A progressive response to the structural changes in the education system requires a transformation in the way we relate to and conceive the system. The creation of more sponsored and quasi-independent schools brings dangers of fragmentation and subjection of education to private interests. These remain, nevertheless, within the socialised sphere of relationships, i.e. within a sphere that remains in public ownership and/or funded collectively by state finance. The system being created is not a monolithic vehicle for business values, but an arena where contending influences and ideals are being played out. The policy developments we are in the midst of are a response to the limitations of a centralised socialised system – not socialised systems per se: ‘… the principal cause of the failure of what we might call the social democratic model to achieve its objectives is not the size of the state but the intellectual framework in which it operates’ (Ormerod, 2010, p 10). We need, therefore, to ‘think constructively beyond the pressures of the present’, as Stephen Ball observes, and ‘to struggle to think differently about education policy before it is too late’ (Ball, 2007, p 191). From a school improvement perspective, David Hargreaves argues, ‘In an era of diminishing centralisation, accelerating the rate and depth of school improvement … requires a new vision’ (Hargreaves, 2010, p 3).

The dynamic of the emerging system is a self-organising one – a recasting of the mutualist tradition (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986/2009, p 15) in a systems context, which involves individual and organisational actors who bring diverse kinds of capital. It is bubbling up in various ways, from diverse perspectives. One way is through the initiatives, such as those promoting ‘system redesign’, alluded to in the previous chapter. Another is that of community organising, which in the US shows ‘how positive educational change often starts beneath or beyond government policy’, in church basements or union offices, on street corners or the internet, and ‘how parents and communities can be so much more than objects of political intervention or recipients of government services’ (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, p 62).