Introduction

As the previous chapters described, the lack of a proper and robust system of accountability and local oversight was thought to be one of the principal reasons why the Trojan Horse affair was allowed to gain such traction, and why it resulted in such a profound crisis for education and for school governance in England. School governing, as the Introduction to this book pointed out, does not operate in isolation, but has evolved according to social and political drivers forming part of a system of democratic accountability that has, over the years, mutated according to the dominant political ideology of the time. Changes in terms of what constitutes democratic accountability have also varied according to national and international policy drivers emerging in the field of education as part of a wider consensus on conceptualisations of both the state and society.

Ranson, writing in 2003, pointed out that ‘accountability’ is not an easy term to define, particularly in the context of education:

In the same article, Ranson argues that the turning point in terms of educational accountability came about some time before the Education Reform Act 1988, in the guise of then Prime Minister James Callaghan’s (1976) speech at Ruskin College, a speech that became famous for its passionate conviction regarding the necessity of a ‘great debate’ on education: a public debate about the whole purpose of education in terms of both the individual and the state. This speech represented the culmination of profound divisions between the government and the teaching profession over what constitutes a ‘good education’. It also marked the beginning of what would become a government obsession with ‘consumer interest’, ‘opening up public services to scrutiny’ and ‘customer responsiveness’, elements of the New Public Management speak that came to dominate discourses on public services from around that time onwards (for more detail on this trend, see the Introduction).