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Schooling and culture
Abstract
Introduction The focus of this chapter is on what is currently the period of compulsory schooling - that is, on education from five to sixteen years and thus on the primary (five to eleven) and secondary (eleven to sixteen) stages. It is difficult, though, to maintain this focus with complete precision. Policy changes, implemented from 1997 by the Labour Government, mean that most children begin their schooling at three or four and that these years are as closely regulated in their content and procedures as any other. Conversely, for increasing numbers (currently, about 40,000) of fourteen-year-olds, school is no longer the institution in which most of their learning is organised - vocational education, based in colleges of further education, or in workplaces, takes over. To add to the complexity, English secondary education has been redesigned on a principle of institutional diversity. In place of the largely non-selective, local-authority-controlled comprehensive system of the period 1965-90, there has developed a multiplicity of school types, all subject to government regulation in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment but widely different in status, in ethos, in the composition of the student population and in level of success. Post-sixteen, the principle of diversity retains its force. From 2015, participation in education or training up to the age of eighteen will become compulsory, but here, too, a wide gulf of status will separate academic provision, concentrated in school-based 'sixth forms' from the vocationally inflected courses provided in further-education colleges.
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The election of a Labour government in Britain, after 18 years of Conservative rule, has seen the emergence of a new educational discourse, based on a distinctive combination of cultural, economic and social themes. In this article, we identify the components of the discourse, and explore how it is currently deployed in arguments for educational change. Specifically, our focus is on two recent documents: All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE 1999), produced by an Advisory Committee appointed by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); and Making Movies Matter (FEWG 1999) by the Film Education Working Group, set up by the British Film Institute at the request of the DCMS. Embodying in separate ways the features of the emergent discourse, these texts also position themselves very differently in relation to current educational policy. Through a critique of the reports, we identify some of the broader difficulties of the 'cultural turn' in education, and the possibility of a more productive alternative.
School exclusions are a site of political and social contestation and in recent years statutory reforms and popular demands have focused on increasing the autonomy of head teachers. This article explores this trend and questions why, in a culture of human and children's rights, head teachers have such extensive powers within their schools and why law has, to a large extent, failed to provide a check on these powers. It does so not by doctrinal analysis of domestic and human rights law but, rather, by enquiring into how legal narratives construct the role of the head teacher and by locating the practice of exclusions within a broader social and political context. It suggests that demanding that the head teacher be unfettered in his or her decisions relating to exclusions ought not to be understood as a policy of ‘non-intervention’ or a return to a ‘reassuring’ past but, rather, as a contemporary policy that reinforces the construction of excluded pupils as marginalized non-citizens.
Incl. abstract, bib. This article combines a global, national and local perspective to study the effects if educational changes over the last 20 years on the relationship between head teachers, teachers and parents in France. Five kinds of transformations-decentralization, marketization, accountability, managerialism and professionalization-are examined in terms of their impact on definitions of the social and professional identities of educational agents and on the redistribution of power among them. The first section of the paper examines main shifts in policy and practice that these transformations were designed to produce from the perspective of policy-makers. The second section analyses the interaction between these global discourses and transformations of French educational models and realities at the level of the nation state. The third section shows how reform projects interact in very different ways with school realities in two contrasting local settings.