raise standards in 'socially disadvantaged' areas, mainly those with what are regarded as underper• Each of them will comprise two or three secondary schools and their associated primary schools (up to a maximum of twenty schools).
• Five Zones will start in September 1998, and another 20 in January 1999.
• Private companies will take the lead in running some EAZS, including one out of the first five •EAZs will be able to scrap existing national pay and conditions arrangements for teachers • Each Zone will receive £250,000 a year from government for three years in the first instance • Zones will be expected to find a matching sum •EAZs will be run by Action Forums comprising unspecified representation from the schools, parents, business and the LEA, together with one or two persons appointed by the Secretary of State.
At least one of the secondary schools in each EAZ should become a 'specialist' school, selecting 10 per cent of its students on the basis of 'apti• Schools in EAZs can opt out of the national cur• Bidding finished on March 20, and the successful bids will be announced in June.
quango, run by a high-paid execthe two or three in each EAZ is to selecting 10 per cent of its intake principle of selection within the diction is that 'specialist' schools with selecting only 10 per cent). the US, where "magnet schools' expense of neighbouring schools. On the curriculum the aim of achievement in socially deprived irrelevant by many schools, and has lum, but the alternative being offered is a mixture of 'basic skills' and narrow vocational education feeding into lowlevel courses in FE. This reproduces inequality by locking students, mainly from working class backgrounds, into lowerpaid low-skill jobs and excluding them from the entry qualifications for higher education. EAZs are not part of a radical programme to tackle the roots of educational disadvantage in poverty. Without that they seem likely to repeat the failure of the Education Priority Areas of 30 years ago, of which one critic wrote that too many urban education reformers have been guilty of producing naive school-centred solutions with no sense of the structural, the political and the historical as constraints'. Certainly, if they undermine pay and principle of a pubschools, are LEA-led and in my view we shouldn't - they will go Our attitude should be tive, and push for more is that in many areas local working class communiEAZs, because they are EAZs provide an exceptional opportunity for the left to take that debate, bringing students and communities that meets their needs - a debate class size to the heart of the class character of schooling. To abstain would be to play into the hands of take from schools in the US as cratic Schools, published in 1985 tionalists, provide case studies of "Taken together, the stories told in this book say something quite democratic school reform. building of coalitions within the it. In none of the cases was the - groups of teachers, the community, social activists, and so on -. provided the driving force for change. Finally, none of the reforms was driven by a techni-