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Abstract
This paper examines Fresh Start, a New Labour flagship initiative to raise education ‘standards’ in a radical and innovative way. Drawing on a qualitative study of a comprehensive school in England, I argue that the initiative added to the problems faced by the ‘failing school’ and promoted rather traditional ways of raising ‘standards’ due to the close surveillance that Fresh Start schools were subjected to. In the case studied, the needs of the pupils that the initiative was meant to address were being sacrificed in the school's construction of a ‘successful’ identity. While the initiative has now lost momentum, some lessons can still be learnt. This paper illustrates the complexity of creating a new school, as well as the need to attend to the specificities of the local context and experiences in raising ‘standards for all’ pupils.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all the participants in this study. The author would also like to acknowledge the very helpful suggestions and comments to this paper made by the anonymous referees and financial support from the Portuguese agency Foundation for Science and Technology (reference BD/15537/97).
Notes
1. The decision to provide a school with a Fresh Start is usually taken by the LEA, although the Secretary of State can also enforce the closure of a particular school when education provision is seen as having insufficient quality (DfEE, Citation2001c). Regulations to allow the implementation of Fresh Start were integrated into the Schools Standards and Framework Act 1998 (HMSO, Citation1998) and in Circulars 6/99 (DfEE, Citation1999b) and 9/99 (DfEE, Citation1999c).
2. This was how the headteachers of Fresh Start schools were labelled by the media at the time, by virtue of the task they were facing and the £70,000‐plus salaries some of them were to receive.
3. Initially, LEAs were meeting investment costs for Fresh Start using existing funds (New Deal for Schools and Standards Fund). Only in May 2000 the government announced its intention to make capital funding available (Hansard, Citation2000b).
4. Reassuring students that I was not a journalist was generally easily achieved, as they seemed satisfied with my reassurances that I was carrying out research; yet it did limit my movements in the informal spaces of the school, as teachers felt the need to be over‐vigilant with the media: after the school was depicted in negative ways on TV and in other media news, it was now limiting access to the premises. On the other hand, I also had to reassure students that I was not a teacher or another member of staff. In order to do so, I chose not to report their misbehaviour in situations in which the teacher was temporarily absent from the classroom. This was very important in helping to create complicity with students.
5. As no other data that would allow making inferences on social background were available, I used eligibility for free school meals as a proxy for poverty, which is standard practice in official statistics in England.
6. Documents that could identify the school are not fully referenced.
7. With setting, ‘Pupils are grouped according to their attainment in a particular subject’ (Ireson & Hallam, Citation2001, p. 10).
8. Barber was also the head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit within the DfEE.
9. See Barber (Citation1996) and Tomlinson (Citation1997) for their divergent views on the case.