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2003). Following their creation, these Groups were all to undergo various internal
reorganisations which will be considered below.
The 1988 ERA and the 1991 White Paper
After the 1987 election and the third successive victory for Margaret Thatcher’s
Government, “the newly elected government was immediately ready to turn the
piercing Thatcherite eye on education" (Barber 1996: 36). The radical reform
programme embodied in the 1988 Education Reform Act signalled that the market
had entered the world of education. Michael Barber quotes Stephen Ball, “sharp and
critical as ever", in describing this version of what was not so much a free market as a
franchise: “You run the restaurant, we set the menu " (Quoted in Barber 1996: 50).
Ball’s more serious analysis typifies the response of the education world to this
legislation:
At the heart of the Act is an attempt to establish the basis of an education
market. The key provisions of the Act replace the principle of equal access to
education for all with the principle of differentiation in the market place
...[through] choice, competition, diversity, funding and organisation. ”
(Ball 1990:60)
Clive Chitty, writing at a later date, recalls that the Act:
...attracted more bitter and widespread professional opposition than any piece
of legislation passed since the introduction of the National Health Service in the
second half of the 1940s.
To encapsulate its basic purpose, the 1988 Act sought to erect (or reinforce) a
hierarchical system of schooling subject both to market forces and to greater
control from the centre.
(Chitty 2004: 51)
His later analysis adds the significant factor of “greater control from the centre"
which has emerged as a clear outcome as time has passed. It seems counter-intuitive
that a move to an education market, with its implied freedom from control, should in