This article critically examines the Labour Party's policies for local school systems, focusing on its proposals for regional Directors of School Standards, for academies and free schools, and for local democracy, and offers an alternative approach.

Our current curriculum and qualifications framework is a "fragmented mess" according to many of those who teach in, and lead, our schools. How can we change it with minimal disruption, particularly after four years of often destructive meddling from above? A number of individuals and groups at school level have been working to develop a…

In this article the author argues that an incoming government should establish a new values base for educational policy focused on the well-being and educational entitlement of all children rather than the education market. A new government must prioritise learning and teaching: rather than pursuing an ideological agenda and attempting to control…

Despite claims made for them, many current education policies have perverse consequences. If all our children are to benefit from the good education they deserve, we need: forms of accountability that do not rely on school performance tables of test results; a focus on standards that embody high expectations for all; the urgent creation of a…

This article notes that the attempt to include all young people in education, an aim of Labour governments over the years, still relies on an expanded and expensive special educational needs "industry". How to include all lower attainers and those with disabilities in the education system and the economy is a political issue for a Labour…

The author is a long-time advocate inside the Labour Party for ending selective education and the 11-plus. She outlines how Labour Party frontbenchers routinely ignore or deflect calls from Party members to stand up for comprehensive education in both word and deed. As UKIP, whose policy is to extend selective education more widely, rises in the…

Tertiary-level educational provision is being increasingly fragmented by government policies, with malign consequences for students and institutions. As currently constituted, higher education works to entrench inequalities and devalue qualifications, while bipartisanship around the future of further education risks reprising past failures. What…

This article is about the "who" of policy rather than the "what". It is a plea for debate and discussion about the purposes of education. It is an argument for replacing technocratic solutions with democratic ones. It is about possibility rather than necessity.

There are problems with considering children and young people in schools as quite separate individuals, and with considering them as members of a single collectivity. The tension is represented in the use of "voice" and "voices" in educational debates. Voices in dialogue, in contrast to "children's voice", are…

Over the past four years, the UK coalition government has made significant progress in transforming the state education system. This transformation has its roots in a longer-term restructuring of education. This article argues that, in order to counter this attack, we need to build a movement around an alternative vision of education. Further, it…

This article describes how one local teachers' union branch has developed an active and imaginative campaign as it has challenged both national education policy and also the very specific attacks on schools in the community. By connecting local and national issues, and by linking struggles on pay and pensions to wider questions of policy, the…

Here, at "FORUM's" invitation, is the text of the 2014 Godfrey Thomson Trust public lecture at the University of Edinburgh. Its backdrop is the centralisation of educational decision-making in England since 1988 and the power and patronage exercised by the Secretary of State. Taking as examples recent policies on childhood,…

"Trojan Horse" has become journalistic shorthand for an apparent attempt by a small group in East Birmingham to secure control of local non-faith schools and impose policies and practices in keeping with the very conservative (Salafist and Wahhabi) version of Islam which they hold. In this article, Pat Yarker gives an account of two…

Five years on from the onset of the global financial crisis, there has been little sustained discussion of its implications for schooling. This is surprising when we consider that for the past three decades education has been shaped by assumptions about the need to prepare students for life in global capitalist economies. The consensus seems to be…

David Blunkett's "Review of Education Structures" for the Labour Party recognises that there is a chaotic and unsatisfactory situation in the English education system but its response is ambiguous and self-contradictory. Its proposals seek to normalise and regulate rather than remedy a system in which lack of democratic…