Devolved school management: the ‘new deal’ in Scottish education

This paper is concerned with the management of public expenditure in the welfare state. It refers in particular to education. Faced with fiscal overload, the government is seeking to curb expenditure in such a way that both professionals and parents come to be complicit in that very endeavour, even though it may have adverse consequences for some of them. In order to illustrate this argument, the example of the self‐managing school is given, with reference to Scotland. The government's case rests on a rhetoric of choice and ownership, and is unsupported either by educational theory or by most of the extant research. The policy marks a profound change in the management of consent in Scottish education, substituting the concept of a professional partnership for that of a business partnership ‐ in sum, a ‘new deal’.