ABSTRACT
Our analysis in the previous chapter of the early impact of comprehensive reorganisation took advantage of a historically unique opportunity; this was that the 1977 survey could be used to describe a school system that was in the process of reorganisation. We could identify a sector of (substantially) uncreamed comprehensive schools and another, more heterogeneous, selective sector. In our analysis we were able to compare leavers from schools in these two sectors. This opportunity was not available, for example, to the National Children’s Bureau in their study of comprehensive schools in England (Steedman, 1980). They found evidence of substantial creaming of comprehensives, and virtually no local authorities in England had reorganised all their schools on fully comprehensive lines by the time their sample entered them.
