This paper reports on a study of how ‘good schools’ have been portrayed in a selection of policy texts from the UK 1997-2007. The paper analyses how both the definition of a ‘good’ school, and the identification of reputedly critical factors in creating the ‘good’ school, have been framed in policy discourse and how such conceptions have shifted over the decade in question. The project aimed to address the question of how schools, especially 'good' schools, are portrayed in policy discourse, the extent to which a single-model of such an institution is presented, and to probe the aspects of school experience omitted from the images. The analysis considered the degree to which performance in external examination results has become the dominant element in conceptualizing the 'good school'. In particular, the study intended to examine how the discourse treats school context, given that current research suggests that this has been inadequately acknowledged in policy-making (Lupton, 2004; Thrupp & Lupton 2006). Reference by policy analysts and educationists to the socioeconomic contexts of schools has been characterised in the discourse as seeking an 'excuse' for comparatively poor educational performance. The paper explores how the texts in question deal with the issue of context and the socioeconomic pressures impacting on school performance.

The paper is an exercise in critical discourse analysis. It makes use of the work of Foucault (1984) and of Fairclough (2000, 2001, 2003) in probing the discourse from both critical social and linguistic perspectives. It also favours Fairclough’s position in seeing discourse analysis as positioned on the side of the disadvantaged and takes critique to include an explicitly emancipatory objective.

The paper suggests that the focus on the ‘good’ school draws its recent prevalence from the emergence of the market model of the public sector in the early 1980s. The elevation of (parental) choice in schooling has led to the perceived need for a system of categorising and packaging the ‘good’ school. The paper analyses how the way in which this has been addressed in policy discourse has tended to commodify school education in a narrow and limited fashion. The paper highlights how fundamental issues such as questions about the aims of education and the significant effects of socioeconomic context on school performance have been sidelined, leading to a restricted and tendentious view of schools. The paper concludes by suggesting that political pressures on schools to take action to match the model of the ‘good’ school, contested though it be, also need to be complemented by action on those external, contextual factors which so limit the efficacy of within-school change.