Informed Consent? Issues in Implementing and Sustaining Government-Driven Educational Change

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).