NEW VERSUS OLD BARBER: AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION by JAMES TOOLEY, University of Newcastle ABSTRACT: Professor Michael Barber’s The Learning Game is a key influence on education policy in England and Wales. This paper focuses on Barber’s policy proposals and their theoretical foundations. The paper states the theoretical foundation of the proposals in chaos theory and the working assumption of this paper. It then explores Barber’s proposals, for the curriculum, the teaching profession, and the ‘individual learning promise’. Finally, alternative mechanisms for arriving at Barber’s desired goals consistent with his theoretical frame- work are sketched out. 1. INTRODUCTION Professor Michael Barber is extremely influential on education policy in England and Wales. In his capacity as Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair strongly endorsed the blurb of his major book, The Learning Game (Barber 1996); one of his first tasks as prime minister was to appoint Barber as Head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit at the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). In office, Barber has been a key figure behind the government’s first Education White Paper (DfEE 1997) and its first Education Bill (1998), which reflect many of the issues contained in his book. It is extremely important, therefore, to criti- cally evaluate The Learning Game, both to gauge the consistency between his policy proposals and theoretical arguments, and to eval- uate the efficacy of his arguments with regards to future education policy in England and Wales. This paper focuses on Part Four of Barber’s book, which contains his policy proposals for ‘the education revolution’ and their theoret- ical foundations. (The other parts of the book investigate the recent history of educational reform since the 1944 Education Act, review research on young people’s and parents’ attitudes towards schools, and discuss the school effectiveness and improvement literature. Much of this is based on previously published work, and would seem BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, ISSN 0007–1005 VOL. 47, NO. 1, MARCH 1999, PP 28–42 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. and SCSE 1999 Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 28