ABSTRACT
The long shadow of vagrancy is a shorthand way to depict the resilient career of a legal category. This chapter presents the case study of the twin paths of vocational and special needs education in England has revolved around two major themes. The first is that both modes of education are akin to social categories. The second theme is dominant and likely the cause of the first one. If one enters the proximate contexts of actual biographies and groups, social history is the vehicle and the present is accentuated over the past and future. The link between the two reports is their location in the "larger narrative" of structuring a national system of education against an entrenched historical legacy of economic and cultural stratification. The decline of a long history of decentralization initiates changes in educational policy of a more "paternalistic" fashioning that confronts the entrenched practices and outcomes of "punitive benevolence".
