Education in Britain has been transformed over the last 50 years. State education systems have expanded hugely, and levels of achievement and participation have continuously risen. At the same time, society has become ‘educationalized': the home, the workplace, the holiday and the playgroup are seen as sites for learning, in ways that increasingly connect to the acquisition of formally-defined skills and knowledges.

Yet for most of the postwar period, education policy has been dominated by questions of ‘failure' ‘crisis' and ‘decline'. Half a century of reform has far from eliminated substantial inequalities, and the ‘conservatism' of education in the face of major cultural and economic change remains a central political issue. This book seeks to describe and explain the patterning of change and continuity in British education, and to account for the persistence of the controversies which have accompanied it. In doing so, it combines economic, political, cultural and social approaches to the study of education.