Special Offer

With schooling being made over by the Coalition Government, we have a timely offer..
Bernard Barker's acclaimed books on how to make schools work optimally for all students, The Pendulum Swings and Transforming Schools are on sale from our website at £20 for the two, plus £2.80 p&p, until 30 April 2012 - Click here

The Pendulum Swings: Transforming School Reform

by: Bernard Barker

ISBN: 9781858564685

Price: £18.99

Quantity:

220 pages
234 x 156mm
April 2010

Discontent with failed, top-down reform and the immediate prospect of political change have created a rare opportunity to reinvent education policy and to think afresh about how teachers and children should be encouraged to develop their full potential.

The Pendulum Swings explores alternative, genuinely transformative conceptions of leadership and learning and shows how they could become the foundation for effectively improving our schools.

Since 1988, education reform has been driven by what Bernard Barker shows to be a delusion. The notion that learning can be improved through market place competition, regulation and inspection, quick leadership fixes, and best practice recipes, has proved wholly untrue. New Labour's education policies have become the single biggest obstacle to school improvement.

In the year of a general election, the pendulum in education is swinging away from markets and measurement towards a humane and professional approach to schools and learning. This timely book shows that policy makers must change their thinking completely, or schools will be trapped in cycles of perpetual change that lead nowhere.

Contents

Preface - Getting the Boys to Sing
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Dynamics of School Reform
Chapter 2: Must the Disadvantaged Fail?
Chapter 3: Markets and Competition
Chapter 4: Imagine an End to Failure
Chapter 5: Bastards and Prophets
Chapter 6: Best Practice
Chapter 7: Progressive Alternatives
Chapter 8: Transforming School Reform

Author Details

Bernard Barker is Emeritus Professor of Educational Leadership and Management, School of Education, University of Leicester. He headed comprehensive community colleges in Cambridgeshire and Leicester for 19 years and is the author of the acclaimed Transforming Schools: illusion or reality?

Reviews

...the strengths of Barkers book lie not only in the historical perspective that informs its understanding of contemporary school reform in England, but also in its use of this perspective to review important and unresolved political debates concerning the future direction of educational reform in the context of major public expenditure cuts that are about to take hold- History of Education

Bernard Barker delivers a historically informed and contemporarily relevant review of school reform in England drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources - Journal of Educational Administration and History

Please follow attached link to a press release by University of Leicester

External Links

Please follow attached link to article in Times Educational Supplement

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