Abstract
How reputations change. A generation ago the UK was viewed as a model of laissez-faire educational planning in which the local school and Local Education Authority2 (LEA) had considerable autonomy over curriculum, teaching and assessment. Today England3 is seen by many as a hothouse of centrally driven educational reform, particularly in relation to what is taught and how. Constant central pressure for change runs the risk of ‘initiative fatigue’ amongst those expected to operate these levers for change. The complexity of bringing about change is frequently highlighted (Miles, 1998; Fink & Stoll, 1998; Fullan, 2001a; Hall & Hord, 2001). Sustaining improvement (Ekholm, Vandenberghe, & Miles, 1987; Fink, 2000) and scaling it up through entire systems (Elmore, 1996; Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 2002) prove even more elusive. There is now an acknowledgement by England’s Government that reform should increasingly be based less on ‘informed prescription’ by Government, a feature of reform efforts in the 1990s, and more on the ‘informed professional judgement’ of teachers (Barber, 2001).
With thanks to other members of the research team, based at the Department of Education, University of Bath and the Institute of Education, University of London, involved in writing the research report
School district
Over this period, the education policies within the UK have begun to diverge, Scotland in particular resisting some of the centralising trends. Since devolution in Wales in 1999, education policy there has begun to diverge from England
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Stoll, L., Stobart, G. (2005). Informed Consent? Issues in Implementing and Sustaining Government-Driven Educational Change. In: Bascia, N., Cumming, A., Datnow, A., Leithwood, K., Livingstone, D. (eds) International Handbook of Educational Policy. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3201-3_8
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