Education policy and the rationale for technology development in schools: political drivers - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 19

Lauder 1997: 173). As Lyotard critically observes, 'knowledge is and will be produced
in order to be sold; it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new pro-
duction: in both cases, the goal is exchange' (Lyotard 1984: 4). With the resurgence
of the British Labour party, Brown and Lauder (1997) identified the 'left modernisers'
adopting a post-Fordist perspective that provides an economic and vocational ration-
ale for technology in education. As David Blunkett the Secretary of State for Educa-
tion and Employment declared in a speech on 16 June 1999: 'Competitive pressures
are intensifying. Ours is an increasingly complex and technologically driven world.
As a country we need the effort and skill of all our people to compete and succeed'
(David Blunkett speech 1999: 1, cited in Younie 2007: 29).
Also, two independent technology reports, McKinsey and Stevenson, both pub-
lished in 1997, clearly indicated an economic imperative that was critical in influenc-
ing Labour government policy on technology for schools. First, McKinsey signified an
international trend when, in 1993, its American branch reviewed technology in the USA
for President Clinton's National Information Infrastructure Commission (NII), which
culminated in $2 billion technology investment in schools (Dawes 2001). Brown and
Lauder (1997) argued the American rationale for the policy drive on technology in
education was also predominantly economic: school leavers needed technological
skills to be productive in the emerging new knowledge economy. The international
development of technology in education, across leading nations, provides a global
context to the developments in the UK in the 1990s.
Proclaiming that 'addressing the issue of ICT' was to be one of new Labour's
'top priorities', the main elements in any new strategy were identified as needing to:
'increase the time given to ICT in both initial and in-service training; make comput-
ers available to teachers and develop curriculum-related software' (Stevenson 1997:
7-8). The Stevenson report powerfully concluded that the government would disad-
vantage the UK in terms of global competitiveness, if steps were not taken to inte-
grate technology into education. The two fundamental conclusions of the Stevenson
Report that alerted government to develop a seminal cohesive strategy for technol-
ogy were: 'The state of ICT in our schools is primitive and not improving [and] it is a
national priority to increase the use of ICT in UK schools' (Stevenson 1997: 6).
The recommendations from the Stevenson Report clearly paved the way for
Labour's policy drive on technology, which marked the first coordinated national
strategy in 1998. In short, over the previous two decades of global policy discourse,
it is clear to identify that different stakeholders draw from 'virtually the same list of
rationales' (Ham 2010: 32) and that these have stayed stable. The principal policy
drivers remain: economic, vocational, commercial and pedagogical, with policy-
makers predominantly referring to the first two and practitioners the latter one.
Phases of technology policy development: Conservative
to Labour (1980-2010)
The early phase of policy focused on supporting the introduction of computers
into schools through developing practitioner networks and encouraging experi-
mentation to explore the potential of computers for teaching. This can be seen in