Markets and the English: rethinking educational restructuring as institutional design

Abstract This paper analyses the concerns, parameters and silences emerging in the field of English research on contemporary educational restructuring. The research effort oriented to the investigation of Thatcherism and the marketisation of education is documented. Its strong emphasis on markets and processes of marketisation and its neglect of alternatives to Thatcherism is noted. This pattern of emphases and silences in research seems to have arisen as a result of changes in the research‐policy context, and because of the way Thatcherism has been conceptualised in educational research. I argue that these developments have encouraged a narrowing of both research and political horizons in education. I suggest that a more comprehensive framework for analysing educational restructuring can be developed by recontextualising Thatcherism and drawing on recent social science research on institutional design. Such a framework would appear to offer a basis for tackling the empirical and normative work of assessing probable futures and the possibilities of preferred futures in the practical work of education reform.