Abstract

This book offers the first substantial, research-based treatment of the impact of marketization on primary schools. There is a particular focus on shifts in management culture associated with marketization, and the consequences of such shifts for heads, teachers and other school staff. The changing patterns of control and autonomy in the primary school have had significant effects on the identities of schoolworkers. The book, therefore, makes an important contribution to an understanding of markets in education, in a hitherto neglected sector of provision, and breaks new ground in its pursuit of connections between market discourses and emergent managerialism. It thus offers a contribution to the understanding of primary schools as workplaces and to their changing work cultures, to the management of primary schools, and to education policy studies.