Radical Policies, Progressive Modernisation and Deepening Democracy: the Academies programme in action

One of the tricky things we have to wrestle at present is whether or not we should believe what often sounds like good policy, policy that trumpets the involvement of those who are to be affected by it.Is 'engaging with the local' to be taken seriously or not?Is the language of participation a linguistic sleight of hand or an indicator of a revival of our democratic way of life?In looking in some detail at the Academies programme Stephen Ball pushes us back to wider issues such as these and suggests that too often we end up with 'fast' policy and 'elite' solutions in which government and big business impose their own aspirations and intentions on local communities.The making of education policy in England has changed radically over the past 20 years.It is made in different ways, by different people, in different places.It has become more focused within central government and yet also more widely distributed, more local.But the re-distribution of policy-making capacities is not in any straightforward sense an extension of democracy, rather it may be, as Bob Jessop suggests 'part of a more complex power struggle to protect key decisions from popular democratic control' (Jessop, 2002, p. 200).That is the replacement or displacement of democratic processes with technical or market solutions, like Trusts and Partnership Boards, Academy schools, Foundation Hospitals -that is 'at the heart of new localism lies a much more retrogressive agenda of privatisation' (Centre for Public Services, 2003) -the privatisation of decision-making.(See for example PFI vs Democracy (McFadyean & Rowland, 2002) and Not for Sale (City Council Trade Unions, 2002) -'Labour promised 'democratic renewal' but in its place we have witnessed the exact opposite.The cabinet system has centralised local governance and privatised council decisionmaking' (CCTU, p. 20).In effect more and more of public policy and public decision-making is out-of-reach, either deeply entrenched in the Jacobin centre