When Education Secretary Michael Gove presented the coalition’s White Paper The Importance of Teaching he declared that ‘head teachers had to be captains of their ship’. Rhetorically it was the climax of a four-decade process of change initiated by the Black Paper pamphlets that from 1969 protested against comprehensive education. They contributed to a change in national education discourse, from comprehensive education being seen as a positive to the view that it led to an ‘erosion of standards’. Furthermore, in the 1970s they...

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