The 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) in England was a turning point in educational policy. To put it in summary terms: before that, the system was conceived as a tripartite partnership model between central government, local education authorities and schools and the teaching profession, providing governance through the ‘assumptions of professional expertise reinforced by the orderly controls of rational bureaucracy’ (Ranson, 2008, p 205); from that point, central government took a much more active role through steering and direct intervention. Governments since then – Conservative, Labour and Coalition (the latter taking office in 2010, involving the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties as partners) – have used their central role to give a specific character to the education system.

The 1988 ERA ushered in a national curriculum, a national system of student testing, publication of schools’ test results in the form of league tables, a tougher regime of school inspections operated by a newly created organisation (the Office for Standards in Education, Ofsted), more open enrolment of pupils (giving parents the right to express a preference for which school their child should attend), funding of schools based on numbers of pupils, and devolution to schools of responsibility for managing their income. These were modified, but not altered in their essentials, by the Labour Government which took office in 1997, and since then there has been an extension and in some ways radical development of some of the key policy directions established by that time.

Central government extended its influence over pedagogy – through initiatives such as the national numeracy and literacy strategies in which schools were pressed to follow a particular teaching approach, and the promotion of priorities like personalised learning, where the particular needs and current knowledge of the individual learner is supposed to be at the centre the teaching strategy.