Introduction

Despite the much-heralded rhetoric of inclusion and social justice, New Labour's education policy since 1997 has lacked genuine innovation. Instead a process of policy development involving the recycling, redefinition and reconstitution of policy ideas and instruments has been evident throughout the government's period in office. Clear continuity with the previous Conservative government's marketisation of education is evident. In a third term, New Labour are committed to accelerating the expansion of specialist schools in the ‘post-comprehensive era’, including the promotion of City Academies and foundation specialist schools. There is continued focus on ‘performativity’ with the introduction of School Profiles, the Pupil Achievement Tracker and more tightly focused performance-related pay for an increasingly differentiated school workforce. The return to two-tier learning pathways is signalled in a 14-19 agenda that seeks to strengthen and extend vocational learning in schools and expand the Apprenticeship system.

New Labour's reconstitution of tried and tested policy responses can be partly explained by policy makers’ need for instant responses in an era of increasing global policy complexity. This proclivity to present the old as ‘new’ can also been seen as a means of managing the tensions and contradictions evident in a platform of education reform that is couched in the language of social inclusion, yet extends the market in education and regulates this through ever more intrusive instruments of ‘governmentality’. New Labour's laudable focus on interagency working, embedded in the national childcare strategy, Sure Start and Children’s Trusts has a compensatory flavour redolent of Fabian concepts of social regulation. The problem of underachievement is often framed by a deficit view of children and families in ‘disadvantaged’ areas. In tackling social exclusion, anti-inclusive strategies aimed at ‘re-socialising’ and ‘reeducating’ working-class children and their families are consequently deployed (Gewirtz, 2001).

The radical centre ground approach to politics espoused by Giddens (1998) contains an uneasy mixture of market and social democratic values. The social progressivism of New Labour operates within an economic realism that reifies the market concept as an inevitable adjunct of processes of globalisation and modernisation. New Labour's politics of education has shifted during the government's period in office to accommodate a reworking of progressive possibilities that foregrounds personal responsibility and employability.