Back to the future? Remembering extended schools in a post-pandemic world

The Covid-19 crisis calls for a transformation of education and schools, with the crisis having shown the many roles and purposes they do and can serve. But, the article argues, in the process of transformation there is another valuable experience to draw on: the 'Every Child Matters' policy agenda of the Labour government, including the concept of the extended school. Drawing on research into this ambitious programme, the article considers the potential of this image of the school, a rich image that has been wilfully neglected by governments since 2010.

Hobbit Laws

In 2010 the National Party-led government did a deal to keep the filming of The Hobbit in New Zealand. The deal involved amending the Employment Relations Act 2000 to exclude film workers from the definition of ‘employee’, and thus also from the protections of employment law. The amendment was rushed through under urgency, and protests and international criticism ensued. Ten years later, the Labour government is considering the Screen Industry Workers Bill. Rather than restoring employment rights to the workers in the film industry, it introduces a dangerous new precedent and continues to trade off human rights against commercial convenience.

Class, Cold War and Colonialism

Following the defeat of the fascist Axis powers and the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945, the British state faced demands from across its vast empire for self government. Rather than concede these democratic demands the decision was taken to hold on to the Empire wherever that was possible, thus putting British economic and strategic interests before the just demands of the people in the colonies. This article shows how Britain’s imperialist strategy worked out in Fortress Gibraltar in the late 1940s. It tells the story of trade union leader Albert Fava’s deportation which effectively neutered the newly formed independent and fast growing trade union federation.

England Speaks

Chapter 1 focuses on the campaigns that preceded the 2015 UK general election and the 2016 EU referendum. In part this is because these two electoral events were clearly linked: it was the Conservatives’ unexpected victory in the former that paved the way for the latter. But both campaigns also highlight different aspects of the English nationalism that is discussed in the remainder of the book. In 2015, the Conservative campaign successfully mobilized English suspicion at the prospect of SNP influence over a minority Labour government—a suspicion rooted in a deep sense of English grievance about Scotland’s alleged unfairly privileged position within the union. Only a year later, England was hardly mentioned by the Leave campaign. Yet, as we shall see, in England, its vision of and for Britain appealed overwhelmingly to those with a strong sense of English identity but not, perhaps ironically, to those who feel exclusively or predominantly British.

Student voice in education

A diverse and contested range of practices referred to as �student voice� have long flourished in many educational contexts, and are regularly re-discovered by new generations of teachers. Currently the fortunes of student voice in England may appear to be waning, particularly compared to their waxing elsewhere and under the 1997-2010 New Labour government. This article argues that even evidencing the value of student voice (whether in instrumental, pragmatic, intrinsic, moral, or democratic terms) is unlikely to convince those who discredit it. Instead, we should change the conversation about voice to go beyond the liberal and individualistic rights-based model underpinning many accounts: we need to develop more nuanced understandings of social contexts, power, the school as an institution, and of voice as a practice rather than the property of an individuated subject. Paying greater attention to the �vital relationality� between subjects, infrastructures, the material and the affective, can help us understand the differences that matter in student voice. We may thereby build socialities that �stay with the trouble� of voice, listen in ways that open us to the other, and create more liveable schools.