ABSTRACT
Partnership, and the notion of parents as partners, figure in this book as key elements in the analysis of current developments in the education systems of England and Wales and of Scotland. Such focusing reflects the broader idiom of public debate within circles of policy-making and practice where the rights, responsibilities, expectations, resources and purposes of partnership are negotiated and arbitrated. Converting the public idiom into the coinage of analysis serves to disengage the concepts from their role in policy debates and to reposition them within discourses that cast light on events, rather than add strength to contending interests within political arenas.
