Sandy Cripps - Further Education, Governments Discourse Policy and Practice: Killing a Paradigm Softly

Killing a paradigm softly

Sandy Cripps
University of East London, UK

First published 2002 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Sandy Cripps 2002

The author has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2001099941

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-73636-8 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-18598-9 (ebk)

My special thanks go to my family, whose love makes everything worthwhile: to my mother for her words of encouragement; to my husband Robert for his love and understanding; and finally to my son Toby and my daughter Jenni for being proud of me.

A work of this kind is largely dependent on the work of others in the past and my debt to them is acknowledged in the endnotes and bibliography. My thanks also go to Pat FitzGerald for her painstaking proofreading.

This work explores the link between public policy-making and its implementation. It adds to the policy-action process debate by raising awareness of the power which governmental discourse can have in determining action. In view of the complexity of the subject, the research was narrowed to four further education colleges, one of which is a private college. It investigates how far the values and priorities sought by government since the 1988 and 1992 Education Acts are internalised or resisted in those colleges. This work thus tracks the impact of increased government regulation and its effect on risk behaviour in those colleges.

On the macro level, it was postulated that the state may have the power to influence what is considered 'acceptable' to the wider public and thus bring about changes to social values in order to smooth the passage of legislation and its implementation. At the meso/micro level it was anticipated that discourse analysis would contribute to the understanding of the policy implementation process within the organisations for whom the policy change was intended. The task of this work is to show that the use of language can be an important tool in any attempt to use power. Understanding the battle for power can be elaborated by linking it with the battle for power over discourse.

It tracks the historical development of the further education sector from 1943 further education colleges in particular via government documentation and legislation. Thus it provides a benchmark against which public policy making in the 1990s can be evaluated; illuminates debate about the association between increased regulation and risk at the institutional level; explains how power over language themes can be used to bring about radical change; and finally introduces emotional intelligence as a key factor in professionals' decision-making. Analysing this narrative reveals several themes representing a journey towards modernising democracy and underlying themes that consistently temper attempts towards radical change. Further, a paradigm shift from the pursuit of educational effectiveness, based on equality and the notion of social responsibility, to the pursuit of educational efficiency is revealed. The panoramic of the narrative reveals that the vision of the welfare state was subjected to the theme of inadequacy and rationalisation, which in combination explain the mobilisation of bias and the way in which society can embrace radical changes such as equal opportunity, yet do little to attain them. It thus traces the factors that influenced the debate about further education such that the political consensus portrayed in the Education Act 1944 failed to maintain its momentum.

It is argued that government's language themes challenged and altered the professionals' language and thus their right to decide, but rendered the newly-incorporated colleges less able to manage the high risk environment in which it was placed by them. In contrast, the private college, operating with professional autonomy as key to its success, shows that professional autonomy and commercial success are not mutually exclusive. Using state-of-the-art management discourse, I am able to show that this approach has much in common with new trends in management.