Schools with a Difference: Policy Discourses and Education Reform in Britain and Germany

This article seeks to explain why Britain reformed its early post-war policy of placing students in separate secondary schools on the basis of perceived ability while Germany has retained the practice. While recent accounts of skill formation have stressed the role of producer groups in shaping the development of education and training systems in advanced democracies, this article maintains that the variation observed in the cases is largely explained by the timing of changes in dominant policy discourses. In Britain, new ideas concerning human ability led policymakers to reconsider the appropriateness of differentiation in secondary education, leading to changes in the 1960s that created 'comprehensive' schools attended by most students. In West Germany, by contrast, cultural federalism and structural legacies from the Nazi era served to delay the acceptance of such ideas. This ideational 'freeze' would prove fatal for education reform in the FRG, as changing political, economic, and social conditions would contribute to the failure of initiatives proposed in the 1970s to modernise the school system.