Introduction

On 28 November 2021, The Sunday Telegraph published a front page story under the headline: ‘Woke’ anti-Government speakers barred from Whitehall. Malnick (2021), the journalist who broke the story, reveals that a leaked memo to civil servants states that they must do ‘due diligence’ on proposed speakers regarding their public statements (for example, social media), and that they must not issue invitations to those who have ‘spoken against key government policies’. The aim is to remove ‘woke and politicised’ (NP) views and activities from policymaking processes. Such a public revelation of censorship raises questions about the relationship between the state, public policy, and knowledge production, and while education research in general, and the EPKP projects in particular, may demonstrate a plurality of ideas, evidence, and debates as resources for education policy, it is the case that oligarchic club sovereignty holds dominion. While the current UK government rails against what is labelled ‘cancel culture’, the impression is given that cancelling researchers and research is integral to claimocracy scoping and strategy (Malnick 2021), and so it seems that policy violence based on authority, legitimacy, and intelligence just became more publicly brutal. For CEPS this unfolding contextual setting matters, and it raises issues not only about policy actors who are in core and privileged vantage points, who espouse approved-of viewpoints and fabricate libertarian standpoints, who relate and exchange within and between official regimes, but it also requires that attention is given to the othered and marginal who have their ideas, evidence, and debates negated because independent data and analysis reveal how knowledge production actually works, and might work differently. Indeed, CEPS research and researchers, that includes the EPKP projects, have been labelled woke and cancelled, and this is why such research is vital.

I begin this final chapter with a summary of the gains made through writing this political sociology of and about the education reform claimocracy through the TPSF, and I then go on to examine how and why developing intellectual activism requires a political sociology for and by critical education policy studies.