Chris Husbands. 
It has conventionally been said that Coalition governments are unable to undertake radical change. The assumption is that the need for trade-offs between governing parties, to prioritise compromise and consensus over clarity and conviction, lead to a tendency to preserve the status quo.
But this appears not to have been the case in the United Kingdom after 2010. In its policies on early years, schools, training, and higher education, the Coalition Government was nothing if not radical. The Academies Act, passed in the first weeks of the government’s tenure, using parliamentary procedures designed for emergency legislation, represented a decisive, irrevocable break with governance arrangements in English education which had lasted, with modifications, since the 1944 Education Act.
Towards the end of 2010, the Coalition made similarly stark changes in the funding of higher education, tripling the cap on (more…)