Business is pretty hard nosed about

Business is pretty hard nosed about what it wants ... if you talk to Marks and Spencers they say ‘what we want is consumers that live in safe inner city areas which is where our shops are’. So they actually have an interest in social cohesion. Other businesses might want good scientists. In our discussion you come across a range of interests. But none of them are doing it for purely altruistic reasons. (Standards and Effectiveness Unit [SEU] in DfEE 1)
The DfEE remained committed to the vision of business as a model of innovatory and modernising practice:
we see it as very important to be in partnership with business as far as possible. Both as a linear influence on the future shape of the economy, as a partner in benefiting fruitfully from the quality of the education system, as the consumer of the education system, but also as a group of people from who we can learn a lot as a whole. (SEU 1)
The Department announced the Zones in terms that assumed a fairly strong degree of financial commitment from business, but in fact the response was mixed. Most businesses involved in the Zones did not donate significant amounts of cash; instead they were more interested in bringing business cultures and management styles to education services. They did this in different ways: for example through using their senior managers as mentors for head teachers, through using their headquarters as locations for EAZ meetings, and by providing technical assistance with school budgeting and staffing. The interests of business, moreover, were sometimes at odds with the social inclusion aspects of the EAZ agenda. ‘Company X (Business) is carving out a niche for itself in the changing face of educational provision: its almost a small scale alternative to the LEAs. They are involved in Careers provision, in running the national literacy and numeracy strategies and they want to run the schools. The EAZ is the wedge’, and ‘Company X is a leading provider of education services: its an implementer rather than a partner. There’s nothing the LEA can do that we can’t. The LEA is a weak institution: we can identify their needs, and we can meet their needs’ (Zone member/Director of Company X). The research supported a more general conclusion that those elements of the modernisation project involving social regeneration, social inclusion and enabling community were not recognised common purposes within the Zone networks. Different perspectives were offered by local government personnel, by DfEE members and by community activists and business representatives. These differences had an impact on the workings of the Zone networks themselves. Formal agencies, such as schools, the police, the Local Education