The beginning of the 21st century was characterised by both striking changes and significant continuities in the UK educational landscape. From 2010 the role of the state in providing education came under particular scrutiny, with a new coalition government intent on implementing ‘austerity measures’ after the global economic downturn of 2008 onwards. At the same time, many of the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism inherited from the previous government persisted, albeit in an ‘intensified’ form (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2012, p 105). For instance, the previous New Labour administration's grand, nationwide school-building projects had been replaced with discourses of austerity and local control (especially under the flagship Free Schools policy for England and Wales, which, incidentally, was first suggested by New Labour). Elsewhere, in Scotland,a new curriculum afforded the opportunity for pupils at risk of school exclusion to put together a suite of activities taken from a range of learning providers, such as forest schools and care farms. Significantly, a controversial proposed reform of special educational needs provision in England (announced in May 2012) would do something similar – providing parents the control over funding to choose learning provision that would suit their child. It is also notable that several of the fifty or so schools approved to become free schools in the second wave of that programme expressly follow alternative educational philosophies – from a Steiner school in Frome, to schools in disadvantaged areas of Bradford and London that advocate ostensibly human scale values and personalised learning. Outside the UK, the neoliberalisation and marketisation of education also continues apace. In different ways, in different national contexts, a shift from ‘largely national and state-focussed control’ has created ‘contradictory forms of coordination and control, played out in different policy spaces (Brooks et al, 2012, p 10). Notably, looking across different national contexts, alternative forms of education are treated in highly variegated and similarly contradictory ways (Woods and Woods, 2009).

Against this backdrop, this chapter reflects on some of the potential, broader implications of the spatialities of alternative education, with a particular focus upon the UK learning spaces that have formed the case studies for this book.