by Ken Jones
The course of educational reform in England has been
broader, deeper, and faster moving than that of any other country of Western
Europe, cutting deeply into what remained, after Thatcherism, of the postwar
policy settlement.
No sector or strand of education has been unaffected
by a programme that ranges—as other chapters have demonstrated—from large-scale
privatisation to micro level classroom reform. Yet, despite a certain, persistent
level of grievance, this is a programme that has not encountered forceful
opposition. Teachers’ unhappiness with an assessment regime based on high
stakes testing has been well publicised, without being translated into a
collective response. Discontent with the government’s programme for “academy”
schools—state-funded privately run institutions—has resulted in a number of
local strikes, and in a lively national campaign, but not one conducted on a
mass scale. School and university teachers have taken occasional, limited
action over pay—the NUT’s one-day strike in 2008 was the first national strike
since 1987. University teachers have fought local campaigns against
redundancies (for instance, London Metropolitan University 2004, Keele 2008),
but have not effectively challenged a policy that aims to align Higher
Education with business needs. Amongst university students, opposition to the
imposition of tuition fees was initially strong, but has waned since, with the
passing of the 2004 Higher Education Act, fees became law.