CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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School Scandals
Pat Thomson's book blows the whistle on how corrupt neoliberal practice is wrecking education in Britain
OPPOSING THE MARKET: Children protest against failed academies
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
THE CORE argument of Professor Pat Thomson’s outstanding book is that when the economistic logic of calculation and competition is the basis for organising the public sector, gross inefficiencies, ineffectiveness and inequities result.
And, she asserts, England’s school system represents “an almost fully materialised case of economistic logics at work.”
Targeting the corruption, corrupted practices and the “fraud, lack of transparency, cronyism and spin” that lie at the heart of the British state, she investigates the undermining of local authority-run schools by neoliberal ideology and how, in the public sector, the neoliberal funder–purchaser-provider infrastructure system has enabled the development of a marketised academy-based system.
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