Conservative Education Reloaded: Policy, Ideology and Impacts in England

This article, written in December 2016 following the election in May 2016 of a majority Conservative government, and the election to the leadership of the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing social democrat, ‘Old Labour style socialist’, revises and updates substantially a previous article of June 2015 published in this journal (Hill et al, 2015). We set out, in Part One, empirical data about the current stage of capitalism, the Immiseration stage of neo-liberal capitalism in England and highlight its relationship with conservatism and neo-conservatism. We identify increased societal inequalities, the assault by the capitalist State on its opponents such as local councils and trade unions. In Parts Two, and Three we describe and analyse what, respectively, neoliberalism and neo-conservatism have done and are doing to education in England- in the schools, further education, and university sectors, and the continuity with policies of previous Conservative and Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition governments. In Part Four, we present three testimonies about the impacts of neo-liberalism/ neo-conservatism, two from the school sector, one from the further/ vocational education sector, and briefly signal areas and forms of resistance. (1