Stress in the system

This chapter addresses the 1990s, when post-war optimism about social welfare and an education system that would bring equal opportunity had been decimated by the politics of self-reliance and by voices which, rightly, drew attention to the problems of humanism’s ‘universalising’ tendency. Not all children fared equally under the post-war consensus. The latter period of the Conservative administration saw extensive education reform, and, from teachers’ point of view, more stress in ‘the system’. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s The Ecology of Human Development (1979) provides a helpful frame to challenge the Thatcherite belief in the individual and the family over the social. It centred the child in their own biology and personality, their families, their communities and their historical moment, over time and space. Two school stories on either side of the Conservative and New Labour administration from the late 1990s represent the school as a zone in that ecology. Jimmy McGovern’s Hearts and Minds (1995) is about the collapse of hope of a newly qualified teacher in Liverpool and Lucy Gannon’s Hope and Glory (1999–2000), focused on an aspirational ‘New Labour’ super head. These two television dramas are like a call and response to the collapse of the post-war way of thinking about schools and its consequences for the teaching profession.