lowest labour costs per unit output of any industrialised country, the US being second (DiFazio, 1996). Similarly, work reorganisation accompanying the introduction of new technology followed by labour shedding, plus ‘culture change’ and work intensification for those remaining in employment are the usual goals of employer-based in-house education and training programmes. As a result of these policies at both the firm and national levels, it can be argued that a process of ‘skill polarisation’ has occurred at work, together with heightened academic differentiation in education. Certainly, as Wilson (1996, p. 3) wrote to ask, ‘Are American ghetto trends emerging in Europe?’, in both the US and Europe, While educated workers are benefiting from the pace of technological change, less skilled workers, such as those found in many inner-city neighbourhoods, face the threat of job displacement. For example, highly skilled designers, engineers, and operators are needed for the jobs created by the development of a new set of computeroperated machine tools, an advance that also eliminates jobs for those trained only for manual, assembly-line work. Also, advances in word processing have increased the demand for those who not only know how to type but can operate specialised software as well; the need for routine typists and secretaries is, accordingly, reduced. The fact that, as corporations contract and computerisation obviates routine tasks, fewer workers are required in place of the less skilled they displace, negates the simple solution advanced by government of educating and training the workforce to switch over from one task to the other. If the nature of the service sector employment that replaced many of the two million-plus manufacturing jobs lost during the 1980s is examined it also throws doubt on the upskilling thesis and the contribution that prolonged learning

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can make to the economy. The term services, as has been said, covers everything from brain surgery to flipping hamburgers. Over half the growth in this area has been in managerial, administrative and financial services requiring higher qualifications and the rest of service sector growth has been in occupations such as distribution, hotels and leisure associated with low-paid, low-skilled employment. Many routine, unskilled and formerly full-time workers have been laid off, employed on a casual, part-time and (even) lower wage basis if they are lucky. The process tends to ratchet upwards, as automation goes further – towards the automatic shop, for instance. Here stock replenishment could take place automatically if some mechanical means of transporting goods from store to shelf could be devised. For many years now in pubs owned by large breweries, the cash tills registering the sale of drinks have been linked to centralised stock reordering so that publicans no longer have to place orders for items that are running low in their pubs, as this is done automatically. Customers can also be made to take on many of the former functions of staff for themselves, as in automated vending machines, or in fast-food drive-through restaurants selecting their order from a touch-sensitive menu. In supermarkets they can run the goods through the checkout themselves, so that only security guards are required to make sure that they do so. (For, as well as recording the price, the check-out wipes a magnetic trace which would otherwise set off an alarm – as with a book you forget to check out of the library.) Aside from the security guards – and even some of their functions can be automated with ubiquitous CCTV video-recording surveillance cameras – the result is a diminishing core of regular employees whose work has been intensified at the same time as it has also been diversified. Increasingly, only a core of securely and regularly employed managers spend their time identifying the tasks that need to be completed to accomplish the latest project and then finding people who have the competencies to carry it out. Such a new division of labour has been seen emerging in FE colleges between a contracting core of senior managers and an increasingly flexible and often part-time periphery of lecturers and other staff. This core/periphery division was first identified in manufacturing industry by an influential

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analysis of trends by the Institute for Manpower Studies in the early 1980s (Atkinson, 1984). This foresaw technical change having the effect of upskilling a multi-skilled and regularly employed ‘core’ workforce in companies with a large deskilled, irregularly employed, subcontracting ‘periphery’. At the extreme advocated by some US business gurus, the management core becomes like an employment agency – perhaps themselves subcontracted by the company which wants the particular project for which workers are required. Those they contract in turn are increasingly self-employed and part-time. According to The Economist (12 March 1994), ‘part-timers have already grown to represent 25% of the workforce’. Many of these part-time workers juggle several part-time jobs simultaneously. If they are self-employed, this tends towards forms of self-employment which, it has been said, are based on self-exploitation. The resulting differentiation in institutionalised learning has been outlined by Edwards: ‘For the core workers, education and training will need to be available to cope with the changing demands of the market, to be able to provide relevant opportunities, as and when they are required. For the rest of the work-force, it will be there to support the movement of people in and out of employment, or to keep them occupied by providing a “revolving door”’ (Edwards, 1993, p. 184). An indication of the changing demands of the market to which Edwards refers is the constant reconstruction of apparently simple tasks into ones involving also technical and social skills. Take shelf-filling in supermarkets as an example: the requirements for this task have changed remarkably in recent years. In the mid-1970s shelf-filling in some supermarkets was being done by special school leavers with moderate learning difficulties. By 1986, though, the National Council for Vocational Qualifications was calling shelf-filling ‘stock replenishment’ and setting it at NVQ Level 1. Competence in stock replenishment was then a component part of the NVQs demanded of Youth Trainees. It has now been placed at NVQ Level 2 as ‘stock control’ and has become significantly more complicated through the inclusion of information technology. Such a process has meant that recent graduates may be employed as ‘trainee managers’ to do this task among a range of others.

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This is a familiar pattern, as recounted by Finn: ‘As industry reduces its workforce, there is less spare labour power to provide either on the job training or continuous supervision. Firms find it cheaper and more “rational” to recount workers who do not need such training and supervision, who are already relatively self-disciplined and reliable. Casual labour is transformed into “semi-skilled work”’ (1987, p. 82). This is not merely a redesignation of the same activity (shelf-filling) as something else (stock control). Stock control does include some new activities that shelf-filling did not. For a start, it is, as indicated, ‘control’. Instead of being told by a foreman what to do, shop-workers themselves monitor the new information technology which keeps tabs on how many of which goods are being bought from the shelves by customers so they know without being told by a supervisor which goods to restock on the shelves when. If it is not done automatically as customers take goods from the store, staff may also order replacements from suppliers. With the addition of other tasks, such as dealing with customers and supervising casual staff, the job has become ‘multi-skilled’ as routine unskilled sub-tasks (and other people’s jobs) have been integrated into it. The ‘multi-skilled’/‘multi-tasked’ work role is thus indeed more demanding and more intensive. It is not necessarily more demanding of higher-level knowledge and skill, however. Rather, the vocational education logic is one of the modular collection of competences – a horizontal rather than a vertical progression. There is no necessary integration of the separate tasks into a new whole that would constitute a higher skilled performance. Nor is there a new level of knowledge open to accommodate the various bits of information needed to carry out the various sub-tasks or competences of the new role. This includes also the task of self-management, which remains restricted to a self-reflexivity that does not involve any determination of the purposes of the work role. These decisions are left to the contracting core management, responding in turn to the demands of a competitive market. So, despite the erosion of the manual:mental divide that marked the Tayloristic separation of managers from those they managed under the former modernist, or Fordist, paradigm of work organisation, the division between managers and managed is

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reconstituted under the new paradigm. Now the new contracting core of senior managers contracts (in another sense) to a periphery of employees, even if these are self-employed or self-managing in the performance of their contracts. There are, in other words, still only two levels of learning between managers and managed. Only the former are educated to comprehend and control the process as a whole, while the latter are restricted to the lower level of vocational information necessary to carry out their assigned, aggregated tasks competently. The persistence of the two levels of learning corresponding to two basic levels in the employment hierarchy between managers and managed has been obscured by the growth of higher education. Ostensibly, HE follows a different and vertical logic of progression from one level to the other, rather than the horizontal level of accretion of equivalent competences through vocational training which my colleague, Judith Watson, argues is the logic of FE (personal communication). But just because degrees have become necessary for a range of occupations that have closed themselves off from non-graduate applicants, this does not mean that the actual information and competence required for these occupations have been raised to a higher level of knowledge and skill. To take the ubiquitous occupation of accountant, for instance: only 30 years ago accountants were recruited straight from grammar schools on the basis of their O-level results and it is doubtful if the demands of the job per se have grown any more complicated in the meantime – indeed computer programs have considerably simplified the demanding if often mechanical tasks of book-keeping. Similarly, in the more glamorous area of media employment, it is no longer possible to make the legendary progression from tea-boy to editor because specialised degrees in journalism have mushroomed even as demand declines for journalists (now able to type and lay out their copy ready for press, which they were not required to do previously), along with the loss of many associated jobs in the print. Relatedly, pressures for multitasking are now impinging also upon cameramen, sound recordists and TV journalists, now under pressure to combine all three separate roles into one, leading to strikes in the BBC.

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As work reorganisation and the latest applications of new technology reach up the employment hierarchy in a process of proletarianisation, they reduce holistic knowledge and equivalent tacit skills to the levels of limited information necessary for the performance of routine competences. The current demystification of graduate level professionalism, for instance, increasingly holds teachers, doctors and other professional public servants accountable through more explicit contracts with the consumers of their previously selfregulated services. While this redresses the balance of knowledge and power between professionals and their clients, it is a proletarianisation of the professions that runs concurrent with the devaluation through expansion of the major part of a more differentiated higher education system. And it is accompanied by the dismantling of the traditional welfare bureaucracies (including education) that have sustained the growth since the last world war of the professional, or what some sociologists call the ‘service class’. The security of the former professions, and indeed their very claims to professional status (whether in terms of access to privileged knowledge or of self-regulation), have been increasingly undermined of late, even in the (semiprivatised) public sector and in academia. At the same time, the latest applications of new information and communications technology have prompted new demands less for the specific vocational skills acquired within particular companies and other organisations and more for the generalised competences and bits of information required within most multi-tasked employments. This is the modern equivalent of what the Crowther Committee described in the 1950s as the ‘general mechanical intelligence’ demanded of all school leavers ‘to be able to adapt to a rapidly changing environment [where] there may be less need in the future of “skill” in the old-fashioned sense of the word’ (HMSO, 1959, p. 449). With services and new communications and information technology replacing mechanical industry, the ‘core’ skills demanded of all employments, and therefore first presented as part of all general vocational qualifications from 1993, were listed as working with others, presentation, problem-solving and managing one’s own learning, as well as numeracy, literacy and

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computeracy (as reformulated by Sir Ron Dearing’s second review in 1996, which renamed them ‘key skills’). These skills are ‘key’ to employability because they can supposedly be ‘transferred’ from one work context to another. However, as stated, these so-called ‘personal, transferable skills’ are neither personal, transferable nor skills, but actually generic or universal competences required in a variety of work situations rendered increasingly identical by the similar use of information technology and by similar forms of work reorganisation. Presented as ‘personal and transferable’ for individually empowered assessment and accreditation, a ‘skills’ emphasis in the curriculum of whatever sector of education and training offers a new illusory quantification of competences to match the marking of memorised and often unrelated ‘facts’ tested, along with appropriate literary style, by conventional academic (literary) examination. Leaving aside the conceptual confusions surrounding the notion of ‘transfer’, which review of the experimental psychology literature shows to be deeply problematic (Lave, 1988), to present competences dignified as skills as technical abilities that can be acquired piecemeal by practice and study divorces them from their real cultural context. At its worst, ‘Neglect of objective learning has tended to reduce educational process to the level of assertion training’ (Robbins, 1988, p. 166). Moreover, so-called ‘personal and transferable skills’ are represented as equally accessible to all students whatever their class cultural background, gender, ability or race. Yet at rock bottom the real skills for employment presented as personal and transferable are those of whiteness, maleness and middle-classness. These are the really generic ‘social skills’ that are the most acceptable to most employers. Traditionally middle-class students, of course, already possess these qualities as a result of their previous education and family socialisation, as Bourdieu and Passeron showed in their classic 1964 study of students. From Youth Training Schemes to postgraduate programmes, a skills emphasis at whatever level of the curriculum is essentially ambiguous. It represents upskilling, reskilling and multi-skilling for a few, combined with deskilling to semi-skilled working for many more. Government rhetoric about educational standards masks the

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complexity of this issue of flexibility at different levels. On the one hand, underqualified school leavers are placated by participation in temporary training schemes that prepare them for their place in a pool of semi-skilled flexible labour to be drawn on as required (Edwards’ ‘revolving doors’), or encouraged to become self-employed within a youth enterprise model. On the other, in the remaining jobs that such school leavers and others would previously have taken, demarcations between formerly discrete tasks are broken down and reaggregated as multi-skilled occupations involving customer relations and use of new technology as well as still necessary routine tasks. Redesignated as also requiring so-called ‘personal and transferable skills’, they can be filled by graduate level employees, also displaced from their previous prospective employment elsewhere. So-called ‘personal and transferable’, ‘core’ or ‘key skills’ for employability should not therefore be confused with the so-called ‘higher cognitive skills’ of reasoning and scientific/ critical thinking imparted not only by higher education, but as part of any course of systematic study beyond the most elementary level. ‘Personal and transferable skills’ relate to employer demands for a multi-skilled workforce, not only now on the semi-skilled periphery of intermittent employment but increasingly in the formerly secure, core sectors, where middle management in particular is being undermined by prolonged recession and squeezed by the latest applications of new technology that render previously specialised expertise increasingly transparent and accessible to all. For at the middle management level, for which higher education generally prepares its students, the same demands are being made nowadays as on the workforce lower down – less for the specific vocational competences required for specialised tasks within particular companies and other organisations and more for ‘personal and transferable’ ‘core’ or ‘key skills’. Unlike general level (‘higher cognitive’) knowledge and the real skills represented by that knowledge in action, the new generic competences, and the bits of information that are their counterpart at this more limited level of learning, are closed at a lower level of understanding than general level knowledge/skill. Their performance does not lead on, as does generalised knowledge/skill, to questioning

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and justifying the purpose of the activity for which they are employed. One consequence of the confusion of skill with competence in the interrelated processes of the latest work reorganisations using new technology is hyperinflation of qualifications – or, as it has been called, looking at it the other way, ‘diploma devaluation’ (Dore, 1976). For, as Bourdieu and Passeron (1979, p. 78) noted, there is a reciprocal relation between the supply of jobs on the one hand, and the qualifications required for them on the other. In a situation of labour shortage, employers do not worry about the qualifications of the employees they need to do the job for them. But when they are overwhelmed with applicants for the very few secure jobs available, they can afford to pick and choose. The easiest way to do this is to use some sort of graded examination qualification as a ‘screen’ to compare candidates. So, all sorts of jobs that never used to bother with the academic qualifications of their applicants now demand them. This is obvious to many students, including the 16 year-old resitting her GCSEs at an inner-city FE college who said in interview with the author, ‘Nowadays you have to go to university to get a job that 30 years ago you didn’t even have to have A-levels for’ (reported in Ainley and Bailey, 1997, p. 95). In selection for employment, all sorts of ‘personnel selection’ experts have appeared to contribute to the task of rigorous selection. The longer and more complicated forms that they issue put off all but the most persistent. Pseudoscientific recording of ‘biodata’ and ‘psychometric’ tests, have been introduced, along with gruelling assessment procedures involving competitive role plays, simulations, presentations and other more or less arbitrary ways of weeding people out. At the same time as these supposedly rational and objective measures are introduced, a fantastic student mythology has developed – so that wild rumours go around universities, such as that only applications in white envelopes will be opened. In truth, such speculations are not far from the mark because, for all the ‘expertise’ of these burgeoning selection specialists, they might as well throw all the applications up in the air and pick one in a hundred for interview. As permanent, full-time posts in core positions become fewer and fewer, the threshold for passing the initial screening is

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steadily raised. Typically, this process does not begin at the ‘top’ of the job market, where there are fewer qualified people anyway, but at the ‘bottom’ where the least qualified are the most vulnerable. Certified qualification provides quantification, numbers attached to the applicants by which they can be ranked and compared. Commodified in this way, examination grades become more important all the way up the system and extend lower down it to entry tests for four and five year olds (half of whom are now inappropriately in primary rather than nursery schooling). When the process of increasing participation is not the primary motivation for learning . . . the focus of attention shifts from co-participation in practice to acting upon the person-to-be-changed. Such a shift is typical of situations, such as schooling, in which pedagogically structured content organizes learning activities [so that] the identity of learners becomes an explicit object of change [and] where there is no cultural identity encompassing the activity in which the newcomers participate and no field of mature practice for what is being learned, exchange value replaces the use value of increasing participation. The commoditization of learning engenders a fundamental contradiction between the use and exchange values of the outcome of learning, which manifests itself in conflicts between learning to know and learning to display knowledge for evaluation . . . Test taking then becomes a new parasitic practice, the goal of which is to increase the exchange value of learning independently of its use value. (Lave and Wenger, 1994, p. 112) Failure to meet the new standards is internalised by candidates as a personal deficiency, especially within the traditional academic model of education which predominates in England. This is specifically designed to be selective of the supposedly innate qualities of ‘first class minds’ that it is designed to pick out at every level. As Gortz (1978, p. 40) wrote, ‘a conceptual and abstract form of teaching makes it particularly difficult for the children of less well-educated parents to obtain intellectual qualifications, and equates good school achievements with the right to a privileged

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position in society. The school system is therefore the key instrument for the creation of social hierarchies: it pretends to discover differences in innate ability and achievement which it in fact creates.’ In schools, traditionally middle-class social attributes are typically treated by teachers as evidence of ‘brightness’ and the frustration of working-class students as evidence of ‘immaturity’. In training schemes and in further education, as Moore and Hickox say, This systematically misrecognizes the competence of individuals by establishing certain criteria of relevance and defining what is to count as a recognized or legitimate display of competence (through behavioural skill objectives, performance indicators, profiles) it represents individuals as incompetent by those criteria (eg. writing CVs, filling in forms, using the ’phone, presenting a ‘smart’ appearance to employers) while failing to acknowledge the competence they in fact possess (e.g. in being able to utilize personal contacts in ‘grapevine’ recruitment or meet the social expectations of membership of working communities). The behaviour which then results from the experiences of mismatch between the ‘formal’ representation of the world of work and the young person’s actual knowledge and experience of it (informal) at the level of class cultural practice (eg. their apathy, scepticism or aggression) is then treated as a confirmation of their ‘incompetence’ and as indicating that they actually need training. In this way the ideologies of ‘skill’ and ‘training’ construct particular types of deficit models of trainees. (1994, p. 206) Certainly, it is harder nowadays in terms of the grades required of applicants to get into the most prestigious and sought after antique universities than it ever was before and, to a large extent, these higher entry standards are demanded all down the line. Self-blame is not restricted to students, but shared also by many of their teachers who may also fail to reach constantly rising standards even as their actual conditions of employment and the resources available to them depreciate rapidly. Never mind that what is being tested is invariably a variant of numeracy and literacy – the latter

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limited to spelling very often – and that this is not necessarily connected to the task in hand or the subject of study being tested, the demand for qualifications also brings the accusation that standards are falling, even as higher standards (of literacy and numeracy at least) are demanded in tests and examinations. In higher education, the allegation that traditional academic standards are falling as more first and upper second degree classes are awarded in absolute if not relative numbers is referred to by some as a process of ‘dumbing down’. ‘DUMBING DOWN’ ‘Dumbing down’ means different things to different people. To former Premier Major on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme (3 July 1998) it means the ‘dumbing down’ of parliamentary procedures by Blair’s presidential style of depoliticised government. To Lady Howe, Chair of the Broadcasting Standards Commission – let alone to erstwhile radicals, Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton, with their plans for a ‘Radio Einstein’ announced in January 1999 – it means too many Oprah Winfrey-style ‘confessional’ TV chat shows and new programme schedules on Radios 3 and 4. Academic traditionalists see evidence of ‘dumbing down’ in modular degree and A-level programmes, allowing more to pass and therefore ‘lowering standards’. Similarly, Sir Peter Hall, speaking for the arts on the ‘Today’ programme (3 February 1998) described the loss of art and music in schools as ‘a real move towards “dumbing down”’. From a Marxist point of view though, Colin Waugh (1998) has also suggested that an ‘“idiotising” tendency’ is ‘individualising’, as academic sociology has it, a formerly more united workforce to return them to a modern equivalent of the isolated ‘idiocy of rural life’ from which Marx and Engels saw industrial capitalism rescuing an unclassconscious peasantry. To many journalists and media commentators this was evident in Sunday and Monday broadsheets, led by the Murdoch-owned Times in its cut-price reduction to a quality tabloid, full of lead stories about Gazza and Ginger Spice (1 June 1998). To the Archbishop of Canterbury, this represented the danger of

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‘football worship’ (Daily Mail, same day). Certainly, as The Economist (4 July 1998) pointed out, despite global communications, national news bulletins are becoming increasingly parochial. ‘The elevation of feeling, image and spontaneity over reason, reality and constraint’ was seen, above all, as by right-wing philosopher Anthony O’Hear (1998, p. 184), in the funeral of Princess Diana. (See also Heath-Stubbs, 1999.) The event was, as O’Hear remarks, as much as the electoral victory of New Labour some months previously, ‘somehow definitive and indicative’. Following Lipietz, the argument of this book is that the general election result indicated a widespread political acceptance of the new dominance over the new mixed economy of private monopoly capital in its new state form but administered in a humane and apparently uncorrupt manner by New Labour in place of the sleaze-ridden Tories. Similarly, the Diana funeral revealed the consolidation of a new mass psychology corresponding to the new settlement. At the level of Lipietz’s ‘psychic economy’, this corresponded for a large number of people – especially many women, now playing new roles in society – to the new post-welfare settlement and the new development paradigm for society’s future in which many individuals could, if only temporarily, see a new future for themselves. Like the former classic welfare state settlement, the new state settlement and the new psychological adjustment which is a part of it, did not, as O’Hear said of the funeral ‘crowds and their attitudes and their grieving and their clapping’, ‘suddenly come from nowhere’ (p. 190). As well as of the class and gender realignments that have accompanied the deindustrialization of Britain, they were – more directly – the product of a steady drip of almost daily reporting of the Royal soap opera over many years in which, due to an accident, the mass of spectators were suddenly given a walk-on part for the first time. For mass circulation tabloids and mass audience media programmes habitually aim to entertain and distract people rather than to help them to think. It is farcical for them to pretend to lend their support, as they occasionally do, to the creation of a ‘learning society’. Especially the tabloids, the secret of whose success, as Auerbach (1992, p. 29) noted, was to follow the example of Murdoch’s Sun in creating ‘a

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newspaper with a vocabulary sufficiently restricted that it could be read without difficulty by millions of people who have been encouraged by our school system to gain only a very partial level of literacy.’ In the terms in which the levels of learning in employment between managers and managed have been distinguished, the mass media generally communicate information rather than knowledge. They thus rarely rise above the level of individual human interest at which their stories are pitched. Like soap operas, the human in which they are interested and about which they are interesting remains unique and ungeneralised. Indeed, this is its attraction for viewers who can thus identify with the characters (often to the point of being unable to distinguish them from the actors playing them – so that they will even campaign for their release from fictive imprisonment, for example, joined in one such episode by the jocular new prime minister, Tony Blair). There is not usually any progression from this level of particularity to a level of generalisability in terms of explicating the general rules that are being played out in the individual case. Often the form in which popular discussion of public issues takes place precludes any real debate that would further the general understanding of participants or audience. An example occurred in March 1995 when – in an example of the ‘soft sofa’-style of political presentation by his successor that he was later to decry as exemplary of ‘dumbing down’ – then Prime Minister Major appeared on the ‘Anne and Nick Show’ at Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham to answer questions from an invited audience of ‘middle Englanders’ assembled elsewhere in the City. This strange separation prevented any of the face-to-face interaction with the public that so many politicians are so often anxious to avoid. The first question relayed from the audience asked what the Premier would do about the high rate of crime and the questioner was assured in reply that this would be harshly dealt with. The second question from another member of the audience concerned the high level of youth unemployment and again this was reassuringly answered. There was, however, no connection made between the two questions, neither by prime minister nor presenters and it was impossible for any member of the

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audience to make such a connection. In the terms that have been used, two items of information remained unconnected by their relation at the level of generalised knowledge. Obvious though this may have been to many of the participants, it was not made explicit so that debate could be opened up from the closed level at which it was presented. The same effects – and perhaps intentions – can be seen, this book has argued, in the latest phase of Learning Policy. In two ways this represents the worst of both worlds, combining an Americanised mass (or, at least ‘medium participation’) further and higher education system for the majority with the persistence of a traditionally elite, academic Ivy League for a minority. In state schooling the worst of another two worlds combines a National Curriculum following the continental tradition of content prescription with the North American obsession with standardised testing. In training, the reduction of skill to competence is based on a behaviourist definition of competence which explicitly denies the necessity for underpinning knowledge to integrate isolated and separately acquired competences into the holistic performance of higher level skill. The CBI’s ‘skills revolution’ which the NCVQ intended to introduce would principally have been a cultural revolution to create ‘a new training culture’ in which individuals would be empowered with ‘real buying power’ for career mobility and needs satisfaction, in the words of the CBI. This individual approach to skill (and knowledge) acquisition was endorsed by the CBI’s 1989 ‘Towards the Skills Revolution’ slogan ‘Britain must put individuals first’. This slogan was justified by the assertion that ‘Individuals are now the only [sic] source of sustainable competitive advantage’ (CBI, 1989, p. 9). Therefore ‘employers need to focus now on individuals rather than groups’ because ‘with the accelerating pace of change in the labour market, there will be many opportunities for important career choices throughout a working life, allowing “careership” to become a reality’ (ibid., p. 21). Employees will thus package themselves as ‘a marketable portfolio of skills’ or, as Barber puts it, ‘everyone will have to keep learning just to keep up’ (in The Times Education Supplement, 3 April 1998). Whilst the erosion of the division between manual and mental labour by new communications and information

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technology has led to some theoretical clarification of the nature of knowledge and skills, which are no longer so rigidly separated from each other, the issue is still confused by a radical adherence to an individualism which misconceives the nature of both skill and knowledge. For, as Collins says, ‘The problem of skill comes partly from treating expertise as a property of the individual, rather than interaction of the social collectivity’ (1989, p. 82) and the same can be said of knowledge (see Bailey, 1977, p. 21). In the ‘learning society’ corresponding to the new learning policy, both knowledge and skill are individualised and limited for the majority of an increasingly peripheral workforce to portfolios of lower-level vocational information and competence, while learning is separated from leisure and popular culture. Education and training’s main purpose then becomes social control of those out of work while managing organisational change within employment and including in both these functions the inculcation of an ideology of self-blame for failure. This is the real function of learning under Labour. It is moving us towards not a learning but a certified society.

Conclusion: Towards a New Alternative It may seem that the history narrated in this book has been unduly negative in its assessment of the 55 years from the end of the Second World War to the end of the century. So that the development of what it has called a learning policy during this period has been a wholly negative and not at all a positive development. That it resembles in this respect the concluding part three of Brian Simon’s magisterial four volume Studies in the History of Education, which he called Downhill All the Way (with the subtitle Thatcher at the Helm!). But the events which have been traced did indeed begin on a high point in the victory of popular democratic forces over fascism in 1945. Capitalism worldwide was forced to adjust to the social conditions created by this victory. In the UK it did so through the postwar welfare state settlement, the terms and conditions of which were outlined in chapter 1, especially as they applied to education. That fuller advantage was not taken by the mass of the people to create a learning system more to their benefit than the tripartite schooling which survived, together with the private schools and elite universities privileging an elite minority, can be attributed to the self-imposed limitations of the political leadership provided by the social democratic Labour government. The 1944 Education Act and the classic welfare state settlement which that postwar government created did, however, as shown, leave open the possibility of further progressive educational advance. In chapter 2, it was argued that this took place in the 1960s as a result of pressure from below for comprehensive reform and amongst the students of an expanded higher education. That the progressive possibilities of this period were not realised is not attributable to the political limitations of social democracy which were transcended by the New Left, militant trade unionism and new social movements which rejected the Labour Party and governments of Harold 197

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Wilson. Rather, a coherent viable alternative to the existing industrial development paradigm was not found which could win sufficiently large and organised popular support to indicate a way out of the crisis society entered with the end of the long boom in 1973. Instead, representatives of increasingly globalised and powerful private monopoly capitalism were able to impose their own solution to the crisis. This presented a new paradigm for social development for which acceptance was won during the 1980s. Social adjustment policies were then dictated by global corporations upon nations worldwide, reversing the previous adjustment by capital in the postwar settlement. In England, this involved, it was argued in chapter 3, a new social and political settlement in which the old ‘mixed economy’ of state and private monopoly capital was rejected in favour of the dominance of private monopoly capital over the new mixed economy of a semi-privatised state sector indiscriminately mixed with a state-subsidised private sector. The new settlement was marked in education and training by the 1988 Education and the 1992 Further and Higher Education Acts. Together with its new Contracting State form of administration, this new learning polity was described in chapter 4, along with the subsequent adjustments to it by the New Labour government. Chapter 5 argued that the new government inherited and developed – in education and training as elsewhere – the new post-welfare, Contracting State introduced by Mrs Thatcher’s governments. The new settlement and the new type of state which embodies and maintains it has involved a commodification of areas of public and private life previously protected by representative democratic control over the state sector. This at least nominal control by citizens in the interest of the public service ideal of the classic welfare state formerly placed limitations on the unbounded dynamic of capital expansion for the sake of profit. With the transformation of democratic accountability into accountability to clients as consumers in the marketplace, this control over the former state sector has been lost. This includes learning at all levels, which has been seen to be becoming more and more commodified through certification, ‘increasing the exchange value of learning independently of its use value’, as Lave and Wenger (1994, p. 112) said.

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This process of commodification of learning means that less and less of any real worth is being learnt at any level of education, even though more students are progressing to gain more and higher certificates than previously. It also makes it more difficult to determine what is ‘useful knowledge’ that is worth learning and what is only valuable in terms of its exchange-value certifiable in educational credentials. Most academics and many teachers have become so confused between learning and its assessment that it is very difficult for them to begin to address the basic question of what it is to learn. In addition, their working life has become a daily struggle at least to appear to comply with the latest demands of central government in order to secure their own positions against growing insecurity and proletarianisation. Together with the confusion as to learning of real worth, these demands of the Contracting State contribute to growing alienation from and instrumentalism towards institutionalised learning on the part of both staff and students. This adds to pervasive cynicism and disenchantment with the virtual society of which commodified learning is a part. Like society as a whole, education and training are managed through often illusory and manipulated performance indicators and governed by press release so that increasingly ‘The Image’ is all (Boorstein, 1962). This is ‘The Audit Society’ described by Power (1997) with its ‘Rituals of Verification’ run by accountants. Its origins have been traced to the collapse after ‘30 glorious years’ of the postwar social and political compromise at the end of the long boom following the oil crisis of 1973. As well as by struggles against unequal development worldwide, the resulting crisis and its global resolution in favour of the political representatives of one of the partners in the old settlement – private monopoly capital – over the other – state monopoly capital – was potentiated by the development of new communications and information technology. This dynamic of technical development affecting the ground upon which struggles between social forces take place is the ultimate explanatory factor in the change that has taken place. Thus the explanation that has been offered is not to be found in any arbitrary change in ‘discourse’, or in the apparently contagious spread of ‘reflexivity’ in ‘late modernity’, which are the usual sociological

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interpretations of events. Still less are explanations to be found in the entry of society to a new and unprecedented, ‘postmodern’ stage of history. If the account advanced here is at least coherent, in another sense the story has been ‘downhill all the way’, for the processes which have been described have widened the role of institutionalised learning in social control. Of course, control over what is learnt and access to the Official Knowledge of society is integral to the maintenance of any social formation. The part played by formal education and training in social control over the population of advanced capitalist countries has increased, however, in proportion with the decline in full-time, lifelong employment, which was previously the main locus of social control through the wages system. In the absence of a shared religious ideology, only the mass media and advertising now exercise a comparable social influence to institutionalised learning. Yet a new millennial moralism is once again reflected in a moral crusade to draw the youth of a disintegrating social order into a unified national experience. Control over the young and so over an increasingly uncertain future for society is clearly felt by those politicians and parents who are amplified by the media into an orchestrated public opinion, to take place most effectively in schools. Here perhaps the single most visible, symbolic and typical result of Mrs Thatcher’s reforms of education was to get nearly all state school pupils back into school uniforms from the youngest age. Less visibly but at all levels, commodification and centralised control are limiting learning to the acquisition of vocational information and competence in place of holistic knowledge and skills. This is the process of ‘dumbing down’ which has paradoxically accompanied all the talk about ‘standards’ in schools and the expansion of further and higher education. It makes it increasingly difficult to open learning to a level of knowledge and skill that comprehends what Cardinal Newman called ‘the general disposition of things’. Indeed, the new academic postmodern orthodoxy denies that such ‘totalisation’ is possible. Yet it is vital to create both in imagination and in practice a new alternative open enough to challenge and contain an unrestrained private monopoly capitalism following its own laws of

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financial speculation and profit unrelated to humanity and the environment. This would move towards a social system, as described by the collective Red-Green Study Group in 1995 (p. 49), ‘in which market exchange is retained, to an extent yet to be determined, but market forces are replaced by negotiated coordination’. Education on its own cannot bring about this transformation, but all levels of the education system have a crucial part to play in the democratic reconstruction and cultural regeneration necessary to save and rebuild what remains of the welfare state. This means more than education as a preparation for democratic participation in society, which is the conventional view of ‘Education and the Struggle for Democracy’ as presented, for example, by Carr and Hartnett in 1995. It means ‘Rethinking Education and Democracy’ (The Hillcole Group, 1997). It will also require developing a new theory of learning and a new conception of knowledgeskill very different from the present informationprocessing model based on book learning or the narrowly behaviourist model of competence-based training (Ainley and Rainbird, 1999). Complementary to this new understanding of learning will be a new pedagogy in which new conceptions of teaching make the negotiation of meaning central to relations between teacher and taught (see Claxton, 1990). Such an ‘excess of meaning which education should exert over schooling and training’ (Cohen, 1998, p. 11) aligns teaching and learning with research. Valuing knowledge and skills other than, or as well as, the abstract and academic, upsets the existing hierarchy between those who think and those who do. But this is happening spontaneously under the constant pressure of the latest applications of new communications and information technology. This new technology has been used by employers to automate and control contracting employment, yet it ultimately offers the prospect of so changing the nature of work as to overcome the division between mental and manual labour. The phenomenal productivity of the latest technology potentially affords everyone opportunities to contribute to society through the right to work at full if not full-time employment. Learning need not then be tied only to earning but can be for leisure also and to encourage active

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participation in public life. This can restore imagination and creativity to learning, to make it enjoyable by uniting it with leisure, sport, art and popular culture and recreation to disconnect it from wage labour. This is now feasible because, as Caroline Benn and Clyde Chitty wrote, ‘For the first time in almost two centuries there is the possibility of our society reshaping itself democratically because there is the possibility of reshaping work itself’ (1996, p. 379; also White, 1997). Work is already being transformed by the latest applications of communications and information technology and it is common to speak of a new industrial revolution with historic implications even more profound than the first. The changes required for human survival in the next millennium are vast and the choices facing humanity demand wide and informed discussion and debate. Society indeed has to learn fast; and education combined with democracy is essential for it to do so. Experiments in democratic learning should, therefore, begin now at all levels of learning from primary to postgraduate schools (as advocated in Harber, 1995). Only education combined with democracy can lead to a real learning society. The fundamental cultural activity, if society is to be so reconstructed from the bottom up, is democratic debate and decision-making. Just as we cannot return to the bureaucratic management of the old corporate welfare state, so we cannot return to its professional paradigm in which knowledgeable experts acted on behalf of their ignorant clients. The welfare state can only be saved by a resolutely decentralised reform in terms of its management and local control, even though its financing will still involve national redistribution according to priority of need. The moribund market modernisation of the state and society that has been allowed to happen in recent years must be reversed to return public services to popular democratic control, extending that control so as to really serve the people. The first step in an alternative learning policy to generalise the knowledge and skill to inform this democratic modernisation is to establish the normality and desirability of full-time education with US-style graduation from a ‘high school’ base at 18 and recurring returns to learning thereafter. Instead of academic qualification at 16 sorting students into different pathways in separate institutions, a broad-based

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baccalaureate at 18 could combine the academic and vocational arts, sciences and technology. The latest very limited reform of A-levels does not go far enough in this direction, but proposals for such a ‘British Baccalaureate’, building on Scottish and other European examples, were drawn up by the Institute for Policy Research to ‘End the Division Between Education and Training’ in 1990. A variety of schools and colleges can then be recognised as providing the basis for a new form of tertiary education linked across institutions and leading on to the right of entry to higher education. In place of Dearing, the recommendation of the 1963 Robbins Report must be reaffirmed of access to higher education for all who can benefit from it. Nor should the definition of ability to benefit be dictated by arbitrarily rising academic entry standards but must be increasingly opened to all who wish as of right to enter their local university, whatever their previous qualifications or lack of them, fullor part-time, in or out of paid employment. Vouchers, which serve only to subsidise the unfair advantages that private education and training already enjoy in the marketplace, are not necessary to enforce this entitlement. It should be constitutionally and legally enforceable – unlike the empty assurances of consumer ‘Charters’. At the same time this ‘front-loaded’, full-time educational entitlement would be integral to work in and out of formal employment so as to learn from work if not learn to work. In the alternative paradigm that we must begin to envision and to create, education and training united as learning would also be integrated with local popular cultures and recreations, allowing knowledge and skills to be developed and assessed by Independent Study on practically useful and collective or individual projects contributing to scientific discovery, investigative scholarship, technical invention or artistic creation. This entitlement should also emphasise the assumption of full citizenship rights and responsibilities for all from the age of 18 (see Jones and Wallace, 1992), instead of – as has been argued is one effect of the current learning policy – marginalising a section of youth in a secondary and peripheral labour market. Investigation, experiment and debate by all students and as many other people as possible is vital today when so many

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received ideas in the social and natural sciences are open to question. In addition, new technology can be applied at every level of learning to facilitate routine memorisation and allow imagination free rein beyond the immediate necessity to earn a wage and the constraints of production for profit. This space within formal education for seeding new ideas must be preserved and extended by making research and creation an integral part of the independent study of all students at all levels, instead of separating teaching from research as is now proposed. In the place of an academic National Curriculum in schools, real ‘Foundation Learning’ would insist upon international connections, on understanding ‘domestic’ as well as paid employment and on opening for consideration the finality of social actions in relation to the larger political and ecological systems of which they are a part. Instead of embracing such an alternative to grasp the new possibilities opened up by new communications and information technology, there seems an almost deliberate but unconscious and, as it were, instinctive, reaction by the state. Dedicated to preserving the status quo and the power of those who profit from it, this reaction takes the form of ‘dumbing down’ and limiting people’s learning even as their institutionalised education extends throughout their lifetimes. Rather than apply communications and information technology at every level of learning to allow imagination free rein to develop from experience the new ideas necessary to comprehend and deal with rapidly changing reality, there seems what can only be described as a desperate rearguard action to push the new conceptions formed from new interconnections back into the obsolete subject discipline boxes of academic Official Knowledge, as in the National Curriculum for state schools for instance. Modelled on the 1903 grammar school curriculum, but in primary schools and in secondaries in inner-city Education Action Zones being abandoned in favour of going even further back to a nineteenth-century concentration on elementary literacy and numeracy, the academic National Curriculum goes against the grain of the latest scientific discovery. For, consequent upon globalisation and new cultural interconnections, there is a ferment of new scientific knowledge as communications are accelerated and

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barriers between formerly discrete academic disciplines crumble. Similarly, barriers between formerly distinct cultures with their own various forms of artistic expression are melting to allow the creation of new extraordinary hybridities. Yet, recent learning policy demonstrates very clearly the alternative use to which new communications and information technology can be put to sustain an ignorant rather than an informed society. In the process, uncertain and indefinable human qualities are degraded to illusory but apparently numerically exact quantities. Social goals for institutionalised learning, like increasing equality and opportunity, have been replaced by the financial accounting of supposed efficiency and ‘value for money’. Public services, like education, can then be ‘costed’ and ‘compared’ by their users, redefined as ‘customers’, especially if their infinite and unpredictable possibilities can be contained within narrow enough delimitations of (academically and/or vocationally specific) ‘outputs’. It has also been suggested that this illusory quantification may soon find a spurious ideological justification in a reductionist socio-biology, connecting the real advances of science in the field of genetics to atavistic social policies and new military barbarity. ‘The extension of selection’, which this book has argued is inherent to the social control exercised by the new learning policy from ‘Foundation’ through to ‘Lifelong Learning’, ‘will inevitably lead to a demand for legitimation,’ wrote Brian Simon (1996, p. 6). Unless some new, brilliant discovery is made, legitimisation can only be found within the field of psychometrics, or mental testing, since this alone clings to the classic theories of genetic determination which insist on the fixed and unchanging nature of Intelligence and its accurate diagnosis. Early selection demands such a theory and will have it. Psychometricians are back, and are beginning to see themselves once more as arbiters of the nation’s educational system and of each child’s future. Such is the prospect facing us. Faced with this reaction and the awesome power of the state and the global capitalism it sustains and supports to call on

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the latest discoveries of science in attempting to provide medical, pharmaceutical and genetic solutions to economic and social problems, there is both the potential and the necessity to turn society from its present destructive course of development. Despite the deepening immiseration of the majority of the world’s population, there has been progress in the struggles for survival of people worldwide. Above all, the possibility of catastrophic nuclear war has been lifted for the first time in more than 40 years. The science and technology on which the West has relied to create the affluence envied by the rest of the world can now be used to confront the threats now facing humanity. This can only be achieved by overcoming the existing state of things in which, as Bahro wrote as long ago as 1982, ‘The very real danger of total catastrophe that we can see ahead . . . is inseparably connected with competition for maximum profit’ (1982, p. 62). So ‘The ecology crisis will free us to say goodbye to capitalism’ (ibid.), but not to replace it with a socialist utopianism preconceived as a fixed and final state of perfected social being, a prefigured ideal which we want to put in capitalism’s place. Rather, ‘the real movement that supersedes the existing order of things’, which Marx called communism, is now necessary for human survival. As survival becomes our Utopia and a theory of social becoming (Sztompka, 1991) replaces old ideals of static social being, it becomes necessary for society as a whole to learn to live. As William Morris argued, this implies accepting natural limits, instead of continually seeking to push them back. ‘This will mean’, Hayward stated in his Introduction to Ecological Thought (1995, p. 75), ‘the development of self-mastery, discipline, and a responsible exercise of freedom such that distinctively humanist ends are pursued which do not depend on the Promethean aim’ of technological so-called progress. The future remains open, though its possibilities are daily foreclosed. The only historical precedent for the current challenge presented to human survival worldwide is that faced by society in the last national emergency during the Second World War. This time, however, no nation can hope to meet the challenge alone; and within countries alliance on terms of equality, co-operation and democratic planning will be required, now as then, merely to survive. With educational

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institutions at all levels returned to the democratic control of their localities and regions, this would serve to generalise science and raise awareness of the radical transformations required to avoid ecological catastrophe through a genuine modernisation of the economy and society. The loss of old certainties has also entailed overcoming restrictive limitations. For example, in the UK in place of reliance on a male breadwinner, women are gaining at least relative economic equality in the labour market. This has resulted in women playing a greater part in public life, bringing into it the knowledgeskills and values, as well as sometimes the illusions, of their experience. For, with the decline of heavy industry and the rise of services – both associated with new technology which obviates physical differences at work, the persistence of so-called ‘men’s and women’s work’ is now open to question along with the whole social construction of gender. In a tendency working its way up the age range, the pay-gap between female and male 16–24 year olds has narrowed to a negligible 4.3 per cent (Deakin, 1996). However, this has been at the expense of a fall in the relative value of male income, so that wages for the same age group have fallen as a proportion of average wages by 10 per cent over the decade to 1995 (ibid.). What has been called ‘the feminisation of male labour’ means that more and more men are coming to share the conditions of part-time, intermittent working which most women were long used to accepting. In relation to age also, about half of all students in further education, excluding those in sixth-form colleges, are over 26, less than one third 16–18. Indeed, most FE students have always been part-time and adult. In higher education, proportions of adult and part-time students are also now increasing towards majorities. Nevertheless, most full-time further and higher education students are younger due to the extension for all school leavers of the period of transition into the labour market – if not into work. This protracted transition has raised the threshold of adulthood and lengthened what is regarded as ‘youth’, ‘adolescence’ or even the ‘permanent adolescence’, or ‘post-adolescence’, in which many young men particularly are allegedly trapped (see Adamski and Grootings, 1989). As Claire Wallace (1996)

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indicated in a richly suggestive paper, all these lifestage definitions are shifting in life-courses disrupted by economic uncertainty; particularly the idea (or utopian ideal) of adult status as a completed state of psychological identity (or being), linked to the assumption of ‘vocational maturity’ – as in Talcott Parsons’ or Erik Erikson’s schemes of things, for instance – rather than the notion of continuous and provisional development (or becoming). Changes in childhood and youth impact in turn on older people. Images of youth and adulthood have become blurred and confused because, for example, whilst students become older, many adults engage in activities previously associated with younger people – by enroling as students, for instance. They also stay single for longer, for another instance, so that the average age of first marriage has risen from its all-time low of 20 for women and 22 for men in 1971 to 26 and 27 today (Irwin, 1996). Simultaneously, there is a lowering of the formal adult threshold; for example, the voting age has come down along with the age for marriage without parental consent and for undertaking hire-purchase agreements, etc. Confusingly, other legal measures raise the official age of majority (to 22 for entitlement to the full National Minimum Wage, for instance). So the various phases of life in which age was linked to status have become ‘uncoupled’, as Wallace says. For, as she goes on, despite the vocational emphasis in schools and colleges, education no longer relates necessarily to work, nor marriage to childbearing. Lack of employment opportunities may have encouraged many people to remain in or return to education or training for lack of alternative options or, more positively, to gain the qualifications to increase their employment opportunities in the future. As a result, expectations have increased generally, encouraging young people to raise their aspirations for education. A wide range of new courses have been offered which are now marketed more attractively by schools and colleges competing with each other for dwindling numbers of recruits. (The second baby boom since 1945 peaked in 1983 with falling supply projected into the future thereafter. This means numbers in schools increased slightly in the early 1990s but have declined thereafter. The number of 16–19

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year olds fell from 3 million in 1990 to 2.7 million by the mid-1990s returning to three million by the end of the decade (Deakin, 1996). These statistics indicate an opportunity for an increase in resources per head in both compulsory and post-compulsory learning.) These transformations are accepted as normal by those who are born into them. Along with all the other changes now taken for granted, staying on in education has also become normalised, except for a minority. As has been noted, there are more than 5 million full-and part-time further and higher education students in the UK with half a million more promised by government for 2002. In this great mass of adult and younger students those in further education can no longer be divided from those in higher education. Indeed, despite Dearing’s efforts to separate the two sectors, the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act for the first time legally recognised the historical and logical connection between them. So today in the new ‘Mass Higher Education’ (Scott, 1995), on one side are students whose preexisting cultural capital is still legitimated by elite higher education. On the other, in further education and elsewhere, are those with special educational needs and on programmes requiring participation in training or work experience as a condition of receipt of workfare. Between these two groups and spread across the universities and colleges, the participation of the mass of students and trainees, adults as well as younger people, is also often prompted by unemployment. This has implications for the motivation that is widely recognised as crucial to learning. The new situation does, however, offer possibility for change as the new, Americanised system of post-compulsory further and higher education, while it cools more students out at a later stage than the previous early cut off points, also allows more students to drift up the system. If just the one third of the 18–21 year olds who can now be expected to progress to higher education, together with many more adults, can be helped to think creatively and generally by their extended formal learning experiences, this represents a major cultural change for society. On the other hand, if this third of labour market entrants and others are bamboozled, not only by postmodern academic approaches which deny

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any possible coherence to learning, but also by a narrow and instrumental focus on outcomes or competences for nonexistent future occupations, then the new Americanised further and higher continuing adult education and training will only preserve archaic social distinctions through academic certification, while creating new divisions between an uncertified ‘underclass’ and the rest. Education at all levels must, therefore, move beyond competence without reverting to academic subjects and technical courses. As employment – particularly the prospect of one occupation for the whole of a working life – becomes increasingly less relevant for defining social identity, many young people now have periods of education and training in which they move from one course or scheme to another without ever entering full-time, secure employment. This pattern of life is reaching steadily up the age range to include wider social groups beyond those for whom it has for long been habitual. Young people – whether they are students or not – increasingly form part of a large casualised labour market, one whose patterns of contract working are also extending up (and down, through similar employment of the semi-retired elderly) into the whole of employment. This combination of education with what have been called ‘McJobs’ not only makes it harder for students to complete their studies but detracts from much of the personal meaning they might once have had for the smaller numbers previously pursuing them. Learning post-16 has become just a part of a pattern of learning and earning that is established early by workexperience and part-time work while at school, through sixth form or FE and on into higher education, with recurrent returns to full- or part-time learning from employment or unemployment thereafter. Despite – or perhaps because of – the relentless vocational pressures for conformity to which education at all levels now subjects students, alternative youth cultures generally oppose the whole work ethic, or what Aronowitz and DiFazio (1994) called ‘the Dogma of Work’, which derives identity from occupation. It is a commonplace to remark that as employment loses its centrality in social life, consumer and leisure identities become more important. There is a contradiction, however, in that conventional consumer and leisure

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identities are harder to sustain without regular income and this has been widely held to partly account for the proliferation of counter-cultures amongst the young and not so young (or amongst the young at heart). Many in the new mass of students working their way through further, higher and continuing education and training are beginning to shape such a challenge in the ways in which they struggle to make lives for themselves in the circumstances in which they find themselves. While the student rebellions of the 1960s expressed a similar counter-cultural alternative, they were associated with a very different period of economic expansion and relative prosperity. The return of stagnation in the economy means that the same frustration is likely to recur, only this time for the far larger numbers graduating with devalued qualifications in debt and unemployed. The contradiction between a preparation for work that may not exist at the end of the course is more clearly apparent to more students and their teachers than ever before. For which students have not at some time been dissatisfied with the answer that the purpose of their study is to gain entry to an occupation that can very often no longer be guaranteed or that is restricted to only a very limited exercise of the capabilities and intelligence that they may have begun to develop during their formal education? The expression of such frustration is therefore a permanent possibility in a ‘Foundation’ and ‘Lifelong Learning’ system that functions at every level to control as well as to inform its students, particularly in the generalised knowledge that employers now say they require for the ‘employability’ of a workforce able to adapt flexibly to a variety of changing demands and not trained to perform only particular limited operations. Such generalised knowledge could also give a greater critical understanding of society as a whole and many teachers are dedicated to educating their students in such a spirit. (See, for example, the interviews with FE lecturers reported in Ainley and Bailey, 1997, and with HE teachers in Ainley, 1994). Many teachers at all levels in universities, colleges and schools oppose the restriction of study to vocational competence and seek to make connections between isolated and disconnected programmes of study – although the latest

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academic sociological orthodoxy of postmodernism abjures such ‘totalisations’. An important part of the real cultural revolution – as opposed to the Confederation of British Industry’s pseudo-’skills revolution’ – to which education at all levels might then lead is democratic debate and determination. This, rather than market determination, should form an integral part of all student experience. It would lead to a real empowerment of learners and teachers, rather than the rhetoric of empowerment through consumer choice of modules in the marketplace. Independent study negotiated on terms of equality through contracts between learners and the organisers or facilitators of their learning offers the opportunity of going beyond this market determination to genuinely new and possibly more open and higher levels of learning, discovery and creation. For it is not for educators to determine the level of closure to which an individual’s mind should be open. It is up to individual students to determine their own beliefs in the light of the evidence available to them. This is the ‘criticality’ which Barnett (1998) sought to attain by integrating reason with morality in higher education. Education at all levels should provide students with the conceptual tools and the general thinking skills to question received ideas. Thus individual students can subject their own hypotheses, ideas and claims to truth generally to the relevant criteria, whether of scientific experiment, logical proof, social research or technical practice. They can then defend the conclusions they have arrived at and the forms of their expression (which in the arts, may include exhibition and performance) in discussion with fellow students, teachers and others. They can, moreover, also acknowledge the point at which their truth-claims no longer depend on proof, but are a statement of faith or an admission of prejudice. Nor can they deny that their thought is in some sense ideological, that it is – as well as a more of less adequate conception of the reality with which they are dealing – expressive of an interest in or perspective upon that reality which it represents. Moreover, that opening or closing one or other system of thought and means of ordering the information they have acquired to another level accepted as encompassing and determining it, is, as well as an aesthetic, logical or practical

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choice, also a moral or political decision that may require democratic endorsement as well as rational agreement to find a wider acceptance. For all learning is essentially a communication of debate in the broadest sense since meanings are created through culture and not discovered but negotiated by individuals who thus regulate their relations with each other. The recognition of this process and the part played in it by education at all levels can be facilitated by the integration of elements of independent study into all courses for all students and by the practise of a rational and reflective pedagogy by their teachers. Another of the many responsibilities the formal learning system now assumes more than ever before, therefore, is that of affording students of all sorts opportunities to appropriate the cultures and technologies of the past on their own terms for their own common purposes (Denby, 1996). The world belongs to all of us, older and younger alike, but in the last analysis it belongs to the young. It is for them that we must begin to change the nature of the learning that society offers. This is not in order to control ‘the new minds of each generation’, but to set all our minds free. So that, as William Godwin wrote over 200 years ago when the first political revolution of the European Enlightenment accompanied the first industrial revolution, ‘the people should understand their own affairs, and, understanding, become inclined to conduct them.’ This requires a new direction for learning policy from that outlined in this book.

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Subject Index ‘academic drift’ 17 academics/academicism 140 et seq see also Knowledge, ‘Official’ academic vocationalism 145 active labour market policy 9, 161 Adam Smith Institute 171 adult education 15, 20, 153 see also ‘lifelong learning’ Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU) 123 apprenticeship 12, 14, 17, 31, 42, 46, 80, 82–3, 84, 91, 98, 100, 120, 126 see also Modern Apprenticeships Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) 96 Assisted Places 119, 121, 168 behaviourism 16, 31, 93, 195 Beveridge Report (1943) 27, 35, 46 Black Papers 72–3 Bullock Report (1975) 76 ‘Butskellism’ 28 Campaign for Free Education 131 Careers Service 114, 124 Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) 100 Central Training Council 83 Charterism 111 Chartism 6 childcare 13, 152 City Technology Colleges (CTCs) 102, 106, 107, 119, 157 Class, ‘middle’, ruling, ‘working’, etc., and class recomposition 15, 16, 24, 33 et seq, 37, 39, 40–1, 50, 53, 55, 56, 67, 70, 71, 78, 80, 85, 122, 128, 132, 171, 187, 191

‘new middle working’ 133, 172 et seq see also ‘underclass’ Communications and Information Technology (CIT) 24, 92, 128, 132, 135, 138, 142, 166, 171, 175, 181, 184, 186, 188, 195–6, 199, 201, 202, 204 et seq Community Development Programme (CDP) 75, 160 competence 21, 26, 31, 93, 94, 95, 138, 153, 177, 178, 184 et seq, 195, 196, 210 Comprehensive Spending Review 154, 163 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) 83, 105, 109, 123, 129, 162, 177–8, 179, 195, 212 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) 146 ‘Contracting State’ 22, 108 et seq, 117, 129, 136, 150, 155, 159, 163, 166, 198, 199 ‘core skills’ see ‘key skills’ ‘corporate state’/corporatism 15, 17, 28–9, 110, 121 Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) 138, 139, 143 cultural capital 56, 73, 133, 169 democracy 6–7, 24, 26, 60, 89, 91, 102, 129, 136, 142, 150, 158, 163, 164, 198, 201, 202, 212, 213 Department for Education and Employment (DfEE)/Department for Education (DfE)/Department of Education and Science (DES)/Ministry of Education 8, 16, 18, 19, 60, 75, 78, 83,

227

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Department for Education and Employment – continued 96, 98, 101, 102, 103, 107, 115, 116, 119, 126, 159, 169 Department of Employment (DE)/Ministry of Labour 17, 18, 19, 85, 90, 96, 98, 99 102, 105, 108, 112, 113, 114–15, 125, 126 Department of Trade and Industry (DTI)/Board of Trade 19, 84, 105, 115, 126, 136, 159 ‘diploma devaluation’/‘qualification inflation’ 20, 128, 133, 146, 189 ‘dumbing down’ 25, 192 et seq, 204 ecology 206–7 Education Act (1918) 84 Education Act (1944) 14, 27, 33–4, 36, 40, 45, 46, 59, 60, 84, 118, 197 Education Act (1988) 18, 60, 103, 106, 116 117, 118 et seq, 125, 159, 198 Education Action Zones (EAZs) 23, 157, 160, 204 Education Priority Areas (EPAs) 74–5, 160 ‘employability’ 19, 22, 24, 171 et seq, 211 Employment Training (ET) 108, 112 Employment and Training Act (1973) 17, 90, 91 Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative (EHEI) 102, 103–4 European Union 13, 161, 162, 163, 164 examinations: A-level 18, 45, 86, 95, 125, 126–7, 128–9, 181, modular 128, 192 A/S-level 128 baccalauriat 203 BTEC 127 CSE 42, 54, 77

degree 42, 52, 53, 137, 138–9, 143, 146, modular 128 eleven-plus 38, 54, 61, 66, 69, 71, 77 GCSE 54, 76, 95, 124, 127, 172 GNVQ 95, 125, 126-7, 128 O-level 42, 54, 77, 185 ‘flexibility’/‘flexible workforce’ 122, 178, 179, 188 ‘foundation learning’ 2, 8, 21, 119, 158, 162, 204, 205 franchising in further and higher education 130, 153 Fulton Committee (1968) 90 Funding Agency for Schools (FAS) 119 Further and Higher Education Act (1992) 116, 119–20, 125, 132, 149, 151, 157, 198, 209 Further Education 8, 15, 17, 19, 20, 46, 65, 82, 83, 85–6, 87, 94, 103, 107, 114, 118, 120, 126, 130, 135–6, 149 et seq, 160, 170, 176, 185, 207, 209, 211 ‘tertiary modern’ 125 Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) 107, 149 et seq, 158, 159 funding methodology 151 et seq Restructuring Fund 154 G8 162, 179 gender see women globalisation 23, 32, 33, 89, 144, 158, 162, 167, 198 ‘Great Debate on Education’ 76, 97, 116 Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI) 62, 63 Hickox, M. 191 Higher Education 2, 6, 8, 15, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 31, 44, 45, 46, 52–3, 54, 56–7, 62, 65, 76, 77–8, 81, 85, 95, 102, 103, 116–17, 120, 127, 129 et seq,

Subject Index 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 170, 185, 207, 209, 211 graduate employment 137–8, 177–8, 189 postgraduate students 130, 139, 140 research in 2, 19, 117, 136, 143, 144, 202, 204 student grants/loans/fees 116, 130, 131, 137, 177 student movement 81, 197, 211 Hillcole Group 201 human capital theory 64, 93, 167, 178 Ince Report (1945) 46 Independent Study 203, 212, 213 Individual Learning Accounts (ILAs) 114, 135, 155, 160 Industrial Lead Bodies 127 Industrial Training Act (1964) 83–4 Industrial Training Boards (ITBs) 17 Information Technology Centres (ITEC) 104 Inner City Task Force 104 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 50, 128, 203 IQ tests 16, 26, 30, 31, 34, 38, 54, 65, 73, 205 Investing in People (IiP) 109 Jobseekers’ Allowance and Jobseekers’ Act (1996) 161, 175, 179

22,

Kennedy Report (1997) 20, 154 ‘key skills’ 127, 139, 152, 186–7 knowledge, academic/’Official’ 5, 6, 10, 31, 34, 40, 50, 53, 56–7, 71, 73, 81, 91, 96, 147, 169 generalised 5, 48, 56, 73, 127, 188, 194–5, 196, 200, 211 reproduction 9, 19, 159 policy 10, 29 production 10, 14, 159 vocational 5

229

see also ‘really useful knowledge’ ‘knowledgeskills’ 10, 201 labour, manual and mental 5, 16, 31, 40, 57, 71, 73, 77, 80, 92, 122–3, 132–3, 171, 184–5, 195, 201 ‘learning society’ 3, 11, 13, 129, 176, 179, 193, 196, 202 ‘lifelong learning’ 2, 8, 11, 20, 21, 24, 42, 119, 122, 146, 157, 158, 159, 162, 179, 205 literacy 7, 12–13, 25, 76, 123, 169, 191–2, 194, 204 strategy 8, 12–13 Local Education Authorities (LEAs) 16, 46, 59, 68, 78, 85, 102, 105, 106, 113, 119, 124, 136, 149, 150, 155, 157, 158, 169 Local Enterprise Companies see Training and Enterprise Councils Lockwood Report (1964) 63 Lower Attaining Pupils’ Project (LAPP) 103 Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Corporate Plan 91 Maastricht Treaty 161 Macfarlane Report (1981) 86 Manpower Services Commission (MSC) 8, 17–18, 90 et seq, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 127 mass media 3, 25, 39, 53, 57, 81, 155, 175, 185, 192–4, 200 McJobs 210 meritocracy 30, 43, 53, 77 mixed economy old 15, 28, 88, 121 new 22, 23, 24–5, 110, 117, 121, 136, 163, 168, 198 Modern Apprenticeships 19, 125, 126, 153 monetarism 18, 64, 99, 147, 161 see also Thatcherism and Reaganomics

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Subject Index

National Certificate 127 National Commission on Education 167 National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ) 93, 126–7, 193, 195 National Curriculum 1, 14, 19, 45, 95, 118, 119, 123, 125, 126, 177, 195, 204 National Diploma 127 National Education and Training Targets (NTETs) 21, 122, 123, 127, 155 National Minimum Wage 208 National Training Task Force (NTTF) 112 National Record of Achievement (NRA) 127 National Union of Teachers (NUT) 37, 62, 63, 76, 105, 124 National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) 93–4, 123, 125, 126–7, 139, 193 ‘New Deal’ 176–7, 179 New Left 197 ‘new public management’ 166 New Start 176 New Training Initiative (NTI) 92, 100, Newsom Report 1963 61, 66, 77 ‘new vocationalism’ 120 New Workers’ Scheme 104 Nexus Education and Training Group 2, 169 Nolan Committee (1994) 149, 150 Non-Advanced Further Education (NAFE) 104, 105 Norwood Report (1943) 34 Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) 159, 169 Open University 65 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 9, 14, 96, 109, 162 Oxbridge 7, 31, 52–3, 65, 138, 139, 141, 143–4

‘parity of esteem’ 116, 126, 128 Parliamentary Select Committee on Education (1997–8) 154, 168 payments by results 1–2 pedagogy 66, 145, 180, 201, 203 Plowden Report (1967) 65–6, 74 polytechnic education 5–6, 84 polytechnics 17, 19, 68, 78–9, 114, 117, 118, 131, 138, 141, 150, 152, 170 see also Higher Education Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (PCFC) 150 postmodernism 147–8, 170, 165, 167, 180, 200, 209–10, 212 poverty, ‘new’ 173–4 prison population 172 Private Finance Initiative (PFI) 121, 164 et seq, 168 Private Industry Councils (PICs) 112 professions/ professionalism 16, 29–31, 34, 52–3, 56, 120, 125, 133, 141 et seq proletarianisation of the professions/professionalisation of the proletariat 121, 146, 177, 186 teachers’ 45, 62, 70, 73, 74, 81, 87, 103, 177, 199 Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) 173 Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) 126, 138, 159 qualification inflation see ‘diploma devaluation’ Quality Assessment Agency (QAA) 139, 159 quangos/‘quango state’ see ‘Contracting State’, also Nolan quago 90–1 ‘race’ and racism 39, 72, 170 ‘really useful knowledge’ 6, 91, 199 Red-Green Study Group 201

Subject Index Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) 164 regionalism/‘new regionalism’ 158 Robbins Report 1963 16, 61, 65, 69, 77, 78 Robbins principle 76, 131, 203 School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) 126–7 schools community 75, 169 comprehensive 16, 17, 36, 54, 57, 59 et seq, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 82, 86–7, 103, 158, 169, 170, 197 elementary 48, 51–2 exclusion and supension from 172 grammar 14, 16, 34, 36, 37–8, 41, 52, 54, 66, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 82, 86–7, 106, 118, 119, 129, 168, 204 Grant Maintained (GM)/Foundation 119, 122, 157, 158, 169 league tables 2, 172 Local Management of (LMS) 118, 121, 169 nursery 130, 190 primary 2, 15, 57, 66, 73–4, 81 private 15, 29, 22, 36–7, 41, 45, 50, 55, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79, 105, 121, 133, 168, 197 secondary modern 34–5, 36, 41, 69 selective/specialist 167–8 sixth forms 18, 19, 20, 31, 71, 85, 86, 87, 102, 120, 125, 126, 130, 137, 155, 170 technical 16, 17, 34, 36, 82 tripartite 27 et seq, 34, 36, 38, 59 et seq, 82, 119, 127, 158, 197 but see also ‘tertiary tripartism’ uniforms 200 Schools Council 62–3, 64, 76, 97, 124

231

Schools Standards and Framework Bill 168 ‘Scottish solution’ 128, 203 sixth-form colleges 86, 114, 159 et seq, 170, 207 skill(s) see knowledge 92–3, 132, 180 et seq, 200 ‘core’/‘key’ see ‘key skills’ formation 9–10 multiskilling 184, 187 polarisation 21, 181, 187 semi- and ‘unskilled’ 35, 40, 43, 44, 80, 162 ‘shortages’ 95, 109, 176 ‘transfer’/‘transferability’ 7, 51, 52, 93, 128, 138, 187, 188 social exclusion 21, 168–9, 172, 176 ‘social partnership’ see corporatism/corporate state Social Security Review 1988 107, 175 sociology, old and new orthodoxies in 30, 147 definition of social class qv 41, 132–3 of education 37, 62 Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) 2, 122, 126, 157, 190 students see higher education Taylor Report (1963) 64 teachers see professions Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) 102–3, 104, 106 tertiary colleges 20, 82 et seq, 203 ‘tertiary tripartism’ 127 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 91, 96, 100, 104, 105, 108, 162 Training Agency/Training Commission/Training Enterprise and Education Division (TEED) 108, 112, 115 Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs)/Local Enterprise

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Subject Index

Companies (LECs) in Scotland 109, 110, 111–13, 114, 122, 126, 127, 149, 159, 164 ‘underclass’ 2, 21, 122, 133, 161, 171 et seq, 210 unemployment 9, 19, 22, 46–7, 66, 88, 89, 91, 96, 107, 108, 112, 120 et seq, 155, 161, 162, 172, 175–6, 178, 179, 181, 208 Unified Vocational Preparation (UVP) 98 universities see Higher Education Universities Central Admissions System (UCAS) 137 University for Industry (UfI) 135 University Grants Council (UGC) 44, 131 Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) 107 Vouchers 203 see also Individual Learning Accounts

welfare state 9, 21–2, 117, 121, 131, 158, 160, 161–2, 202 settlement, old 15, 18, 27 et seq, 47–8, 89 and new 171, 179, 193, 197 women and ‘women’s work’ 35, 43, 72, 80, 93, 193, 207 work ethic 33, 84, 108, 202, 210 workfare/workfare state 18, 21–2, 23, 121, 166, 175 World Bank 9 Youthaid 114 youth and community work 15 Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) 98, 100, 102, 120 Youth Training Scheme (YTS)/Youth Training (YT)/Network Training (NT)/Youth Traineeship (YT)/National Traineeship (NT) 8, 18, 22, 99, 100–1, 102, 104, 107, 112, 114, 118, 120, 125, 126, 176

Name Index Adamski, V. 207 Addison, P. 34 Aldrich, R. 64, 114 Allen, M. 63 Amin, S. 32 Anderson, H. 42 Apple, M. 6, 10, 31, 147 Aristotle 1, 51 Armstrong, P. 58 Arnold, M. 72 Aronowtiz, S. 121, 146–7, 210 Ashton, D. 51, 162 Atkinson, J. 183 Auerbach, P. 12–13 Avis, J. 160 Bacon, F. 15 Bahro, B. 206 Bailey, B. 84, 137, 153, 154, 170, 177, 189, 211 Bailey, F. 57, 147, 196 Baker, K. 106, 118, 119, 157 Ball, C. 132 Ball, S. 2 Barber, M. 34, 81, 157, 167, 195 Barnett, C. 50 Barnett, R. 212 Baron, S. 111 Barton, D. 7 Bateson, G. 38 Beaumont, G. 127 Bell, R. 62 Bender, S. 177 Benn, C. 59, 72, 75, 86, 96, 121, 168, 170, 202 Benn, T. 68 Bentham, J. 111 Bergendal, G. 10 Bernstein, B. 76 Biffen, J. 170–1 Blackwell, T. 28 Blair, T. 13, 23, 70, 130, 157, 162, 163, 170, 179, 194

Blunkett, D. 157, 167, 168, 179 Boddington, S. 10 Booth, A. 98, 101 Bourdieu, P. 55, 56, 133–4, 187, 189 Boyle, E. 60, 61, 66 Boyson, R. 60 Bowles, S. 44 Brighouse, T. 54–5 Broadfoot, P. 133 Brosio, R. 6–7 Brown, G. 7, 13, 162, 163, 170, 179 Bunn, S. 5 Burgess, T. 17 Burke, J. 95 Burt, C. 73 Bush, G. 23, 164 Butler, R. 28, 36, 41 Byers, S. 157, 158 Callaghan, J. 18, 60, 76 Capey, J. 127 Carlisle, M. 101 Carr, W. 201 Carter, M. 27, 43–4 Cassels, J. 100 Chandler, J. 110 Channon, G. 81 Chitty, C. 59, 86, 96, 170, 202 Churchill, W. 28 Clarke, J. 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 77 Claxton, G. 201 Clinton, B. 23, 165 Coates, K. 47 Cobb, J. 55 Cochrane, A. 164 Coffield, F. 109, 110 Cohen, P. 101 Coleman, R. 80 Collins, H. 196 Cooley, M. 1, 91, 92 Corney, M. 8, 90, 92, 95, 100,

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Name Index

110, 176 Crook, D. 114 Crosland, A. 17, 63, 69, 78, 79, 88 Curtis, S. 35 Davies, N. 172, 173, 174 Deakin, B. 43, 207, 209 Dearing, R. 19–20, 78, 125 et seq, 130, 131, 136, 137, 155, 170, 187, 203 Denby, D. 213 Descartes, R. 57 Dewey, J. 6 Dickens, C. 38, 111 Dombey, H. 12 Donald, J. 97 Dore, R. 189 Drucker, P. 167 Dukakis, G. 112 Durkheim, E. 30 Ebert, F. 50 Eccles, D. 64 Edwards, T. 183, 188 Elias, N. 3 Eliot, T. 3 Engels, F. 192 Erikson, E. 208 Evans, B. 112 Eysenck, H. 73 Fairley, J. 96, 100 Field, F. 161 Field, J. 12, 180 Finn, D. 18, 90, 98, 125, 177, 179, 184 Foot, M. 96, 98 Ford, H./Fordism 16, 29, 31-2, 40, 44, 67, 73, 92, 158, 167, 174, 184 Fowler, N. 107, 112 Fraser, J. 131 Freud, S. 30 Fulton, O. 131 Gaitskell, H. 28 Gallie, D. 180 Garonna, P. 111

Gortz, A. 190–1 Gibbons, M. 10, 140 Gilchrist, K. 81 Gintis, H. 44 Godwin, W. 213 Goldthorpe, J. 47 Gould, B. 162 Gramsci, A. 81, 148 Green, A. 11, 48–9, 122, 123, 125, 159 Green, E. 36 Green, F. 51, 162, 180 Greenslade, R. 37 Grootings, P. 207 Grosvenor, I. 72 Habermas, J. 6 Hall, J. 41 Hall, P. 192 Hall, V. 154 Halsey, A. 75, 82 Hamilton, M. 7 Handy, C. 44 Hansen, S. 64 Harber, C. 202 Hardy, T. 56 Hargreaves, D. 71 Harley, S. 147 Harris, R. 71 Hartnett, A. 201 Harvey, D. 144, 148 Hayek, F. 99 Hayes, C. 92 Hayward, J. 206 Healey, D. 18, 89 Heath, A. 82 Heath, E. 17, 60, 61, 89, 90, 101 Heath-Stubbs, J. 193 Heckscher, C. 178 Hennessey, P. 160 Hickox, M. 191 Hilliard, J. 89 Hirsch, E. 12 Hobbs, D. 39 Hobsbawm, E. 25, 32, 39–40, 46, 48 Hodge, M. 168 Hoggart, R. 41 Holland, G. 100, 102, 103, 115

Name Index Holmes, E. 3 Howe, G. 99 Hutton, W. 162 Irwin, S. 208 Jackson, B. 37, 38, 43 Jefferson, T. 77 Jenkins, R. 69 Jennings, A. 63 Jensen, J. 64 Jessop, B. 121 Jessop, G. 93, 94 Johnson, P. 105 Jones, G. 120, 203 Jones, K. 63, 81, 85, 97 Jones, M. 110, 121 Jordan, B. 172 Joseph, K. 14 Keegan, W. 161 Keep, E. 12, 162, 180 Kelsey, J. 162 Keynes, M./Keynesianism 18, 29, 32, 47, 64, 88, 110, 147 Kinnock, N. 23, 70 Kogan, M. 63, 68 Kopsch, H. 34 Kumar, K. 49 Laborit, H. 7, 135 Landes, D. 48 Larkin, P. 66 Lave, J. 187, 190, 198 Lawlor, E. 178 Lawson, N. 90 Lawson, R. 173 Layard, R. 65 Leavis, F. 72, 111 Lee, F. 147 Levitas, R. 70 Lipietz, A. 29, 47, 67, 174, 193 Lockwood, D. 47 Low, G. 90, 102 Lowe, R. 27 Lynn, R. 73 Macmillan, H. Macmillan, M.

31, 67 90

235

Major, J. 23, 111, 115, 130, 150, 192, 194 Maritain, J. 57 Marsden, D. 37, 43 Marshall, R. 44 Martinez, P. 153, 170 Marwick, A. 37 Marx, K./Marxism 5–6, 30, 37, 40, 44, 73, 135, 148, 192, 206 May, R. 57 Mayhew, K. 12, 163, 180 McClure, R. 150, 152 McJobs 210 Meighan, R. 74 Midwinter, E. 75 Milton, J. 81 Moon, B. 54 Moore, R. 93, 191 Morgan, K. 34, 144 Morris, W. 4, 92, 206 Moser, C. 41 Mulgan, G. 179 Murdoch, R. 193 Nairn, T. 67 Newman, J. 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 200 Newman, H. 52 Nicholson, B. 105 O’Brien, R. 99 Offe, C. 21 O’Hear, A. 193 O’Reilly, K. 132 Parsons, C. 172 Parsons, T. 30, 208 Passeron, J-C. 56, 187, 189 Peck, J. 121 Pedley, R. 61 Perkin, H. 53 Piaget, J. 65–6, 73 Plaskow, M. 62 Plato 5, 6, 35 Polanyi, M. 10 Power, M. 199 Pratt, J. 17, 150 Prentice, R. 68 Prescott, W. 62

236 Quattrocchi, A.

Name Index 67

Raffe, D. 116 Rainbird, H. 201 Randall, C. 110 Ranson, S. 11, 21, 96, 125 Reagan, R./Reaganomics 23, 112, 164, 165 Reay, D. 74 Reeves, F. 123 Reynolds, D. 61 Rex, V. 158 Ridge, J. 82 Rikowski, G. 3 Robbins, D. 133–5, 187 Roberts, K. 39 Robertson, D. 148 Robinson, E. 68, 79 Robinson, Pamela 137 Robinson, Peter 123, 127, 129 Rose, D. 132 Rosenbrock, H. 49 Rubinstein, D. 69 Rustin, M. 158, 165 Ryan, P. 111 Saint-Just, L. 160 Salter, B. 131 Sarup, M. 70 Sayer, A. 144 Schilling, C. 36 Scott, P. 132, 136, 209 Seabrook, J. 28 Searle, C. 63 Selbourne, D. 70 Semmel, B. 11 Sennet, R. 55 Sexton, S. 119 Sheldrake, P. 83 Shute, C. 3 Silburn, R. 47 Simmel, G. 53, 111 Simon, B. 1, 11, 24, 33, 36, 42, 44, 59, 60, 61–2, 64, 69, 71, 72, 79, 118, 170, 197, 205 Sinfield, A. 88 Smith, R. 172 Smithers, A. 137

Snow, C. 42, 78 Socrates 11, 145 Spours, K. 124 Standing, G. 31 Stenhouse, L. 62 Stewart, M. 61, 69 Straton, K. 112 Sullivan, M. 61 Tapper, T. 131 Taylor, F./Taylorism 16, 184 Tebbit, N. 100, 101, 102, 105 Thatcher, M./Thatcherism 18, 22, 23, 60, 89, 99 et seq, 105, 106, 108, 112, 115, 118, 119, 124, 131, 132, 141, 150, 157, 164, 165, 171, 197, 198, 200 Trevor-Roper, H. 50 Vickers, G. 4, 25 Vickerstaff, S. 83, 121 Wallace, C. 110, 120, 203, 207–8 Watson, J. 185 Waugh, C. 192 Webb, S. 11, 79 Weber, M. 30 Weinstock, A. 98 Wenger, E. 190, 198 White, J. 202, White, M. 180 Whitty, G. 52, 74 Williams, S. 70, 97, 98 Wilkinson, E. 37, 74 Wilmott, P. 41 Wilson, H. 23, 69, 197 Wilson, W. 44, 98, 167, 173, 181 Windsor, D. 193 Winfrey, O. 192 Wolf, A. 31, 94, 95 Wright, P. 98 Young, D. 100, 101, 102, 105, 112 Young, M. 41 Young, M.J. 64, 74 Zuboff, S.

122