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Journal of Education Policy

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New Labour's cultural turn: some tensions in contemporary educational and cultural policy
David Buckingham & Ken Jones Available online: 10 Nov 2010

To cite this article: David Buckingham & Ken Jones (2001): New Labour's cultural turn: some tensions in contemporary educational and cultural policy, Journal of Education Policy, 16:1, 1-14 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930010009796

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J. EDUCATION POLICY, 2001, VOL. 16, NO. 1, 1 14

New Labours cultural turn: some tensions in contemporary educational and cultural policy
David Buckingham and Ken Jones
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The election of a Labour government in Britain, after 18 years of Conservative rule, has seen the emergence of a new educational discourse, based on a distinctiv e combination of cultural, economic and social themes. In this article, we identif y the components of the discourse, and explore how it is currently deployed in arguments for educational change. Specifically, our focus is on two recent documents: All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE 1999), produced by an Advisory Committee appointed by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); and Making Movies Matter (FEWG 1999) by the Film Education Working Group, set up by the British Film Institute at the request of the DCMS. Embodying in separate ways the features of the emergent discourse, these texts also position themselves very differently in relation to current educational policy. Through a critique of the reports, we identif y some of the broader difficulties of the `cultural turn in education, and the possibilit y of a more productive alternative.

Between 1988 when the Education Reform Act introduced the National Curriculum and 1997, the trajectories of education and of cultural practice sharply diverged. In curricular terms, state schooling in England was organized around: strong centralized control of provision, through national curriculum legislation; opposition to local diversity, and in particular to any strong response to ethnic or class-based sub-cultures; a defence of tradition against innovation and nation against cosmopolis; an emphasis on print-centred culture, and a rejection of new media cultures ( Jones 1994). Outside the school, the principles of cultural organization were different: new forms of communications technology proliferated; the regulated duopoly in television was brought to an end by deregulation and channel multiplication; the audience for mass media fragmented; and cultural hybridity became at least in some cultural sectors a norm. Discursively, this polarization was expressed in two rival representations of the business of childhood one stressing the necessity

David Buckingham is Professor in Education at the Institute of Education, London University. He is Director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media (http://www.ccsonline.org.uk/ mediacentre). His most recent books are The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Polity, 2000). Ken Jones is a Lecturer in the Education Department at Keele University. Recent publications include: `In the Shadow of the Centre-Left Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 20(2) (1999) and `Education en Grande-Bretagne: la revolution des conservateurs et ses prolongements Syndicalisme et Societe 2(1) (1999). He is an editor of Education and Social Justice, and co-author with David Buckingham and others of Childrens Television in Britain: History, Discourse and Policy (British Film Institute, 1999)
Journal of Educational Pol icy ISSN 0268 0939 print/ISSN 1464 5106 online # 2001 Tay lor & Francis Ltd http://w ww .tandf.co.uk/journal s D OI: 10.1080/0268093001000979 6

DAVID BUCKINGHAM AND KEN JONES

of traditional forms of scholastic achievement now claimed to be imperative for all children, the other depicting the child as an active and adept consumer of commercial culture (Buckingham et al. 1999). Labours 1997 victory at first seemed to do little to shift this polarity. Government advisers continued to disparage television, and ministers to despise some of its most popular programmes as embodiments of `dumbing down (Barber 1996: 301 303, Byers 1997). David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education and Employment, insisted that schools should concentrate on the `basics of numeracy and literacy. Curriculum reforms continued to allow only an incidental place to popular culture; and even traditional arts subjects remained on the margins. More generally, the educational `work ethic of Labour was connected to a view of children less as inhabitants of a complex cultural space than as economic resources to be augmented or as social problems requiring a stronger disciplinary regime; and where culture figured at all, it had less to do with emancipatory possibility than with strengthening established norms of behaviour. In education, as elsewhere, Labour was keen to place a distance between its conservatively-oriented communitarianism and the `expressiv e revolution and libertarian social policies of the 60s and 70s (Driver and Martell 1999: 258). Three years into the New Labour project, these impulses and priorities have not gone away. But they are now increasingly co-existing with and occasionally being challenged by discourses which establish different kinds of connection between education and culture. Notable here is an emphasis on the economic importance of cultural activity, most apparent in the growing recognition of the value of the `cultural industries. In 1998, the Culture Secretary Chris Smith published Creative Britain, a book reflecting his departments insistence on the centrality of the `creative economy defined generically as `that cluster of individuals, enterprises and organisations that depends for the generation of value on creative skill and talent and on the intellectual property that it produces (Smith 1998: 15) and comprising in more specific terms `advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio (CIU 1998: 3). Smith estimates that this growing sector at present produces 4% of GDP. One of his departments priorities is to coordinate policies for its further development, via means that range from the making available of venture capital to the strengthening of educational input (Smith 1998: 11). To this extent, education in the arts and culture has a direct importance for a particular economic sector. But it also has a more general significance. The Arts Council of England document Leading through Learning claims that `the skills people acquire through studying and practising the arts are among those most needed in the modern workplace. . . communication, co-operation, problem-solving, risk-taking, flexibility and creativity (1998: 2 3). The Royal Society of Arts likewise identifies `communicating effectively, teamwork, negotiation, co-operation as qualities developed through artistic practice and valued by business (Bayliss 1999: 15). In this perspective, increasingly voiced by think-tanks and lobbying organizations, cultural activity in schools will promote the creativity and adaptability thought necessary for the negotiation of the `complex environments of the twenty-first-century workplace (Bentley 1998: 86 87). Conversely, the workplace itself becomes a site where learning takes place, and schools are urged to make full use of its possibilities: in the process, Bentley suggests, there will be a weakening of the boundaries between the home, the school and the workplace as potential locations for learning. Cultures role is not

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limited to the economy, however. Cultural activity is also claimed to contribute to the social inclusion and regeneration that is central to Labours `third way. Thus Smith writes of the `intimate links between cultural activity and the cohesiveness of a society and of the ways in which `culture helps to bind people together (1998: 19). More concretely, a `Policy Action Team report commissioned by his department argues that participation in the arts and sport can bring about social inclusion and promote the economic and cultural regeneration of derelict communities: it serves simultaneously as a means of job creation and of building job-related skills, of developing a sense of identity and community, and a way of raising `self-esteem and `changing peoples perception of an area (Policy Action Team 10, 1999: 29 33). These arguments help to explain why art, music and sport find an important place in Labours largest and (in design, at least) most innovatory project of educational reform. The Education Action Zones (EAZs) are centrally-funded local initiatives intended simultaneously to break the mould of existing educational practice, to address problems of achievement and exclusion, and to `create the education system of the next century (Byers 1998). In this varied agenda, which includes both curriculum change and social regeneration, cultural activity has a prominent part. The Bridgwater LEA, for instance, believes that `the curriculum should be built more around the subject of the arts, to reflect the interests of the community, rather than working in ignorance of it (sic). . . Using the arts will bring education to life. . .. On this basis the document goes on to construct an ambitious multi-faceted agenda, in which the psychological benefits of participation in the arts lead inevitably to social and economic benefits: `the arts can also be used to communicate awareness of important issues such as different cultures, disabilities, health, social and political problems. . . Artistic forms of communication also enable the student to obtain skills in negotiating, team building, creative thinking, management and assertiveness, all of which are key skills recognised by employers. And if this range of achievement does not lead to prosperity, it can at least defuse social tensions for `using artistic expression also allows people who tend to be introverted, to show off their skills and make others aware of their feelings . . . (it) is a tool which can be used to demonstrate frustration, anger or despair and can be used as a safety valve to prevent feelings being bottled up, which could lead to detrimental actions (Somerset LEA 1998). The cultural turn has other advocates, outside government and often critical of it. Throughout the 1990s, pressure groups campaigned against the decline in levels of arts funding that followed the diversion of budgets from local authorities to schools. Others have criticized the narrowness of existing curriculum regulations, and sought to establish a more central place for cultural activity (Gee 1998, Graham 1999). To this pressure essentially the work of long-established networks of influence has been added a new resource: recent funding arrangements (especially the use of National Lottery proceeds) have attached important regulatory conditions to the work of local and national cultural organizations. Publicly-funded cultural institutions are now increasingly required to develop forms of educational provision and partnership with private and voluntary organizations as an intrinsic feature of their work. Funding bodies such as the Arts Council of England and the Regional Arts Associations place an ever-greater emphasis on providing access to previously excluded groups, and on evaluating the educational impact of such work (Woolf 1999). The Arts Councils `New Audiences initiative and its earlier `Arts for Everyone (A4E) programme reflect this democratizing impulse although one should not underestimate the resistance to change within such organizations from

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advocates of more elitist notions of the arts. As a result of such initiatives, there have arisen at least the beginnings of a new educational cultural complex, as galleries, museums, theatres, art cinemas and opera-houses strive to justify and secure their existence by brokering partnership schemes to promote cultural activity among young people, both in and out of schools. However, none of these arguments has yet compelled a shift in the core mechanism for regulating educational practice the National Curriculum, whose latest revision does not to any significant extent embrace the visions of education set out above (DfEE 1999b). Even so, existing educational objectives and procedures are encountering criticism and proposed modifications from a number of locations from think-tanks and policy institutions offering synopses of watershed economic changes, from leading-edge projects of practical reform, and from campaigning organisations which have already been successful in affecting the smaller print of policy (Graham 1999). Most strikingly, these critical arguments are now echoed by committees set up by the government to provide advice on curriculum policy; and in what follows, we will look more closely at two examples of this kind of work. First, however, we need to take more general stock of the current rethinking of the relationships between culture, society, economy and education which inform their arguments.

Culture and creativity in the knowledg e econom y Contemporary capitalism is in important ways a `knowledge economy. Knowledge is both a commodity in itself, and the means by which business seeks to understand the complexity of a world shaped by what seems like an infinity of transactions. The accelerating accumulation of information necessitates continuous adjustment and accommodation, via the absorption of existing knowledge and the creation of new knowledge. But the attempt to innovate in a world of sudden and lurching change inevitably involves encountering risk and the prospect of failure. In such a climate, the practices and discourses of business have changed. As alertly as any postmodernist, business now views the world in which it operates as `complex and ambiguous. Survival depends upon rapid adaptation: looser and more agile organizational forms must, it is argued, replace centralised hierarchies now too cumbersome in their processing of information to respond to the speed of change (Thrift 1999: 142 143). Accordingly, the workforce of `agile organisations must now become familiar both with less secure patterm of work (outsourcing, casualization and `portfolio careers), and with the need for continuous learning. The OECD, claiming that `routine and low-skilled jobs are no longer in demand, now accentuates `multi-skilling, personal and consumer-oriented skills and flexibility (Papadopoulos 1994:175). Pedagogically, what follows from this is a stress on `learning-by-doing. Adapting to complexity is not something that can be learned systematically, as a set of rules, but rather requires attentiveness to what Scott (1998) terms `metis or practical knowledge. The individual must be able to draw from the entire range of his/her experience, to articulate that which in other circumstances would remain tacit, and in doing so to respond productively creatively to new challenges. From this viewpoint, the existing national curriculum is criticized on the grounds that it `focuses on what students know rather than how they use that knowledge (Seltzer and Bentley 1999: 9).

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In this new discourse, the terms in which earlier generations of progressiv es depicted the relationship between education and industry are turned about. No longer is the liberatory potential of the one contrasted with the calculating rationality of the other; and no longer does `culture offer a vantage-point from which to comment and make judgments on economic processes. On the contrary discursively, at least the reverse is now true: the language of creative practice and personal development is more a feature of contemporary business rhetoric than it is of an education system dominated at all levels by centrally and narrowly established performance indicators and norms. The insistence that culture and creativity are not elite possessions but ordinary elements of everyday life and work (Williams 1989 [1958], Willis 1990) is no longer the position of an embattled intellectual minority but a maxim of business innovation. And where radicals once sought painstakingly to uncover the skills and knowledge of a workforce which a capitalism based on alienated labour tried to disavow (e.g., variously, Braverman 1974, Ewart Evans 1956), now such resources are routinely invoked by managements keen to secure competitive advantage. In the process, the hard-won gains of labour are translated into the dynamic forces of the new capitalism: solidarity becomes `trust; autonomy from Taylorist supervision becomes `freedom of action. Meanwhile, the earlier insistence on culture as an area in which meanings and values collide is now muted. As the world, and in particular the workplace, come increasingly to be understood in terms of the possibilities they offer for education and self-development, they are no longer seen in terms of the conflicting interests that divide them. This is not, of course, to imply that in reality such conflicts have disappeared. Indeed, they may be intensifying, as the benefits of this new `creativity are only likely to be available to certain categories of workers: what for some is a productive form of complexity and flexibility, for others is simply a recipe for insecure and poorly-paid employment on the margins of the service economy. However, it is not only in the discourse of business world that the meaning of cultural practice is being redefined. The Conservative notion of culture, organized around race, nation, tradition and authority, which dominated educational and cultural politics in England in the 80s and 90s, has succumbed in at least two ways to different conceptions of the relation between culture and government. First, here, is the question of value. Conservatism was torn between a defence of national heritage and of traditional criteria of value, and the contradictory championing of market forces, in which cultural forms were evaluated solely in terms of their commercial success. New Labour is less troubled by this dilemma. Chris Smith, for instance, has no difficulty in refusing a clear distinction between high and low culture. `What matters, for him, `is not the imposition of an inappropriate category but the quality of the work and its ability to transcend geography and class and time (1998: 3). As we shall see, this perspective is not as settled as may at first appear, and concealed within it may lie older notions about value. Nevertheless, though criticized by sections of the arts establishment (e.g. Tusa 1999) for its populism, Smiths is a position which has less difficulty than Conservatism in reconciling culture, business, and a `democratic commitment to accessibility. The second major aspect of this reformulation centres on the linking of culture to questions of tolerance and social responsibility. Cultural activity is seen to guarantee a new mode of social cohesion, no longer so dependent on tradition and authority. It has a `shaping function, which should be employed in the service of `a multicultural tolerance which respects and rejoices at cultural difference (Bennett 1998: 105). Thus, the Arts Councils Leading through Learning celebrates hybridity, citing

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`the benefits that come from mixing differing cultural traditions, values and aesthetics to produce new artistic expression, informed by different perspectives and heritage (1998: 4). The stress on tolerance for others is matched by an insistence that individuals should take responsibilit y for themselves, and that cultural and educational policy should promote the necessary new forms of self-discipline and self-reliance. Thus Seltzer and Bentley, who define creativity as `a form of interaction between learner and environment (1999: 10), insist that workers must learn to handle this interaction responsibly: they need now to `manage themselves in a more fluid and unstable organisational environment (1999: 13). To note these discursive changes is not to concede that they yet dominate policymaking. On the contrary, they are most often deployed as a rhetoric of persuasion, a weapon wielded by those who have not yet convinced policy-makers of the need to change tack. In education, particularly, this is a difficult campaign. New Labours educational politics are based on three perceptions, all of which work against any easy translation of culturalist discourse into policy. The first is that policys central objective should be mass proficiency in basic skills, particularly in the areas of literacy and numeracy. The second is that the power to determine policy has to be wrested away from teachers who still, via resistance, subversion or incompetence, exert too great a practical influence on the classroom: the autonomy required by the cultural turn is from this point of view undesirable. Thirdly, the development of policy necessarily has to occur in the shadow of the Conservative achievement; and since the issues highlighted and the constituencies mobilized by Conservatism are still potent factors in educational life, there are clear political limits to potential radicalism. These resistances force would-be reformers to take account of the political conjuncture in which they operate as well as the longer-term trends which they address. The two documents we discuss below therefore need to be assessed, not just in terms of their philosophical arguments, but also in terms of their response to these more pragmatic constraints. Back to the future? Making Movies Matter Of the two, Making Movies Matter (FEWG 1999) is the more precisely calculated intervention. It glimpses opportunities for far-reaching change, noting that `opportunities for learning and the uses of learning have become more diverse, and that the `leisure and entertainment industries take a growing interest in the business of education (p. 30). Education may, it suggests, be in a strong position to take advantage of these developments, via new forms of partnership between schools and cultural industries. Yet while the convergence of cultural and economic change may allow some shift in the curriculum log-jam of a period still influenced by Conservatism, the report recognizes that this has not yet reached the point at which it can be utilized to set a complete new agenda for reform. `It is not realistic, the report argues, `to expect radical (educational) change in the immediate future; and it describes its own `modest proposals as efforts to make a `small but salient effect on the current policy climate (that) will provide a good basis for the further development that is clearly necessary (p. 48). In adopting this pragmatic approach, Making Movies Matter represents the latest stage in an ongoing attempt on the part of the British Film Institute to influence the direction of educational policy, and thereby to create a place for media education within the school curriculum. Dating back to the mid-1980s, this attempt has

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involved the production of a series of curriculum documents (Bazalgette 1989, Bowker 1991) explicitly reflecting the existing structure of the National Curriculum; the staging of a Commission of Enquiry on the teaching of English (Bazalgette 1994); the production of `audits and research reports on media education in schools (Learmonth and Sayer 1996, Barratt 1998); as well as behind-the-scenes interventions, for example in the production of Non-Statutory Guidance for the National Curriculum and other forms of lobbying and advocacy directed at bodies such as the QCA and OFSTED. According to its leading author, the report embodies a new political realism, particularly in terms of how it defines media education for the benefit of its intended audiences. `The aim, we were told, `is to attract the attention of powerful people within education.1 This means acquiring a `nous that media educationalists have previously lacked: `people [in the 1980s] were much more naive about how things work and how things get done, and who your allies are. By contrast, the FEWG was able to enter the loop of policy making. It came into being not as an autonomous lobbying organization, but rather at the behest of government, emerging from the work of a Policy Review Group that had examined the current state of British cinema, and concluded that `education should form an important part of film strategy as a whole (A Bigger Picture, DCMS 1998). The needs of competitiveness required that Britain develop a more `cineliterate audience, capable of sustaining a wider base for domestic production hence the FEWG (FEWG 1999: 6). Through the FEWG, media educators or at least those associated with the British Film Institute and with the industry-sponsored body Film Education were offered a new point of entry into policy making. But this was not a guarantee of success, since the setting up of the working party represented merely the recognition of the DCMS that education had a place in overall film industry strategy. The DfEE a much weightier organization had yet to be convinced. Moreover, the key agents of educational change officials and politicians with custody of the school curriculum tended to be hostile to media education, which they saw as an unrigorous project, contributing to the relativizing of cultural value and the questioning of cultural orthodoxy. In making the case for media education, the FEWG had to distance itself from this disreputable public image. Yet for its authors, the `image problem reflected a more fundamental confusion of purpose. According to its principal author, Media Studies `doesnt sell; and so the working group attempted a rebranding. It did not entirely forsake the established concerns of media educators: there remains a strong emphasis on developing an analytical language for the study of media, as well as an insistence that students should be involved in the production as well as the critical reception of media texts. But, in a key respect, the field was redefined. Media Studies historically concerned not only with film and television but with the press and radio, with advertising, with comics and so on became `moving image studies. To narrow the field of study at a time of increasing media convergence is in one sense an odd move. Yet in making it, the reports authors were seeking a rapprochement with a more traditional emphasis on questions of aesthetic value and cultural heritage, still favoured by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (Tate 1998). Historically, media educators have often opposed the valorization of `middle class cultural preferences in the language of aesthetic judgment. This opposition reflects both a broad class politics and a more specific recognition of the pedagogic difficulties of dealing with questions of taste in the classroom, particularly for middle-class teachers of working-class students (Masterman 1980). In practical terms, this has led

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to a revaluing of popular media cultures and, in consequence, to derisive press comments that Media Studies could find no grounds on which to distinguish Chaucer from Coronation Street (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1994: 1 3). Making Movies Matter deals very awkwardly with this debate. On the one hand, it is bound to note that:
Nearly a third of the evidence submitted to the FEWG concerned the cultural status and assumed class affiliations of different kinds of film. The frequent oppositional pairing of terms such as `elitist and `popular, `arthouse and `mainstream, `intelligent and `abstruse reflected deep tensions, and models of production and consumption that may be losing their relevance (p. 6).

Outwardly, the report wishes to transcend such oppositions. It laments `the constant elision of culture and class in public debate, wishing instead to celebrate `the brilliance of our moving image heritage (p. 7). In doing so, it reflects many influences, from postmodernism to the public relations strategy of the film industry. But it also thereby takes a step towards rehabilitating a particular form of aesthetic judgment. The `constant elision of culture and class (p. 7) is seen as a kind of conceptual mistake: `culture needs to be separated off, and placed back where it belongs, in a neutral space where objective judgments can be freely made. `Culture comes to be defined here in almost Arnoldian terms, as a metaphysical good rather than as a social or material phenomenon. Thus the report recommends that the study of film should no longer focus on its role as a means of `conveying of information and ideologies but on `teaching and learning about the cultural and historical value of the moving image (p. 6), reasserting the importance of questions of `aesthetics and `history, allegedly neglected by previous generations of media educators (Bazalgette 1998). In the process, the report stresses, pleasure as well as intellectual effort is involved. Reacting perhaps against the suspicion of pleasure found in more politically radical versions of media education, the FEWG claims that it is `setting in train a profound cultural change in which `we are, essentially, asking the British to feel good about enjoying movies (p. 7). Yet, stripped of its appeal to the `feelgood factor, this ambition turns out to be quite a familiar one: peoples enjoyment of film must be `enhanced, its range must be `broadened and it must become `more cineliterate. Children must be educated to make `adventurous cultural choices (p. 20), to experience `more challenging, `uncommercial films, and to do so in cinemas rather than through the inferior medium of video (pp. 20 23). At these points, where an appeal to cultural value is detached from an exploration of social interest, the FEWG leaves the territory staked out by previous forms of media education and enlists in a project of cultural development that has a much older history. In this respect, the reports selection of illustrations and references is indicative: mainstream contemporary Hollywood movies of the kind enjoyed by the large majority of school students and particularly those from culturally disreputable genres such as modern horror or action movies are conspicuous by their absence. However, in a potentially more progressive move, the report also aligns itself with new understandings of the relationship between school and other sites of learning, represented in the DfEEs interest in lifelong learning and educational partnerships. Policy-makers, it argues, must recognise that `an emphasis on schools involves focusing (also) on the relationships between home, school and leisure (FEWG: 7) and must therefore attend not just to the formal curriculum, but to the informal ways in which learners at all ages develop their knowledge and understanding of film. Institutionally, it hopes to create a network of partnerships, in which public, private and voluntary bodies cinemas, schools and colleges, libraries and film societies

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come together to develop a coherent programme for a `cineliterate population. Paradoxically, rethinking education in the light of cultural and economic change turns out to involve the rehabilitation of particular cultural ideologies at the same time as it includes an increase in the number of sites on which it can take place. In these respects, the cultural turn embodied in Making Movies Matter , like Chris Smiths simultaneous pursuit of quality and accessibility , remains ambivalent. Reform ulating the creative project: All Our Futures In All Our Futures (NACCCE 1999) culture and economics are at war with politics: a reading of the world which identifies a `synergy between creative education and economic need is counterposed to a claim that the existing system inherited from Conservatism and maintained by New Labour is both over-regulated and narrowly conceived. Compared with Making Movies Matter , the reports scope is broader, its arguments more critical, and its concern for tactical contexts of policy opportunity much less evident, to the point where policy insiders refer habitually to its `political ineptitude.1 The reports immediate origins lie in Secretary of State David Blunketts decision early in 1998 to set up four advisory committees to inform the process of national curriculum review. The committees the other three related to `citizenship, `personal and social education and `sustainable development were not intended to consider fundamental issues of whole-curriculum design but rather to complement the work of established subject areas. The aim here was to address the broader formation of students subjectivities such as their `self-confidence and self-esteem and their `knowledge of the growing complexity and diversity of multi-cultural Britain (DfEE 1999a). In the case of creative and cultural education, the committee was briefed also to address questions of `informal as well as `formal education, which goes some way to explaining the involvement of the DCMS as joint (though in practice, subsidiary) sponsor. In some respects, All Our Futures can be seen as the re-emergence of interests that had spent two decades on the margins of policy-making. The chair of the advisory committee was Professor Ken Robinson, who throughout the 80s and 90s had argued for the centrality of arts education in schools, and who had close connections with educational and cultural sectors music, dance, theatre which had particularly suffered from Conservative stringency. Robinson lobbied hard to get the committee established and eventually took the leading role in drafting the report, going beyond the initial brief to call for a thorough reorientation of educational practice. At least in the short term, however, these aims were disappointed. The reports publication was accompanied by a lukewarm endorsement from Blunkett, and the DfEE refused to distribute summaries to schools, despite concerted lobbying from supporters. There seem to be both local and more general explanations for this tepid reception explanations that connect to the preferences of ministers, and the `court politics of government departments, as well as to wider political strategies. Thus Blunketts interest in `citizenship as a core set of curricular values took precedence over the reports interest in creativity, and the influence of Chris Woodhead, Chief Inspector at OFSTED, stood in the way of its challenge to the traditional academic curriculum. More broadly, it was agreed by policy insiders that the New Labour project ruled out radical change in the governments first term: central aspects of the
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Conservative legacy could not be challenged without electoral costs, and policies however appropriate to new times which seemed to revive practices discredited by the right in the 1980s were a liability. Perhaps in response to this official indifference, advocates of the report have worked to generate considerable grassroots backing, so that within six months the report had sold out. It would be a mistake to regard All Our Futures as merely a return of the repressed and infamous ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the report deploys most of the characteristic figures of the cultural turn. There is, it argues, an `incessant need for businesses to develop new products and services and to adapt management styles and systems of operation to keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions. As a result `the growing demand in the businesses world-wide is for forms of education and training that develop ``human resources and in particular the powers of communication, innovation and creativity (NACCCE 1999: 19). More specifically, knowledge-based and cultural industries have increased in size and significance, providing `opportunity for the creative abilities of young people (p. 19). Creativity itself needs to be rethought: it is fundamental to the arts, certainly, but also to `the sciences. . . politics, business and in all areas of everyday life (p. 27). The `conventional academic curriculum (p. 23) is incapable of responding to these creative needs. It cannot prepare students for the cultural complexities of an `increasingly diverse (p. 23) society, nor can it help `promote inclusion and combat exclusion in a world of rapid social and economic change (p. 25). The reasons for the governments indifference to the report stem from the ways in which these arguments are pursued to the kind of critical conclusion which is often strategically evaded or blurred in the work of government-related `think tanks in this field. In the present national curriculum, the report argues, `the balance has been lost (p. 9) and `the creative abilities of young people have been inhibited (p. 8). Teacher education is narrowly regimented, and the creativity and initiative of teachers is not valued. Funding arrangements damage arts-based curricular provision. Inspection regimes `militate directly against creative learning and teaching (p. 107). The creative resources available outside the school in museums, galleries, theatres and so on are little used. In place of the current system, the report calls for radical change: a `fundamental review, post-2000, of the `structure and balance of the national curriculum (p. 86); experimentation and flexibility in the promotion of creative learning and teaching; and a shift in regimes of pupil assessment, so as to emphasize `formative support rather than summative judgement (p. 117). These changes would be accompanied by a weakening of the boundaries between the school and the outside world: partnerships between the school and `outside partners businesses, community groups, artists, cultural organizations would become the norm (p. 120) and funding would be increased to support them. In this way, the report seeks new resources for change, albeit ones that have less to do with the expertise of teachers than with the involvement of professional arts organizations and creatively-oriented businesses. All this amounts to a call for the dismantling of the post-88 educational settlement, and challenges the Labour/Conservative consensus on the regulation of schooling. Hence, one assumes, the charges of political ineptitude: the task is thought too great to be realistic. Yet the report does not lack a strategic-political dimension. Recognizing that the short-term acceptance of its proposals is implausible, its advocates present it as a document for Labours second term, when a more generous educational vision, one less haunted by Conservatism, might inspire policy.2 They insist

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that such a vision would correspond not so much to the wishes of a `lobby group for the arts as to a `wide range of public and professional interests about the balance and priorities of education (p. 13). In arguing thus, the report attempts to distinguish itself from earlier cultural and educational projects. In relation to `progressivism , arguments about student-centred learning are melded with a rhetoric about `standards and `achievement; and there is a constant emphasis on the need for `freedom to be balanced against `control. Likewise, in relation to the two major concepts of `culture and `creativity, there is a careful repositioning. The report does not counterpose popular cultures to formal institutional ones; nor does it see culture as providing ground from which to criticise social development. Its approach is rather, to recall a remark of Deweys, less `critical than `constructive in character. `Culture from this perspective refers to `the shared values and patterns of behaviour that characterise different social groups and communities (p. 42). Educations role is to enable students to understand and explore these values in all their diversity - a diversity which is deftly defined as a `core value of `our national way of life (p. 48). Likewise, `creativity does not denote that which goes unrecognized in economic life, but rather an attribute which is vital to competitive success. Nor should it be counterposed to academic accomplishment: knowledge of formal conventions is an essential part of any creative process, in ways which were not fully realized by earlier `progressives. Conclusion: redefining culture? Our primary emphasis in this article has been on the textual rhetorics of educational and cultural policy. Their strategic implementation is, of course, another matter. Broadly speaking, we would welcome moves to recognize the cultural productivity of young people, in all its diversity. It is time schools moved beyond their limited emphasis on high culture, and their privileging of print media. The emphasis on culture and creativity in these reports, and the specific claims for the value of the arts and of media education, are things that we would support. Nevertheless, it is possible to foresee some tensions and difficulties here. Ultimately, many of the problems derive from the ways in which `culture itself is conceived. Chris Smiths account, for example, is quite inconsistent. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on democracy and accessibility , and a rejection of distinctions between high and low. Yet on the other, there is a view that is worthy of Matthew Arnold, which emphasizes `[t]he focal point of the individual citizen, no matter how high or low their station, having the chance to share the cultural experience of the best. . . (Smith 1998: 3). This kind of tension also characterizes Making Movies Matter , where the rejection of the link between class and culture sits awkwardly with the broadly canonical emphasis on `our cinematic heritage. By contrast, All Our Futures side-steps this textual notion of culture in favour of a broadly anthropological one culture as a `whole way of life and thence moves towards a rhetoric of multiculturalism. Yet even here, as in the other material we have considered, there is little sense of culture as contested ground. `Culture is celebrated in generalized terms, as a social good that should be cultivated and disseminated; and despite the emphasis on diversity, there is little recognition of the politics of culture. There is an interesting contrast in this respect with the forms of cultural policy developed by the Greater London Council (GLC) in the mid-1980s policies which

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may continue to inspire some of the initiatives mentioned here, however much they have been officially excoriated by New Labour. GLC policy attempted to create a cultural public sphere that would prevent the commercial monopoly of cultural production, and also to relate cultural production explicitly to social movements (GLC 1985: 169). These efforts were paralleled elsewhere in London by an attempt to rethink teaching and learning in terms of class, ethnic and gender difference. In some of its manifestations for example in the work of the Cockpit Department of Cultural Studies and its journal Schooling and Culture this was a project which had an explicit cultural focus, albeit defined largely in opposition to established practices in school subjects such as English and Art. Despite the more damaging elements of `political correctness that sometimes characterized them, these initiatives were centrally informed by a view of culture as necessarily a site of conflict. By contrast, the new cultural turn disavows the existence of such antagonisms: there are no recognized cultural conflicts, beyond a superseded conflict between high and low, and there are no discordant or dissenting aspects in popular culture. In our view, this position cannot be sustained, either theoretically or practically. Enthusiasts for the cultural turn may have overlooked the continued existence of cultural contestation and struggle; but they will find that in invoking the creative energies of young people, they inadvertently provide resources for just such conflicts. It is also reasonable to envisage more specific conflicts over the involvement of business in education and the arts. As we have noted, `culture is increasingly seen to provide resources for business strategies, as well as activities that are personally fulfilling or socially regenerative. Over the longer term, lines will have to be drawn here. Without claiming an intrinsic purity for `culture, we doubt whether the market can provide genuinely emancipatory possibilities , or indeed provide equally for all. Beyond a certain limit of tolerance, business involvement is bound to regulate and limit cultural productivity. The principle of `partnership should provide a means for business to contribute to education not just financially, but also in terms of knowledge and expertise. But the fact remains that schools are often the weaker partners; and such partnerships often founder on fundamental conflicts of motivation and purpose. The second area of potential conflict concerns the status of audiences. Chris Smiths Arnoldian vision of cultural access implies that students will be trained in cultural appreciation; yet there appears to be no critical element in this envisioning of audience/text relations. Making Movies Matter remains uneasy about the critical legacy of Media Studies; yet here, as in a good deal of contemporary educational and cultural practice in a range of art forms, there remains in such `appreciation a strong critical element, that links cultural forms to social and economic relations. Much contemporary practice in teaching Art and Design and Media Studies, for example, combines theory and practice, seeking to enable students to reflect systematically on what they have produced, rather than simply encouraging them to `feel good about particular sanctioned forms of cultural expression. While we would support the view that young people should become active participants in cultural production, they will necessarily become critical participants as well. Finally, there is a limit to the extent to which culture can remain separated from politics. Smith wants to `nurture cultural productivity (Smith 1998: 3), and proposes several channels for doing so (access, education, increased funding). However, in other respects, government is preoccupied with disciplining and restricting the political and cultural agency of children and young people through policing and criminal justice policies, the dismantling of the state benefit system and the privatization of public facilities. There are growing eco-

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nomic pressures on children and young people to find part-time employment, and increasing levels of stress associated with continual programmes of educational assessment and monitoring (Buckingham 2000). Outside the immediate cultural sphere, much government policy seems to work against cultural productivity, and particularly against productivity of an informal sort. In the context we have outlined, there is a danger that `creativity and `culture will come to be seen as magic ingredients that will somehow automatically transform education, and bring about broader forms of social and economic regeneration, in and of themselves. Such arguments typically rest on an asocial conception of the psychological benefits of creativity as a way of building `self-est eem and `motivation, rather than (for example) communicating with an audience. Even more reductively, there is a risk that cultural production will be seen as a means of social control or, in the words of EAZ designers, a `safety valve, a way of letting off the steam that is created by other social pressures and tensions. By contrast, we would argue that the more progressive emphases we have identified in contemporary cultural policy need to find their counterparts within educational and social policy as well. A policy that tolerates dissent and lessens financial and educational pressures is much more likely to create conditions for cultural productivity than one which emphasizes conformity and rations social and economic resources. Notes
1. This claim has been made to us on several occasions by different members of the great and the good who staff DfEE advisory committees, policy action teams and so on. 2. Researching this article, we interviewed two people who played a leading role in the composition of the reports. Quoted material is drawn from these interviews, which we have also used for background information.

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