Education

New Right

For the New Right, the purpose of education is to promote drive, enterprise and initiative in young people. This will come from encouraging competition between schools just as in a wider marketplace; education is a business like any other.

A useful overview for the beginner can be found here:

Discover More According to the New Right’s beliefs, the role of education is to instil drive

Students could then spend time researching examples of education policies over the last 50 or so years. From their research they can be asked to provide a succinct overview of the policy followed by a New Right commentary on the policy.

As an extension task, the following website contains a more detailed synopsis of the perspective with clear definitions of key terms as well as some questions to answer:

Discover More

This page contains a wealth of links to information on the New Right in education. Particularly useful for recent and contemporary Conservative policies, the page has some links to materials on the coalition that formed in 2010 with policies many political commentators view as being influenced by the New Right:

Discover More Conservatism, Thatcherism, The New Right and Education Policy

This piece from the FT looks at Conservative policies more widely but provides a helpful summary, with comparisons to Labour Party proposals.

Discover More How the Labour and Conservative election policies compare

This could prompt discussions around the appropriateness or otherwise of independent schools attracting charitable status (affecting their taxes) and the proposals to involve independent schools in the operation of state schools.


More Resources from Discovering Sociology


Functionalism

Some useful background reading for use as a flipped resource for the lesson can be found here:...

theory

Is Sociology a Science?

‘Is Sociology a Science?’ has been a popular past question for all major exam boar...

theory

Looking Glass Self

A key idea that contributed to the development of Symbolic Interactionism is the work of the S...

theory

Marxism

The lesson could begin by asking students to write down everything they think they already kno...

theory

Modernity

Slide two on the following presentation gives a good overview of key ideas in relation to mode...

theory

Postmodernism

Prior to the lesson, ask students to watch the following video and write down the key ideas as...

theory

Research Speed-Dating

The idea for a speed dating type session came from this blog post see link below:

theory

Symbolic Interactionism

This is a clear overview of a perspective students often find tricky; and in particular the tr...

theory

The Enlightenment

An important precursor to modernity was The Enlightenment. The Open University has a wide rang...

theory

Value Freedom

In 2009, the media extensively covered a debate as to whether the BBC should allow the BNP to ...

theory

Sociological Theory Introduction

theory