Fantasies of empowerment: mapping neoliberal discourse in the coalition government’s schools policy

Abstract

The swift nature of school reform enacted by the new Conservative-led coalition government has sparked debate over the future of state education in Britain. While the government rhetoric suggests a decisive break with past policies, there is evidence to suggest that these reforms constitute the next stage of a long revolution in education reform, centred around neoliberal market discourse. In the following paper, I examine the current government’s education policy discourse and, by employing techniques of post-structuralist discourse analysis, reveal the government’s attempts to rearticulate education around the logics of market, responsibilisation and self-esteem, which act to shift responsibility for social problems from the state to the individual. Furthermore, I shall argue that such rearticulation has been coupled with an ideological fantasy of ‘empowerment’, which conceals the subordination of actors to these neoliberal logics by constituting the parent and, more recently, the teacher as powerful actors who have been freed from legal and bureaucratic constraints forced upon them by central government.

Keywords:

• discourse/analysis
• critical analysis

Notes

1. Even the Liberal Democrats’ flagship policy of the ‘pupil premium’ appeared in Conservative literature (including those working papers cited above) some time before it became an important Lib Dem pledge, although the Conservatives may well have got this idea from Labour’s earlier ‘Pupil Learning Credits’ pilot scheme (see DfES 2001).