The management of curriculum policy: negotiating "putting general education to work"

This paper provides an interim overview of work I am doing on national work in education deriving from the 1992 Mayer Report "Putting General Education To Work" and the promotion of 'key competencies' in education and as a link between education and work. The aim is to show how the convergence of general and vocational education, as a popular policy international across the globe, provided the opportunity for the development of an exemplar of how education policy can be managed so that the dysfunction between policy goals and practice (so well recognised in practice and the literature) need not occur (so extensively) as a destructive, deceptive and manipulative phenomenon.