This paper seeks to make sense of a 35 year period of marked disruption and hyper-innovation in England seeking variously to displace and reform a social-welfarist model of schooling that had unevenly and frequently precariously emerged during the post-war era. It is a contribution that is centrally concerned with characterising and making sense of a bewildering range of reforms that seeks to develop an educationally focused theorisation of the interlacing of neo-liberalism with new modes of governing, governance and populism in this context. Stretching from the Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s, through the New Labour administrations of the late 90s and 00s and on to the Conservative and Coalition administrations since 2010 the paper charts the displacement of lighter touch, self-regulating ‘club government’ (Moran 2003) characteristic of education during the post-war era prior to the election of the Thatcher-led governments from 1979. It then moves to examine their replacement by processes of marketisation, privatisation and corporatisation tightly bound to neo-liberalism and, simultaneously, by radically intensified forms of centralised regulation. Contrary to dominant accounts of contemporary shifts towards governance that emphasise the hollowing out of central government (Rhodes, 1997), it is argued that the marketised, neo-liberal turn in school reform in this context has been strongly allied to an ostensibly very different phenomenon; a dramatic increase in centralised regulation (Hall, 2023). Whilst the election of a New Labour government in 1997 did result in significant discontinuities from previous Conservative administrations, not least in terms of increased government expenditure on schools and teachers, the dominant model of tight regulation combined with neo-liberal approaches to school reform was largely reinforced during this time. It is argued that this ultimately acted to enable and legitimise further rounds of marketized, privatising and increasingly corporatized approaches to school reform that developed markedly from 2010. England’s early adoption of this approach in the 1980s and its wider role in the UK more generally, alongside a small group of other countries, as a front-runner in the New Public Management (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011) are associated with it emerging during the 1990s and 2000s as an international laboratory for educational reform. The paper ends by considering the pronounced emergence of populism in school reform in England, and the increasingly idiosyncratic and erratic governmental interventions that have developed strongly since 2010 and which seem likely to have significantly reduced wider interest in this national educational laboratory.

*Hall, D. (2023) England: Neo-liberalism, regulation and populism in the educational reform laboratory in Krejsler, J. and Moos, L. (Eds) School Policy Reform in Europe. New York: Springer. *Moran, M. (2003). The British regulatory state: high modernism and hyper-innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Pollitt, C., and Bouckaert, G. (2011) Public management reform. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Rhodes, R. (1997) Understanding governance. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.