At the end of May 2008 I will be participating in an international seminar on Cultural Studies and Education at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

My paper is based on experiences and research at virtually all levels of the English education system and argues that we can observe the ‘impact’ of Cultural Studies on the forms and practices of Education as a system and as institutions as well as at the more micro-levels of individual learning and even theories of learning itself. These ‘impacts’ are analysed along 3 dimensions.: the institutionalisation and/or incorporation of school subjects (like Media Studies); the way Cultural Studies has been used to frame an offer of schooling to resistant and disengaged youth; and the ways in which practical and informal forms of pedagogy have supported identity-based theories of learning. I use use examples of each type of impact to explore each level of effect

My interest is in reflecting on how transformative these impacts have been. Do they pose lasting types of change or have they been incorporated by the status quo given the imperviousness of schooling to successive waves of educational reform? How have the more radical kinds of critique contained in Cultural Studies methods, thinking and approaches been absorbed at the different levels of the education system and at what cost and to whom?

The final section of the paper considers practical and theoretical prospects for future versions of Cultural Studies and Education. I end by considering whether the destiny of Cultural Studies is to repeat its marginalised academic status as critique or ‘system-irritant’ or whether we can could envisage a theoretical way of scaling up and mainstreaming how Cultural Studies works.