The politics of pedagogy: making a National Curriculum Physical Education1

Abstract

This paper documents the activities of the Working Group formed in July 1990 by central Government in the UK to ‘advise’ on a National Curriculum Physical Education (NCPE) for state schools in England and Wales. The analysis concentrates on the interactions between group members and the Secretary of State for Education and the Minister for Sport, a process in which there was a struggle for control of what Bernstein refers to as the ‘pedagogic device’ (Bernstein 1990) ‐ the rules governing the form and content of the curriculum of PE and concomitantly how the body should be schooled. The data point to a complex dialectic between the discourses of cultural restoration and progressivism, and reveal how the latter was both circumscribed and ‘regulated’ by sometimes subtle, at other times quite brutal discursive strategies. Running through the discussion are issues relating to the nature of power, authority and control in the policy‐making process.