Introduction

The front page of the right-of-centre newspaper The Mail on Sunday on 10 November 1991 had the following headline, ‘Back to the blackboard’, with a story about how Kenneth Clarke, the then Education Secretary, planned ‘a radical overhaul of state primary schools’ (Lightfoot, 1991, p 1). The approach to be adopted was to return to whole-class teaching and subject-based learning. When New Labour took office in 1997, they said in Excellence in Schools (DfEE, 1997, p 10) that ‘in the 1996 national tests only 6 in 10 of 11 year olds reached the standard in maths and English expected for their age’, and the solution was ‘at least an hour each day devoted to both literacy and numeracy in every primary school’ (p 5). Nearly 20 years after the Clarke intervention and over 10 years after the New Labour National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, the Mail Online applauded the 2010 Conservative-led government for pledging a return to ‘traditional lessons in English and maths after warning that achievement had “flatlined” for much of Labour's time in office’ (Clark, L., 2010).

The issue of standards is an international discourse. For example, in 1983 A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) was published in the USA where ‘its conclusions were alarming, and its language was blunt to the point of being incendiary’ (Ravitch, 2010, p 24); and in 1988 the publication of Tomorrow's Schools (Government of New Zealand, 1988) led to decentralisation in New Zealand as a means of improving learning outcomes, whereby, in Codd's terms, teachers became ‘“managed professionals” in a global industry’ (2005, p 193). It seems that functional and measured standards in publicly funded schools are the problem, and, following Bacchi (2009), the approach I intend to take to understanding how this is framed and the solutions generated during New Labour's time in office (1997–2010) is about ‘the ways in which particular representations of “problems” play a central role in how we are governed’ (p xi).

The aim of this book is to describe and explain how the problem of standards has been represented through creating solutions for identified workforce deficiencies, and how New Labour constructed and deployed leaders, leading and leadership as the solution.