English Education Policy after New Labour: Big Society or Back to Basics?

This article considers possible future directions for education policy and public service governance under the Conservative‐led coalition government. The article considers the extent to which Conservatives might develop a distinctive strategy for managing public services that breaks decisively with that of the New Labour era. The coalition faces a markedly different political and economic context for public service reform compared to its predecessor. This article argues that these contextual constraints make a continuation of the New Labour governing strategy less viable, but unresolved tensions in the coalition education policies enacted to date may hinder the development of a novel project for education reform. As a consequence, the New Labour education project seems likely to remain largely intact for the foreseeable future.     

Do Welfare State Regimes Determine Public Sector Reforms? Choice Reforms in American,Swedish and German Schools

The idea that modern welfare states can be grouped into distinct regimes dominates contemporary studies of welfare state restructuring, and several studies have concluded welfare state reforms to be correlated with regime structures. These studies build, however, on analyses of only cash-benefit programmes whereas social services are almost neglected in current welfare state research. Thus, the aim of this article is to test the explanatory capacity of the welfare state regime perspective in relation to reforms in the service dimension of advanced welfare states – normally termed 'public sector reforms'. For this purpose, the author has conducted a focused comparison of the degree to which archetypical examples of the liberal regime (United States), the social democratic regime (Sweden) and the conservative regime (Germany) have introduced vouchers and parental choice into their public primary schools. Schools and education have ranked high on the public sector reform agenda since the 1980s, while the school choice issue signifies core aspects of the rationale of the reform movement: re-arranging public provision of services into quasi-markets. The article identifies, however, a clear lack of correlation between adoption of the school-choice policy and welfare state regimes. Instead, the reforms undertaken in all three countries seem closely related to the institutional rules of political decision making.     

Childcare Policies and the Politics of Choice

Governments have intervened in two basic ways on childcare: via the provision of leaves to care (usually taken by mothers) and the provision or (often only partial) financing of childcare services. These policy options reflect the fundamental debate on how young children should be cared for. Labour has developed both policy areas since 1997, but there is a question mark over how far mothers and fathers have a ‘real choice’ to work and/or to care. Parents' choice in this policy area is a sensitive political issue and, this article suggests, requires a careful balancing of policy instruments. Policy goals may conflict with preferences and there is also the difficult issue that parents' choices may prejudice their future welfare in a work/welfare system that is tending to assume that there will be increasing capacity for self‐provisioning.     

New Labour and the Public Sector in Britain

In Britain, New Labour has a distinctive public philosophy that contains an ideal often found in the socialist tradition—that is, citizens attaining moral personhood within and through the community. Old Labour generally sought to realize such an ideal in a universal welfare state characterized by a command form of service delivery. New Labour has responded to dilemmas, akin to those highlighted by the New Right, by transforming this model of the public sector. It conceives of the state as an enabler acting in partnership with citizens and other organizations, delivering services through networks characterized by relationships of trust. We explore this distinctive public philosophy through its ethical vision and then its implications for welfare reform and the delivery of public services.     

The Future of Socialism and New Labour: An Appraisal

Recently, much controversy has been generated about what Tony Crosland would have made of New Labour. Critics and supporters of the Blair project alike have laid claim to Crosland's legacy. For some it is evidence of New Labour's integrity; for others it confirms the party's betrayal of social democratic values. An examination of the arguments in The Future of Socialism indicates that it is neither. In this article, I offer a new appraisal of that text that challenges the orthodox analysis of it. Most accounts present the volume as a theoretical and original statement, one seeking to align British socialism with Swedish social democracy. I argue that the volume does not offer this kind of original contribution to debates about socialism. It is neither primarily a theoretical volume nor one that breaks decisively with the insularity that has shaped the trajectory of British socialism. I maintain that the importance of Crosland's legacy is emotional and symbolic: it offers Labour a charismatic and reassuring image of the party's past.     

Democracy and Education Spending in Africa

While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where "weak institutions" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this article I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education. I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization .     

Choice in a World of New School Types

As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is significant as previous research generally has not been able to link individual households to school enrollment decisions. Using these data, we examined the role that socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity play in school enrollment decisions. One of our more interesting results suggests that the newest public alternative, charter schools, attracts families with higher socioeconomic status than those that traditional public schools attract. The attraction of charter schools, however, unlike traditional public schools, appears to be racially and ethnically neutral. Families do not choose a charter school because of its racial or ethnic composition, nor do race and ethnicity within a household influence its choice of charter schools. Other socioeconomic factors influencing charter school choice are more similar to factors explaining private school choice than to those factors explaining the choice of traditional public schools. The findings suggest that policies governing the design of charter schools should focus on broader socioeconomic diversity rather than race only.     

Denying Citizens Their Rights? Indigenous People,Mining Payments and Service Provision

Indigenous Australians have a growing capacity to extract monetary payments from mineral development on their traditional lands. Considerable controversy surrounds the possible use of these payments to fund services such as health, housing and education for the Indigenous groups concerned. Critics of such an approach argue that government should provide basic public services to all citizens, and that use of 'mining payments' for service provision denies Indigenous people specific compensation for the negative impacts of mining and an important opportunity to enhance their economic status. There is also a danger that government may reduce its existing spending on services, leaving Indigenous people no better off as a result of allowing mining to occur. This article argues that while there are certainly risks involved in using mining payments to fund services, Indigenous groups can generate substantial net benefits by doing so. Mining payments can leverage additional government spending; fund services at a level or of a sort that government will not provide; give Indigenous people greater control over service provision; and help develop Indigenous organisational skills and governance capacity. A strategic approach is required to minimise risk and maximise the available benefits, and the article identifies policy principles that can be applied to secure such an outcome.     

School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined

Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual-level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data. Unlike most school choice studies, this data set has a large, representative national sample. More importantly, the panel structure of the data allows us to examine the same parents both before and after the school choice decision has been made, permitting a true dynamic analysis. The results demonstrate that actively choosing a child's school does not make parents more likely to participate in school activities. Some institutional attributes of schools do appear to increase parental involvement in school activities, however.     

Different Roads to Unfamiliar Places: UK Experience in Comparative Perspective

This article views the new public management (NPM) as a prime example of the sour laws of unintended consequences in action. Section 1 places the UK in international context by arguing there is no such thing as NPM and suggesting recent public sector reforms vary along six dimensions: privatisation, marketisation, corporate management, regulation, decentralisation and political control. Section 2 updates the UK story by describing developments under New Labour. Section 3 identifies the unintended consequences of reform: fragmentation, steering, accountability, co-ordination, and public service ethics. Section 4 argues the conventional story of public sector reform as marketization and corporate management omits significant changes. British government differentiated its service delivery systems and now employs at least three governing structures: bureaucracy, markets and networks. The final section discusses whether British experience is different. I argue a satisfactory explanation of the differences must include an analysis of governmental traditions that make public sector reform distinctive everywhere.     

Contracting Out and Accountability

Governments are increasingly moving to contract out the provision of public services which have previously been delivered by public service departments. Contracting out typically implies provision by private sector contractors. However, it may also include in-house provision by public service departments or other public agencies where the right to provide is won through competitive tendering and is governed by contract. At the Commonwealth level, the trend has been given added impetus by the Coalition government elected in 1996 (Reith J 996; National Commission of Audit 1996).
The main rationale for contracting out is to improve efficiency in service provision by harnessing the virtues of competition, in particular the superior productivity engendered among competitive providers (Industry Commission (IC) 1996, B3.4; Appendix E). At the same time, there is a legitimate expectation that providers of public services paid for by public funds will be publicly accountable (IC 1996, BI). However, contracting out has the potential to reduce the extent of public accountability by transferring the provision of public services to members of the private sector who are generally not subject to the same accountability requirements as public officials. Indeed, reduction in such accountability requirements may be one of the reasons for the greater efficiency of the private sector.     

Quasimarket failure

The efficiency of ??quasimarkets????decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition??is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement called ??neoconsolidationism?? began to challenge this wisdom. The neoconsolidationists use the logic of government failure to argue that quasimarkets fail and that jurisdictional consolidation is a superior way to supply public goods and services in metropolitan areas. Public choice scholars have largely ignored the neoconsolidationists?? challenge. This paper brings that challenge to public choice scholars?? attention with the hope of encouraging responses. It also offers some thoughts about the directions such responses might take.     

The Politics of Choice and Competition in Public Services

The politics of choice and competition in public services are complex. Only public service users seem basically to want choice. Providers prefer alternative models of service delivery especially those that rely upon trust. Social democrats prefer voice and trust; conservatives want choice and competition to be exercised in the context of a full private market. Yet, so long as they are properly designed, policies aimed at promoting choice and competition can serve the interests of all these groups better than the alternatives.     

A New Look at New Labour

This article challenges the current orthodoxy, for instance put forward by Driver and Martell (1998), that New Labour represents a clearly defined break from the Labour Party's past. Drawing upon accounts of Labour's historical development, I argue that Labour in government has always been concerned with forging cross-class alliances, more often than not in the face of bitter internal opposition from the party's grass-roots membership. I conclude that the objectives of the Blair government are not dissimilar from those of the Attlee and Wilson administrations, and that where the means to achieve these ends differ – for example with regard to social policy – this is a rational response to the profound economic and social changes that have taken place since the 1970s.     

Collaborative Innovation,New Technologies,and Work Redesign

Stakeholders agree on the need to promote innovation in work organization in public services. This article deploys the concept of collaborative innovation to discuss employees' and managers' experiences of a major technology‐driven work redesign project within National Health Service pharmacy services in Scotland. The authors draw on extant literature on New Public Management (NPM) and collaborative approaches to innovation to frame more than 40 in‐depth interviews with managers and employees. They find that key components of collaborative innovation—related to joint problem‐solving, interdisciplinary working, and mutual learning—were important to the success of the redesign project and had positive impacts on job quality for some employees. The authors argue that researchers and policy makers should look beyond NPM‐driven models that have dominated some areas of the public innovation literature to consider the potential added value of collaborative innovation to improving both work and service delivery in the public sector.     

From Old Labour to New Labour: A Comment on Rubinstein

In a critique of our book New Labour, David Rubinstein has argued that we exaggerate the degree of difference between Old and New Labour and underplay the similarities. In this article we agree with many of the continuities that Rubinstein outlines. However, we argue that he himself gives plenty of evidence in favour of our thesis that change has been marked in many policy areas. We argue that we give a good account of the wider social factors that he says accounts for such change. In this article we offer a restatement of the view that New Labour offers a 'post-Thatcherite' politics. New Labour breaks both with post-war social democracy and with Thatcherism.     

Contractualism, Democracy and Ethics

Contractualism, as concept and practice, may be defined in different ways (Yeatman 1995, 1998). In this article I am concerned with contracting out or outsourcing as it is otherwise known. That is, I focus upon the process whereby functions undertaken formerly by government are now performed by private or voluntary organisations in a contractual relationship with public service departments and agencies. Whereas departments and agencies once provided a full panoply of services directly, government purchasers now select providers by tendering competitively for an expanding range of employment, education, health, social welfare and local government services. Contractualism, then, involves the recon-figuation of public service provision to favour quasi-commercial rather than bureaucratic forms.     

Declarations of independence 1

Abstract

With the recent landslide electoral triumph of Tony Blair's New Labour in Britain, the question of the degree of convergence between Labour and the Conservatives in opposition takes on even greater strategic and political significance. It is generally undisputed that the terms of political debate in contemporary Britain have been altered markedly in recent years, and that this is not unrelated to Labour's self‐styled “modernisation” in the face of four consecutive election defeats. More contentious, however, is the interpretation of this trend. Has Labour abandoned its socialist and social democratic traditions, re‐projecting itself as an essentially conservative, even Thatcher‐ite, party, or has it managed to develop a novel, dynamic and modernising social democracy for new times? In this paper I seek to provide a benchmark against which such propositions can be evaluated, assessing the extent of bipartisan convergence since 1992. On the basis of comparisons of policy commitments at the 1992 and 1997 general elections, I argue that there has indeed been significant convergence between the parties, that this convergence has been driven principally by Labour, and that Britain is witnessing the emergence of a new bipartisan consensus. Such an interpretation is further reinforced by a consideration of revisions to policy since the Tories’ electoral debacle, which would merely seem to confirm the ascendancy of neo‐liberalism in contemporary Britain. I conclude by considering the likely trajectory of social and economic policy under a New Labour administration with a seemingly unassailable parliamentary majority.     

The lightship in economics

What role does government play in the provision of public goods? Economists have used the lighthouse as an empirical example to illustrate the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. This inquiry, however, has neglected the private provision of lightships. We investigate the private operation of the world’s first modern lightship, established in 1731 on the banks of the Thames estuary going in and out of London. First, we show that the Nore lightship was able to operate profitably and without government enforcement in the collection of payments for lighting services. Second, we show how private efforts to build lightships were crowded out by Trinity House, the public authority responsible for establishing and maintaining lighthouses in England and Wales. By including lightships into the broader lighthouse market, we argue that the provision of lighting services exemplifies not a market failure, but a government failure.     

The Engage programme and the Government Communication Network in the UK, 2006–2010

The Engage programme was launched in April 2006 by the Government Communication Network (GCN) in the UK. As a civil service body supporting those in government working as press officers and in marketing roles, the GCN under the New Labour government in the period 2006–2010 was involved with the extension of the logic of marketisation to government communication. This article charts this process by examining key government policy documents from this period. The rationale for Engage rested on the assumption that government in the UK needed to adapt its communication approach to reach what were perceived as individualised consumers in society. The extension of the logic of marketisation to government communication that happened under Engage is shown to be consistent with the New Public Management approach to public services under New Labour. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.