ABSTRACT
The late 1980s marked a period of substantial curriculum reforms throughout most of Europe. Although sharing a partly similar vocabulary of teacher autonomy and curriculum agency, the reforms in the Western and the then-socialist countries were aimed in different directions. 2 The prevailing argument in many Western countries was economic efficiency and the need to overcome the inequality of students’ learning outcomes that allegedly resulted from the teachers’ excessive curricular freedom. Teachers, therefore, were placed under stronger centralised political and public surveillance and accountability pressure. A well-known manifestation of this is the National Curriculum introduced in England and Wales in 1988. 3 The traditional Western, notably English, 4 model of an autonomous professional was radically redefined according to the neoliberal ideology: it started to denote a transparent, publicly accountable, simultaneously collegial and individually oriented professional who satisfied centrally defined and standardised evaluation requirements in conditions of diversity and complexity.
