Rethinking the Education Improvement Agenda

Kevin J Flint is Reader in Education at Nottingham Trent University, UK.Nick Peim is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Birmingham, UK.

'Rethinking the Education Agenda fills a huge gap in our understanding of the role and function of schooling. Eschewing a standard argument that the state and (true) education are in opposition, Flint and Peim provide an accessible analysis of a wide range of ideas which challenges traditional assumptions about power and government. This is a much needed myth-busting book that will stretch our thinking about schools and schooling, childhood and life-long learning, teacher education and identity, research and statistics. The insights offered by the authors are fresh and provocative and provide new ways of thinking about education policy in an era of accountability. It should be recommended reading for any student of culture and society and will be of great interest to people working in education policy and teacher education.' Annette Patterson, Head of the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

• Introduction \ 1. Education, the School and the State \ 2. Education, the Language of Improvement and Governmentality: The Enframing in Practice \ 3. Governing Childhood \ 4. Educational Research: Improvement and Metaphysics \ 5. Schooling: The Social Landscape of Modernity \ 6. Initial Teacher Education: Practice, Performativity and Identity \ 7. The Enframing in the Leadership and Management of Education \ 8. The Enframing and Lifelong Learning \ 9. The Rhetoric of Numbers \ 10. Fifteen Theses on Education \ References \ Index