Introduction

When marketisation principles were being introduced into English schooling from the 1980s, and new internal markets for services being set up, this was paralleled in other public services. And more broadly, national economic policies were being pursued to deregulate the private sector and reduce perceived bureaucratic restrictions on companies.

These processes too evolved under their own organisational logics: it will be argued here that the structural weaknesses that developed in the way that parts of the private sector were led and managed became reflected in not only Education but the broader structure, conceptions and failures of the British state.

Private sector parallels

Perhaps one of the best known acts of market deregulation was the so-called ‘big bang’ in 1988 of the financial markets, specifically those in the City of London (Tooze, 2018; Blakely, 2019). This process, as Blakely and others have argued, had the logical consequence – or at least was accompanied by – the ‘financialisation’ of the UK economy. The nature of this financialisation is contested, of course. Whether a national economy such as the UK's can only return to growth through consumer spending, financed by corporate and personal debt, is similarly debatable, especially within the current economic outlook (OECD, 2022). These matters are well beyond the scope of this book, but some of the visible structural traits of deregulation, such as limited self-regulation, perpetual self-referencing and the apparent common behaviours of system leaders are not. This is especially so as they have become more and more the norm and are paralleled in the state sector, including Education.

To take one example, the ‘can-kicking’ of major strategic matters, referred to at the top of the last chapter, is a typical common behaviour that Davis (2018: 122) found in the top echelons of major companies in the City of London. According to him, this has arisen for a variety of factors. One is the short-term nature of contracts for senior postholders and CEOs – often only three years or so. Another is the way that a particular financial ambition, so-called ‘shareholder value’ (2018: 37; Blakeley, 2019: 61), became dominant as a principal outcome sought by both shareholders and hence company boards. According to Mazzucato (2013: 198), shareholder value has become an ‘ideology’.