Specialisation and Choice in Urban Education

From their announcement in 1986, city technology colleges (CTCs) have been presented both as a new choice of school for the inner city and as pointing the way to a more diversified education system. This account of their development uses interviews with key architects of the initiative to identify more clearly the objectives CTCs were designed to serve. It then draws on interviews and observation in CTCs themselves to discover how far these schools are becoming centres of innovation in school management, curriculum and approaches to teaching and learning. The authors also consider how CTCs have managed the task of selecting intakes representative of their catchment areas, and explore their impact on local schools. Throughout, the CTC policy is considered in the context of the Government's broader political project to challenge "welfarism" and to encourage entrepreneurship, competition and choice. This report on the experiment comes at a time when a new Education Act, claiming to promote diversity and choice within the system, is offering other schools the opportunity to become more like the CTC model.